I had highschool classmates bragging about driving 80mph down dirt roads and one girl planned to become “richly married” as her career. Maybe we all had dipshits.
Here’s the thing: we can’t ALL have been the smartest kids in our classes. It’s just so unlikely.
We were the generic background idiots in someone else’s success story all along.
I’m born and raised in rural northern Nevada population 4000ish. I barely graduated high school and went straight into a manual labor job. I feel like I’m a goddamn Nostradamus or Albert Einstein here sometime.
Lol :)
That’s what we call an average fish suffocating in a puddle
One of the asian ones is a frog in a well. Though it carries more the connotation of Dunning-Kreuger, though more due to environment and experience vs a mental condition.
Yea… This was the basis for my first existential crisis in my life… All through small town public school I was basically the smartest kid in the room (sometimes smartest person - we had some really bad teachers). Thought I was god’s gift of intelligence to humanity. Went out of town to a really good engineering school and holy shit I was immediately humbled. I was clawing my way to try to reach “average” and couldn’t quite reach.
“A big fish in a little pond”, it’s how I described my achievements in my first job out of uni.
Oh God.
But they were all dipshits.
You know, this actually explains a lot. Like how I never realized this before.
Big fish in a small pond.
Guessing I’m not the only one in here that had a similar pathway with video games. Maybe games in general, as chess was similar.
A bad teacher can stunt you. I always wanted to make video games, but my high school programming teacher’s style didn’t mesh. Even though I enjoyed the class, he suggested I drop it because he thought I wasn’t a good fit for the field, I reluctantly agreed. Twenty years later, I’ve completed most of the programming for a game I plan to release one day, though I can still picture him tapping the chalkboard every time I asked a question like that was supposed to help…
likewise, i have always been the family tinker/inventor. invented a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell when i was 8 before i learned they already existed better than i had invented. i went to school, took engineering classes. the intro to CAD teacher was an ableist douche (long story) and publicly stated that it was his intention to weed out anyone he felt was not “worthy” of being in our “noble” (ranked four hundred something nationally) engineering program via his computer drafting program and since grading was almost entirely subjective (75% of each project was for “style” whatever that meant) he got to do that.
i changed majors next semester. haven’t stopped building shit. i’m tired, but i’m supposed to finish rebuilding my bike today. i’m going to hang the drapes instead.
weeding out is horrific bullshit. I got weeded out of CS and now I don’t get to have a good job
Most programming classes are bullshit. You come out with basic knowledge of practices that aren’t used in real production. They teach you how to write code, but they don’t teach you how code is written in most businesses.
Outside of actual gaming programs in colleges, new developers are generally bewildered and end up making stuff that’s hard to maintain.
We had a professor sit in with us for a few months once to get the gist of what was needed so he could form classes around game deveopment.
Good luck on your game! I was always too dumb to realize if I combine all the stuff I love doing it equals game dev. Only realized a couple years ago and it’s the happiest I’ve ever been.
Honeslty, I thought it was way above my head. Im a social worker so very far from game dev. My friend sorta nice bullied me into it stating all the time anyone can do it the hardest part is getting started. He was right once I started rolling it came together. Now I do it as a hobby after the kids go to bed. I treat it like playing video games, its a creative, problem solving, process that i really enjoy. I honestly believe anyone can make a video game with a good idea!
Opposide for me. I realised i enjoy playing games much more than making them.
But im happy for you that you found a thing you can be passionate about and spend time working on it too.
In my defense, Ft worth was a big town
You’re unique, just like everyone else.
We are all snowflakes.
It’s sort of one of my favorite things about us.
“We’re all individuals!”
“I’m not.”
For me, it was realizing that while I was smart, the shit level of schooling was more an impediment to me gaining the skills needed to continue excelling and I continue to be surrounded by absolute dipshits wherever I go.
In school, I didn’t have to study to pass and there was no real incentive to learn how to. This bit me when it came to university because the lectures didn’t cover everything that was to be tested on. Turns out, trying is a skill I never needed until then.
Then, in the workforce, I’m constantly exhausted dealing with people who are at best functionally literate and I have to cater to their understanding of literally everything. No desire to either understand the problem or fix the root cause, just make the thing do what they want right then.
school is kinda bullshit to be honest
The infuriating thing is that it doesn’t have to be. It’s been gutted, filleted, and various other words of a similar effect over the decades to the detriment of the entire populous
is this going to be me in the future ;-;
Did I write this last night in my sleep?
I just told this exact story to my oldest yesterday, almost verbatim. Freaky.
There are dozens of us!
Isn’t this basically the premise of Idiocracy?
No the premise of that is that a totally average servicemember in every way is forgotten about in an experiment and is unconscious for 500 years, only to awaken with his prostitute experiment mate, as the two smartest people on earth. A documentary.
You were gifted with a monkeys paw smarter than most people but not smart enough to do anything great so you got stuck around the people you were smarter than to watch them struggle at the self checkout
The difference between most GT and Standard classes lies in your ability and willingness to put in extra work.
Half the kids in the standard classes just want to skate along as easily as possible. Why stress and work hard when you get the same exact outcome in the end? It’s not like they want to go on to college, so why work hard now?
It’s not that different in the workforce in many places.
An IQ of 100 is ment to be directly in the middle, so roughly 50% of the population is below that. An IQ of 100 isn’t that bright, so think about the incredible masses of dumb people.
So, yeah. It’s not impossible that you were the one-eyed among the blind.
