I Could Make Things

I spent thousands of hours with LEGO. That sentence survives in my old bio because it is one of those compressions that is actually basically true, but "played with LEGO" undersells what I liked about it. Sets were fine. The real thing was that the pieces were primitives. You could look at the same pile and see a vehicle, a mechanism, a building, a machine, then tear it apart and turn it into something else. Nothing was sacred. The instruction booklet did not define the object. The parts exposed an interface and you could compose them differently.

Then NXT made the composition computational. Suddenly the structure could sense and move. We built battlebots. [embed: photos/video] A motor wasn't merely spinning because I pushed it with my hand; it was spinning because some little program was making a decision from an input. You could put mechanical leverage and software logic into the same artifact. You could make two robots hit each other and discover instantly which assumptions about traction, geometry, gearing, or control were stupid. It was an unusually honest design review.

VB6 was another jump because software had basically zero material cost. I could make interfaces and little programs and immediately have the computer behave differently. I did not need to order parts. I did not need permission. If I could express the procedure, I could instantiate it. I loved the visible UI construction of it too: controls on a form, event handlers, little chunks of logic attached to things a human could touch. Later I would become interested in much more abstract systems, but I think I have always had a bias toward computational structures that cash out into an interface or an action. I don't really care about intelligence as a number floating in benchmark-space. I want it attached to affordances.

There was Blender and animation and making videos too. Those were different because they taught me that making was not only engineering. A thing could have composition and presentation and pacing and aesthetic intention. You could manufacture an experience. You could take some half-baked model you made and point a camera at it and light it and put music over it and suddenly it communicated something much larger than the mesh itself. I was not necessarily GOOD at any of this by adult standards. That is almost irrelevant. I was developing the expectation that if I wanted an artifact to exist I could usually find a tool that would let me make a first approximation myself.

The internet amplified this in the obvious way. Whatever I wanted to learn, there was somebody who had uploaded a tutorial or a forum post or a PDF. The boundary between "people who make this stuff" and "me" felt thin. You did not need to be formally inducted into the profession before you could start touching the medium. If I wanted to model something, download Blender. If I wanted to program something, install an IDE. If I wanted to build a robot, buy or salvage parts and start screwing them together. This is so normal now that it is easy to miss how psychologically important it was to grow up while these tools were becoming absurdly accessible.

There were failures everywhere, obviously. Half-finished projects, ugly interfaces, things that broke, code I would be embarrassed to read now. I do not want to rewrite this as evidence that I was some miniature founder prodigy. I was a kid with too much curiosity and enough access to computers to repeatedly get in over my head. But that pattern matters: I kept learning by producing external objects. The object would disagree with me. The robot would lose. The code would crash. The render would look wrong. Then I would modify my model of the system and try again.

[embed: LEGO photos] [embed: NXT battlebots] [embed: VB6 screenshots/source if recoverable] [embed: Blender animations] [embed: childhood videos]

Somewhere in here the maker identity started mixing with a much more socially loaded one. I did not only want to make things. I wanted to be the kind of person who made the FUTURE, and there was one guy who occupied that archetype in my mind more than anybody else.