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The devil is in the details. Big things are made up of smaller things. By considering the small, detailed matters it may become clear whether the larger matters are possible at all.

a day well spent :)

If you devote all your brainpower to one thing, you're going to get stuck in patterns. It's so incredibly important to take time to do other things and be "off" so that when you come back, you have a fresh perspective

Here's what art looks like when only the "higher level ideas" are considered:

Those little decisions you make in the moment that you *weren't* planning ahead of time are where the magic happens.

yes!!! thanks for articulating that so well <3

The nitty gritty little decisions is how you achieve these higher level ideas! They are worked out from rough and unshaped first thoughts!

right! like look at stuff like inktober where a ton of artists are working from the same prompt and they all make completely unique pieces

Ideas are plentiful and low in value

Yup. This is the art of shipping. Coming up with the ideas is fun, but it means nothing until you have to tweak, cut and mangle them in order to get something you can actually ship!

YES and once you spend enough time on it, those little things and constraints BECOME the real thing and you look back and realize your initial idea wasn't even as cool as what you ended up having

Yes absolutely! That is also the craft.

It also makes me think about some of the music I love. I love it and all the tiniest little details that make me smile, that the songwriter, performer, producer, engineer, or some combination of all of those, thought up and included in the song because they cared about the detail of their craft.

In 2026, as I live and teach it, Art is short for Art'iculation (silly if true). The details Flavor the thing. Otherwise it becomes lost to it's genre: generic. How a thing was moved, moves, and moves others: IS the entire Arch. If there was no Flow and Consideration: it's probably Content.

Yes, I agree. Except sometimes in some aspects of software development. There is an awful lot of "boilerplate" code in those situations, but where there's still *just enough* different that you can't always just copy-paste a whole block.

I keep thinking about Ben Esposito's "nobody told me when you make a video game you have to make the whole thing" people who don't see the value in making those tiny decisions, no matter how good the quality of their AI generated code, their end result will only be a sum of its parts

Just one immediate example I can think of. It’s Vox’s pin as a human changing as he climbs in influence in his song “Brighter” high level CEOs or shareholders arent making that call. Someone on the animation team is and gives fans one more level of enjoyment on rewatch.

Like me spending hours tweaking collision detection, enemy spawn rates, etc.... then spending hours making a chiptune to my game, and all. All while spending hours shading my pixel art of Ramlethal that I made a long time ago to get the shading on her thicc tighs as best as possible...

big ideas are nothing but an impetus, and a vague direction art, and its essence, are the painful steps we take, barefoot on legos, as we walk that mile, as well as the triumph we feel when we get to the end and bring those ideas to life

This. Why would I want AI to make a game for me when I can instead write crazy optimized math functions in assembly myself for ARM, x86_64, and RISC-V?

most of my favorite ideas/jokes have come to me while designing for animation. getting bored and letting the mind wander is key

I've ran into this a lot as a laboratory scientist. Sometimes buying the right plastic can be critical for getting an experiment to work. I've also caught major errors where a single calculation in a workflow screws up the entire process.

The fine details are absolutely my favourite part of the process.

Love this. This is so important. Sharing it with my Godot students!!