What creative project have you long wanted to start but never have?

Does anyone know those tony boxes for kids? It's a box with a speaker, and if you put a little figure (a bit like a playmobile character) on it, it plays an audio book as long as the little figure stands on it.

I really want to build it myself, but I have done 0 research yet. But every now and then a thought plopps up, like 'I could use NFC tags to trigger the box start playing', 'I have an old raspberryPi somewhere', 'is it even possible to build a good sounding speaker in this size?',..

But no time to follow up on those thoughts.

https://www.tonuino.de/TNG/

I said I'd make a musical RPG video game, and spent the last six years as a solo Dev for it. It's now coming to steam at the end of this year.

Next I want to write a musical set in New Zealand about the Maori Land Wars. I have two Maori brothers who were embarrassed of their skin colour (rural NZ is pretty racist). I want to show how formidable and powerful a people the Maori were/are, in a style akin to Les Mis.

I would love to see your musical when it's done

I keep telling myself I'm going to draw monsters. But I never do.

Would you start with big scarry teeth and draw the rest of the monster around that? Or start with the shape and worry about details later?
- Body type. Reptile, humanoid, insect, vacuum cleaner, etc.

Cloud native desktop Or Cluster desktop computing

I want to get the Linux desktop experience but capable as highly available set of services and jobs that can run on the machines around my house.

Methadone for F2P Skinner-box games. An endless treadmill of dungeon-crawling, basically knocking off Path Of Exile or similar - but aggressively free. No mechanism whatsoever for taking your actual money. It'd use all the tricks that make spending bullshit currencies feel good, but you'd actually find those currencies, like it's a video game or something.

A key conceit of the modern-fantasy setting is that credit cards are naturally occurring. Magic understands that plastic is money now, so they just kinda spring forth, as loot. Maybe less than loot. They'd grow on trees. Have as many as you like - you'll enjoy it less than playing. The game's incentive against spraying cash at every problem is that you still have to examine the in-game model and type in some long sequence of numbers to get a random quantity of dollars. It's amusing but not really fun. You'll enjoy the game more if you just play it.

What you'd spend that fake money on is a trickle of procedurally-generated variations for every form of content I can think of. Swords, guns, hats, capes, hairpins, familiars, particle effects, et very cetera. A maximized possibility space of stuff to look at and go "want." None of it's ever exactly what you had in mind, because each thingamajig is a random sixty-four-bit number. That entropy translates to a bajillion trim and shape combinations and then several materials and colors on top of that. There'd only need to be a few dozen models for each thing, and a few dozen textures for each layer, and their distributions would drift over time to create a sense of changing fashions.

A lot of this was a reaction to every live-service money-pit having "seasons." That cyclical change would be textual and central. Summer's ending, and it'll come around again, but it won't be the same summer. So - gear has affinity for its period in time. A summer sword is especially good against summer enemies. It'll struggle against any lingering spring enemies, and eventually, against emerging autumn enemies. By winter's end it's just a prop. You can keep it as a display piece if you really like its randomized appearance, but all of its stats are gone.

Loadouts are visible as a partial halo over someone's head. Their offensive and defensive capabilities are represented as shapes along that crescent, sliding from the near future into the oncoming past. Someone optimized to hell for right now will have one great spike at the center. And you can probably tickle through their armor with half-faded sword from last season, or any mediocre early drop for next season. All these things have their place and time. There's never a reason to spend real money on them. They don't last. They're not real.

What about starting and not finishing?

This song that I've wanted to record for the past 15 years.
It started stagnating when my preferred DAW changed a lot with the newest update, to the point where I had a hard time being productive in it. The struggle with new features that I didn't like, and old useful features having been hidden (or even removed), took away the joy of composing, recording, and arranging.
And then I had kids. Four of them.
Then came a period of financial distress, necessitating monetization of every lucid moment I had. The stress killed any remnant of creativity.
However, I'm doing A LOT better now, both economically and mentally, so I started looking for a new DAW. I really fell in love with bitwig during the trial period, so I bought a license a few day ago, and I've started playing around with it, taking baby steps in learning to be as productive with it as I was with Sonar back in the day.

I've considered making a youtube channel discussing politics with a heavy emphasis on organizing unions. I'm extremely proud of my achievements as a part of a successful union campaign, and I want to share what I've learned, give folks some of my war stories, and teach people the political and practical necessities to organizing. The reason I haven't is because I feel like I would get entirely drowned out in the political youtube space

LeftTube (definitely covered by union-oriented content) does a fairly good job of propping up important messages and messengers. You might try uploading a few videos and sharing them with the likes of Hasan Piker, TYT, Big Joel, Shaun, and PhilosophyTube (Abigail Thorn). Getting your videos in front of the right eyes can expose them to an enormous audience, and most of these people do nothing but consume recommended content in one way or another.

It almost never happens overnight, but I think there's an importance to your story, and we need more union-centric content. Shoot me a link, and I'll be a day-one subscriber.
I'd subscribe just to watch the comment sections.
i personally would love to hear your story

A novel. First because I'm not sure on some key aspects of the plot, second because I'm not an amazing writer

you wont get any better at writing by avoiding it. start writing out your current key plot points and see if your pen can guide you towards some others

There are games I want to make. I caught long COVID and barely had energy for my job. I decided now that I got laid off for having an invisible disability, I can learn how to make games while I can't get a new one, but I'm having issues thinking long enough to learn... I've almost started my game and that's where I'm stuck.

I’m also in the learning how to make games path. So far I’ve learned you want to:

Write idea down on paper. There’s something magic that happens with physical paper. Can move to digital later. What’s the game loop? How do you win/lose? This becomes the start of your game document

Prototype in game engine of choice. Speed above all else. Don’t make it pretty make it functional. Make it feel good to play.

Vet the idea. Playtest the game with friends, family, randos. Watch them play, only explain what they need to know to test what you’re interested in. Sit back, watch and take notes. Do they find it fun? What do they think is cool about it? What’s frustrating them? Focus on the fun parts. Maybe the idea is a dud. Don’t be afraid to scrap it and move on to another. Some bad ideas can be salvaged. If people find some part of the game really cool take that an run with it. This process will likely take many iterations to find a good idea.

Once you have your idea nailed down that’s when real development starts. Plan plan plan. Write everything down on paper first. Analyze your prototype and plan out all the systems the game will need and how it’ll be architect. Then scrap the prototype and build a vertical slice polished game demo.

This is getting really long but from there you can get funding or just throw that up on steam to start generating wishlists while you build the full game.

A lot easier said than done! But thanks for coming to my Ted talk

I have a factorio comic/vid idea I’ve been kicking around in my brain forever. Kinda made a story board of it but realized idk how to make story boards. Or how to tell stories, or how to make comics or animate things lol So if it’s ever gonna get finished it’s probably gonna be some shitty napkin comic 😂

I just constantly have ideas that need a lot of setup and never have any time.

contact microphones on a canvas run through distortion making noise art is probably the most likely thing to happen next, but again I never seem to find the time.

user name checks out

Sobriety

If you need a random mf to talk to hmu. Do it. You don't gotta be a square just because you clean yourself up. You just may fuck up a few times, so may as well try sooner than later.

I wanna learn more about poetry. I love reading poetry. I've written some too. Some of those even got published. But I feel like I don't really understand how it works. I can write decent lines, make things rhyme, or not if that fits the tone better. But I don't really understand why it works, if you know what I mean.

I guess I kind of want to study about how to analyze and appreciate poetry in a structured way. I wanted to take a few courses, but I'm in USA and they only have courses on Western poetry, which I'm not really that interested in. (It definitely very good, but I'm more fascinated with Indian, especially Bengali poetry. That's what I grew up with.)

So yeah, IDK how to do it. But I'll love to. Maybe I can mail some professors and ask for books? Or maybe actual poets might be better? I'm not sure. But I'll love to do it one day.

Look for online courses, like that archive of free MIT lectures. I wouldn't be surprised if you found something worthwhile.
- I haven't been able to find anything like that yet.
If you’ve had poems published without really understanding poetry itself, you may naturally have an intuitive grasp on poetry. I think it would be interesting if you continued writing and reflect on what you write, how you write it, and how you feel while writing it. Maybe write a poem expressing your feelings on poetry!

Then again, studying could give you better means and terminology to express your internal understanding. Either way, I wish you well!
- I would read this

I want to paint the Dinosaur Train song "Dinosaurs A to Z" dinos on a large canvas for my son.

Learning any instrument and creating music

A sequel to my first novel that people regularly ask me about 12 years after I finished it. I published it myself and sold to friends, family, work acquaintances. Two young kids and a busy job wildly delayed any free time I might have for grand modern fantasy. One of these years.

Can I have a copy?

I actually did start once, but didn't get very far.

I wanted to design a mall out of Legos. I got it all set up on Stud.io, and I even started making an entrance with doors, lights, a drive-up and a little park. I'm not good with the building techniques, so it's a super basic flat wall and everything. Also it takes a long time to do much of anything in that program.

Webdev. Wanted to do this to increase my tech skills and insulate myself from several degrees of idiocy at work. Just haven’t had the wherewithal.

If you have the time, I'd recommend trying it out. Creating a basic webpage isn't too hard, and you probably have the tools to get started on your computer already (you can do it with just Notepad and view it in any web browser! Although I would recommend downloading a free proper code editor such as VS Code).
- Bruh, I’m talking about a crud app. Possibly running on the shiny framework. It’s not going to be trivial.

I have several small ideas that seem like they'd go together in a work of fiction, but there are also so many gaps that seeing it ruins any forward thinking I might have about it.

The best way really is to just start. You might chop and change, write and rewrite, many times but you will find a way to make it come together. Writing notes and a list of plot points helps, or even writing out the separate sections and then finding a way to make them meet. Don't get bogged down in the minutiae of sentences and paragraphs. Getting the bare bones down is your starting point. I used a spreadsheet and would add in new points and landmarks as and when they came to me. I still ended up spending ages editing, and adding, and amending until it felt right. Taxing but cathartic to get it all out.

Welding. I'm currently putting my woodworking on hold because of other project, so i really can't start another until i finish the current one and finish whatever i'm trying to finish with my woodworking

Record an indie album with mostly acoustic instruments then send it off to a DJ to mix and master. It wouldn’t be a remix then, more of a collaboration.

Pottery and learning blender and creating characters which I then can animate

I want to get into a little machining and welding.

Unfortunately I have a smallish townhome that doesn't leave me much room for a workshop, and even if I had the space, I'd probably have to go in to the tune of a few hundred if not thousands of dollars worth of machines, tooling, equipment, and materials pretty quickly, and I have other things to blow my money on.

I generally just like working with my hands, making things, figuring out problems, etc. and having some machining projects to figure out seems like a good way to fill in the gaps left by a pretty shitty math curriculum in my high school (I've probably learned more trig from watching some machining videos and only half paying attention than I did taking an actual trig class)

Why not 3d print? I've taught myself a ton of CAD and sm now learning surface modeling. When I'm ready for a CNC, I'll be ready.
- I also want to get into 3d printing, and probably will before I find space for a lathe and mill
  
  But that kind of scratches two different itches for me. I know there's a bit more to it, but pressing a button and letting the machine do most of the work doesn't really appeal to me, I want to do it manually.
  
  There's also the issue of materials, I don't often find myself needing/wanting a plastic part, but I do find myself wishing I could get some custom made metal pieces

I want to buy an old police cruiser (crown Vic) and chop it up into a rally car, and do the gambler 500.