I came across a blog post highlighting a Japanese watercolor painter, Yoko Tada, who is getting a collection of works published. Yoko Tada is 100 years old. They started painting when they were in their 80s.
I am still quite far away from my 80s (for now). But I love hearing stories like this. It’s refreshing to hear about. There’s so many stories of artists, musicians, and even programmers who have the same story of: “oh yeah, I have been doing this since I was 4.” It’s almost soul crushing to try and be a beginner when there’s so many stories like that. The internet especially has so many of these. I love hearing about writers, artists, etc that started way later in life.
Programming can be a lot of fun for me. But there’s so much software that is generally uninteresting. Especially if 5+ years later the problem it was solving or usability of it goes away. I think about how so many people learned very specific javascript or css tricks to solve problems in internet explorer. Games and such handle this a bit better (RIP flash games). Those have the art and fun aspect to it. But man, I think about how a grandchild is going through a box of my stuff. Find a now ancient usb drive and realize none of it works because hardware has changed so much it’s unusable without some emulation. Then it be some small web application that crashes immediately because it cannnot connect to some other web service.
A journal about life during the 2030s will be much more interesting to find. Bad paintings of clouds (they’re so hard for me). I got a few years to get better.