One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.
Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.
I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"
Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.
I'd suspect many places would still respond positively though, especially in the more creative worlds. Almost every creative was that kid once.
I'm a bit sad that we lose that innocent, carefree attitude later in life.
For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.
it's a great marketing platform, if anything. Strong brand loyalty going forward and costs you not much to do well, not to mention you can brighten a day or few for thousands of kids in all sorts of life situations.
If the problem of society could be summed up in one bite, this would be it.
Gen X kids were starving for any adult not their parents to acknowledge their existence. Which made us targets for predators. But now we’ve overcorrected and acknowledgement is routine. That dopamine hit is practically free.
(I know that submariners literally have water obstacle courses where they have to learn to, for instance, do some repairs while a compartment is flooding, but I’ve no idea what the Navy does as a whole).
Feel like that opened something in me..
I recall their response being very human, warm and encouraging, but it also included all of our original sketches, with a very direct (but kid-understandable) statement that they were obligated to return the originals to make it very clear that they were not kept and thus could not possibly be understood to be "inspiration" for anything that might be in a future game.
If anyone else knows what I am talking about, I'd like to know the name of the company.
They told us they took care to not even read the manuscripts. I don't remember if they return them unopened or destroy them, but otherwise if the ideas from the manuscript end up in one of their productions, they open themselves to legal trouble. It may happen even if it is a coincidence, so they don't want to take any chance.
I mean it can work; especially for smaller studios, community members and modders are often hired to work on the game itself (I'm sure Bethesda has a lot of that, the modding community is basically free onboarding / training, but also Factorio's Space Age was mainly inspired and executed by the developer of the Space Exploration mod).
Ahhhh this makes me so happy. My brother and I, like many, were so obsessed with all the LucasArts adventures, so naturally I mailed them in my idea. I also got a letter back. IIRC it wasn't from a lawyer, but it was definitely a soft "no." There's a chance I still have that letter somewhere.
Man, I am not a "good old days" kind of person but the 80s (well, late 80s early 90s) really were a different time.
I remember the wiring, pipes, everything actually went somewhere and was meant for something. Nothing was just for looks and everything served a purpose.
Still hasn't been built to this day ;P
I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular expression. Ha, how naive. My dream was to receive a letter back saying how a good idea that was and that I was hired.
Unfortunately I never got a response back.
I found the CEO’s corporate address somewhere online and sent the letter to him, never to hear back.
Then, around 8 months later, I saw my first ad for Snickers Unwrapped Bites on TV and freaked out. They had immediately implemented my idea, which as a kid was amazing, but I’ll never forgive them for not writing back. Especially because none of my friends ever believed me.
TouchID solves this in a sense.
Anyhow, when I was about 10, I wrote the CEO of Grumman a letter about how great they were talking nerdy about my favorite planes of theirs. The CEO wrote back with a short message thanking me personally. I was so excited, my parents framed it and put it on the wall of my childhood room, etc etc. Only as an adult, well into my 30s, did I remember that and think "OMG, of course his secretary or PR firm wrote that", but I truly couldn't realize that when I was a kid.
Reading this I wish I'd set my sights higher, figuratively and literally!
ahhhh this makes me feel things
I wanted to write Sony about my idea but never got the balls. Years later they released the minidisc, still bulky, a total flop. The memory stick was a much better idea from them, I never knew why they didn't implement an iPod earlier than Apple
"Disaster on a stick An attempt to erect the world’s largest popsicle in a city square ended with a scene straight out of a disaster film — but much stickier."
In hindsight, I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write a printed book's worth of material (maybe a few modern blog posts, at best). But at the time, I knew more about electronics than the other 29 kids in my grade school class, and that constituted most of my worldview, so why couldn't I write a book.
I loved the Forrest Mims books, and, like any kid, wanted to mimic the things that I saw grownups doing.
Someone at Tandy might have realized that I was just an enthusiastic kid, but in any case, they wrote me a nice letter back. The company didn't wish to develop a book at this time, but if I did so on my own, they would be happy to review a copy off the press.
(Edit: I mean, there was a mailing address right there, on the back cover. In a kid's mind, why couldn't you simply mail a letter to that address. https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/page/n131... )
Now, I answer every single email my app customers are sending me and have been doing this for close to 20 years and I get a lot of positive reviews for the great customer support.
Thanks for the nostalgia though. Amazing game.
He was a bit intimidated by the enhanced strapping, but he liked it still.
I applaud parents who encourage kids to do stuff like this when they have the innate drive for it.
I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.
I sent it to Nokia over email :-D. They didn't respond.
Dual SIM phones apparently became a thing that same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM#:~:text=The%20first%2... Not originally by Nokia, though.
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
I love that kids could be left alone in their home and would burn plastic over a gas stove to create models of roller coasters.
I love that Disney would respond to him and not even forget the typo in quadrupuler.
I love that he kept all that and thought of it as a foundational part of his personality (I think probably he was already like that)
They sent our boy an advertisement.
Oh, joy, where’ve you been left?
I actually got a personal response thanking me for my input!
Then a few years later that keyboard I wanted actually became a product.
Not sure if I really influenced their process or not; but I got that keyboard and its fun to think I did :)
I'm curious about this - I thought it was a very expensive process to patent something.
In the following years, they made it possible to order custom M&Ms (for a price...) and how you can even have your logo on them.
It also takes some awareness to state your age at the start of the letter. That's what makes people respond so well to it. I would never have thought age was relevant, or even that it was shameful to admit you're just a child. I didn't understand how people think. This guy apparently did, so again, he was already cut out for acting, I'd say.
He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making of EPCOT.
A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
I remember also receiving that weird VHS tape from Nintendo in the mail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzIc_c1PvE
I have no idea how I received that, but it was so cool!
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.
I have very mixed feeling on the language as a whole, both the tag and script language, though they’re mostly negative nowadays. I joined the CFML Slack a few months ago, which I was surprised to find, and the people on there were very nice and I respected their passion for the platform, but I personally still find the language pretty irritating, even with the scripty version.
Granted, I am very removed from web stuff now, and mostly work in data-land.
[1] I have a degree now, but that came considerably later.
Anyway, YC's Heart Aerospace's intended commercial airframe design now does use a turboprop as a backup (for range extension beyond the capabilities of their battery electric engine), so six year old you was clearly onto something :)
https://i.imgur.com/1eHcead.jpeg
Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning that it'd be cool if you could print out an image of your city in SimCity 2000, as you could in the previous SimCity game. That was enough to get me only this letter from legal as a response:
https://i.imgur.com/Y2wGcRt.jpeg
I did grow up to become a professional game developer though!
https://i.imgur.com/E9QgkCp.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/i3MYCZv.jpeg
Presumably they are implying that if they read creative suggestions, they open themselves to the possibility of being sued if they ever implemented anything similar to what was suggested. Doesn't sound too complicated to explain to a kid.
That's not really a catch-22. It's just a contradiction.
It's such a terrible response for someone that was not in fact suggesting a new feature for the franchise.
And even if it had been, rejecting the entire letter for one sentence is still bad.
It's polite. Being polite is pretty much expected here.
It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing. Like in the 80s and 90s people were trying to make things that were fun and interesting and probably based on their life experiences. And now they're trying to make things that are the best distillation of whatever was most successful before. But that makes it feel dishonest, corporate.
Even Microsoft in the 90s could still make stuff that felt fun and unique. There was a counterpart to Creative Writer called Fine Artist that was equally good.
Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.
The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.
I've let her play around with Google Docs before. But what I really wanted was something like Creative Writer that is more kid friendly. I used Gemini (sorry) to suggest some software and it suggested "Book Creator" which is intended for schools/teachers. I signed up as a fake teacher and added my kids as students and they did create some really creative books, importing images, and adding their own drawings. But it's still missing that kid-friendly vibe like Creative Writer.
https://glyphdrawingclub.itch.io/mr-baby-paint
https://pasteboard.co/2aYWHRlnuFuM.jpg
I guess they have to deal with so many annoying complaints, so they are really happy if there is something joyful once in a while.
I got a rejection letter once from a company I submitted my resume to (online) and I still remember that and in a positive light even though it was a rejection.
Now they just ghost you even if you went through 5 rounds of interviews and spend a bunch of your time.
Absolutely. But it doesn't increase next quarter's revenue. Which seems to be the main metric nowadays.
Wait, the villains have Sega and Sony logos. How were they able to do that legally?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley
They sent me a letter thanking me and said that they don't develop games in a nice way.
I immediately filed that letter with the orange Sony letterhead and still have it til this day.
Good times.
I don't remember this episode of Firefly
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
Just a reminder: we've supposedly been in/near late/end stage capitalism for over a hundred and fifty years now. Marx was proposing this back at the end of the nineteenth century.