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Early this month, some people from my company went to our client's company for a visit. When they came back, we got to hear some fun stories about what it's like there.

MJ told me a story about how the employees there get a lot of nice free stuff, but they don't really like it. For example, they have a frozen yogurt machine. He complimented one of them about it, and they go "yeah, but it's only got 2 flavors a week and it's never open when you want it to be".

Another person was saying that even though they have Keurig machines on every floor, only the plebs get coffee from the Keurigs. The best coffee is on the 7th floor, where there's some nice barista coffee maker.

It's a funny contrast to our company, which has no frozen yogurt and a gas station coffee maker. We get by fine.

These things remind me of how used to things you can get.

Right next to my desk, we have a dashboard of some of the metrics for our game. Stuff like how many people are playing, what they're doing, and graphs over time. We put a nice little bit of flavor by adding some embedded shaders of fish. They're just little renderings like loop indefinitely, kind of like a gif, except you can rotate the camera.

It gives the dashboard some personality and people like to mention that the fish is their favorite part. Today, someone said, "you know, I get tired of looking at the fish". People nearby admonished the comment, but it reminded me of the yogurt and the Kuerigs; something that was nice at first becomes standard after a while, and then it gets boring.

Food is a pretty obvious example. Sometimes if we're going out to eat, Lainey will reject something like pizza because we had pizza the day before. "I'm tired of pizza". I think most people are like this. We just want some variety to the things we eat, or the things we watch, or the things we do.

I spent a few days last week watching Cutthroat Kitchen, and by the end of the week, I'd had enough. Every episode feels the same. The chef that's there for validation, the chef that's there to prove themselves to their parents, the chef who's not looking to make friends. Replace your heat source with X, use Y instead of knives, I couldn't watch it anymore.

Noticing this makes me want to change things up. I changed one of the fish already, maybe I'll change another fish next Monday.

One of the tough things about it is that it takes some work to change things all the time. It's easy to get a subscription to something and then just stick with it. It's an ongoing battle.