I really appreciate the Newbie Help Zone. It is a lot of pressure working in environments where people expect you to prove that you have read every sentence of every textbook, reference manual, and Google hit in existence on a topic and have tried every possible fix before you are allowed to talk to another human being about an issue you're having.

I constantly have people apologizing to me for not knowing enough and am constantly explaining that there are no stupid questions, and that I'd rather them ask me so I can get them unstuck, instead of them pretending they understand when they don't because they're afraid of looking stupid, being raked over the coals, or googling for hours instead of just picking up the phone and talking to me. I get sick of memorizing where every person sets the bar for when a question is "too stupid" to deserve an answer and decided long ago that for myself, to make sure no ever trips over it, I'm just going to throw the bar away.

I really appreciate that this forum has chosen to do the same, with no such thing as a stupid question, so I can stop worrying about constantly impressing people with my performance so that they are ok with me asking a question when I don’t know something, and get back to developing games.