And after the Fenris Wolf devoured the sun, bringing a sudden and permanent darkness to the field of Ragnarok, he turned his fusion-wet muzzle toward the Earth. “Urk,” he whined, his stomach growling with the ferocity his face had worn a moment earlier. “I’m full of apocalypse and plasma. Can I have that one wrapped up for later?” Ares, trotting along on a clattering battlemech and showing a distinct lack of concern for the regional purity of this mythological narrative, handed him a styrofoam clamshell large enough to house the planet with a few side orders of moon. “Enjoy, man. You can reheat it with Alpha Centauri later.” The wolf nodded his thanks, and the two laughed with good-natured glee, their voices built from the harmonies of a few billion screams.
When he’d complained of ennui and the classless lassitude that follows from a surplus of time and a lack of inspiration, the poet-king who sat at the end of the block with his head tucked between his knees had offered him some advice: “Writer’s block? Take a page from my book, and get out of your head for a while.” He’d determined that this was wise enough, but not quite right; instead, he took a page from a book of his own and invited it in, praying that some of the words would outlive their medium.
He snorted the razor-chopped paper with one long breath, then sank into the couch as spindly figures of fiction were transcribed from their scenes into his. They moved slowly at first, but the twitching of his eyes soon made them dance, the typesetting which composed them shifting into font-wrapped limbs and broadsheet grins. They leaned in close to whisper in his ear, the words flowing forth in every mental voice he’d ever used when reading them. Their messages grew oddly-pronounced and ungrammatical as they threaded through each other, trading diphthongs and gaining punctuation in strange new places. Somewhere, a linguistic purist screamed.
Is this how novels are born? he asked one, searching its face for a stray word that might inspire him. Its flesh was written in simple clauses, though the occasional misspelling marred the otherwise attractive stream of consciousness they formed. Adjectives flowed just beneath the surface, creating gentle shades of light and dark and describing the curves of the character’s cheeks. He sought the perfect phrase, but the ink welling up in his eyes was making it terribly hard to see.
Well, it replied, maybe postmodern ones. But nobody wants to read those, you know.
I miss running and developing a game; it was the most intellectually satisfying long-term project I’ve undertaken to date. If I were to invest the amount of time I spend reading interesting but ultimately pointless material on the Internet more wisely, I could spend 10-12 hours a day working without having any significant impact on my current social calendar. This suggests that perhaps I should spend the final three months of my degree investigating the game development companies in Toronto.
It is dangerously easy to become anaesthetised to life, to drink the nectar of convenience and settle, like a human-shaped rug, atop the nearest horizontal surface. To trade live performance for reruns. Modern adulthood all but demands such behaviour; work all day, then let your molecules drift until morning, too distracted to stoke the fire in your eyes. You may not even notice it happening, since it has become so smoothly integrated into our existence. We’re aware of the threats posed by crass consumerism and the endless need to obtain more and more meaningless objects – Fight Club taught us well! – but what of those wrought by our new and ever-expanding ability to consume data?
The issue is this: the Internet is a well with no bottom, and we’re pennies that a handful of brilliant engineers tossed in a decade and a half ago. Its nourishing glow is with us wherever we are, flowing forth from desktops and cell phones and laptops and screens hung from arbitrary walls. This accessibility is an incredible tool when used appropriately, but humans are generally not creatures of moderation. If you can peruse websites and deal with your email for half an hour a day and then get on with your life, that’s great – but is anyone actually doing that? I haven’t managed such a feat in years, and that bothers me. It has recently started to bother me enough that I feel a pressing need to figure out how to roll back the clock.
See, I discovered the Web in 1996, and back then, there was a cap on the amount of random information a person could absorb in a day. There weren’t many easily accessible sites that suited my fancy, and the ones I found had a limited supply of content. It was simple enough to check for new information and then move on. Starting in 1998, my biggest distraction was the MUD I played and, later, ran; that game devoured my days. However, my time there was split between conversation and creation, both of which were filled with ideas. It was not a passive experience, and my interactions with players and staff kept me working on new features pretty much constantly. It occupied the vast majority of my online time from 1998 to 2004, but the ratio of ADP to other things changed along with the structure of the Internet. When I went to grad school and stopped contributing to the MUD in 2004, “other things” took over completely.
While I’d been writing code and designing worlds for people to get lost in, the well had been deepening. Google opened the field of websites so much that it became impossible to see the end in any direction, and aggregators made it even easier to track any number of subjects. No niche was too obscure. (Ten million people love ferrets in party hats just as much as you do! Hey, check out this website that contains nothing but photos of Margaret Thatcher with pandas! Oh my god, a Tumblr devoted to inappropriate footwear!) There was so much to see and learn; every story was accompanied by a dozen useful links and a hundred potentially interesting comments. I could spend all day discovering new topics, and I did: particle physics, American political movements, and more cancer research than you could shake a stick at. (To date, there are no interesting articles about the use of shaken sticks to treat cancer, but give it some time…) I felt smug about my choice of content – no celebrity gossip, no reality television, no YouTube vlogs – but over time, it has dawned on me that it doesn’t matter how high- or low-brow the information is. If there’s too much of it, it must be displacing something else.
The vast majority of my time online is now spent consuming; the target is content, not food or objects, but it’s the same idea. Every minute I spent reading is one I don’t spend creating, and there is enough out there to ensure that I can read for the rest of my life if I’m not sufficiently vigilant. The iPhone in my pocket whispers secrets wherever I am; the laptop travels to the deck as easily as its dead-tree analogue does does. Sure, I’ll do something else, just as soon as I find the bottom of this well. Hey, at least it’s not television!
Those are just rationalisations. Passivity is to be fought, because it spreads far too easily; we’re witnessing a Fibonacci Sequence of meme reproduction. I want to regain my old ratio of information in to information out, but it seems so much harder to do now. How do you ignore the siren song of the entire world’s store of knowledge long enough to contribute your own?
You know how repetition of language has a tendency to render it meaningless? After a certain threshold has passed – let’s say ten repetitions – the definition slips away, leaving a smear of alien letters on the page.
“Tail?” What’s a tail? I DON’T KNOW.
#lang racket
#| Annotate tail calls in Scheme code built from non-quoted literals, variables, 'if', 'set!', 'λ', and function call.
Tail calls are annotated as (τ: ...). |#
(provide annotate-tails)
(require (only-in "match-diamond.rkt" match◇))
(define (annotate-tails code [tail? #t])
(let ([tail (λ (code) (annotate-tails code #t))]
[not-tail (λ (code) (annotate-tails code #f))]
[preserve-tail (λ (code) (annotate-tails code tail?))])
(match◇ code
((λ
...
)
(λ
,@(map not-tail `)
,(tail `)))
((if
)
(if ,(not-tail `)
,(preserve-tail `)
,(preserve-tail `)))
((set! )
(set! ,(not-tail `)))
(( ...)
(,@(if tail? '(τ:) '())
,(not-tail `) ,@(map not-tail `)))
(
))))
I’m tired of fearing the things I dream about. An opportunity has presented itself, and I’ve decided leap up to grab the moment in my teeth; I’ll drag it back to my lair and curl up with a sense of deep satisfaction, like a dragon revelling in its hoard.
If you’d like to contribute to a not-so-secret project, please send me the most beautiful Hubble photographs you can find.
On a completely unrelated note, doing a Google image search for coyotes yields an awful lot of shots of dead tricksters. We’ll have to do something to improve that ratio, too…
I remember when my weight was distributed into the shape of a person. Not a human, necessarily, but a physical collection of parts that worked together as harmoniously as anything so flawed and organic could hope to. My mind was a halogen bulb perched atop the streetlight of my spinal column, which wound its way toward a distant army of toes between layers of muscle and half-moon arcs of bone. Bodies are insubordinate, obstinate things, always taking matters into their own hands, but mine was distinct from everyone else’s; its edges were sharply delineated, like those of a figure gracelessly added to a scene at the last minute. I felt so completely like myself that meditation was a necessary vacation, a rare opportunity to relax my cartoonish ink outline for a few minutes at a time.
A person, an observer, a writer: an island off the coast of us.
Time has eroded the gradients between me and not-me; the island seems much closer to the shore now, more a protrusion than a foreign body. This is not the joyful oneness that hippie teachers debate with their dilated pupils, the sort which transforms one’s fingers into tree roots and conflates whispers with the breezes they ride. No, it is the disturbing unease that comes from fatigue-blur, the melding of foreground and background that speaks harshly of the photographer’s issues with aperture. A lack of personal space. I am a bundle of vague neuroses, a vat-child formed by the total institution that beckons toward a grand future with one hand as it squeezes with the other. A bonsai girl, snipped into pleasing shapes that work so well in this walled garden beneath the ivory tower.
To hell with that.
The fire is still in my belly, that cauterising heat which sears my edges shut. I’ve been buoyed along by the human river for almost three years now, and that’s more than long enough; it’s one thing to stick around a while in order to catch the big fish, but keeping one’s head below the water until it marries one’s lungs is quite another. I’ll finish my degree because it is important, and because I want to know where the road leads – but it’s time to remember what sets me apart. It’s time to write again.
I had a job interview today. I’m not entirely sure that I’ve ever uttered that particular phrase before, in text or otherwise, which should tell you something about how many such experiences I’ve had. By my reckoning, this was the third real one, which is to say the third interview involving questions which in no way pertained to my ability to use a cash register or lift heavy objects. (I can do both of those things, by the way, although attempting them simultaneously is the sort of multitasking which tends to lead to consumer tragedies.) It’s also the first I’ve had in at least five years. I did my best to feel undaunted, but a thorough daunting still ensued; when the Lord of Daunt pays a call, after all, you’d best accept his anxious coin.
I’d spent a couple of hours preparing for the experience, formulating answers to hypothetical questions which struck a careful balance between earnest honesty and shameless self-promotion. It didn’t feel like a sure thing, but I knew that my resume was strong, my work experience reasonably impressive. I’ve more-or-less emerged on the other side of Impostor Syndrome, although it still pops up from time to time, like an insidious banner ad whose 72-pt text reads, “YOU’RE NOT ACTUALLY VERY GOOD AT ANYTHING.” Time and practice have improved my technical skills immensely, and I know that I’ll be a good addition to whichever company I choose (and which chooses me, I suppose. Otherwise, I guess I’ll just be that girl who sits on the lawn and stares).
Then I got there, and after asking me about my education and explaining the company’s general structure, my interviewer started in on the real questions. He is a senior software engineer in the company’s core OS division; I hadn’t known that beforehand, so I was completely unprepared for the sort of queries he made. You know that dream where you have to write an exam, but you don’t know any of the material because you’d never gone to the class? I got to blunder my way through one of those, except that I was a) awake and b) in the middle of asking a huge and amazing company to employ me. It was mortifying, although the kind man was quick to reassure me that none of the candidates he’d interviewed for the position had been able to provide solid answers to the questions which stumped me. (Since this is a public blog, I’ve mentioned neither the name of the company nor the specific questions; that seems like the path of corporate goodwill, or at least the path of plausible deniability and reduced shame.) Suffice to say that I think I presented myself well, but I suspect I’ll be passed over for the job because my performance wasn’t particularly impressive. Well, unless everyone else was wretched, but given the quality of CS students who come out of UoT and Waterloo, that’s unlikely.
And it’s too bad, because I really wanted this one. I’d hoped to have some practice-run interviews with less interesting companies before coming up against something so important, but no such luck. I’m reaching the stage where I’m totally burned out on school and am desperate to reconnect with the feelings of self-sufficiency and personal progress I pawned in order to pay my tuition. I don’t really know where I’ll be going after this degree – although I am dragging Bryan there with me, even if I need to employ feminine wiles and horse tranquilizer by the boatload – but it would be nice to get to try on one of the bigger options to see how it fits.
I think Cupertino and I could get along, if someone there gives me a shot… preferably one which contains less than 5% horse tranquilizer.
I spend an unreasonable amount of time crafting lives for other people. I see them sitting in class and walking down the street, quietly existing in a world that runs parallel to mine, and I rework them to fit the model in my head. They receive new backstories and new goals; I wrap them in mighty quests and fell them with subtle tragedies. The more special of them become so complete, so real, that I feel like I could just pick them up and drop them into their custom-built constructs.
I generally don’t talk to them once their new inner-universe selves begin to take shape. If I did, they could escape back to the banality from which I’ve pulled them…
Hey, you! Yeah, you – the five people who read this blog! Look over here! *jumping up and down, waving a large banner that says “EDUCATION” on it. Well, that was less exciting than you’d hoped…*
Bryan and I are giving a three-hour lecture/seminar on iPhone development to a group of York Region high school Computer Science teachers on Friday. It’s going to be a lot of fun and I’m happy to make some extra cash, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a bigger opportunity than it had seemed at first. We’re basically going to present ways of marrying iPhone development to the Ontario CS curriculum, and I’m writing a series of apps which will serve as jumping-off points for class projects. No one’s placed any restrictions on these apps, so I plan to make them engaging and fun; they’ll include be a game which uses the accelerometer, a Bluetooth instant messenger, and probably something which uses the camera to let students make their friends’ heads explode.
I also want to release these apps into the wild after the seminar, likely under the BSD license or something similar. It’d be great to know that my code is helping people learn to write apps for the iPhone, and if I can introduce just a tiny bit more mad science into the world, well, that’s all to the better.
So my question for you is this: what do you wish you’d gotten to do with computers in high school? What would have helped to prepare you for university (if you studied CS there), or – more importantly! – what would have helped you realize how much fun computers could be? I can introduce all sorts of wacky stuff, and things which aren’t appropriate for this talk may still be great for future releases. Any ideas are welcome, and if you want credit, I’ll add some comments to the code with your name/pseudonym in ‘em.
