Tuesday 16 February 2016

Coding

This post is less an afterthought from my blog on HeadCrash vs SnowCrash and more a lifelong frustration which I have never shared with people because people generally don't care enough about the impact it had on my life to give a shit.

Coding

At the age of Eight I sat in front of the console and I wondered why I was phasing in and out of perceptions, self-belief and ability. Some moments I stared at the screen, had focus and knew exactly what to type. Other moments, I was not sure what I was doing. I realised that I was sensitive to some type of unknown cause, resulting in my perceptions shifting wildly between self-belief and ability to do something such as code a computer, or the disbelief in myself. I contemplated the waves of beliefs coming through the wall from the classroom beyond, each individual persuading other individuals to share their perception and I saw this as colours in the air overlaid on the infrastructure like lava-lamps on a wireframe.

The teacher came out of the classroom and told me that the other kids had been telling her I was not coding, I was playing games. The teachers was disappointed in me because she thought I had conned her into allowing me to play computer games by pretending to be a computer whizz kid capable of coding.

I told her the truth; I had been hacking the games on the school computers floppy disk to learn how to put them together because there were things in them which I did not know how to do, an that this was possible only because I was good enough at coding to know how to do it. I did not intend to steal anyones copyright but the fact is that in BBC Basic there is simply one way to do things as sleekly as possible which works, which is the sensible optimal way to do it. My confusion was that the games on the school floppy disks were not coded that way; they were coded with lots of extra lines that made no sense and i was changing them to do it my way because I wanted to see if I was right in how I was thinking about this. So far my alterations had made no difference whatsoever to the gameplay. BBC’s were too basic to be able to tell if I had improved the processing speed and other considerations.

I did not explain any of the above very well because of the pressure the teacher was putting on to me to answer her question and the waves of suspicion she was projecting onto me that I was tricking her. I replied; ‘A bit of both but that is how it works.’ She interpreted this as guilt on my part and that was the last time I ever saw the school computer.

I had not got a chance to show her the three thousand plus lines of hand-written code I had been making into my notepads for my text-based adventure. I did not get a chance to show her the vdu games I had written already from my own code on disks that my grandad had given me, during the time I had been cramming in as much learning as possible on the days when I had stayed at his house across the river Severn in England during school holidays. I had showed some of the kids that, but their response was to get jealous and tell the teacher that I was doing nothing but playing games and so evidently she believed them that I was lying and had tricked her.

My reputation after that was one of being a clever liar with no actual skill in coding. Not only this but having waved the school computer under my nose and permitted me to code on it for a few sessions during break time before the other kids came in and took over what I was trying to do so they could play games on it, which I felt a social duty to allow them to do because computers were new back then and none of them had ever seen a BBC micro, the school had only just got one themselves.

My mother threw my notepads out because the school had a word with her that this whole coding thing was a scam, and that was the end of my career as a coder. When my dad brought an Amiga home several years later I started to learn the several programs which it was capable of running, only to discover that software security had tightened up a lot since then and that the actual books I needed to learn how to code in these more complicated languages were more expensive than my parents were wiling to purchase for my education.

Then the whole world outside the professional industries went over to PC’s. In a bookshop I had a look through the PC languages and came to realise that they were created by a psychopath. While there was a lot of logical application in them, for example using particular symbols to refer to particular functions, the arrangement of these was either haphazard or according to a very twisted perception which I did not enjoy forcing my mind into the shape of, because it was psychotic. I anticipated that perhaps the mind who generated this did not know it was creating a vortex channeling into a particular paradigm through which some psychopath operated; actually understanding this syntax caused psychopathy. An alternate format would be less psychotic but by then; the future of the industry was already sold on fast-practicality at the cost of humanity. As a child I had no way to express this instinctual awareness from the study of code; what I was saying would have sounded like crazy talk to the adults who I had stopped trusting already. Much later I learned that Bill Gates who had pioneered this particular code is investing millions of dollars into Agenda21 the depopulation of the planet, proving what I had said all along; that microsoft’s programming languages were created by a psychopath.

Nobody cares about my opinion so I went home and watched Tron yet again, wondering how different things could have been had I not been actively discouraged by the adults with my natural talent at software programming because they had already written me off as a clever liar and destroyed all evidence that I had ever written my own games in the first place. I tried to explain that the precision focus required to be a good coder is so concise that it is a very different way of thinking than lying, and why would I want to lie anyway? My interests are in being a coder. Words which fell on deaf ears. I learned very young that the reason I like coding is because it is something pure, and the adults of the past generation are far from pure because otherwise they would have been able to see where I was coming from and not spread lies about my objectives. That is how intelligent people are mistreated in Wales; with suspicion and then actively persecuted, their creativity destroyed by people with less sincerity.

So I was forced to study art instead of computers and therefore the industry standard Macs instead of dodgy-mentality of PC’s. Thirty years later and only now is a company starting to release a computer product (raspberry pi) designed to teach kids how to code from the same age which I had been coding, before personal computers even existed as a normality. I was lucky that my grandfathers job necessitated him to own one and be writing his algorithmic codes for the company for which he worked. I am still very aware that the organic structure of a child's mind, growing along the streamline of a software code's functional sincerity; is vulnerable to being corrupted toward amplifying that psychotic format which the PC codes create.




this album reminds me of mad professor studio techniques




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