A Broken Watch

Posts

"Beautiful Constraints"

I'm starting to think that programmers who dip into the homebrew, demoscene and retro communities and come out talking about the beauty of programming with constraints are getting it slightly wrong. You want constraints? If you're in a programming or engineering profession, you already have them. Heck, if you're in any profession. But, I know programming/engineering professions best because I've been in them for like 20 years. Your constraints are: Horrible bosses, bad management decisions, a pathological Capitalistic enterprise, idiotic schedules, badly written existing code bases and technical debt, people at higher levels with political control that know a lot less than you, lack of creative or design control, etc. You want constraints? Probably also throw in: Non-existing or ineffective build and test automation, annoying auto-formatters, syntax requirements, unhelpful code reviews and nagging code review requests with people circumventing the tests to get past ...

Automatic Nonsesnsors

Imagine if you and each of your friends wrote random things on index cards all day. You then made copies of them and whenever you saw your friend or passed by your friend's desk, locker, mailbox, etc. you gave him a copy of the index cards you wrote on that day. Each friend also gave you a copy of her cards. After a few exchanges with a few friends, you had a stack of cards to go through, reading each individual card (and they wrote a lot of them). And, since you wanted people to see your cards, and since trading cards became a social task in itself, you often started trading with just about anybody. Most of the messages were dumb and boring. In fact, your friends knew that many other people would see these cards, so most were stripped of any kind of controversy or antagonism. A number of the cards simply said "Here's something I like that I know many other people also like," and then other cards repeated the same thing and had things like, "Yeah!" ...

enjoy your symptom

Me: "Doc, you gotta help me." Doctor: "Jesse, I'd like to help you, but there's nothing wrong with you. So, there's nothing that can be done. We can't fix anything because nothing is broken." Me: "I hear you, doc. It's worse than I thought. I'm completely irreparable."

tail call

Saying a lot to say nothing really gets a bad rap. Talking in circles for a while is great even when, ultimately, it's only to prove that there's not much to say in the first place. Because, really, there's not all that much to say, anyway. And, the most interesting thing about all this nothing is the only way to come to terms with it is the futile act of attempting to symbolize it. If we don't do that. If we fail to go through the motions of attempting and failing to symbolize the something that is actually nothing, we might mistake it for something. We risk pooling meaning behind shaky, fragile signifiers that we never explore, never peel back the lid to see the emptiness inside. The idea that we always have to convey some datum, some rational and utilitarian fact with our speech seems noble on the surface, but that's the only place it can ever exist. It perpetuates shared delusion. It allows us to put too much faith into ...

Cage of Reason

During the Haitian Revolution against the French, The Haitians sung the soldiers' songs in their language and tense. The soldiers could all see the irony; their own rebel songs, their ideology. We can't invoke this story with our captors, They never heard it. We sacrificed stories for verdicts. We can't invoke the words of the poet. We sacrificed him to the Market. We can’t invoke the wisdom of the old books, We sacrificed them to stammering and doubtful looks. We can't invoke the Church's righteousness or reliance. We sacrificed it to Science. We can’t invoke empathy, We sacrificed it to individual agency. We can’t invoke the deeds of the old King. We sacrificed him to perennial voting. We can't invoke legacy, We sacrificed it to, “Everything I have was earned by me.” We can’t invoke a God’s reprisal. We sacrificed him to blunt denial. We can’t invoke romance. We sacrificed it to an enlightened stance. We can't invoke the r...

The End of Story.

This is it. The end of the movie. The hero will have to use all of the cliched pithy wisdom that’s been spelled out for him by the older, wiser, less head-strong character who was surprisingly like him in his youth. Older audience members can relate to both characters, and younger audience members are taxed to consider the wisdom of their elders more often. All pretty much male-centric; the girl lead who seemed to completely be put off by the male lead has just about completely come around now, after the lull in the middle of the story where the hero’s sensitive side was exposed and he was vulnerable to change. Finally embracing that change, in the apex of his final challenge, the young hero is compelled to apply the advice that was clearly and consistently broken down for him by the wise old male character and combine it with the sensitivity he’s learned from the female lead. None of the base-line collateral characters believe in him. The clear...