When I was 6 years old, I got my first computer, a Commodore 64. I still have no idea how my parents managed to afford it, as we weren’t exactly well off, and computers were fairly expensive in 1987. While playing games was fun (in particular, I loved dressing Barbie up in ridiculous outfits for her dates with Ken), what I really loved was playing around with C64 BASIC. I would anxiously await every issue of 3-2-1 Contact so I could type in the programs included, which would lead to endless hours of trying to fix the various problems, as they would invariably have numerous errors.
However, this isn’t a post about computers.
Fast forward to today. I’ve got a digital piano that mostly serves as a dust collection device. Every few months, I’ll clean it off and print out the sheet music of some song that’s stuck in my head, and I’ll sit there for hours trying to figure out how to play it by ear before resorting to looking at the sheet music (which invariably leads to me having to pull up a refresher of just how to read sheet music). Most of the time, I’m pretty close to having the majority of the keys right.
I am not a good piano player. My ability to read music isn’t that great. I’m still learning how to look at the sheet music and not my hands. If someone would ask me if I could play piano, I would very emphatically answer “no”. Yeah, I’m good at figuring things out when I take the time, and I’m pretty sure that if I practiced, I would be very good. But unlike the way I treat most other things in my life, being good isn’t the point.
However, this isn’t a post about playing piano.
When I was hacking around with those BASIC programs when I was 6, I wasn’t thinking about my future. I didn’t realize that I was slowly honing skills that would shape my career. I didn’t think about how the code I wrote was horribly inefficient. I didn’t care that I had to do it wrong 100 times before I got it right. I wasn’t worried about someone else seeing my programs. I did it for the sheer joy of solving a problem.
I may not be good at playing the piano, but when I nail a section of Adele’s Something Like You, even if I have to play it a bit slower than it’s meant to be played, even if I can’t play it repeatedly without making a mistake here or there, even if it takes me 3 hours to learn how to play 30 seconds of music, I get that same feeling of joy that I did when I was a kid writing hacked up BASIC code.
This isn’t about computers, and this isn’t about playing piano. It’s about joy.
Do you remember what made you incredibly happy when you were a kid? Think about it for a minute. What you did isn’t nearly as important as how it made you feel. You felt accomplished, on top of the world. It wasn’t about what other people would think of your accomplishments. It wasn’t about proving yourself. When did you last feel that way? For me, it’s when I’m playing piano. It’s about the raw joy of creating something. I may be rehashing someone else’s music, but it’s my fingers solving the problem and playing the tune. It’s hard work, and my fingers hurt afterwords, and it’s not something I do all that often, but it’s the closest thing I have to being an innocent 6 year old, unaware of stress and complications and retirement plans and politics.
Joy and love are two different things. Find something that brings you joy, not just something that you love. Keep trying everything until you find it: it’s worth it. Hold that feeling tight. Forget about the rest of the world, and do what brings you joy like no one is watching.
- They are both set in the PNW.
- They are both written by female authors.
- They both are popular for being both loved or hated by a large number of people.
Let me tell you something. This is getting to be how if you’re a jerk on the internet, someone is eventually going to compare you to Hitler.
Just because something is bad, it does not mean that it is the same thing as the absolute worst thing you can think of. It’s not a valid comparison. It just means you don’t have the imagination to come up with a more scathing review.
How many of you have read the entire Twilight series? How many of you have read the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy?
I’ve read them both. Seriously. Cover to cover, multiple times. They are nothing alike. Neither of them are stellar writing, but because they are popular and appeal to a large number of women without having any technical merit as a well written piece of literature, people are jumping on the OMG WORST THING I HAVE EVER READ bandwagon.
You know what? I’m just happy people are reading. I’m happy that women feel like they can write books that appeal to them. They are talking about the things that they personally like, and other women are buying those books. I’m glad that these book series exist, because they have spawned conversations about the need for more positive female role models for teenagers. We’re now actively discussing how women read erotica. It’s not just something that’s hidden behind cookbooks on a book shelf or in a collection on our Kindles.
How are these bad things? Despite how you may feel about the writing style or the plot, they both resulted in positive conversations. And if you’re going to say that one of them is just like the other, that’s what you should be referring to. Not that they are the worst pieces of writing ever, but that they are opening up conversations among women of all ages about topics that previously were considered scandalous, unbecoming, or completely under the radar.
And furthermore, by completely dismissing these books as being the worst thing ever and by constantly disparaging the authors with ad hominem attacks, you may be teaching some other teenage girl or bored housewife that if she publishes her book, she’ll be up for a world of hate on the internet, because it may not be the highest form of literary art. Shame on you for that.
I don’t find heteronormativity or consumerism attractive. But I’ll keep the chocolate.
I’m a big girl. I shop in the plus sizes. Macy’s doesn’t call them plus sizes, they call them “Macy’s Women”. This is insulting to anyone that isn’t a plus size, as apparently you are all girls, or maybe ferrets, or an alien life form. They don’t care; Just give them your money.
I went in search of “Macy’s Women”, and I finally found them on the 3rd floor. This floor was disturbing. The escalator getting there sounded like it was about to break down at any moment with it’s wheezes and squeaks and creaks, the floor was broken in places, and I don’t know if it was a trick of the lighting, but everything looked dirty.
The clothes were… beyond description. I think some of the shirts were just re-purposed tablecloths with a $200 price tag. All I wanted was a black suit jacket and a white (or black) button down shirt. I must have been shopping for an hour before I finally found a shirt that didn’t have an excessive number of buttons, pockets, or weird flair in the form of ropes, buckles, or bows. Also, what’s up with the collars? Why do the buttons not go all the way up to the collar? Why are the collars so ugly? The designers were just terrible. I know that there are non-ugly fat people clothing out there. I own lots of it. Am I really that much better at picking out clothing than the people that stock Macy’s shelves?
There weren’t any sales people around; at least, not that I could find. There weren’t any mirrors scattered around like there are in most clothing departments. I guess they didn’t want anyone to see how ridiculous they looked standing next to the paisley print tent pants. The dressing rooms were so gross. They were also self-service: once you’re done trying something on, you have to take it out of the room yourself. I don’t consider myself a lazy person, but when I’m paying that much money for a shirt, I shouldn’t have to put my reject pile away.
While the first two floors had been a comfy amount of warm, they decided to kick the heater on the 3rd floor into overdrive. I was melting. Literally. I have bright red hair. When I start sweating, the dye drips. Macy’s, I’m sorry that I ruined that hideous white shirt I tried on by leaving a tiny red spot on it, but really, the cut was horrendous, the material was terrible, the price tag was astronomical given the quality of the garment, and you shouldn’t hate fat people so much, anyways. I left you a note saying I was sorry. I’m not paying for the shirt.
We hold all of our developers to that standard. I’ve been called out for having one space incorrect. I’ve been called out by using spaces instead of tabs. I’ve been called out for so many things, and it’s made me a better programmer because I have learned to examine code that I’ve written that much more closely. (Disclaimer: To be clear, I’m not a good programmer yet. I still have so much more to learn.)
PHP as a project doesn’t seem to enforce any type of order. I mean, just look at their function naming convention. They’ve got camelcase, they’ve got underscores, they’ve got words running together. It’s lazy. It’s bad design. However, it’s the model that Linux has promoted, a hodgepodge of code shoved together until it works, regardless of beauty.
I don’t actually have a problem with Linux; I think it’s a great OS that definitely has its uses. But I do dislike the effect that their too-many-cooks madness has had on open source.
I’ll admit I haven’t looked at Linux code in a while. The last time I had a reason to dig in, it’s because I was trying to port a Logitech USB display to FreeBSD, so I had to go poking around in Linux’s (fairly new at the time) input subsystem. The lack of documentation was terrible. When looking around at other areas, the code standards seemed nonexistent. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. I’d love to hear it.
A project isn’t just about the end product. It’s also about the path it took to get there, and there will be growing pains. From my perspective, it appears Linux is still going through a lot of that teenage awkwardness where it is covered in acne and knocking over things in its clumsiness. I would love to see it get out of that stage, but I haven’t yet seen any commitment to get its act together. Instead, it is teaching people that it is alright to be messy. It is alright to do things your way and not necessarily work together to put together something as simple as a coding standard as a team. People are learning these habits and applying them to other projects, and it is harming open source as a whole.
I know I’ve gone a bit off-topic as I started out talking about PHP, and I’m not implying that PHP developers and Linux developers are the one and the same. These are just my personal opinions. I’m also not going to say that FreeBSD is perfect, nor does our entire code base adhere to the standards we have in style(9). But if I have anything to say about it, we’ll get there eventually.
