Sunday, 1st April, 2007

What Computers Are For

"Hey Siobhan, you've been a bit quiet the past couple of days. No general day-to-day banter? No random CGI photographs of a stylised version of yourself? No scathing slight on Russel T. Davies's writing ability after the new season of Doctor Who started?"

"Ah, see, I've kinda been busy"

I've long believed that there's something rather unique about my generation. We may not have been the ones running around Haight-Ashbury with flowers in our hair, and we may not be the ones collecting ASBOs for a living, but despite us being written off as "Generation X" by those around us, I think we hold a particularly special seat in the developments of 21st Century life.

We, after all, were the ones that got computers.

I mean, sure, our elders were popping tape-drives into unfesibly large machines when we were in diapers, and if it wasn't for the development work of a billion hippies we wouldn't have ourselves the digital lifestyles that we do know.

But, we were the ones that got computers.

It was us that tinkered. Us that typed in page-after-page of code to get QBert running on our BBC Micros. US that took the devvy things that we could and made something good out of them.

And it's us that straddle that weird line between the command line and the GUI, and hold a unique perspective on what those little boxes with the typewriter and the telly attached to them do.

Anyone born after 1984 doesn't know what a computer is. And anyone born before 1970 doesn't know what one can do.

...

I was thinking, earlier, on my way to buy booze (as I do) about a moment back in secondary school. We'd been set some kind of problem by our Maths teacher (I forget what), and rather than delving into first principles (like I normally would), I decided to write a program to throw every number between 1 and 1000 at the equation, to see which one worked.

And it struck me that that mindest — that "I have a problem ... I'll write a programme to solve it for me" just doesn't exist in the post-Macintosh age group.

(She said, totally over-generalising)

I dunno — I guess what I'm hinting at is the difference between saying things like "I need to do something. I can't until I get [insert programme here — usually Photoshop, or Dreamweaver]", or "Can someone show me how to use [insert programme here — usually Photoshop, or Dreamweaver] to do something?", rather than "OK, so I have this, and that, and that thing over there. I bet I could cobble them together and make something new".

...

Thinking about secondary school though, reminded me of my career aspirations when I was younger. I may have mentioned at some point that I wanted to be an architect when I was in school — which is why I did Art, Maths and Physics for A-Level BTW — but that was only a passing fancy, sparked off by my mother trying to coersce me away from rather more 'kid-like' fantasies.

See, what I really wanted to be, was a train driver

There's a particular tranny-stereotype out there — derided by its peers, yet comforted by them at the same time. It's almost a running joke at tranny parties, with al the cool girls hanging out in the kitchen laughing at the 'spotters' in the living room, talking about the new rolling stock from Virgin.

But when I was a lot younger, I used to love model trains. For some reason, my early memories from our house outside Belfast involve two things: (1) wearing my mother's dresses when she wasn't looking, and (2) building train sets around my bedroom floor.

Hell, I loved it. Making little worlds that I could send the trains around, creating stuff, modeling my immediate environment. Dammit, I even joined a club — a small gathering of 70-year-old men and me, in the basement of a Belfast Library.

(Looking back, that could have been so dodgy... )

But hey, there's actually a point to this — somewhere.

I was thinking earlier about a little daydream that I used to have. Me and my brother would get the train to school every day, and I had vaguely planned in my head that one day I would recreate Lisburn station — as perfectly as possible — with the scenery ending just after the first bridge on the way towards Belfast.

What I used to wonder, was whether or not if I did make it, it would somehow alter reality, and one day we'd be on the train home, and just after we went under the bridge, the whole train would get picked up by a giant hand.

We'd realise that we were just part of someone elses train set — and it would be me making it that would make that happen.

...

Sorry — too many threads of thought converging into one tonight for anything to make sense. Basically, I finished the thing I was working on, and while thinking about it, loads of different and vaguely related ideas dropped into my head in a brain fart.

I'm just sat here waiting for the little film that I've been putting together today to show the whole build of my RL Uni in SL to compress and upload itself, so I thought I'd try and explain a little about what it's all about.

I think I might have failed...

PS. Doctor Who was brilliant. Absolutely fucking outstanding.

Except for the music, which got on my tits.

How very dare you

Because, I can...