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2020-11-05. On Unix and literature

I came across what turned out to be an old-ass article (from 1998!!) about "UNIX as Literature:"

The Elements of Style, by Thomas Scoville

and boy, let me tell you -- it really got me going, as both an English and computer nerd. I feel like it explains me, in some ways: why I like the computers I do, what I like doing on them, how I use them. In This Essay I Will .. talk about that, I guess. For about nine hundred more words. Here we go. Hang on /type/ (lol, see what I did there? I'M NOT STALLING, YOU'RE STALLING)!

I began writing in seventh grade. I wrote a lot of Very Bad poems¹, and I bound my own book. It was great fun. In highschool, I got a TI-83, you know the one, the graphing calculator with games on it. Remember MirageOS? Good times. Anyway, I started playing around with TI-BASIC and made a few little choose-your-own-adventure-style games (which is where I learned the slang meaning of /cum/, but that's another story), and even tried a little Assembly. It was also great fun. So much fun, in fact, that I wrote a little booklet about the basics of TI-BASIC and my dad was convinced I should be a technical writer or something, it was so great. I am not a technical writer now. Whether it was great or not is lost to time. I doubt it.

I went to college for English Writing, and about midway through my first semester (and my first laptop), I thought I'd try out this Linux thing I'd been hearing about. I installed a truly terrible, backwater distro, and pretty quickly decided I didn't want to continue down that road. I uninstalled Linux (do you know where this is going?) and to my horror (here it comes!) found my computer unbootable. The true irony is that now, after having walked this path for some time, I could easily restore the boot order to get Windows Vista back running on that laptop. Alas, not as a wee froshie -- I wiped the whole thing and installed .. Ubuntu, I think. Thus began the Great Linux Adventure.

Before we embark, however, a detour: I was talking to my coworker today about Geocities and she said, "Remember MySpace?" I answered, "Of course," and we talked about the great HTML learning capabilities of that wonderful Tom creation and I mentioned that really, I got my start with HTML on a website called /expages.com/, which was another HTML builder, and which had this great juggler gif that I spent a few minutes trying to find just now, to no avail. Of course, there was a lot of =<marquee>= in those days, as well. This, of course, is just another waystop in my Text / Computer Journey.

In college, I used Linux exclusively (... GNU/Linux, whatever nerds), writing my papers, poems, non-fiction, stories, etc. on my little laptop, through a parade of various distros (it was a prime distro-hopping time). The only one I'll mention by name is the scrappy, now-defunct (well, retired) CrunchBang Linux, where I met my first Linux (GNU/Linux!) pals on the forum and had all-around a great time. Twas a good distro. Now I'm thinking about it, I wonder how much of the subject of my senior thesis, a hyptertextual PDF of everything I'd written in college², was born out of playing around in the computing environment I did in those days. Probably very much. (Do these sentences connect logically? I don't know if they do. No matter, onward!)

I finally got a new laptop in graduate school (for Creative Writing, this time!) and kept Windows on there for a bit, partly because I was lazy and partly because ... no, wholly because I just didn't get around to wiping it and installing Linux (GNU/L---let me stuff a sock into the RMS in the back of my head). Finally, I did -- and I used it to write my Master's thesis, an outgrowth of my senior thesis but this time on the web (I still worry a little that I'll be got for self-plagiarization)³.

After all that schooling, at some point I bought my website, got into tildes, and type a whole lot about nothing in particular online, all day. I still do a ton of writing and a lot of computering.

Here's the thing though, my Big Scary Thought: I'm worried I'm only into any of this for the gear. When I was younger (and before I had to move twice a year), I collected books from everywhere, and they littered my room. I never read most of them, because the objects themselves were more interesting to me -- the old paper crinkling with pageturns; the slightly-raised ink on the pages; the typefaces, baroque and interesting; the covers, cardboard or paper, wrapped in fabric or nothing; and oh, the smell of all of it together. I've got rid of most of my books through moving a lot (they're quite heavy, as anyone who's lifted a box of them will know), but the books I still cannot bear to part with are majority unread as well. I never read that much poetry, really, and never felt as though I knew what I needed to be great at it.

The same goes for computers -- I've been thinking about mechanical keyboards recently, but even before then -- the bulk of my tinkering on the computer has been tweaking my desktop settings, first through GUI tools like Compiz (wobbly window gang) and GNOME Tweak Tool, then by moving on to text-configured WMs like awesomewm, xmonad, herbstluftwm, i3, bspwm, or even programming my own with dwm. What I've learned of programming, I've learned because I was trying to make rectangles on my screen move around in different ways. Not because I actually had anything to /do/.

I'm always worried that I am, at bottom, Unserious. That I'm just having a laff, shooting the shit -- though on the other hand, isn't that why we're here? I'm going to risk the ultimate cliché, quoting Vonnegut, because I really do like this one:

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

~ A Man Without a Country

And I believe that, I really do -- but at the same time, what if I'm not farting around /right/ ? ... To be honest, being a part of a tilde community has helped with that, because I get the feedback I so crave, and friends are always nice to have. I also find the older I get, the less I care about being /right/, I just want to putter around. So putter I do. And most of the time, I have Great Fun.

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