OK, I’m being harsh – and imprecise. Wondering whether your vocabulary is good is a valid concern (at least for beginner or intermediate authors). The “pointless” part of the title is there to offer a quick response: Whether your vocabulary is good or not is not as crucial as you might think.
What I didn’t mention in that post – though it’s perhaps implied – is that having a vocabulary that is good plays an integral part in such… strategies.
Whether that’s important or not is something we’ll explore in this post.
Whether your vocabulary is good or not can affect whether you can offer a three-page description of the sea. The point is, why should you?(more…)
Some months ago, I went to Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The purpose of the trip was to visit as many museums and art exhibitions as I could fit in the span of six hours – I managed to visit a couple of museums, four exhibitions, and the Helsinki Observatory. It was great fun, but I wouldn’t bother writing about it if it weren’t for one serendipitous realization, one related to the true nature of art, that can be summed up this way:
Art hides in the most unexpected places.
You need to be able to see art.
All this might sound a bit cryptic. Moreover, referring to “the true nature of art” makes me feel uncomfortable – who am I to define something so undefinable? For all purposes, this text is somewhat stream-of-consciousness, drawing on the way I experienced some things. It’s subjective; there’s nothing but subjectivity.
Still, whether you’re a creator of art (a writer, a painter, a musician, or even – why not? – a coder) or “just” a reader/viewer, this might reveal new horizons to the ways you understand the “true” nature of art.
The true nature of art is… Well, I’m not the one to answer. Ironically, if we could even begin to approximate something remotely resembling an answer, we should begin from subjectivity and ambiguity(more…)
There are all sorts of asinine challenges in the ocean of mediocrity that is social media, and let me assure you, this isn’t one of them. My “48K challenge” is something I came up with when I noticed something disturbing on my “smart” phone: The size of the calculator app is 8MB. That of the alarm clock is 19MB. And my personal favorite, the messages app (just SMS, that is) is a whooping 204MB.
Are these people serious?
When I was a kid, you could pack an entire video game in 48KB. In other words, the space the calculator app requires is the equivalent of more than 165 video games for the ZX Spectrum – my first computer.
It goes without saying that technology has advanced a lot; the games of the 80s can’t be technically compared to those we have today. And yet, it feels programming has become sloppy.
I’m of course generalizing, but it feels as if the more the resources we have, the less the creativity and the greater our laziness. It all leads to resource hogs that take too much space and are often buggy. Because, hey, let’s all keep updating all the time.
And so, I gave myself what I termed the 48K challenge. I decided to make a retro-style video game in JavaScript, that had to be 48KB or less. The results were intriguing and revealing – and a little bit disappointing, but not in the way you imagine.
Here’s a screenshot from the result of my 48K challenge. The acuity of the image is deliberately low. I coded the program in 256×192 pixels (the native ZX Spectrum resolution) which I then quadrupled, to emulate the loss of acuity when projected on a TV, as we did in the 80s monitor.(more…)
