BOOK CLUB: Life In Code Ch 1+2 (Patreon)

 I used to have dreams in which I was overhearing conversations I had to program. Once, I had to program two people making love. In my dream they sweated and tumbled while I sat with a cramped hand writing code. The couple went from gentle caresses to ever-widening passions, and I despaired as I tried desperately to find a way to express the act of love in the computer language called C.

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Outside of Time (1994)

I have grown to really adore this sort of vignette style storytelling. Fiction books that split their chapters quite finely, sometimes just a page or two long, are just so delicious to consume. A sense of PACE and momentum. Like I'm in some strange building and I'm peeking in rooms.

Contains the iconic "not a real techie" section. Was circulating on tumblr and is the reason I found this book so is the reason we are reading it together. 1 point for the internet.

Introduction of an idea elaborated on later, that has been quite influential on me. That "user-friendly design" can be a symbol of contempt for humanity.

 Come In CQ (1996)

the fucking YEARNING

An electronic couple, a "we," began to evolve: "We think that way," he wrote once. "You and I feel that way," he said later. He ended his messages with "--K"; I responded as "--E." We were like adulterous corespondents who feared discovery then being sued for divorce. (31)

...there was a momentum by now, a critical mass of "we-ness" which was hurtling us toward each other. It must be done: We will have dinner. (34)

I looked at our hands lying near each other's on the table: they might as well have been typing. (35)

Ullman's intense romanticism, her urgent interest in bodies, and the incessant insertion of this into the computational world that has grown to swallow all of us, is everything to me.

Finally, A Note About Ink & Paper

Some may have noticed I have become very ride or die for letters, postcards, little handwritten notes and journalling. This is because of a few things. The first was a personal revelation about the generation of artifacts, as I described briefly in my Return To Web 1.5 essay. The second was John Vervaeke's Meaning Crisis ep 2 lecture, the section on the psychotechnology of literacy.

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The third and most utterly binding was a simple sentence.

There was his writing: precise and printlike, standing straight upward, as lean and spare as his body. Having this piece of paper, I knew what the email lacked: the evidence of his flesh, the work of his hand. (31)

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ooo i am so excited to read what you have to say today!

Evidence of Flesh Below!