textured noise

“In theory, you can make a programming language out of any symbols. The computer doesn’t care. The computer is already running an invisible program (a compiler) to translate your IF or body into the 1s and 0s that it functions in, and it would function just as effectively if we used a potato emoji 🥔 to stand for IF and the obscure 15th century Cyrillic symbol multiocular O ꙮ to stand for body. The fact that programming languages often resemble English words like “body” or “if” is a convenient accommodation for our puny human meatbrains, which are much better at remembering commands that look like words we already know. But only some of us already know the words of these commands: those of us who speak English. The “initial promise of the web” was only ever a promise to its English-speaking users, whether native English-speaking or with access to the kind of elite education that produces fluent second-language English speakers in non-English-dominant areas.”

Me: I’m gonna finish writing that thing tonight!

i met up with an old writer friend over the weekend and she told me about how she sends every single thing she writes to The New Yorker. 

gentle reminder

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like returning home again.