Visions of the Future; part 2; You Don't Really Need a Debugger

So, I've learned enough about VBA to write a few subroutines with variables. A subroutine is what the programmers, or coders, call one little part of a program. These little subroutines were excel macros. 

I didn't know what a macro was for a long time. A long long time. I would read the word "macro" and immediately think of "macrobes", a scientific sounding term in the CS Lewis space trilogy that I don't think has a title for the whole trilogy. A "macro-title", you could call it, like "Lord of the Rings". I quite enjoyed the Lewis series, most of it, even the religious elements; because he reworked Sunday school stuff into fun science fiction elements.  Unfortunately the Sunday school stuff took over the series in the end. Much like the Microsoft part takes over and ruins all the cool stuff that Microsoft almost develops. There, I brought it all back. It was no digression after all. Macrobes, cool, "Macros" why called so?  

But eventually I learned what macros are and had lots of fun recording macros and looking at the code - You can record a macro in excel or word, and then go look at the automatically generated script in the Visual Basic editor. You can find the Visual Basic editor by employing super secret hacker methodology, going into the excel or word options menu and clicking an option in one of the menus. You'll immediately know when you go into the visual basic editor because you go from the newfangled ribbon layout of the later versions of excel to a layout looks like Windows 3.11. I think they've probably kept the old-timey look of the editor because the only people that use it are my age, and we don't like things to change. 

The editor is fun because not only can you look at the generated script, you can change it just as easily as you can rewrite an email. And you can add things to the macros or subroutines  like variables, which I learned from the Dummies book. I'm just old enough to admit that I found the dummies book helpful, and just young enough to feel embarrassed when I admit it. 

And Ive learned just enough about variables to write some macros that Ive used at work, but read just enough online to know that my coding is incredibly lazy and sloppy and jury-rigged. I constantly attempt macros based on ideas I have that are always slightly beyond my actual programming abilities, which due to extreme mental laziness I consistently overestimate. So whenever I have trouble with public variables, which I always do, I just slop the data into some corner cells somewhere in an unnamed sheet that I may later delete because I've forgotten about the slop and end up wondering what the hell happened to my previously kind of working macro until I go back and rework some lines and accomplish nothing or make everything worse until I remember the slop data and think I can just use a public variable and it doesn't work so I redo the slop sheet and put a note to myself not to delete them and delete the note later when I find copies of the same file in two folders and keep the newer one without checking the change history. And I write bad comments that I never understand later, during the long debugging/utilization process.  And I do not practice good file management/ organization techniques.  So I have grown very accustomed to the "Send Error Report?" Message box. It's one of the most reliable results in my macros. 

Having achieved this level of VBA knowledge, wherein I am constantly in "debug" mode in the Visual Basic editor, I decided to try web programming, the glamour child of the programming world; using html, css, JavaScript, all three coding languages with no debug mode at all, just a stab in the dark guessing game. I wanted to have a neat website, you see.  So where my bad programming with VBA results in error messages and yellow highlighted lines, the inept JavaScript programming results in a blank. It just doesn't do anything, and I end up looking through my handiwork in total confusion, looking for semi-colons and curly brackets, as illustrated in this week's pic:

Please note that I couldn't remember the names of any real laptop making companies nor what the back parts of a computer look like. 

After finally getting the script to do something, I have to get it to do what I actually envisioned it to do, which means inserting an endless series of "alert" boxes in an effort to pinpoint the parts where the written code has diverged from my inner vision. My inner vision can swing right by brackets and misspelled variables without a trip up, this is one of the marvelous things human brains can do. We can run a preposterously illogical program in our heads, we can compile almost anything, no matter how sloppy it's written. 

I easily picked up JavaScript from free iPhone apps, because it's comparatively easy if you know a little C.  It uses C type script, which Ive learned from a beginners guide that my wife got me, that I didn't think would be useful but thought would be fun and it turned out both. When I say easily picked up, of course, I mean just enough to write web pages that do things that are somewhat related to what I wanted them to do like the shadow of a cone is related to the taste of ice cream. Still making the hand shadows and waiting for that sweet taste of functionality

And another change in direction, I'll shake off you readers yet!

I learned many valuable things during my Year of Moving Constantly (covered in my previous blog series 6 Migrations - link to be updated post post).  The primary lesson: Do not keep more than you can swim with (one hand free). 

I have adhered to this valuable principle in all my efforts to build readership of this blog, and this post is one of many occasions where the enhanced mobility made possible by the light readership of the blog has rewarded this adherence. Yes, I'm changing direction again and starting a new series. No, this does NOT mean I won't EVER return to previous series. Think of this blog as a sort of verbal TV station where they do a LOT of pilots and they still haven't cemented a programming schedule but they never ever do reruns. YEs!

New pilot: Gateway to the Future - a brutally honest account of my personal attempt to learn computer programming, or "coding" as the young people call it. Lingo is important. My journey to VR will include many new terms, like "VR" which stands for "Virtual Reality", which is the future, especially for old people like me, who will be the first old people to be plugged into a VR cable and left to rot on a plastic recliner in a room strongly resembling a closet by our ungrateful children. That's if we're lucky. That's what this quest is all about. I don't mind the thought of living in video games at the end of my life, but I definitely want to be able to hack the system enough to verify that the attendants are changing my diapers and linens. Especially if the attendants are Russian. They might be robots, of course. So much the better, then I will be the secret boss of the living center, controlling everyone's meds and room assignments, scheduling snack time, who gets first dibs on the whirlpool. Obviously I've thought about it a lot. But first, I'll have to learn "coding". Don't say programming online. They'll tear you apart in the forums. It's like admitting you only know Visual Basic (wipes away tears - vicious little bastards). 

Which brings me to the first installment of Gateway to the Future, learning Visual Basic for Applications, which is super easy to do if you have MS Excel, which I do, and you like it, which I do. Excel is the best thing Microsoft ever did. As a matter of fact it might be the only good thing Microsoft ever did. I'm thinking about it, but no sense in wasting too much time...

I've actually taken a few stabs at learning programming in the past, one a long time ago, in high school, in the computer lab, when a friend who was TA'ing in the computer lab and who I played this King Kong banana throwing game with (I was not taking computer lab, I was TA'ing across the hall, don't remember anything about it as I spent all my time in the computer lab or riding around with my friends) showed me how to call up a list of Basic commands from the DOS prompt. I remember the mindless enjoyment I had, typing at the prompt, watching the files and directories whiz by, and then typing DEBUG and something else and suddenly seeing a column of characters and gibberish, all hex numbers, and discovering that I was seeing a text file Character by Character, as it was actually written on the disk itself!  I was amazed , but I was also thinking a lot about girls and dice and sci fi novels at the time, and we didn't have a home computer, and I will totally give up on something, at the drop of a hat, so I never learned more. 

Later, during one of my many spans of unemployed time, I took a stab at learning Visual Basic.Net, which seems to have flickered in and out of existence in the time since then, and I don't really understand what it's for now and can't afford to re-learn and there's so much free stuff to learn that there's no point. I quite enjoyed that experience, to the point that I eventually made a picture viewer for my web page, where people could click through some of my drawings that I'd scanned. But eventually my unemployment ran out and I had to go back to work at various horrible temp jobs and had no time to return to it until now. 

And I discovered that not only could you record macros in Excel, which I had used often and on some rare occasions even for actual work, but it would actually generate VBA code as you recorded and you could edit it!  It was on a par with the time my wife showed me the board editor in Age of Mythology. I was amazed that Microsoft had included something fun in their office software - but of course, it was for Excel. I eventually got a for Dummies book on Excel programming, and midway through that book, I experienced my major insight on computers and my relationship to them: I hated and feared computers for the same reasons I hate and fear air travel; total loss of control.  You are in the maddeningly indifferent hands of others, subject to their soul-sucking security checks; bag probes, password requirements, security questions, long lines, progress bars, enforced bare-footedness (an ancient Assyrian technique for humiliating prisoners), swirly word pictures that don't make a recognizable word!  

The solution? For air travel, to find superman's fortress and steal his green crystal (if you dare run through the gigantic hologram of Marlon Brando, denouncing you in a voice like thunder! - it's just an alarm system, but superman is coming and he is very swift and fast) that is to say there is no solution but the proud highway, meaning road trip. 

But for computers there is a solution, the green crystal is out there and you can steal it from them, we are aged but cunning and I still have a day job thank Christ. Many my age have no net, and face the grim prospect of mass competition with the other career refugees, learning to program in some language they will come to despise in "coding boot camps" with masses of other bewildered old timers, now rendered useless by the creepy millennials in Feel the Bern T-shirts, waving batons (crafted to look like light sabers) and herding us and our children to the vast tent cities accumulating just outside the inner city cosplay-grounds for twenty somethings where they work. 

I will be avoiding the boot-camp type learning system for now, as I prefer to learn at my own pace (think glacier), but I'm not above jumping in if the financial opportunity presents, like an old people scholarship or a bequest. 

Back to the VBA for Excel book, and my quest to learn to learn coding. Upon experiencing the epiphany, I made a goal that I would make a game written in VBA and configure it as an Add-in that anyone with a copy of Excel could install, but since then I resolved on another goal which has put the Excel game on the back burner: To rework the hagenart website with JavaScript. I resolved on this goal because I picked up some JavaScript from a free app, (which I will credit and discuss in time), and JavaScript is fun and maybe I take too readily to quick and easy and I'm tired of all the remarks on Stack overflow. 

Also, with html and JavaScript I'll be able to put actual examples on this blog! Maybe, not sure of the support

The Unbearable Lightness of My College Experience; A Scientific Treatise

This post marks a departure from the sloppy, narcissistic solipsism  of the previous posts in this series. Actually "this series" is over. I have begun a new series. So this post actually marks a new series, not a change in the current series. I will however be using pages from the current sketchbook, the same sketchbook that I used for the recently ended series, as graphical scientific illustrations for the new series. Just to make it clear to my readership, or mother, that I haven't given up on my resolution to do two drawings a week for the whole year. 

New series: A scientific study of my life, beginning with college and going back, like a paleontologist, digging down through layers of dirt to find older and older fossils. What a miserable job that must be, digging and sifting through the dirt, looking for bone-shaped rocks. You can tell how miserable it is by the toys they give kids to promote the science: Shovels, sieves, and tooth brushes. The etchings look fun though. 

And speaking of fun: The Marriott Library. My primary college residence, or my primary hangout while in college. For most of my collegiate years I resided in my parents' basement, and did not experience a great deal of the magic and excitement of the college years that you see in movies. I wish I could say that I devoted that socially muted time to intensive study, to the maintenance of 20+ hours of bio-engineering and applied mathematics classes, but obviously I can't, or I wouldn't have built up to it.  

I spent a lot of my freshman year in the Marriott, with my face buried in textbooks, sleeping. I did discover the abnormal psych section in one corner of the fourth floor, and spent a good portion of waking time reading the kinkier case histories. I also enjoyed finding a study desk by a window where I could watch people walking on the sidewalks outside, or, as depicted here, I particularly treasured the rare days I found an empty desk around the edge of the atrium, with the marvelous view of the people wandering the lower floor card catalogs and or pretending to study at the other desks. 

But that was freshman year. Utah is a commuter college in a fairly populated area, which, I've been given to understand, offers a more impersonal, or less iconographic, college experience than the small town university. A part of me enjoyed the bleak solitude of afternoons on campus, but I'd seen enough frat-centered college movies to know that I was missing something.  I believe advertising agencies are built around this strangely suggestible facet of the human mind; that an artificial image of life, pretended to be lived by attractive and well dressed people in a setting far from one's life, or possibly any real person's life, can instill a powerful desire to imitation. They call it "following your dream" in America. It almost always ends in disappointment, but the small minority of success stories are the people with the free time available to write books about it. 

Forgot my original point again, but that doesn't matter.  Whatever point I thought I would make was a digression from the more important general purpose of this new blog direction. So I digressed from a digression from the redirection, bringing it all back the new direction. Which is science, meaning charts:

Another New Direction for Science!

I have often waxed rhapsodic on the magic of books, but only to close relatives or my own offspring. I myself am a reader who would never advise other people to read, because even in a democracy like the US, where an uneducated electorate can take your money and wreak havoc, I would prefer to always feel like the smartest person in the room.  And for that reason I don't like children's books about books where characters emerge from the books, emitting magic sparkles and preparing to fill someone with wonder. 

Well actually that's not the reason. I find them vapid and saccharine. That's the reason.   And I believe they're useless as far as encouraging people to read. 

So what are we to make of this picture of a little book town?  

Drawn by someone who doesn't like those kind of pictures?  I honestly don't know. I'm almost fifty and I still can't explain myself. Pathological immaturity and laziness, but maybe I'm flattering myself. There may have been a book or two sitting inside the toy train track circle, that inspired me with the notion to draw a little book town. I do remember having a vague idea for some kind of neat representation of book people coming out of the books, little letter people with serif hands and bow ties, or perhaps the characters of every book, magically come alive and on whimsical foray beyond the edge of their flat papery home.   They would have sparkly dust floating around them to signify they were magic, and would speak in rhyme. 

I'd like to say I didn't do that because it's an overdone idea that other people, many other people, had already beaten to death, over and over again, in countless children's books. But it appears that I started to do it in this picture and then gave up for reasons of laziness, leaving the little people without sparkles or indication of the wonders of reading. They're just little figures that could possibly be descendants of silverfish, completely illiterate, and slowly devouring the pages of the gigantic books they shelter in, caring no more for the inky gibberish that appears on their food than we would for the stems and leaves that we wash off our fruits and veggies before we eat.  Perhaps they would enjoy and prefer the rare blank pages as we enjoy a seedless watermelon, delicious food that can be savored without annoyance.   

And it appears I did try the same thing again a week or so later on another sketchbook page:

I'm breaking a rule, my own rule, to include this second picture in the same post, but I don't like this second picture and it doesn't deserve its own post. I honestly don't know why I include pictures in the posts at all, if only to continually remind my family that I wanted to be an artist, that they might share my sense of failure. This second picture features the magic of words, or letters at least, coming to whimsical life to bring a little magic to our sad lives.  I usually critique my own pictures with the ferocity of a doting grandparent on their only grandchild, but I can barely stand to look at this one, and it has forced me to re-appraise the meandering unfocused nature of this project.  If I were a young man again, 30 years old and living in my parents basement without a job or a care in the world, I could well believe that a yearlong project to produce two random doodles a week might indeed yield a plethora of astounding art, and the unfocused and free range thinking would allow my sexually repressed and angry young brain to conceive revolutionary artistic themes, drawing upon intuition and passion, not the cold reason of my dry, jaded middle age. Yes, the artistic time of my life has passed. Like my father before me I have a house and family and a job that I'm ashamed to tell my children about, and see modern art as a huge scam and literature as a tired, dull magic trick. I have completely lost that delightful cluelessness and ignorance that make art possible. I view movies as an irritated skeptic, like Siskel and Ebert with a painful hernia and an inflamed prostate, unable give a thumbs up to anything longer than fifteen minutes. I roll my eyes at the opening credits, and I find every ending is either lazy or forced. 

And so I have decided to change the entire direction of this project: A scientific study of my life, where it went shatteringly wrong and why, told in graphic form. This will not be a graphic novel. I have grown weary of the recent spate of graphic novel memoirs. This will not be a story to warm the heart and inspire. I envision a cold, dispassionate dissection of my youth, a treatise, absent of the rich, painfully honest detail that the Norwegian guy filled his autobiography with. Only a Scandinavian would do that.  They watch shows about trains in Norway. Not Thomas the Train, not stories about people riding a train. Just a video of a train going on its track for hours. Not even funny videos of commuters fighting as the doors close, or neat speeded up shots of people going in and out of the station like koyanaskatsi. 

 I've covered the years between my work at the radio station and family life, and the final collapse of my artistic pretensions, in the sklogs. I've graphically covered my inner world from mid twenties to the radio station, the aftermath of my college failure, the life chapter I've entitled "Flight into Delusion", in the ballpoint illustrations that I later sold at local festivals. Now for the science. Beginning with college, before I gave up on being a writer. This won't be a chronologically-ordered study. We'll go back and forth, like pulp fiction or Doctor who. We'll begin next week, after I've prepared some graphics about my college years. This will be statistically intensive, but I'm assuming anyone reading this has read their prerequisites

Requires 2D Glasses- Har har that's a good one!

I have a strange fetish for two dimensional pictures that I believe to be the result of artistic childishness; I can't draw convincing three dimensional people or objects, and instead of pushing myself to learn perspective and proportions I have allowed myself to regress back to my two dimensional world in everything I draw.  This failing turned fetish has biased my preferences for any art or design, and I have turned away from the current 3D mania in movies and video games. I want everything on the surface, like old-school Nintendo, and the first person shooters tend to fill me with existential dread. If I was given a choice of virtual reality afterlives, I'd go for the 2D, like an eternal webpage with comics. And I draw pictures like this one, flat with the whole story on the surface. 

One interesting result is that people think I'm drawing abstract art, when I never do. Abstract art is based upon all kinds of beneath the surface meanings, but I never put anything beneath the surface.  Not abstract. No themes or symbolism. For this one I was drawing a port, with two dimensional buildings and little boats in it. The shapes further out are are plants growing on islands. Obviously an art major might be able to sleuth out some subconscious meanings in the picture, but really, it's a port with little ships in an alien, two dimensional world.  

If I suddenly became a famous abstract artist and sold pictures for loads of money, and people asked me what a picture meant, I might not say the same thing. I might say it the first time someone asked me, but if they seemed disappointed or if I felt embarrassed, I might say something like I was "toying with shapes". Then I might read critical reviews referring to "exploration of organic forms" or something very cool like that, and I might prefer to say that instead of "little alien ships". I might start referring to "pieces" instead of "drawings".   

I just realized that there was a Kurt Vonnegut book, "Bluebeard", where the protagonist, an abstract artist, says about the same thing; that he has silly stories in mind when he does his pieces. I'm a little disappointed to be imitating his idea, but I think my backstories for my pictures are more embarrassing.  His were about a deer or something. And I do not claim to do or try to do abstract drawings. I was just saying that I might change my tune if I became rich, which is a completely different theme than Vonnegut was pursuing. 

This picture would be much better in color too. That would be another failing I have; letting ultimate intent skew current method. I drew the picture with the idea at the back of my mind that it would be colored, and so drew a less interesting, un-colored picture instead of an intended black and white celebration of its own monochromatic nature sort of picture, like ansel Adams photos. I also do the opposite; I add colors to a picture, in line with earlier intent, that actually mar the black and white picture, because it didn't need any colors and was drawn to be without colors, by myself, because I forgot about the colors halfway through the picture and drew it to be black and white. The moral of the story is don't add color unless it needs color, but you'll never know if it needs color unless you're a real artist, so the moral of the story is I never know and neither by the laws of probability will you the reader because my mother is not an artist either. 

I may use computer technology to color the picture later, using the magic wand and the button with the sloshing paint bucket, but for some reason, probably age-related, a drawing task that I wouldn't mind spending two hours doing by hand seems almost unbearably difficult if it would take more than five minutes on the computer. 

My Creative Output is an Enigma wrapped in a Mystery Containing an Imaginary Comic Book

I didn't continue the story of Doctor Elephante in the sketchbook. I continued the story in idea mode, meaning in my head, for several days after. And in my head the story got so incredibly good that I could hardly think of anything else. I became completely involved in the story as a viewer, and could hardly wait to see what would happen next. At the same time as a creator I became convinced that I had a monster hit on my hands, a story that could possibly be the best selling comic book of all time, and a hit movie and a tv series and an Oscar winner that might go down in history as comparable to the works of Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach as one of the supreme achievements of the human mind. My expectations as a viewer soared into the stratosphere at the same time as the pressure to deliver began to inhibit the playful creativity that I had begun the imaginary story with. It stopped being fun, and turned into a chore. I began to just grind out the illusionary episodes like an indifferent machine, without feeling any connection to the character or the audience which was also an imaginary character. Then finally, as a viewer, I gave one of the installments a negative review.  As a creator my world came crashing down around me, and I resigned from the show (it was no longer a comic book at that point).  Unfortunately the panels and scripts and completed episodes were all in my head, in idea mode, so when I stopped writing and inking and publishing the comic book and adapting and directing and filming and starring in the series about 72 hours after the original doodles, it all sorted of faded away and I have nothing real to show for all that effort but the memories - which are all sort of fading away too.   Anyway, heat death of the universe, water under the bridge. 

Then we went on a road trip to Tucson and I drew a picture of our motel room:

I had some problems with the layout of the room in this picture due to the un-calibrated nature of my representative drawing style, meaning I can't do proportions and don't know how real artists do them. They may use a ruler or something. Also, I tend to adopt a circular scanning technique wherein I draw one side of a doorway and draw along down in a clockwise motion of my field of view, drawing the stuff nearer the doorway, down to my own feet, then moving up along the left side and up to the left  side of the doorway - which, mysteriously - did not now line up with the right, not even close, the left side bottom began at a spot just below the top of the door frame. This left a blank void in the middle of the room, which I filled with a farewell panel from the Doctor Elephante comic.  I then simply completed the left side of the door in space, so to speak, leaving the door and frame seeming to stand about ten feet inside the room, past the entrance area. Looking at the picture now, I am astonished with how natural and realistic and cozy the room looks with this fantastic door standing confidently in the center of it. The phantom doorway lends an easy and delightful flow to the layout to the room that motel designers and architects should pay close attention to, and the yawning chasm of nothingness through which my financially and critically triumphant comic book from an alternate universe makes its enigmatic appearance doesn't seem to mar the aesthetic of the room as severely as I'd originally feared

Diffident Continuation of Previous Story

The story of Doctor Elephante

Continuing the development of the character introduced in the previous doodle:

Revisiting this origin story, I have to confess that it seems to me to display several fundamental weaknesses of myself as a comic book writer. For one thing, who is this person in the first panel? I mean, to start with, what's his name?  Even Stan Lee took some time before the Origin Event of his characters, to show them as normal humans in a normal life. I personally found these introductory sequences almost completely unbearable to wade through, but it doesn't mean they didn't help a little to ground spidey or Mr Fantastic in a kind of boring, this-is-your-goodguy-like-him-and-get-to-the-pow-pow, kind of way. At the bare minimum, a name and occupation, and at least one adjective having somewhat of a relation to personality should preface the explosive origin event. 

So, reviewing this comic, I would say this writer has no patience and is unwilling to put much work into his craft. And does not possess the ability to visually tell a story. The best part of this panel, in my opinion, has got to be my idea for the two ton elephant pants. If I had continued the comic, I would have dedicated it to the development of this idea. How does he make the two ton pants?  How does he walk in them?  What events transpire, in his post-origin-event experience, to set him on the path to conceiving and devising and creating the two ton pants?

But alas, we will never know. These doodles are not blueprints of what will be, but merely shadows of what might have been about to be.  They offer a snapshot of an unproductive mind, in continual ferment, with no progress, no habitable structures. A roiling mob of ideas with no will to organized government or culture