As the title suggests, currently finishing my two hour run on Code Academy (1.5 hours, but the Cathedral of Learning is very creepy at night and they seemed to have switched the lights outside off our computer lab office off) with some bittersweet feelings:

Attempting to learn the language of basic codes was a harder task than previously anticipated. Most of the time I found myself staring at a page, attempting to recall the early lessons that I flew by, finally culminating in the realization that I should start again from the beginning (utilizing repetition as a means to get a better understanding of the computational language that certainly seems foreign). My ego certainly got checked as I overtly anticipated my ability to just “jump in and succeed”. I quickly realized that all my academic weaknesses (lack of attention to detail, lack of patience, and struggles to remember mathematical signs) are the sine qua non for quickly learning the linguistic structure and trade. After the initial shock wore off, the repetition of trail and error eventually got to the point where some of the commands were beginning to make sense, which quickly shot some optimism back into the fold.

As I’m writing this, I’m currently excited again about the computational and technical aspects of this course. First and foremost, the efficiency and simplicity of the language (once attuned) mixed with a determined infrastructure is giving me hope that there might be a computational critical method that can be excavated onto rhetorical criticism at large (not just semantically), and while this thought is still nascent, I’m definitely going to be thinking about it as I move forward. Second, and selfishly, I hope that continuation with technical computation can help me resolve some issues with how I approach text in general (whether it be word efficiency or better attention to detail). Finally, I hope that (as the reading suggests) I become pseudo-competent over the next few months of the course and literate enough to understand what’s beyond “the black box”.