I am beginning to wonder whether my progress in “computational literacy” can be measured by my own self-satisfaction with a small victory. (This is what process feels like, isn’t it?). Coding has been hard. My brother is a programmer and I think he must have gotten all of the left-brain genes. As I think I’ve mentioned here, I like algebraic/fill-in-the-blank tinkering but have trouble with conceptual formations in programming / understanding exactly what I’m doing.

The project I tried to undertake in class was more or less plagiarism of the code we were initially provided, an attempt to get my bot to tweet Paradise Lost line by line (http: //www.twitter.com/paradiselostbot). The text file was available on Project Gutenberg (and was apparently already input into a computer in the ’60s) — as straightforward as it seemed it would be to get the bot tweeting with a slight alteration to the code, I kept receiving Twitter’s 403 error. At first, it seemed I was tweeting too often, or maybe that each time I restarted the bot Twitter was seeing I had already tweeted a line (despite my attempts to create a more-perfectionist timeline with no restarts by deleting all my tweets before a restart). In the end, I discovered my bot could not read line breaks — by using Matt’s code to start on a later line, I was able to get it to tweet the whole first stanza of the poem, which feels like victory enough for the moment.