A quick walk backwards through time to 2006-2004

It’s strange, looking back at the writing of a younger self. The things I concerned myself with are simultaneously familiar and foreign: I still cared about God, without any hints of my later de-conversion, but I would post up poorly-worded rants on terrible HTML practices in educator websites. I would whine about school, talk about math, and post random music tidbits. As I delve back through the years, some other observations:

• Spell check in the browser has made so much of a difference: I no longer look like such an idiot by default. Sure, I work hard to make sure I appear to be an idiot, but it’s no longer easy as pie.
• I made this thing called the Sarge engine, which apparently was supposed to be a forum engine. I had a thing for fancy project names that had nothing to do with what they actually did.
• I started doing Linux stuff around here. I was also posting TI-BASIC code in plaintext, so I guess the two cancel each other out.
• I thought heaps and stacks were incompatible, because C and Java used stacks and heaps, respectively.
• Twitter has certainly changed how I blog, for the better.
• I got excited when new versions of Blender came out (2.37!!! WHOOO!!), just like I do now (minus the fact I missed the 2.57 update).
• I was a very angsty child (boohoo why won’t anyone love me?! I’m so ronree!).
• I thought, at one point in time, that programming as a job would be boring. Which is why I did it all the time, apparently.
• I thought I could help my fellow nerds become less anti-social. Ha.
• I was slightly socially incompetent. Just slightly.
• I was also just slightly incompetent at making anything I wrote make sense to me 5 years later.
• I sure hope my kids don’t write like this for such a long time. To be fair, I posted almost every day, so it only seems like a long time when I read 5 posts at a time (5 one line posts all saying something along the lines of ARGHHH I IZ IDIOT or LOLZ MAH PRGRAMZ BROKEN), but it’s very much a product of not being competent: to be fair, these posts were part of the process that got me here, but it would be less embarrassing if it were a shorter part.
• Oh god, POVRay code.
• Very few of my long form posts contained coherent content: most of the time, longer posts could be decomposed into tens of one-liner posts. I believe this is a consequence of my inability to focus during my high school years, and/or just my general stupidity at that time. In retrospect, it’s amazing I even got anything finished.
• It reminds me that I wished I could go out of Christianity with a bang: make a huge scene while breaking with the church, screams of fire and brimstone going both ways. Now that I’m standing here, I didn’t get that, but I realize it’s okay. I’m still where I need to be, and it doesn’t matter I had gotten there with strife.

Overall, I get a sense of just how much I have leveled up over the last 6 years, which is some huge amount I do not care to try and enumerate. My writing is sensible, my code actually does things (instead of trying to do things), my thought processes aren’t trying to reason from contradictory bases using outmoded methods of thinking. I now view myself as a highly-junior member of the Interesting People Club.

In the negatives department, I don’t care quite as much about music: sure, it would be nice if I could pull some music out of my bum, but I don’t have the will to make it happen at the expense of my other pursuits (and if I’ve learned anything from that trip back, talking about things and doing things are very different. Didn’t exactly understand that back then). Another negative is the fact I can’t go back: at that time, I could have conceivably given up programming, gone to seminary, and lived out a simple life. It really is unfortunate that at this point, my only options are to rock the world or die trying. So be it.

And here’s to another 6 years of growing up!

Note: don’t try looking for these writings. As soon as I posted this, I deleted that blog account. Would it have been hilarious to look back on another 6 years from now? Not really, as it would’ve been even more pathetic than anything else. May as well put this content out of it’s misery now than later. So long, 2006-2004: it was nice knowing you.