Breakage

I don't believe that you have to know rules to break them well. That's a myth. But I do believe the world bristles and bubbles with rules of thumb that you should listen to, and break freely when you want to and it hurts no one.

Knowing the rule clearly first is not a prerequisite. That's a scare tactic that teachers use to get you to listen to them (and you should).

Much has been done by people who didn't really know what they were doing, and who, as they have said afterwards, were just stupid enough not to realize that what they were doing was impossible.

You do not have to know a rule before breaking it excellently.

It can help. As long as you remember not to be a rules Nazi, you will benefit from knowing more of these rules of thumb offered because you're supposed to know.

There is, of course, the question of complacency. Yet breaking complacency isn't about refusing to learn. Don't refuse to learn. Learn rules, break rules, make rules, shake 'em up.

The Good Skeptic

Sometimes I think skepticism needs an owner's manual. Skepticism is NOT closed-mindedness. It is NO way to conveniently shoot down what doesn't please you or doesn't sound believable to your intuition. It is both LESS and MORE than common sense. It is FAR from militant atheism. It understands and exceeds reductionism.

Skepticism is three things used well: uncertainty, imagination, and curiosity.

You can also use those things poorly and get very confused. Use them well, though, and that's skepticism. There isn't much out there more useful than good skepticism.

Far from giving you license to stand on sidelines and forbid anyone to speak who doesn't meet your criteria or agree with your set of approved facts and mechanisms, skepticism is a tool for expanding and improving on knowledge wherever you find it.

The skeptic is not the enemy of new or alternative ideas, but of the notion that their own understanding has reached its final best form.

Be skeptical that you've got it all down pat, and do something about that. Now you are a skillful skeptic.

Semi or Pseudo

Semicolons are weird. It isn't difficult to use them; it's difficult to use them stylishly. Apart from the self-referential pun, that's one example I don't find too stylish. A comma or a dash would have worked fine, or a new sentence.

You could probably get away with something non-standard like... It isn't difficult to use them; but to use them stylishly. Technically that isn't correct, at least not by the usual simple guidelines. The reason I'm saying it could work is that a reader understands that this version is just the original cropped down. The second part is a clause (a would-be sentence) with a few words removed, and you can feel this as you read. In effect, it is still a full clause. And the reason I think this version might be more stylish than the first is that it leans on the semicolon to do something - cleanly separate two clauses, showing contrast - that neither a comma in its place nor a semicolon in the original context would do. It's "stylish" because it's more compact than the alternatives without losing any coherence. Still, I'm not convinced. I'd feel pretentious writing that.

I'm not sure why semicolons have a reputation for being difficult. Is this why? Style worries? To be fair, rather like colons, they are difficult to get right. You might need to understand fragments, clauses, and conjunctions modestly well to judge whether a semicolon or colon is technically correct—or clarify the difference for someone.

But really. Take any two sentences. Replace the period with a semicolon. Not hard. (Reverse the procedure to check if one's correct.) The question is, why would you do that? When is it a good idea to set two sentences into extra relief against each other? Let's not forget that any two sentences next to each other are already a juxtaposition, and relatedness is already suggested by the sequence.

A semicolon (when not used in what I call its "supercomma" role, which I'm ignoring in this post and almost never comes up) basically asks a reader to look again—look, look a second time—at how two thoughts are connected.

That's it. It's very simple.

Now the question is, when do you think that's a move that's stylish and helpful, rather than a move that shows off that you know how to replace a period with a semicolon. (That's dead easy. You write a tail onto the period, and you put a dot above it. Then you improvise to make the capital letter lowercase.)

A Trunk is a Chest is a Nest

Sometimes I'm really not smart. (Often.) Early this year I lost my oldest sweater. It was kind of falling apart and made me look homeless. But it was the best sweater I ever had. Deep blue, a zip-down hoodie. It was thicker than usual, slightly padded and snug, and had a single green strip down either side of the zipper, on the inside, which looked interesting. Tragic loss.

Except I didn't lose it. It was in the trunk of my car all along. With some rotten food. And a dead mouse. The poor creature had gotten in somehow, but never got out.

I found it a few months ago, the sweater, height of summer, but only just tried wearing it. Yeahnope! I reacted to mold. I'll have to wash it more, which might shred it. The mortality of sweaters.

It's moments like these that give me inspirations for stories/songs/games I never write: Sweaters for the Dead. Sweaters from the Dead.

Heimweh

"Nostalgia" annoys me sometimes. Bad or mediocre times can seem great in retrospect. But aspects of culture that remain interesting aren't interesting because of nostalgia. Many tastes I've acquired might seem nostalgic, until you realize I'm also this way about times well before I was born, and it isn't about thinking life was better in those days.

There can be a component of deeply evocative familiarity. For the usual example, many people feel their mother's or grandmother's version of a dish is the best ever, just in terms of how they experience it. I've had many good spaghetti bologneses, but the way my dad makes it with two unusual twists (the presence of a "secret ingredient" is such a standard part of the story though!) just seems far better. To me, that's how bolognese should be, and it feels a lot like nobody else gets it right. And traditional Czech cooking the way I know it from my mom, aunt, and grandmother is just the same: no one else gets it right, and there's no other food like it.

There are four things going on, actually, not just "nostalgia" (one of the below is most accurately called that):

1) If people loved a thing back then, it appealed to human minds and hearts and probably still has the same emotional potentials, even though it might take some digging under the surface or into that culture.

2) We sometimes do feel that things were better in some golden past, whether or not we were actually having a good time then.

3) Familiarity from deep pathways, the deer paths we carve out in our own lives, makes some experiences especially resonant later, not least because meaning is created by time and experience and reflection and sharing.

4) Art is supposed to be evocative to begin with, its call-sign unique feelings and patterns (no one will ever write quite like Jane Austen again, etc), and when it loses something for new audiences—either by comparison, or because old references and values and languages are lost—it retains intellectual interest as an artifact of that time, place, and people, and often for obvious and extensive influences on newer work.

I hate it when people pronounce "nostalgia!" and dismiss all that in one breath because they believe cynicism makes them worldly.

Nostalgia means 2, often mixed with and easily confused with generous heapings of 3.

I have no interest in going back and living in the early 1920s, but I've never seen another movie that feels just like a good screening of the remastered Nosferatu. That isn't nostalgia at all. I wasn't alive then, nor did I watch silent movies as a kid. Its appeal has nothing of 2 and only as much of 3 as any other art that resonates with me through ambient ideas and patterns.

Poise

The most difficult thing about coding is not 1) arcane stuff 2) logic or 3) bugs. It's finding entry. You could stare at code all year. Until you go, "Ok, I'm gonna change something and see what happens," you're K I N D A N O W H E R E.

Coding is more like music than writing. Until you play some notes, it isn't really music. Constructing the logic is a duet or dialogue. Dialogue is never just staring, nor is it only staring and writing. Dialogue is two or more sides actually speaking, and to each other.

Whenever I've been stuck on a big project for weeks and seem to have written nothing, you know what I do? I hit the run button. I watch it run and prod it this way and that. Then I change something, and run it again.

You feel way too stupid to understand the code (even when you wrote all of it) until you engage with it like this, in my experience. Once you do, quickly you find you're back in the mental space that wrote the code. You didn't get any smarter in a minute. You engaged!

The other central lesson, which you'll probably have to learn over and over and over again, even after you start telling people it's the central lesson, is that getting upset under no circumstances helps you solve a code problem. The solution is always the same: get curious, test your assumptions, put in sanity checks, the most basic ones first. Ask yourself, "What's the dumbest thing it could be?" and almost like magic, it's often exactly that, because that's what you were overlooking.

Our first instinct when there's a problem is to get hyperactivated. Then we think we need to get sophisticated. With code, the approach is calm and simplicity.

That does not, of course, mean that code doesn't get super hyper (it runs fast) and elaborate (you could spend many lifetimes learning complex code patterns). But as they say in the Marines about dismantling, cleaning, and reassembling firearms: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."