As a kid, my first drawings were of stick figures in magical places. One stick figure would be jumping rope. Another would be reading. Two others would be playing tag. All in a giant flower field, or in space, or in a park. You get the picture. I’m still drawing stick figures now. Make sure to press your mouse down:
I don’t know how much to admit, but who really reads these besides the Professor. I’m already frustrated. I’m keenly aware of how behind my peers I am. I have big ideas but have no idea how to translate them. Between my brother and me, he’s the logical thinker. They say the devil is in the details. And as a lifelong airhead, I’m constantly worried about all the details I’m missing. I feel the consequences of my natural inattention in daily life. I feel the consequences of it when coding.
The best part of my code is the bit I saw on the Internet, linked here: https://happycoding.io/tutorials/p5js/for-loops. And embedded down below:
let lineWidth = random(minLineWidth, maxLineWidth);
for(let lineY = 0; lineY < height; lineY+=3){
lineWidth += random(-lineWidthChange, lineWidthChange);
lineWidth = constrain(lineWidth, minLineWidth, maxLineWidth);
line(width / 2 - lineWidth, lineY, width / 2 + lineWidth, lineY);
It looks straight out of a Joy Division or Arctic Monkeys poster. I took the time to thoroughly understand what was happening and make my own adjustments, but it’s something I never could’ve written myself as of now. Coding is like writing proofs. When you read a proof, you can go back through the trail of logic and understand how the mathematician arrived at their conclusion. But could you have written the proof yourself? That’s the real test of knowledge.
Never be so arrogant that you think you deserve to have been born an expert. Everyone started at one point, and what they made was bad. It was bad for a long time before it got good. You study the greats. You copy and copy and copy until you’re able to make something that’s truly your own. From here on out, I don’t want to be borrowing bits of code off the Internet. I want to write everything myself. I’ve discovered this whole new world. You have to decide whether some worlds are worth exploring. I want it to be worth it.