vivdunstan

Still working on my list of fave/rec books published one for each year of my life. Last night I managed to figure out how to persuade Wordpress to support expanding/collapsing details if you click on a title.** So then added expanding notes for the 1970s portion of the list. 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s to do another time!

** which more than anything else reminds me of Occam's folding editor I used to program in for a brief period as an undergraduate!

Finally getting around to contacting ScotlandsPeople to ask if they could fix their code so it doesn't report "1 records found" in search results rather than "1 record found". That's really poor programming, as hammered into computer science students in my 1st year class 35 years ago at St Andrews!

Me just now: “I wonder what my 3rd favourite computing book would be?” I rediscovered my 2nd favourite today, complete with school prize bookplate in there. I had form for spending school prizes on computing books! Even a 5th year French prize on a Pascal programming book 😜 Will ponder. Then probably blog about it. So far we’re talking 1980s though.

I'm continuing my reread of The Fellowship of the Ring. And the party have just got through Moria. But I was struggling hugely to visualise in my mind the different rooms and levels that the party were going through, especially later on in their time in Moria. But I can remember a time when I could visualise them clearly. For many years. So this seems to be something I've lost since, or can't do now anyway. It's not that I'm not remembering the Peter Jackson movie version. But my image of the journey through Moria was memorably different from the movie I saw in 2001. I remember clearly having "thoughts" about the film's depiction of Moria, and how different it was from how I imagined it looked ever since I'd started reading the book for the first time as a young child. But now I can't really visualise any geography at all as I read.

Relatively recently I tried an aphantasia online test. And scored highly. Which would fit with my struggles to visualise things in my mind now. Including faces. Even very close family! But I'm now wondering after this LOTR rereading experience if it's something that I've developed more in recent years. Perhaps as a result of my progressive neurological illness.

When I was young I could visualise things, and draw from images in my mind. However when my neurological illness started in 1994 at age 22 I quickly noticed my ability to think abstractly diminishing. Rather a big problem for a computer science PhD student needing to program. I quickly lost the ability to program effectively in lots of languages. Though at the time I just coped as best as I could. It's more distressing looking back.

So yup, I wonder if visualisation is another loss with time, perhaps due to my long term illness. It's partly also why I dreaded designing cover art for my latest IFComp game. But hey, got there!

Curiouser and curiouser anyway. I am enjoying my LOTR reread despite this. Next up Lothlorien.

Good spurt of IFComp game coding. Inform 7/10 is a largely declarative language, very like coding in Prolog. But sometimes you have to go imperative. And I've just coded a ridiculously large set of nested IF ... OTHERWISE ... statements to handle a key situation. Now approaching the end of the game, though still have masses of earlier stuff to go back and finish off writing properly.

Me to Martin just now: “It’s like an Occam folding editor!” as I try to explain cut/spoiler sections in DreamWidth blog posts. That won’t make any sense except to fellow computer scientists possibly of a certain vintage. But sharing for them! I can still vividly remember coding Occam in the Edge basement Sun lab on the Scores in St Andrews in the early 1990s.