[BLOG] The roots of evangelism

KhaosKhaos New Hampshire
edited November -1 in Community
Peel back my bark, slice me in two, and you'll find a cross-section of contrasting rings dating back to my childhood some twenty-four revolutions ago.

The ninth ring sees the definition become clear. The order, if you will. Without apparent causation, the chaotic, asymmetrical bands of life form a recognizable pattern of exponential growth.

This was the revolution of BASIC. The season in which I started programming.

Like many upstart programmers, I cut my teeth on BASIC DOS console applications. The notion that I could write text into a computer and cause it to respond to my every whim enthralled me, and continues to.

I languished in BASIC for many rings, not knowing that I was not so firmly rooted as I might have once thought. Not knowing that my roots were in fact legs, and that these legs could and would carry me to places yet unknown.

By the time the seasons had seen eleven of my rings form, the Internet was gaining momentum. America Online was beginning to gain ground in the forest of information technology, and widespread adoption of this new communications platform had taken hold of the surrounding fauna.

Not one to sit by the wayside, I threw my foliage into the fray and began to explore what would become the new soil of the Earth; Hypertext Markup Language.

In addition to exploring these newfound Internet-enabled whimsies, I discovered that BASIC had grown up in my absence. A new form of command was available, a form promising a new vision. A visuality, if you will. Visual BASIC.

By now, three orderly rings had taken shape in a sort of functional cocoon of knowledge surrounding the chaos of my earlier revolutions. The trees that formed my stand had all adapted to the new soil. The new Earth. America Online.

I found the world as seen through this newfound prism fascinating, yet lacking in its accommodations. With every step that my freed root-legs took, I could not help but notice that if I only moved a pebble here and a stone there, the bedrock of the world would be just a little more orderly. A little less chaotic, as my rings had become.

This thirst for improvement and the advent of the New Vision came full circle when I began to write simple applications that could move pebbles. Soon, I was able to write applications that could move stones. Soon, I was shaping the bedrock beneath me; the very foundations of the new Earth. In America Online.

I joined a collaborative effort with many other ambitious souls and together we shaped communication in ways incomprehensible in their scope and impact. Together, we invented notifications to alert other trees in the forest when one was hibernating. Together, we invented malicious means of gaining access to forests outside our native domain. Together, we invented means of transferring preferences from one forest to another, means of maintaining ties to the old trees of forests past and meeting trees in forests new.

Together, we invented.

The seasons came and went. The rings continued to grow, larger and larger. New forms of visuality and expression came to be and came to pass. Some lingered, some were fleeting. I explored them all with a passion that can only be described as true love.

My travels took me over land and seas, with pluses and pounds, woven nets of scripture, pearls and poetry. I formed mountains from clay, watched children grow, flourish and die, and etched my mark on the very existence of the New Reality.

With each season, it becomes more challenging to traverse the fields of time in search of new forests that are increasingly distant and abstract. Yet the passion remains. It drives me to lift my roots from the hold of old soil and seek arable land elsewhere, over new horizons. The rings continue to grow in scope and number.

And so it shall continue, this quest of quests, until the ax men find me and bare my rings to world. May their blades dull in my core, for symmetry is strength and logic holds the power to defeat all ignorance.

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    The Victorian era called, they want their prose back.
  • KhaosKhaos New Hampshire
    The Victorian era called, they want their prose back.
    Laff.. Wicked burn.

    irpoetlawlz
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    <3
Sign In or Register to comment.