tara_hanoi

A friend sent on a wonderful talk by Chipzel, the chip-tune artist responsible for the soundtrack of Super Hexagon, called "We are all hackers". It's a TedX talk where she lays out the hacker mentality and her journey to it. It made me want to engage with the hacker mentality again.

The hacker mentality is one I tend to identify with, when I allow myself the cycles.

However, the identity of "Hacker" is one I burned out from a long time ago¹.

One of the reasons I don't call myself a hacker is that I've nothing to really hack on. Moreover, there's nothing I really want to hack on. So, in the tradition of WB Yeats and "How can you know the dancer from the dance?", how can I call myself a hacker when I don't even want to hack right now?

If you've spent any time with me in person, or on some of my social media accounts, you'll have probably heard me talk about the importance of Finding Your People; the folks where a certain set of assumptions and common experiences are held as axiomic, and you don't have to work as hard to communicate effectively with them about certain issues.

Chipzel's video made me realise that I might be hacking the wrong way. Now, I will happily tell people that there's no Wrong Way to hack, and I still stand by that. But there are approaches that are right and wrong for an individual; if they're not hitting the mental space that most hackers are hooked on, it's probably safe to call it wrong.

So, what do I think I'm doing wrong? I learned all these tools and techniques that I could make something with them. But, I need to come back to terms with the fact that you don't effectively learn a tool or technique without a goal. Chipzel's story was that she discovered a thing and made something with it. She expanded her skills to match what she wanted to make.

She also described the demo scene, a scene that absolutely fascinates me. And it made me realise that finding a scene is probably as important for nurturing and expressing my hacker mentality as finding my people is to allow myself to grow as a person.

So what does this mean? I think it means I need to find my scene. I need to find the thing that interests me enough to make me want to pull it apart, figure out how it works, remix, and make my own. The skills come later. I need to remember to pull back from the rabbithole of trying to Know All The Things, but learn the tools and techniques that are useful to me now.

I made some HTML5 toys², but didn't get much further with them. Because I was staring down the barrel of a software project. I got caught up in details.

I think that's why I loved tools like Processing. They gave a load of technical demos of what the tool could make, and also their source. You could pull it apart, and figure out how to make your own. You didn't need to worry too much about the stuff you didn't care about yet, just the actual making of the thing you wanted to make.

That might be my scene again, but I don't think it is. I know what it can be like to find your thing. You want to steal seconds away from what you're doing right now, to work on your thing. You want to make time for it, not find the time for it. And right now, I don't want to make the time for these toys, I just moan about not finding it.

So, what's my scene right now? I don't know, but I'd better make time to find out.

( Herein lie the footnotes )

A few weeks ago, there was a Steampunk event in Dublin. I had intended to go to it, and I had also intended to take a dive into making a bit of jewelery for it.

This involved some leather strip, some nuts from a hardware store, and some findings that I got in Beads'n'Bling. Me being me, I managed to lose the leather, so I couldn't make the choker I had intended. It didn't matter that much as, due to a busy week, I missed the event anyway. I still have all the materials, with the nuts littering my room, and the leather being... somewhere.

Anyway, I have a pendant that a friend gave me. It's really worn and the clasp was slightly broken (the main latch was chipped), but I wanted to inject some new life into it. This morning, on a whim, I decided I'd fix up the problem by replacing the latch, given that I'd recently bought a bag of 50 of them.

For reasons I've long since forgotten, I have a pair of pliers on the shelf above my bed (I think it's from the last time I had notions about trying to make jewelery) - they're from Maplins, but they seem to be the same as a pair that I got in a magazine one time, except with a better grip. Using those, I opened up the jump ring, and replaced the latch with minimum difficulty.

Wearing it now, it somehow feels more secure, although that may just be a psychological effect from knowing that I made it more secure.

Yes; I know this barely qualifies as anything on pretty much any scale, but it's a start in the right direction, and it's something I did for myself with materials that I had. It's a feeling I've forgotten until recently, and it feels good.

Now, to put that huge roll of cat-5, rj45 crimpers and heads to good use.