User:C3/What am I doing

Coding

My relationship with coding as of now is very limited, I'm still learning but I am very interested in it! Which is weird because at the beginning, my introduction to it was not well received.

The first time I got introduced to coding was during my second BA year, we got introduced to Java and Netbeans. The result of that semester was a disaster, when the course officially ended I remember thinking "What a waste of time! I can open *name of a random GUI software* and do the exact thing in a few seconds". The second time I got introduced to coding was during the next year, across two courses, both used Processing but one used only P5JS. Everything started making slightly more sense, but I remember struggling understanding the main concepts because each of these courses went the extra step and translated everything in our native language, which turned out to be extra work for both the sides.

The only time this made sense was thanks to a very nice introductory book, Getting started with P5JS which explained the core concepts of programming using the same example over and over, re-writing code to show the different ways you could do the same thing with different techniques. A mixture of this book, plus the resources that the courses gave us (links to artists, educators etc...), plus other more theoretical books that talked about programmable media, helped me understand and discover what I could do with it, which felt like 'everything', but I am nowhere near that goal, still it is nice to keep picking up pieces here and there that go into this very large puzzle that I probably will never solve.

All in all I noticed that the most difficult part about learning to code is the absence of concrete results, coming from a drawing background the most difficult part to get past was the initial "empty screen" situation (due to syntax errors and the inability to know where to look for them). Even after years of learning to code I still have to make something entirely code based.

Animation

Aside all the computer stuff that I've been doing/will do, I draw a lot, and for a long time (high school years) I though that I wanted to become a traditional animator (hand drawing frame per frame). On my second BA year I started attending a course called "Digital animation techniques", there I came in contact with non traditional animation works for the first time. Until then I was exposed only to 2D or 3D animation that somehow involved realism, even if something unnatural was portrayed it would always follow some real world rules, what I saw was what I expected. On the contrary, during class we constantly saw animation that was wrong, rightfully so.

Emulation

One winter I visited two friends of mine that live in Krakow. During my stay there I mostly spent time with one of them at their apartment, he worked full time online. When he finished his shift we had some time to kill before my other friend came back from work, during that time he showed me something I forgot about entirely.

He told me he was thinking about this game a lot and he wanted to play it, thing is, it was a Playstation 2 game, and of course he did not have a PS2 just laying around, since this was a temporary living situation. So he showed me a PS2 emulator, a program that can run ISO files of PS2 games, then he asked "What game do you miss most?", I never though about it, precisely because my PS2 is in my hometown, catching dust.

From then on the emulation journey began, it interestingly also overlaps over topics like DRM, copyright, copy protection schemes, media archeology, media preservation and so on. Apart form being able to re-play video games I grew up with, emulating helped me better understand...(continue)

Software Preservation Network