The other night I was drifting toward sleep, thinking about E2, and in
particular the
6502 opcodes metanode. This started me reminiscing about
the
good old days when I used to write
assembly language
on the
C64.
Then a weird thing happened.
You know that period between wakefulness and sleep, where surreal
dreamlike thoughts start crowding your consciousness without your
permission? And you know how, in dreams, bizarrely dissociated
concepts can melt together into a grotesque hybrid, like those dreams
where you're talking to your mother but she somehow appears in Joan of
Arc's body? (Hmm. Maybe that's just me.)
Well, as I lay there fantasising about hardcore coding,
I suddenly realised that the mental movie I was viewing featured me
sliding my penis, surprisingly sans condom, into my
girlfriend; however, my brain was not interpreting this as
sex: instead, the implicit understanding was that the X-rated image was
actually a symbolic representation of me writing 6502 assembler.
When I realised exactly
how fucked up this was, I woke up
pretty fast. I knew instantly, of course, that this had to be noded;
and I also got interested in analysing the reasons that my
subconscious had spawned something so unusual. (Do 8-bit
microprocessors turn me on? Or do I view sex as a cerebral challenge
akin to those faced when writing complex programs in 64K of RAM?) Hence,
the comparison below:
Similarities between assembly language and unprotected sex
When you screw things up, you can screw up bigtime. The layers of
type checking and scoping and grammatical rules which separate you from
the machine when coding in a high-level language are a
type of syntactic condom.
They both feel soooo much better than their respective alternatives.
Software written in assembler runs fast. Likewise, the increased
sensitivity associated with condomless sex... you get the idea.
Both are discouraged by modern educators.
Differences between assembly language and unprotected sex
Nerdy fifteen-year-old boys with no social skills can write machine code
whenever they want.
People who write in assembler
are often held in respectful awe by their lesser peers.
Contraceptively challenged lovers are not.
Few people are brave enough to use assembler.