Yet another week of anxiety wrought coding and I think things are finally coming together. I keep having to reshape how I learn and practice code, a big part of which is to organize myself and focus on getting the small stuff right. I often struggle against impatience, and although I feel good about the things I’ve learned so far, writing code while remaining human-legible continuous to be a difficult. In the spirit of setting near-impossible goals, I’m giving myself one more weekend to finish the rest of my dailies and begin my project. Mercy.

Reading The Language of New Media has been quite the experience. I have not been immersed in computer studies in a very long time, and since learning to code properly now comes with real stakes, Manovich’s book almost reads like a computer science manual. Although I get to dig a little deeper and learn the inner workings of scripting software, or think of interfaces in their binary, modulated and sequential forms, I am not interacting with digital technology at the serious programming level. Coding labs can often be a lesson in alertness and algebraic manipulation. Manovich’s guide to digital media is still digestible at the ordinary user level.

The creators of p5 seem to have the same sort of instructive project in mind, making the otherwise daunting task of commanding code a bit more fun and accessible. This makes the dailies a little easier to get through, although when I do sit down to work on code, the cultural and political contingencies of digital media are the last thing on my mind. For now, what occupies it instead is how to get those damn bubbles to move and multiply for me.