Frustration and 4 Dimensional Hypercubes
I’ve always had a weird relationship with frustration. It pushes me to do things I didn’t think I could do.
There was a time I was seven years old in the hospital after an accident. I couldn’t walk, and people were hauling me from the hospital bed in and out of wheel chairs all the time. One day my grandmother left to go get some food for lunch, and on her way out of my room she said “Don’t go anywhere!”
I’m nothing if not a contrary little shit, so of course my first thought was how funny it’d be if I were gone when she got back. It was tricky though, I was hooked up to like 4 different machines, I’d have to carefully unplug them all and roll them where I was going, and I had an IV I didn’t want to disturb otherwise I’d have a repeat of a couple days prior when my IV came loose and my room became the set of Grindhouse.
So I went about the delicate task of untangling the wires behind the bed, unplugging everything and wrapping the loose wires around machines so they could roll freely. I figured out how to push them all in front of me, and slowly made my way toward the door, and out into the hallway.
I was considering where to hide, when I became about as confused as you are right now. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I can’t walk.”
That’s the story about how I was too busy being a little shit to notice that I was doing something I couldn’t do, and that some highly qualified people said I might never do.
Hypercube
The other day when I shared my cute little hypercube toy, the feedback tickled the same shit bone that “Don’t go anywhere” tickled decades ago. It’s not really a hypercube, and it only has vertices, and the vertices are placed wierdly.
Like, seriously, man, dude, you’re going to give me shit about a cute little thing that’s sort of cool? Well fuck you man, I’ll build it again, better, so you can’t give me shit anymore.
It’s perverse maybe, but it’s often a winning strategy.
Allow me to present a 4 dimensional hypercube toy, written in javascript for your diddling pleasure: