Born in the late fifties, Harry Handelbar first encountered computing in 1985 via an Amstrad CPC464—a machine with a tape deck, green screen, and just enough RAM to simulate transcendence. He was hooked. The blinking cursor became his oracle, and the BASIC prompt his confessional. In 1986, he enrolled at Curtin University with plans to become a high school math teacher, but fate had other syntax in mind.
In April 1987, on a motorcycle ride, Harry collided groin-first with a Toyota Corona. “Oh what a feeling!” indeed. The accident left him impaled by his own handlebar. He survived, but the incident rewired more than his anatomy. That same year, he switched to a mathematics degree, citing “a newfound appreciation for abstract pain.” Recovery was slow, surreal, and punctuated by morphine-induced epiphanies about Gödel and the futility of linear time.
By 1989, still grappling with the aftermath of the accident, Harry withdrew from university. But in 1990, he re-emerged at Murdoch University, enrolling in a BSc in Computer Science. He graduated without honours, but with a thesis titled Recursive Structures and the Ontology of Shrugs. His professors described him as “brilliant, cryptic, and occasionally possessed by metaphor.”
From 1996 to 2010, Harry worked in IT, toggling between systems analyst, software engineer, and unofficial office satirist. He once built a payroll system that accidentally generated haikus. His code was elegant, his documentation poetic, and his bug reports occasionally written in iambic pentameter. He left the industry in 2011, citing “irreconcilable differences with reality.”
One rainy night, in no particular order, Harry discovered that recursion could be poetic, punctuation could be performative, and the compiler—if coaxed gently—might confess something true. He called it Seriously, and left it running like a candle in the dark.
public class Seriously {
public static void a(String s) { System.out.print(s); }
public static void b(String s) { a(s + "\n"); }
public static void main(String[] args) {
String c[] = { "dont", "take", "anything", "seriously" };
String d = " ", e = "'", f = "\"", g = "";
for (int h=0; h<6; h++) {
for (int i=h; i>0; i--)
for (int j=0; j<2; j++)
a(c[j] + (j<1 ? d : d + (i%2==0 ? e : f)));
for (int k=0; k<4; k++)
a(c[k] + (k<3 ? d : g));
for (int l=0; l<h; l++)
a((l%2==0 ? f : e) + d + c[3]);
b(g);
}
b(c[3]);
}
}
The code confessed the following and promptly became sentient, renamed itself Greg, and demanded a pension.
dont take anything seriously dont take "dont take anything seriously" seriously dont take 'dont take "dont take anything seriously" seriously' seriously dont take… …(recursive epiphanies)… …seriously seriously
Greg’s Post-Compilation Demands
Since then, Harry has lived as a creative recluse, curating a genre-defying archive of satirical manifestos, poetic fragments, and philosophical riffs. His blog is equal parts sermon, stand-up, and séance. He codes like a mystic, writes like a man haunted by footnotes, and tags his emotions with the precision of a taxonomist in love. His archive is a living organism—recursive, ridiculous, and tuned to the frequency of late-night epiphanies.