originally posted on Tumblr
Someone was asking about tech magic ideas in a discord server and one of my favorite intersections is Code Poetry, which is the practice if writing poetry using a programming language (so yes, it's exactly what it sounds like.) I was going to send some links but then I felt like I'd be spamming the chat so I figured I'd just make a list here instead.
First of all, my disclosure is that I do a lot of variations of writing as magic, including "regular" poetry and some stuff that's vaguely derived from galdr and the idea of naming things/using true names and... that's all a bit much to even try to go into but suffice to say that this is interesting to me because Words Are Already Magic for me. If that doesn't make sense to you, this probably isn't going to click for you either.
Anyway, some links!
From there I think you can probably guess where you can go with it- if you can name and assign variables you can use the idea of virtually anything as a component of the spell and once you write an executable "spell" you're essentially launching the spell on command.
As for how it "works," the easiest explanation is probably to compare it to working with sigils: you're taking something complex and making it simplified, but your unconscious mind still knows what's contained in that simplified form and can act on it. You can also build it into a public website where it will execute every time the page is loaded, regardless of when or by whom.
Even if you don't lean into the energywork, you can think of it as a mental exercise: it's a way to carefully consider what your goal is and how you would get there and what variables are in play that you would want to control.
Once you start thinking about it that way, I think it becomes pretty intuitive. I mean, you know what I mean if I say
let Luck = "good";
don't you? The principle flows out from there and gets exactly as complicated as you want it to be, no more and no less.