Rosencrantz2
12d ago
I'm not immune to the idea of a landscape that draws you in and in the past have liked such. These days I'd mostly prefer the landscape to be quite unusual or presented in the right context. I kind of like the Lo-fi girl videos because they seem especially well calibrated for the mood they are trying to create; I loved Scavengers' Reign because of the continual newness of its alien landscapes and wildlife. Whereas simple beautiful photos of earth's landscapes have been so abused for the purposes of marketing, screensavers, etc that they have in general lost their charm for me unless curated/displayed just so. Or else I feel that they are trying to suck people in to look at them as distraction, instead of in relation to the place where they're displayed (a pet peeve is places that display photos of the cities where they actually are, like a London cafe that has photos of London on the wall, a sure sign that you are in a crappy tourist spot.).
As to why I find the Miro piece attractive, hmm, hard to articulate, but I guess I like its choiceful colour combos, its combination of crisp shapes with rich more naturalistic textures. It feels like it abstractly represents elements of thought being observed, like when you close your eyes tightly or meditate. I find in it a sense of soft motion and microscopic scale interaction, like we're in some kind of primordial soup or subatomic field that could run on peacefully for millions of years. But I ain't gonna pretend this doesn't sound a little pretentious. In the end it just feels like Miro caught onto a certain wavelength and was able to share it at a time when it hadn't been captured so well before.
Rosencrantz2
13d ago
Interesting and a lot of the story as you tell it I agree with, but there is a bit of a perspective of 'overriding what's natural = bad' in your post that I don't agree with.
I can't reply at length right now, but just a few thoughts:
-We are constantly learning to like things we might 'naturally' dislike, and that's good if we're not blind to how we're being changed. (Kids don't like coffee.)
-Watery, glittery beautiful landscapes (real ones) are essentially unfakeable. Their rarity and the knowledge that they are real healthy ecosystems that have developed over millions of years and offer our bodies and communities good things is part of their beauty. Pictures of the same are available in plentiful supply and these days are entirely disposable. I think the abundance of such images is a large part of how they strike us. Looking at a beautiful lake is a sublime experience but looking at a painting of one usually does little for me; the latter has a copied, possibly manipulative nature that is just as loud as if it were covered in neon graffiti – it overwhelms any latent aesthetic appeal the image may once have had.
-Architectural myopia may be real and bad. But that doesn't mean just making buildings the way we used to is better. There might be learnings from traditional and learned notions of beauty that can be combined into something better that would not read as plain mimicry.
-We live in a world where screen-based imagery is cheap and increasingly has no limit in its abundance or ease of production. Living in this visually unprecedented world is constantly updating our sense of what is visually pleasing, whether we like it or not, and we can constantly learn from this experience. This is the process of becoming visually literate in 2024. Which is different from the process as it was in the time of Rembrandt, and again from the same process in the time of Miro. While I like the Miro image, I also find the idea of being moved to tears by it completely ridiculous, but I accept that it may have hit differently in decades past. Being able to actively learn from imagery around us in its full social context can open up new worlds and communicative possibilities, at least if we are alive to what is happening inside of us and don't just internalise a false ideal (as I tend to think some brutalist architects of the past did).
Rosencrantz2
13d ago
Do you not differentiate between what's beautiful in nature and what's beautiful in art? I guess I am in your 1% since I vastly prefer that Miro image to a typical watercolour of a pretty landscape. But that doesn't mean I don't find nature and the other things people have evolved to be attracted to incredibly beautiful (or that Miro doesn't agree or Ozy don't agree, for that matter). It's just that representing one's preferences in 2D in such a basic way seems crude, unimaginative and close-minded.
Rosencrantz2
5mo ago
Say that after your face is melted in a fire.
Rosencrantz2
5mo ago
Thinking that someone who is suicidal due to a business failure should seek mental health assistance in hopes they don't. ---> "A culture that pathologises all negative feeling"
Wow!
I do think it's "pathological" to want to kill yourself in many circumstances, that doesn't mean I think the same about feeling sad or upset about life events.
I also don't think that having a pathology is something to be judged, rather something that it might be useful to get help with.
I'm maybe a little confused by your reply though.
Rosencrantz2
5mo ago
I feel like you are describing a time when you weren't suicidal and had the composure to see that time would be an adequate healer. That's great. But in a case where you are suicidal, almost by definition, you are not coping with what has happened and time may not be enough to heal you. You may die first.
In your last para you are implying that there's nothing unhealthy about being suicidal after losing your business. It's a very short step from there to saying there's nothing unhealthy about going through with it and killing yourself after losing your business. If that's what you think, then 'nuff respect, but I consider not living in that kind of shame/honour culture to be a good thing and one worth building protections against, such as we're able to do.
Rosencrantz2
5mo ago
"I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff"
I don't understand this point even slightly. Do you genuinely think the other people calling a suicide helpline are not dealing with real issues but just 'lefty mental health'? It's the businessman who has real issues, the others are just faking it?
Rosencrantz2
5mo ago
But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference.
Isn't the current thinking something like the following:
- The gender we each feel ourself to be is something we don't have control over.
- The preferences we feel are also something we don't have control over.
- Both are externally given to us, whether as a result of biology or socialisation or a complex mixture of factors. The only choice we are able to make is how we ask people to regard us.
- In both cases, gender and sexual preferences, people should be allowed to seek to resolve any mismatch by changing their outer actions to line up with their inner realities.
- Seeking to change one of these inner realities, however, is discouraged because gender and sexual preference are supposed to be basic, fundamental human qualities that will eventually push themselves to the fore and create inner turmoil if denied.
Not sure what I think about these issues personally but I'm not too sure if any of the the above statements contradicts any other.
Rosencrantz2
6mo ago
Yeah? I'd say it was both, there were loads of gotcha articles by Times reporters for instance that dug up internet comments made by MPs in their youth and such.
Rosencrantz2
6mo ago
Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.
That IS keeping the peace. If you don't subsidise people's consumption they might not be peaceful for long.
Rosencrantz2
6mo ago
This was a massive element of the taking down of Corbyn's Labour party in the UK, the press were on a hunt for any and all potentially anti-semitic comments from leftwing figures. (To be clear, they did find a fair few.)
Rosencrantz2
6mo ago
It's supposed to incentivise you changing your vehicles, so that the air becomes less horrible. I can understand poorer people being annoyed about ULEZ, but you can obviously afford to change your cars, so what are you actually upset about? I mean, would you say it's that you're concerned for the livelihoods of poorer vehicle users? Or is it a principle of liberty thing?
Rosencrantz2
7mo ago
Sure Harrison Ford is well known but I think you overstate it.
Rosencrantz2
7mo ago
Yeah, I notice that it did kind of happen in the past – Thomas Chippendale was a household name. However that was at a time when furniture was a huge status symbol among a small number of people among whom wealth was highly concentrated (more than today).
Rosencrantz2
7mo ago
People would probably risk homelessness for carpentry if there were highly paid star carpenters.
There totally should be highly paid star carpenters.
Rosencrantz2
7mo ago
Touché, there are indeed a tonne of stars that need to align to produce a good show. But I think that without seasoned professional writers, it would take really quite a long time for a new breed to develop well enough to deliver even the patchy consistency of quality we currently see.
Rosencrantz2
7mo ago
I am a sweet summer child but I actually do believe they partly are striking to make the shows better. If you end up with small teams having to write shows fast (the way it's been going), you lose the large writer's rooms and space for development that enable young writers to practice and get good. I don't believe long prestige TV seasons get made with the typical British model (in which one or two writers typically take on all writing duties for a series). Quality has already got worse in the streaming age, sometimes I think a lot worse.
Re the Twilight example, obvs there are some fanfic writers who became high grossing professionals, people have to start somewhere. I don't think that gives us many clues about how to actually use the talent of fanfic and other amateur writers appropriately though.
I am talking about how to engineer a replacement talent pool from amateur writers relatively quickly if, say, the strike didn't end.
Rosencrantz2
7mo ago
What, do you think you can put a bunch of fanfic writers with the highest number of likes in a writers room and they will write Succession? It IS wizardry (at least in a similar way to other developable skills such as being a professional athlete or musician).
Rosencrantz2
7mo ago
The fact there's no credentialist barrier to entry to writing for the screen means there are a million and seven aspiring writers for every job and the vast majority are awful. But you can't prove they're awful, it's kinda subjective. All you really have to go on is the respect/admiration of producers and other creative people, and their previous credits. These relationships and credits are very difficult to obtain and so they select strongly (whether for exactly the most talented people, I highly doubt, but they do select). Sidestepping that edifice of relationships and trust and trying to start again with writers who are willing to scab (i.e. those new writers who don't care about the very relationships that matter most, with other writers, show runners, actors etc) would be truly hard and expensive. You'd have to invest a lot without knowing who'd do a good job, building whole new systems of trust, and that would require a lot of failure along the way.
Rosencrantz2
8mo ago
Yes, it seems like Putin's modus operandi with these killings is to assiduously maintain a layer of plausible deniability, but to deliberately keep it paper thin.
I can only think it's a power move: "Not only will I have you killed by the means of my choice, but afterwards, no one in Russia will even dare publicly accuse me of doing what everyone can plainly see I did."
Rosencrantz2
8mo ago
You're right, the scouring is actually good. The selection of this small detail and crafting it into a news story that will push their reader's known buttons is not good. Obviously if you think the story is a big deal you're entitled to disagree, and obviously the other side does it too.
The concept of "try to show a realistic mix of ethnicities" just makes sense in mass communications so I'm actually unsure if this would be a much bigger scandal? It depends how it was worded, the nature of the examples etc.
PS Obviously if you used a picture of a black family with the caption "Not real Londoners" that would invite a scandalous interpretation but I don't know how far that takes us? Of course the implications change with a race flip, as black and white are not symmetrical opposites in British society.
Rosencrantz2
8mo ago
I don't agree that it looks like a Facebook image, if you can't see it you, can't see it, but that screams Getty to me. Look at the carefully casual composition of multiple landmarks in the background, harmonious wardrobe and filtered sun. I bet you it's chosen from hundreds of images of the same people, look how all four of them are smiling at once. Hardly the cheesiest example ever but it seems more appropriate to me for overseas tourists than an audience of jaded Londoners.
Of course I agree that it should be fine to show the right image of an all white family but I think the nature of the decision making process often favours mixed ethnicities except when casts are very large. (If you've seen TV ads with multiple vignettes of different families, pretty common on British TV, that is where you're most likely to see more homogenous families depicted.)
Rosencrantz2
8mo ago
I won't try and speak for the designer but I can imagine different don'ts for staging a situation fakely on the one hand and casting in a way that looks inauthentic on the other. I can't stress enough how makework these things are. The more categories of 'don't', the better, from the agency's point of view. I also know how these things come together, it could easily be a junior designer doing a quick web surf for images that they think look intuitively wrong for the brand, and then they try and think of various categories for why they look wrong so it looks structured and scalable and keeps clients convinced that this is not smoke and mirrors made by failed artists, but real rigorous MBA type stuff. How can we produce a lot of rules and stuff to sell the client is the guiding principle (can you tell I've had bad experiences with brand guidelines?).
I'm very aware that ads tend to try hard to 'represent' for a few reasons, and so if there are two people one will probably be non-white. The decisions are taken per piece of communication, and there are not large casts in all ads, so this has lately led to some kinds of minority over-representation (I don't know what the situation would be if all ads had a cast of thousands, enabling them to more accurately represent the actual demographic mix!).
A photo of a good looking, carefully dressed white nuclear family can easily come across as cheesy for a few reasons, especially that that is how the much mocked ads of the past looked. Agencies want to be seen as modern.
All this is fairly dumb but I think the causation is mostly due to dumb industry dynamics, with ideology part of the mix but not the whole story.
I agree with this. Equally, though, a subservient mode of creation is just going to generate more of what people already like, and ultimately end up disappointing them. I feel like the most genuinely pleasurable experiences come from creators who serve both an inner master and the public too.
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