problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
Been making my way through a fiction backlog. Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook an obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration with only a relatively thin plot justification for the oversight, but if you can accept that (and the very simplistic prose) the story's good fun.
Read The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch on Saturday after having it on the back burner for a while; it was entertaining for a bit but the prose was clunky and story-wise it felt all over the place, since it was trying to pull together so many elements - murder mystery detective plots, apocalypse scenarios, time travel (of a sort), deep space travel, incomprehensible starfish aliens, timeline-hopping Nazi vigilante groups, and more - and it never felt particularly unified as a result. The book doesn't always explore these plot points to its fullest extent and threatens to become incoherent under the weight of its own story a lot, and I never got the sense that there was an underlying gestalt to the entire story, which is something I generally like with twisty sci-fi. Also somehow nobody ever sees an ethical problem with creating whole temporary universes filled with people who think and feel, all of whom will blink out of existence once the traveller leaves.
Currently on Quarantine by Greg Egan and enjoying it a lot so far, though some of the futurism has aged rather poorly in retrospect.
96%, and I'm actually surprised because in real life I hardly remember the faces of anyone I don't meet frequently (I actually often struggle to pick out prominent public figures by their looks, who I remember far more by their names and policies than I do their faces). In practice I store people as an abstract set of traits and positions in much the same way I do concepts.
In the vast majority of contexts the specific way somebody's face looks is probably the attribute of theirs I care the least about, and I suppose I just don't bother to commit it to long-term memory.
I intellectually agree with you on the broad strokes and the impossibility of restructuring society around the whims of "creatives" - yet emotionally sympathise with @Corvos, since I find myself in a similar boat and used to create a lot of music in university (as well as when I was laid out flat by chronic illness). Given the musical taste you've demonstrated here I doubt you would like any of what I made, but I honed my skill at it until I would say I was at a professional level, or at least close to it. I have some receipts to prove it, too; I minimally marketed my music and ended up selling over $1,000 worth of it with pretty much close to zero financial investment on my part (this is not much in context, but considering how little I was trying to get eyes on it, I'm surprised it actually gained so much traction). At one point I had a friend show a track of mine to someone who had studied audio engineering in university, and they asked to speak to me so they could understand how I was making what I was making. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I was good at it.
At this point, though, I've been so radically run down by the endless demands of my work, which I have complained about here and here, and I barely find myself making anything at all. I used to be so much more of an interesting person; I used to make more, I used to read more, I used to care more about things, and now I find myself largely blanking out in front of the screen during much of my free time because my work and personal commitments swallows all of my energy. I would be lying if I said it didn't bother me.
To be fair, I constantly see artists who are just bad and whose creative endeavours amount to just dabbling make this claim as well (way too many people in the electronic music sphere are capable of only making drone music), and a lot of times it does in fact boil down to a skill issue and placing a lot of blame on "capitalism" to mask their own lack of motivation and talent. But not every eight-hour shift was made equal, and the amount of time I spend at work almost certainly heavily exceeds eight hours per day when you count the unpaid overtime, I'm not really capable of sparing the time to have lunch many (most?) days. The fact that people use the justification to bolster their own failure to accomplish things is not incompatible with the existence of people who are actually burned out as hell on their jobs, barely keeping their head above water on that front, and who would genuinely make things that are worthwhile if their motivation wasn't constantly being sledgehammered.
More options
Context Copy link