problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
I feel like I'm the only person in existence who doesn't like Cowboy Bebop.
It's a very vibey show but it's all aesthetics, the characters and their motivations are about as deep as a puddle, and the episode-to-episode plots make very little logical sense and feel like they were all made up on the spot with a lot of technobabble to cover up the sheer lack of effort put into any of the plotting or worldbuilding. I watched many episodes and never got the sense that it was a coherent world with rules that had to be adhered to at all. Incoherent ass-pulling constitutes a significant portion of how most of the plots in each episode actually progress, and it's really hard to be invested in the episodic narratives when some deus ex machina can be invoked at literally any time to turn the plot on its head. The overarching reaction I had to most episodes was "This is happening now, I guess". Honky Tonk Women is an early example of an episode that's just needlessly contrived and really only exists because of a lot of irrationality and a one-in-a-million coincidence without which the plot would not happen.
They also try to pull emotional scenes at the end of most episodes that don't hit IMO because they spent too little time fleshing out the characters; that moment in Asteroid Blues when it's revealed that Asimov and Katerina won't make it to Mars is clearly supposed to be a pensive one, but you've spent all of 15 minutes with them at that point and so the emotional scene feels unearned. Also seriously, does anyone actually like Faye Valentine? She's superficially charming but is often shown to be a selfish, arrogant, lazy individual who leeches off the rest of the Bebop without so much as a show of gratitude, with a bad habit of gambling all her money away.
Visually, aurally, it's a great experience; the whole atmosphere is immaculate. But you need more than that to carry a show IMO, and animes almost always fall apart on plotting and characterisation for me (Japanese narrative writing generally rarely delivers on these fronts). Ghost In The Shell is another great example of a classic anime with fantastic art direction crippled by a wafer-thin narrative, which purports to be way more than it actually is given that it has basically nothing much to say on the subjects of consciousness and AI it touches on (what it does say is vague and bordering on incoherent). This banger of an intro sequence deserved so much better.
I was indeed offering a hypothetical (mostly based on my limited knowledge of OP's situation and the fact he has described himself as a "depressed shrink"), but I half agree and half disagree with what you've written here.
As for anhedonia I have no answer. It's a term I learned on reddit, meaning at first I assumed it was just a pretend word meant to be a catchall excuse for not getting out of fucking bed. I'm not unwilling to believe it is a real thing, but I would suspect finding the root cause of this and sorting it out should be any one individual's main goal in life if he finds himself suffering from it for any length of time. Of course for the anhedonic there is always the convenient excuse: They simply don't have motivation to do anything. I cannot imagine a household where anyone would accept or tolerate this without taking some action to sort it.
Speaking as someone who veered closer to suicide at one point than I usually care to admit and who has also seen claims of poor mental health used as a way to excuse one's failures and a means of aggressively manipulating others (mostly by women who in retrospect exhibited many traits of BPD), I'm of two minds about this. Often it can be beneficial to adopt the mindset of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop whining" and it helps induce a positive feedback loop wherein doing more productive things in turn improves your mood and consequently motivation, but there is a point beyond which it will actually make things worse; beyond a certain level of despair some external assistance can be necessary. Of course it's always a problem that should be solved, it should never be left to fester, but I find maturity is knowing the appropriate context in which one should deploy these two strategies.
Not enough time is a flimsy excuse. There is nearly always enough time for anything that matters. We carve out time for what is important to us. We do what we have to or need to do before we do what we want to do.
I don't necessarily disagree, but "anything that matters" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and doesn't really tell you what you should prioritise, since that is a value judgement that's heavily dependent on the individual. There is a lot of grey area in between "what you need to do" and "what you want to do". Yes if you're an extremely unhealthy weight, losing that weight should be a major priority. On the other hand, if you're within a healthy range perhaps reading books, learning things, etc may actually give you more utility than losing that extra weight and getting swole, depending on what you personally value.
Of course if you're just choosing between these two options you can likely do both to some extent. But tradeoffs inherently have to be made, and inevitably you will not have enough time for something. There are legitimate situations and preference rankings which result in goals like "exercising more" being put on the back burner.
problem_redditor
6d ago
From how it’s presented I assume it is a 5-point scale, with the median value of 3 revised downwards to zero.
problem_redditor
6d ago
Not OP, but I imagine there are two reasons why not: Time and anhedonia.
I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.
If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning these skills authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little instruction on the techniques used seem to be available online. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).
As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here and here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through craftsmen willing to mentor people. To a lesser extent it's the case for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.
Even traditional European Renaissance painting (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) isn't being actively taught in many art colleges in spite of the fact it was the source of many codified Western artistic techniques. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't really focus heavily on classical painting skills but includes other super important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world. Of course there are plenty of resources on Renaissance painting you can read yourself, but still; one would imagine it would feature more in curricula given its importance to Western art. The situation for other less-known skills are far worse.
I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these skills are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice no longer covers them. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.
Thoughts? What do you think would be a good thing to try my hand at?
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