Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
19d ago
I read The Hurt Locker, it was pretty good. Although I was really talking about movies etc. rather than books - did anyone involved in making the adaptation actually go to Iraq?
Folamh3
19d ago
According to his biography:
Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs
While I have mixed feelings about Oliver Stone, I have to concede that at least his confrontational "war is hell" movies about Vietnam actually drew on his personal experiences of serving there. Which leads me to an interesting question - have there been any films about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan written or directed by people who took part in said invasions?
Folamh3
19d ago
I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies
I have this thought every time I watch a movie directed by John Carney. It's as if he's an alien who's never met a human being face to face and only learned how they talk and behave from watching movies. Oppenheimer gave me the same feeling.
I keep coming back to this article by a guy talking about the National Book Awards, and how they've become increasingly insular and self-referential over time. He talks about how previous generations of award-winning books were written by people who had actual practical "lived experience" of the things they were writing about (e.g. Hemingway actually fought in a war), often without having ever attended college. Increasingly, the people winning or being nominated for these awards are people who hold MFAs in creative writing and have never lived outside of the academy for any significant period of time. They're books written by people who learned everything they know about life from reading other books, rather than from the primary sources of actually doing and experiencing things firsthand.
Pointedly, he notes that previous generations of award-winning books often had mass populist appeal and were just as widely read by ordinary people and educated people. Increasingly, National Book Award-winning novels are novels you've never heard of: they're written by and for MFA graduates.
There was a campaign video (which I haven't seen) where Vance tried to present himself as a "regular dude" by going into a donut shop and buying a box of donuts. Apparently the person behind the counter wasn't interested in taking part, Vance stumbled over his words and the whole thing was awkward and uncomfortable for everyone.
Folamh3
20d ago
Tangentially related but this reminds me of a tweet playfully mocking Vance which I found pretty funny, primarily just for how it was phrased:
[vice presidential debate]
moderator: what makes you smile
tim walz: my kids
jd vance: pass
moderator: what’s your favorite donut
jd vance: what if i killed you
Folamh3
20d ago
Anyone starting to feel like there's nothing really that dystopic about A Clockwork Orange?
Folamh3
20d ago
I mean, we do have our token progressives. Darwin/guesswho was active as recently as April, and I had a spirited and productive debate with @TokenTransGirl more recently than that.
Deiseach is still active in the ACX comment section. Reading between the lines I get the impression he lives they live in Ireland.
I'd love to see a source for this claim. According to Wikipedia, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting research into coronaviruses in bats as early as 2005.
In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.
That sounds pretty similar to GoF to me.
Also:
[In 2014], the US government granted exceptions to the GoFR moratorium to 7 out of 18 research projects that had been affected.
Folamh3
21d ago
Since you asked for modern works, a world without the film Tár would be poorer than one with it.
To me, it seems like it's useful to have that stuff around, just as a canary test that free speech is really working.
Of course, I'm not calling for creepy fetish art to be banned. Just like "hate speech" - I think that people yelling racial slurs makes our culture slightly worse, but I'm not calling for them to be banned.
Folamh3
21d ago
Remember how, at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the overwhelming majority in this forum suddenly developed unconditional trust in consensus MSM reporting, if only on that topic?
I'm afraid not.
Folamh3
22d ago
Oh yeah, I have heard of this.
Back when I was in secondary school, some guys in my social circle spent a lot of time on BestGore. It never appealed to me, I have no interest in watching real people being actually tortured and murdered. One time I asked one of these guys "when you watch these videos, does it turn you on?" and he said "a bit".
I still have no idea if he was being honest or just trying to be shocking (he couldn't have been older than eighteen at the time). It will not surprise you that I haven't been in touch with him for over a decade.
Folamh3
22d ago
Reminds me of that joke from two years ago: "Following the example of McDonald's and Coca-Cola, PornHub is pulling out of Russia in protest of its invasion of Ukraine. If this trend continues, Russia is on track to being the healthiest country in the world within a generation."
Folamh3
22d ago
therefore a pornographic painting is no worse off than a landscape, a still life, etc.
I can imagine an erotic or even pornographic artwork which enriches human culture, if only marginally. Heck, I don't need to imagine: Klimt's The Kiss (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)) was attacked as pornographic in his lifetime, and it's one of the most iconic portrayals of intimacy the twentieth century has given us. Alan Moore's From Hell depicts sexuality and prostitution very explicitly, and it's my favourite of his works (and I think superior to Watchmen). Lolita was banned in many countries, but remains a masterpiece. It's been a long time since I saw Antichrist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist_(film)) and, while I don't think the film couldn't have done without the unsimulated sex scenes, I still think it's an impressively disquieting and thought-provoking film. There are many erotic, even pornographic, works of art which I will defend and which I really do believe have enriched human culture in ways great or small.
I just don't think the category of "creepy fetish art depicting non-human characters made for perverts on commission, and for whom the creator feels his livelihood is threatened by the advent of Stable Diffusion" contains any such works - I think 100% of works in this category had either no impact on human culture, or a negative impact. And I have no reason to expect this state of affairs to change at any time in the immediate future.
As an aside - I've written in this forum before about how, up until a certain point in my life, it was quite common for story ideas to pop into my head at any given time; but this process largely halted a couple of years ago as I entered my 30s. There are a lot of practical life factors in play, but subjectively, it feels as though my head were a radio, and the tuner knob has gotten bumped off of the frequency where all the story ideas are broadcast. Before, I could just hear them, and now I can't. Have you ever felt that way? And did you change anything in your life accordingly?
I could've written this paragraph myself. I used to write fiction and compose music quite a lot, but when I undertake NaNoWriMo this year, it will be the first significant chunk of original prose I'll have written since mid-Covid. Before that I wrote four novels or novellas (three as a teenager). The reason I haven't written anything since mid-Covid isn't because I've had writer's block (in the sense that I've been trying to write but the words aren't coming to me) - I just haven't had any ideas since. And it happened in two artistic media - it used to be I could write an entire song in my head without touching a guitar, the ideas would just come to me of their own accord. That almost never happens to me anymore, except sometimes with rhythmic patterns - with rare exceptions, writing a melody is something I have to consciously work at, playing a riff over and over until it congeals into something more substantial. It's hardly surprising to me that the best musicians tend to produce their best work in their twenties and peter out thereafter.
All of the foregoing is why it was such a surprise to me when the idea for this story popped into my head - I'd legitimately forgotten how pleasant that sensation is of being in a creative flow state and the ideas are just "coming" to you. I'm not going to say it's better than sex, because it isn't, but it's an intensely pleasurable intellectual sensation.
Why do ideas rarely come to me anymore? Half of the answer is just growing up and having a more keenly honed sense of what works and what doesn't. It's not merely that the four novels or novellas I wrote earlier in my life had a strong premise but were let down by the execution - I think even the basic premises of all of these novels were unworkable to start with, and I was too young/inexperienced/immature to recognise that at the time, so close to my creation and so caught up in the act of creating that I failed to appreciate how dumb my creation was. I remember a handful of the ideas for stories and novels I had when I was younger, ideas which I fully intended on bringing to fruition when I could find the time, and absolutely all of them were utterly terrible. (And that's not even getting into the ideas I've forgotten - I very much doubt there were any gems in there.) Like Scott talking about the Chamber of Guf, I think it's very possible that ideas for stories appear in my subconscious at about the same rate as they always did, but my quality control filter prevents them from rising to the level where I'm consciously aware of them. I'm very excited about the idea for this story, in large part because I feel like it has a very strong "elevator pitch" - even if I can't pull it off, I feel like someone could do something interesting with the same basic premise. This is in stark contrast to my third and fourth novels in particular, which were navel-gazing narcissism from start to finish.
But the "quality control filter" explanation doesn't explain why melodies don't come to me as often as they used to.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture".
Well now you're putting words in my mouth, which I don't appreciate. At no point did I claim that creepy fetish art doesn't significantly enrich human culture, but that non-creepy non-fetish art does significantly enrich human culture. Given the vast rate at which humans create art (e.g. 100,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day) and Sturgeon's law being what it is, the likelihood of any given artwork having a significant impact (positive or negative) on human culture is about the same as winning the lottery. Creating art is almost always done purely for the amusement of the creator himself, and I say this as someone who devotes a large chunk of his spare time to making and distributing music. Even the proportion of artworks which are created with the expectation of turning even a modest profit (or breaking even) are a small minority.
What I said was that depictions of Judy Hopps getting gang-banged fail to enrich human culture in even the most meagre way. That is to say, if someone draws Judy Hopps getting gang-banged, at best the existence of this "artwork" has zero impact on human culture whatsoever, and at worst it makes human culture very slightly worse (appeals to humanity's baser instincts, a waste of the artist's time when he could have spent it doing something more edifying, promoting gooning rather than self-improvement etc.). I'm not saying that art which depicts something beautiful or moving makes human culture significantly better; I'm saying that creepy fetish art will never make human culture even a little bit better and have a good chance of making it slightly worse.
calling New Jersey trash or an “armpit” has been common for decades
100% confident that if Trump referred to Detroit or Baltimore or maybe even Louisiana as "trash" or similar this would be cited as a white supremacist dog whistle, for unsurprising reasons. Who, whom all the way down.
My point is not that having lived experience will lead you to have a more accurate picture of how the world works. I'm saying that if you have lived experience of X, if you're writing a book about X, then all things being equal it will probably sound more convincing than a book about X written by someone who has never experienced X firsthand.
Could a novel written by an underprivileged black youth about his experiences growing up in the hood contribute to a progressive's erroneous impression that unprovoked police shootings of unarmed black men are widespread? Sure. But all things being equal, I would expect such a novel to be a lot more affecting and convincing than a novel on the same topic written by a creative writing MFA from a wealthy family who's never even set foot in the hood.
Sure, but even having broadly comparable lived experience might be more beneficial to the creative process than just pure research. The experience of fighting a battle in Baghdad in 2003 is unlike the experience of fighting a battle in the Somme in 1916, but I would expect that the two experiences have far more in common with each other than they have with the experience of sitting in a warm cottage with a pot of tea reading a book about the battle of the Somme.
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