Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
23d ago
Started playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker around 11 last night and ended up staying up till around 2. Very absorbing, the methodical gameplay really appeals to me, and the zero-g six degrees of freedom movement with conserved momentum is nauseating (in a good way). My first death really took me by surprise.
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.
If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that.
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.
Folamh3
23d 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
23d 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
23d 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
24d 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
24d ago
Anyone starting to feel like there's nothing really that dystopic about A Clockwork Orange?
Folamh3
24d 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
25d 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
25d 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
25d 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
25d 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
25d 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.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic
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