Zompist Bboard Again

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2026 6:04 am

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2026 5:48 am He famously thought he would move to Seattle, which he believed to be a liberal mecca. A major problem is that he no longer has a place he considers a liberal mecca.

Give the man some credit, he wanted to be an activist, not live in "mecca." You don't become an activist in a place if that place is perfect.

If malloc wants advice on where to go he can ask. There are pros and cons all over. But "everywhere is equally miserable" is neither true, nor is it good advice.

An uncharitable interpretation is that he thought a place with a liberal culture would be full of activists, and he'd fit in.

A charitable interpretation is that he thought Missouri is incorrigible and he wanted to move to a place closer to the center of revolution. It's like running away from your feudal lord and making your way to Paris during the French Revolution.

I'm leaning towards the second one because it fits better with the things he said.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat Sep 26, 2026 6:22 amA charitable interpretation is that he thought Missouri is incorrigible and he wanted to move to a place closer to the center of revolution. It's like running away from your feudal lord and making your way to Paris during the French Revolution.

Quite. The political culture has always been deeply reactionary, from the Missouri compromise that enshrined slavery here, to border ruffians attempting to spread slavery to Kansas, to the Veiled Prophet. There simply isn't any appetite for socialist or even liberal politics around here.

I just filled out some forms on paper with a pen. Does it show?

https://youtu.be/vlsarwh3njU?si=Z_TNrSlZ7wi546Hn

Klingon pIqaD is Horrible!!

tlacamazatl wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 9:07 am https://youtu.be/vlsarwh3njU?si=Z_TNrSlZ7wi546Hn

Klingon pIqaD is Horrible!!

Even without watching the video I heartily agree! A clear example of a script designed for visual look, not functionality.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 9:36 am Even without watching the video I heartily agree! A clear example of a script designed for visual look, not functionality.

That's the crux of the case, but I go in-depth making the argument that such a script simply doesn't make sense based on the structure of the language.

tlacamazatl wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 10:01 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 9:36 am Even without watching the video I heartily agree! A clear example of a script designed for visual look, not functionality.

That's the crux of the case, but I go in-depth making the argument that such a script simply doesn't make sense based on the structure of the language.

What do you mean by ‘such a script’, if not its look? Structurally it’s just a bog-standard alphabet, which would seem to suit Klingon fine…

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 10:07 am ...which would seem to suit Klingon fine…

yeah, not exactly, but you should totally join my channel to see why.

Music question: do people still use the "end a song by fading out the sound"-method these days? I've kind of got the impression that the time when people did that a lot were the last decades of the 20th century, that is, probably the first decades after the technology to do that became seriously usable. But I don't really know much about today's music.

I don't think they do anymore; and it hasn't been used for a while (not since the 1990s, I think?) Apparently we're not alone in noticing this:
https://slate.com/culture/2014/09/the-f ... olume.html

Personally, I think the fade out was so overused as to be a little ridiculous.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2026 5:15 am I don't think they do anymore; and it hasn't been used for a while (not since the 1990s, I think?) Apparently we're not alone in noticing this:
https://slate.com/culture/2014/09/the-f ... olume.html

Personally, I think the fade out was so overused as to be a little ridiculous.

Thank you! Agreed.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2026 5:15 am Personally, I think the fade out was so overused as to be a little ridiculous.

Often it was little more than an admission of bad craftpersonship - "we can't be bothered to work out how to finish this thing".

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2026 5:07 am Music question: do people still use the "end a song by fading out the sound"-method these days? I've kind of got the impression that the time when people did that a lot were the last decades of the 20th century, that is, probably the first decades after the technology to do that became seriously usable. But I don't really know much about today's music.

For our album in progress we have some fade-outs planned. I also want to say at least Gojira and Auralnauts have done that this century.

Man in Space wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2026 6:00 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2026 5:07 am Music question: do people still use the "end a song by fading out the sound"-method these days? I've kind of got the impression that the time when people did that a lot were the last decades of the 20th century, that is, probably the first decades after the technology to do that became seriously usable. But I don't really know much about today's music.

For our album in progress we have some fade-outs planned. I also want to say at least Gojira and Auralnauts have done that this century.

Thank you for telling me.

I don't really know that much about art. I think in most arts, I would probably be able to tell if someone is really bad at the art in question, but I couldn't tell a good and talented amateur from one of the world's best.

Now, that makes me wonder: is there really that much of a difference there? How much of a role do skill and talent play when it comes to rising to fame in the arts, and how important are willingness and ability to self-promote, being seen as promotable by the right people, stubbornness, confidence, plain luck, illegitimate methods, and similar factors?

All in all, are the most celebrated singers in the world really noticeably better than many people who are among the more respected members of local hobbyist choirs in the places where they live?

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2026 4:27 pm I don't really know that much about art. I think in most arts, I would probably be able to tell if someone is really bad at the art in question, but I couldn't tell a good and talented amateur from one of the world's best.

Now, that makes me wonder: is there really that much of a difference there? How much of a role do skill and talent play when it comes to rising to fame in the arts, and how important are willingness and ability to self-promote, being seen as promotable by the right people, stubbornness, confidence, plain luck, illegitimate methods, and similar factors?

All in all, are the most celebrated singers in the world really noticeably better than many people who are among the more respected members of local hobbyist choirs in the places where they live?

I think this is a great question, and a big, multi-faceted one.

A quick reflection is that people tend to get better at any activity the more they do it, and thus there is a loop which reinforces the skills and talents of those who are initially given opportunities: they learn more from those opportunities, and their technical ‘lead’ over those who didn’t get that in the first place grows.

Another reflection is the difficulty of comparing like-for-like, and the subjectivity of ‘goodness’.

Another: quality of an artist’s output is far from static over their career or lifetime.

A final reflection for now: in today’s cultural climate, I would estimate that ability/willingness to promote oneself is genuinely around half the battle for singers, specifically (which is all I can really talk about from experience). That doesn’t automatically mean that those who don’t relentlessly promote themselves are all undiscovered geniuses; generally I’d say there’s a rough mapping between singers who are really, really good at singing and singers who choose to concentrate a significant effort into self-promotion. But there are, still, plenty of singers who only occupy either of the poles of the Venn diagram.

If you are talking about potential, then I’d say that there is a lot of that about that never got nourished. But the lead taken over these people by those who put intense pressure on themselves towards ‒ and amass resources towards ‒ success will only tend to grow.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2026 4:27 pm I don't really know that much about art. I think in most arts, I would probably be able to tell if someone is really bad at the art in question, but I couldn't tell a good and talented amateur from one of the world's best.

Now, that makes me wonder: is there really that much of a difference there? How much of a role do skill and talent play when it comes to rising to fame in the arts, and how important are willingness and ability to self-promote, being seen as promotable by the right people, stubbornness, confidence, plain luck, illegitimate methods, and similar factors?

As you can imagine, this is a can of worms.

Art is a craft or skill; it takes time and energy to master, but almost anyone can do it if they put in that time. Think about music, say, 400 year ago: a bourgeois family would provide its own music, on various instruments. You don't need isolated geniuses to make music, but you do need practice. Similarly, if you look at older sources, you often find that quite a few people were pretty good at cartooning or sketching. If you wanted to record your impressions or just amuse your family, that was what you did before photography.

(For examples, the Wikipedia article on Jane Austen includes several drawings by her sister Cassandra. By no means expert, but most people today are convinced that they "can't draw". That's because they stopped trying, as kids.)

Promotion is kind of the secret sauce of artistic celebrity and always has been. Undoubtedly a lot of crappy art has been promoted; but (say) the crappy but well-promoted plays of 1610 are not remembered, Shakespeare's are.

Earlier eras tended to see art as a single scale which everyone acknowledged. Even Orwell, who had no love for the elite, ends up talking about "good bad art" for things which the masses enjoyed but the elite scorned. Genre novels, or comic strips, or fantic, are all genres that require skill, and it's harder for critics to get away with an attitude that only literary novels, realistic paintings, and opera are Art.

So I guess my major point is, yes, there is skill in art, and the process is important— someone with "an idea for a novel" isn't a novelist if they haven't written it. But it's not a mysterious art forbidden to mere mortals, either.

Thank you very much, sasasha and zompist!

tlacamazatl wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 9:07 amhttps://youtu.be/vlsarwh3njU?si=Z_TNrSlZ7wi546Hn

Klingon pIqaD is Horrible!!

Sorry if this sounds hostile, but why are you posting videos that aren't even watchable for the general public?

malloc wrote: ↑Wed Sep 30, 2026 11:08 pm

tlacamazatl wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 9:07 amhttps://youtu.be/vlsarwh3njU?si=Z_TNrSlZ7wi546Hn

Klingon pIqaD is Horrible!!

Sorry if this sounds hostile, but why are you posting videos that aren't even watchable for the general public?

Agreed. Why should I subscribe to your channel just to view a video (especially since I hate most vlogs with the exception of things where the visual aspects actually add something, e.g. vlogs about retrocomputing where vintage computers are actually shown)?