森

I disagree with some of his stance on universality vs particularity, but overall this is a well thought out analysis of urban memoirs, and includes some amazing lines.

Mistaking the task of self-inquiry for the task of describing the wider world is endemic to contemporary writing. Take the ludicrously popular essay topic, that guy who likes David Foster Wallace too much. I’m not going to link but fifteen seconds of Googling will reveal a dozen such pieces. They have emerged from the least self-aware corners of the internet with a numbing regularity. As my friend Roxanne Palmer said, “Half-baked essays about annoying men recommending DFW to you are now as much a cliche as annoying men recommending DFW to you.”

It should go without saying, but these essays speak to an incredibly small slice of the human population. They are written by, about, and for bobo types who grew up middle class and above, went to private liberal arts colleges, left immediately for an urban enclave, and got jobs in creative or creative-adjacent industries. And even beyond those demographic features, we’re talking about people who have a certain set of affective and cultural commitments related to being perpetually blankly sarcastic online as a way to desperately seek the approval of their peers. You could fit the audience for these pieces comfortably into a football stadium. But, crucially, if you’re in media it’s an audience full of the kinds of people who could give you a job or invite you to a party.

My reaction to these essays is always the same: no one knows what the fuck you’re talking about. And the fact that we have not just a few of these essays but an entire genre of essays about tiny little classes of people known only to a tiny little class of people says a lot about how our media is broken. That’s because these essays are always written based on an assumption of universality — the aren’t-DFW-guys-so-annoying genre always comes packaged with claims of “everybody knows that guy!” when in fact nobody knows that guy. Walk out into the street and pick out a hundred random Americans and I would be shocked if more than one or two had the slightest idea who he was. And the number of people who could therefore identify a particular slice of the fans of this obscure, experimental, not-at-all-populist novelist…. I suspect that the Venn diagram of people who write these essays and the people who know what they are talking about is just a circle.

…

Indeed, the basic problem with this endless string of essays about increasingly-specific flavors of urbanite asshole is that they justify their existence through fake universality while fulfilling the social function of speaking only to the very few. The whole point of this type of essay is that only a certain kind of person can understand them. And that kind of person just happens to be the cool, savvy, ironic, fuckable city dweller that the writer wants to be and to spend time with. When you say that a bro is a guy like Jonathan Safran Foer when 99% of the world thinks a bro is a guy like Rob Gronkowski, you are transparently identifying yourself as a member of a particular social milieu. There are easier ways to announce your value to your potential sexual partners, thanks. And if you think Steve is an asshole just send a group text where you declare Steve an asshole. Spare the rest of us the trouble and stop flogging the corpse of a tormented author who hung himself 10 years ago. It’s fucking ghoulish. And I don’t even like Infinite Jest.

So very true.

Think of the cliche of the “first novel that’s about being a bohemian writer, drinking a lot, and feeling lost in your 20s.”  Every such novel does in fact capture an authentic piece of experience, and insofar as the author doesn’t over-generalize, it’s a perfectly good instance of the “memoir-type” writing that de Boer is endorsing here.  But if people don’t want to read more stuff like this, it’s not because of over-generalization, it’s because there’s a glut of it.

In other words, my reaction to this –

Don’t get mad at Girls for being about people who are mostly like Lena Dunham; work to create an industry where a black woman would have the same professional opportunity as Dunham.

– is that we are a long way away from that world now, and indeed we will always be a long way away from a world where our most visible creative people look like a representative sample of the population.  So we’ve got to put some value on creative people stretching beyond what they know, even at the risk of producing “utterly tone deaf, wince-inducing” results.

That said, I really think there is something bad about the current level of pressure to make everything “about” some broad societal phenomenon.  It definitely feels like there’s an implicit attitude in the air that good, important art has to be “about” big stuff.  Merely individual stories are devalued.  (More than they were in the past?  IDK, that’s my intuitive sense of things.)

OTAKU Credentials: I learned Japanese to read eroge, can mostly read simple Japanese without assistance (e.g. most manga) and can read college level stuff with some access to a dictionary. Know people who read 2ch pretty regularly and consume a large amount of eroge (think 50+ games and counting).

Also, IMO Key’s work is just really bad* relative to other things commonly mentioned in the same breath, so I have to do more psychologizing than usual to reach a satisfying explanation for why it’s so well-regarded.  That does make my own preferences a hidden premise of the argument, though, which is not ideal.

I didn’t know anything about White Album 2, and wow yeah its popularity does seem like a big strike against my hypothesis.

seems like it’s prob a normal book and weasels are a metaphor for something ? right ? like ? that’s what you’d think ? but no; no, look:

it’s literally about women and weasels. women and weasels throughout history. it’s a long, scholarly book about women interacting with cute furry rodent slinkies throughout history

technobabble, and military shouting.

I watch movies because I want to see impressive visuals, clever plots, acting, witty dialog, emotional moments. But what I get is this:

“Reverse the polarity of the tachyon streams by 17 degrees!”

“All units report in! Advance on my mark! Squad, move out!”

“If we can invert the radiation, maybe we can frogsnarble the waxsplitter!”

“Fire in the hole! Incoming rounds! Three marks at 2.10! Copy that! Roger!”

and on and on. I know plots need macguffins. I know sci-fi needs a smattering of technobabble for plausible deniability. I know action scenes sometimes involve soldiers with guns.

But modern movies go way beyond that, to the point that it’s a relief when characters just shut up for a second and spend some time making eye contact.

Do audiences actually enjoy garbled military/industrial babble shouting?

Marine: Broken Arrow, Broken Arrow! Marine: Drop that 1000-pounder on the red smoke! Now!

^^That is just background noise if you don’t speak the lingo.  If you do, it is a story of sacrifice and nobility told in less than five seconds.

Elsewhere are two exchanges taking place a few minutes apart, between a some pilots in the air and their ground control:

First: Air: Requesting permission to engage, over. Controller: Negative (pilotname), the ROE for that grid prohibit engaging enemies in close proximity to civilian dwellings at this time, out.

Second:  Air: I understand we are operating under restricted ROE? Over. Controller: Ah, negative on that restricted ROE, (pilotname).You are cleared to prosecute any other targets of opportunity in that grid square, over. Air: (Pilotname) copies.

That is an incredibly poignant story of despair, subtly told.

Incidentally, there’s something almost primally soothing to me about technobabble, at least when it is extended/pervasive enough to feel like professional chatter about real and complicated things, not just a way to solve any plot hole in a few lines of dialogue.  I guess it’s because it makes me think about how there’s so much complex physics/chemistry/engineering/etc. going around us all the time, and how there are always people out there somewhere thinking in depth about many little bits of it, which gives me a relaxing sense of perspective.

I’ve trained this open-source neural network framework on a variety of datasets, including recipes, Pokemon, knock-knock jokes, and pick up lines. 

Here’s the latest: a list of 365 different spells you can cast in Dungeons and Dragons. 

It’s a really small dataset, actually - so small that in almost no time at all, it learned to reproduce the original input data verbatim, in order. But by setting the “temperature” flag to a really high value (i.e. it has a higher chance of NOT going with its best guess for the next character in the phrase), I can at least induce spelling mistakes. Then the neural network has to try to recover from these, with often entertaining results.

I give you: D&D magic spells, designed by neural network

I think it’s really reasonable to look into what kinds of training make for a better environment for children, and to subsidize those and say that government subsidies for daycare only go to daycare that meets those standards. I don’t approve of a law, though, for a couple reasons:

1) Laws should always be conceived of as ‘things we are willing to put people in prison for’ or at least ‘things we are willing to have the police called on people over’. I do not think that running a childcare operation without having obtained certification is something we should be willing to do that over. Regulatory penalties are also an option, and a better option, but you could still absolutely end up bankrupting poor grandmothers who watched her own and the neighbors’ kids without proper licensing. 

Obviously running a childcare that is not healthy or safe for the kids is something we should be willing to punish, and evading safety inspections etc. etc, but I want the focus to be on a good safe environment and not on having successfully navigated the application for certification of a good safe environment.