thanks for linking “River Man”, I really liked it! The apparent lack of any interesting midi string parts is strange, I feel like someone should’ve done something by now. My hunch is that people are coming at it with the “how can I make these midi strings sound acceptably realistic” frame instead of a more “oh, I wonder what I can do with these robot strings” frame.
bjorkiscool113
Karma: 12
I’d tried to include something coherent about the causation in my first reply, couldn’t quite figure it out. :P Hold on, I can tell already the structure’s gonna be pretty rough...
It’s sorta hard to imagine classical violin having songs only as difficult as the fiddle repertoire, because in some sense the difficulty is the whole point. The challenge is never to make something sound more beautiful, it’s to include {insert a difficult to explain violin technique, +/- equivalent to tying your hand around your back} even if it sounds slightly worse as a result. (That’s not true, violinists spend a lot of time trying to make things sound more beautiful, and trying to make groups sound even moderately synchronized, but it points at something. (Is this what “directionally correct” means?))
I mean, there are lots of ways in which the violin is a batshit crazy instrument, but while fiddle music embraces the ensuing idiosyncrasies (pitch should slide around a lot, tone should usually be muddy instead of clean, you’re allowed to change the key-center of your tune to better make use of the (usually constant-pitched) open strings as a drone voice, when ur bowing quickly it’s alright if the resulting rhythm is a little wonky, etc.), classical violin tends to try to eliminate these idiosyncrasies. When violinists chat, they don’t talk about melodies or the emotional impact of the music or really anything that could be understood by non-violinists, they talk about just indescribably minute details. “The angle of the last joint of your right-hand pinky seemed a bit flat, there. I mean… you know Bach was Baroque-era, right??” (I could be mixing up the jargon here; it’s been a long time.) Maybe this is evidence in favor of “violin calls to people who are already neurotic”? hm.
Misleading headline; it was a survey of 100 “child prodigies” the study author could find, and one former prodigy who teaches violin claimed the “1 in 10″ stat. Eh, might point to something. I know a violinist who attempted suicide, and that was for pre-existing reasons. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I lean towards “✨something ✨about violin attracts neurotic people, which led to the repertoire and shibbolethry becoming absurdly difficult and abstruse, respectively”, but the causality probably goes the opposite way too, to some degree.
I did! 10⁄10 experience so far, not going back (besides, i couldn’t if i wanted to!)
Nah, in my experience fiddle players are a lot less neurotic.
Oh wait dang it’s me, I’m ~the park friend!
I was born in 2006. The first phone I acquired was a flip phone; I bought in late 2023 because a friend wanted my number and I was running out of plausible excuses. I know what the blogosphere is but don’t care too much about it. I feel like I could convince the raspberry pi in the kitchen to become a server, but I feel like that would take more googling than I’d like and why would I want a webcomic anyways? I can make a real comic and give it to people. I saw some open flames around Christmas-time and so did my friends. Before that, November; I backpacked along the highway for a while and had to cook my food over a burner thing I got from amazon.com. My family used to go camping and backpacking a lot, but it is now weak and dissolved and we can scarcely coordinate family movie night. I don’t really use Spotify, Instagram, Snapchat, Linkedin, Twitter, Tumblr, &c. I don’t drive, I mostly walk, but my friends who drive all drive old cars without touch screens. My brother and I play Minecraft 1.21.2 on a CRT screen from the 90′s enclosed in an arcade meant to look like the farm from Stardew valley. I spend too much time on my laptop; I get outside and see my friends significantly less than I’d like to. This all feels pretty normal to me??? Well, not normal, but not so far from normal that it’s the most significant thing about me. Maybe the 4th most significant thing about me for people who don’t know me well? Possibly 5th if there is a significant thing about me that I can’t notice but no one mentions because it would be rude.
The flip phone is a phone, an mp3 player, a camera, a GPS, etc. It’s ugly and cheap and doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to. I can’t imagine evangelizing about it to anyone; its main virtue is that it’s cheap and I can lose it on a bus without getting too upset. Some people assign flip-phones magical this-will-fix-my-media-consumption-issues properties, and maybe if they believe this it becomes true, but also like maybe you own a laptop. ???
Everyone says they should get a flip phone and thus fix their consumption habits; not that many people really do, and Cool people definitely don’t because their consumption habits weren’t an issue in the first place.
You’re doing an okay job at pointing to the Problem, in my view, but I feel like the reaction movement you’re describing only exists as an aesthetic pastime for wealthy people (I don’t know if that’s actually true tho). I understand the sacred ideal of each Object having a Purpose, but it would be really expensive and impractical. I try to make Beautiful Objects for my friends, musical instruments and embroidered towels and family-heirloom-books-of-poetry and physical incarnations of text-message-inside-jokes, but the flip phone doesn’t need to be a Beautiful Object. It’s a very practical thing, like a toilet cleaning brush. It’s useful for coordinating things with my friends, and sometimes calling them, but my friendships overwhelmingly take place in the world.
(as a person who is new here, I’m a bit confused! The helpful grey box tells me to “Aim to explain, not persuade”, but then I come across these vague beautiful mushy rhetorical-sounding things like your post :p)
Recent events have updated me towards thinking that a decent fraction of Americans (10-40%?) will rationalize and go along with ~anything the current admin does
I feel like unfortunately I am maybe one of these people, but it sort of depends on the definition of “going along with”. I can’t imagine myself ever feeling generally good about any of the recent administrations, but I also can’t imagine myself trying to do much of anything about any of the things the administrations do, except for direct impacts on people I’m really close to. I’d guess that for that definition, the proportion may be significantly above 40%, like 80%-90%, but I’ve got no particular reason for those numbers.
i’m not certain you’ve yet earned the right to conclude that trying to do it makes you worse! :P Considering the set of all things that might someday go well, I don’t think all such things will necessarily go well in the beginning, nor do i think they’ll necessarily go well after a Significant Deliberate Attempt to Make Them Go Well. (I could ofc be totally wrong here—for instance maybe you’ve had many experiences that lead you to believe ‘trying do this makes you worse’, but you focused on the meetup in your post for narrative purposes.)
I’ve only attended one philosophy meetup, but most people seemed to be attending recreationally, not with the goal of believing more true things. The philosophy department chair was in attendance, and he seemed mildly horrified throughout.
I feel like I have some understanding of the ways in which people who are not rat-or-rat-adjacent care about believing true things and doing good things, but mostly that comes from simply being friends with them. For instance, I’ve not heard a certain friend of mine express many beliefs probabilistically or make many explicit verbal allowances for the likelihood of their being wrong, and I wouldn’t even claim “generally believing true things” is something they care about without at least asking them first, but: they’re very good at challenging certain subsets of their beliefs about themselves. They keep their actions consistent with their beliefs about the personal safety of the people around them, they treat safety as a sacred value even if it’s very inconvenient—which no one does well, in my experience. To a degree that I’m not really capable of describing, they’re better at doing good things in challenging situations than I am. And I’m grateful to know them for many reasons that wouldn’t fall under the umbrella of “believing true things and doing good things”! But I don’t think they’ve ever attended a philosophy meetup, and if they have, I think they probably treated it as something mostly recreational.
Who are you quoting/responding to?