Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to DexterX,
Addiction is the health problem.
It can be. My business partner is a total computer games addict (the highest number of PlayStation trophies in the country, by quite a large margin), but it doesn't stop him being a functional, happy, well adjusted member of society. But other people, myself included, have suffered from it quite badly, in fact I'd say computer games have been my most serious addiction, have harmed my life more than anything else I've ever been "on", and I'm extremely wary of them now, quite careful to avoid the ones that tout themselves as addictive, because it is quite literally true.
There are alcoholics who suffer very little harm from it other than gradual health problems. If you took alcohol away from them, they might go to pieces.
Edit: The other very dangerous addiction worth mentioning is gambling. Most people who gamble have it under control and take joy out of it. But a proportion of people destroy their entire lives with it, and really quickly too. Those ones need help.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Yes, that's the 10% of pure truth in what he was saying. That 90% rubbish is the price of having the other 10%. Just as 90% disproof of hypotheses is a vital part of science for the 10% (or more likely 1%) that don't get disproved. That's why I don't feel like this is a bad time for music - there's more than there has ever been before, which means there's more good stuff than ever before. The cost is that there's more crap than ever before.
It's a deeply apt metaphor, I think - both science and music could be seen to be evolving towards their form - science seeks empirical truth, music seeks beauty and meaning. But truth is an asymptote - once you know the truth, there's no more to be found. However, you will probably never know it all, because it becomes progressively harder and harder to approach, as the easier truths are hoovered up. So physicists need 20 mile wide particle smashers costing hundreds of billions nowadays, just to find out things no-one else can even understand about things they didn't even know existed. Gone are the days that a clever patent clerk can work it out in his spare time, and everyone can go "wow, so the universe is actually curved?", and have even the vaguest idea what that might mean. Similarly, one could say that there's only so many ways music can be made, so many kinds of beauty that can be appreciated. After the most attractive ones are discovered, what does that leave but smaller and smaller tweaks? And we reminisce, much as I do that programming wasn't such a bloody chore when the biggest program that could fit on my computer was 3000 bytes long. I tend to forget that I can quickly make a computer do things I couldn't even dream of 30 years ago. But whatever it is that I do is seldom going to seem amazing without a huge effort now.
I have the same take on literature as you, without having gone through the hard yards of being forced by an institution to read a lot of things I had no time whatsoever for. But I don't think this makes me smarter than you - quite the opposite, you come by your refined tastes from your extensive reading. I'm missing out. My only excuse is that I enjoy other things.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to Sacha,
For some, others having fun seems to be a 'problem'.
I see this as one of our society's biggest problems, actually. It warps everything. I don't want to live in a schadenfreude society (with the natural corollary freudenschade that goes with it). I want a freudenfreude/schadenschade society. Which could also be called a loving society, or an empathic one, at the very least. And again, it starts with ourselves. If we take joy in other people's joys, and feel sad at their sorrows, that's an infectious attitude. Of course discretion is needed, there are evil joys and foolish sorrows. THAT is where the harm principle comes in.
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Hard News: What the kids do, in reply to nzlemming,
I'm curious why binge-drinking seems to have become a problem world-wide, and I wonder how much of it traces back to marketing the products at the young.
and
The accompanying analysis suggested this was to do with the breakdown in traditional French family patterns.
I think so. It seems to me we model way more than we realize from our parents. Even when we rebel from them, we very often are only doing it to confront perceived hypocrisy, how Dad's bitter on drugs but has no shame about getting paralytic on booze in front of you. We see he does it because, at least for a little while, when he's drunk he seems happy, and having fun.
(2) want to feel less inhibited in social situations
...
(2) will be grown out of eventually too,
I'm not so sure. It can become a crutch too. There are plenty of people who can't socially relax without alcohol. And, like misery, boozing loves company. The social pressure was extreme when I was a lad, I can recall many an occasion where not getting hammered was considered not an option.
After work binging was much the same - the more straight laced and uptight a guy was, the more determined everyone was to see what he might be like when he was fucked up, what kind of moves would he bust out on the dance floor, what hilariously indiscreet things he might say about colleagues, whether women who were super professional at work became crazy dancers after a few drinks. People who resisted or refused were often seen as maybe having something to hide, or just didn't like the group. A heck of a lot of social networking was done in those circumstances.
I'm not even sure it's that bad. Of course there are bad times to be had on alcohol too, but that was just a risk you took for the good times. I distinctly remember one popular and gregarious programmer telling me in all seriousness that he had been completely unable to relate to anyone at work until he had discovered alcohol and found that people actually liked him when he was a bit drunk. His self-confidence grew exponentially.
In some ways it's sad, but I do very much feel that there's a flip side that's often missed in harm minimization discussions - life isn't all about harm. It's also about the fun too, and taking that away to reduce harm is actually removing a good. This is taking an old-skool Utilitarian line here. Yes, some kids do get fucked up on Kronic, but also a lot of kids have had good fun on it. Really, really good fun. You can't even begin to understand drug culture if you see it as a mental illness that people enjoy the fun that drugs bring. It shouldn't be unsayable that kids having a good time on booze is "a good time". Certainly I have extremely fond memories of numerous occasions on mind altering substances. There's also some shocking horrors, and that's where the harm part comes in, it should be easy for people to get help, and they should be aware of when it's not fun any more, and a problem for them.
Seriously, I think one of the biggest factors in bad drug habits in kids is bad drug habits in their parents. So the solution starts with the parents. If they can be seen having a good time, but also being moderate, and if they involve their kids rather than pushing them away from such times, they can teach them the good habits. If parents are actually having a good time without any drugs, I think that has a very strong influence on childish perceptions. Some uptight abstainer isn't a good role model either - but abstainers who enthusiastically throw themselves into partying are very inspiring. Too many adults have just forgotten how to have a good time, and of course kids see the shocking hypocrisy when they suddenly lighten up after slugging back a few beers.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
Just picturing you tapping your foot. Do you bob your head too?
Of course, level of body involvement totally dictated by how much I'm into it. From barely noticeable movement to wild gyration.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And, sadly. it's funny because it's true. Crap.
Actually, it's also 90% crap, by definition. If it wasn't, the law would be false. But the residual 10% is beautifully insightful. If we define good as the top 10% then of course 90% isn't good. However, when saying something is 90% crap, it isn't always just in comparison to the other things that are in the same category. You could say that 90% of Hollywood movies are crap compared to indie film. Then you're not making a mostly redundant comment, but rather you're saying that indie is better than Hollywood. But these contextualizations are very often left out.
Furthermore, whilst the percentage of crap might be constant (or increasing IMHO), the percentage of crap that we allow ourselves to be subjected to can change. Hence my view that I have listened to a lot more crap recently, than as a youth. When there was only one decent music video show on for an hour every week, they mostly played only the good stuff. Now, I often have it on for hours at a time, and the unoriginal shite that plays is amazing. But I just tune out for most of that, and only when something good comes on do I find my feet tapping again.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Rich Lock,
Lousy biology, limiting the boundaries of popular music again
Ya, beat-matching software has made me realize what a difficult task it is to define the beat of music, and yet we do it unconsciously with ease. It's like hearing words in speech, something computers still struggle with. I guess we forget just how much music we've heard. Also, we probably don't realize quite how specifically designed for the human ear that music is.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Russell Brown,
t's quite odd. On one hand, dubstep really has opened up new vistas. On the other, it's about 90% shit.
I think that about most art generally, to be honest. Of course the really good ones are in a minority, that's almost by definition. I don't like most music that's around, but there's more music around that I do like than ever before. That has changed - I used to like more music from the mainstream, as a proportion of the mainstream. But the mainstream was so narrow, and the people controlling it so selective, that what we got to hear was usually good stuff. Now the mainstream is much wider, and the control so much weaker, that it just doesn't work that way. I can find DJs who pick stuff I like, but that's not done by picking amongst the small array of broadcast stations in NZ, it's by picking carefully from the enormous array of internet stations. And it involves far more conscious effort on my part to decide upon my choices.
There's not necessarily anything wrong with working with something from the 1950s
Hell no. Or older. One of my favourite kinds of music is ragas, and part of my embarrassment about my musical collection in the 80s was the very large European classical content, which was seen by my peers as ridiculously uncool. My dad was a fan, had hundreds of tapes he'd made from radio. I distinctly remember telling him I thought his music was dull and shit once, and he laughed and said, yeah, well there's a lot of shit classics, but tell me this isn't good, and played me excerpts from his favourites, all of which I had to admit were really good stuff. He laughed and said, yes well it's not surprising you like it, you had massive exposure as a small child, any time Mum wasn't playing her pop stuff.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to BenWilson,
the contextualized setting of what made Elvis and the Beatles super stars is an unlikely thing to re-occur
Again I should be more specific - I mean "in our lifetimes". If humanity takes to the stars, I can imagine plenty of scenarios where the tyranny of many light years distance between human groups could easily create scenarios where amazing movements of popular taste could be isolated and yet really well developed, and when they hit anywhere could take them by storm. Or the whole world could go through a massively regressive phase in which dissemination of music is hampered on purpose, which could easily mean the removal of this would be by definition revolutionary. But as things stand and are trending, anyone who has the least passion for music can pretty much get everything they want that makes it's way to anywhere that the internet reaches. So musical revolution will never seem so ... revolutionary.
But then again, I have to say, I'm limited by my musical imagination, into feeling that we've nearly covered every kind of music that can be made. In a purely mathematical sense, this is impossible. I could hear something tomorrow that is new in every sense, totally underivative in every way. But it seems likely that I won't even recognize it as music.
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Hard News: Rough times in the trade, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Once again - dubstep. it's transformed and penetrated the way popular music is made, both inside and outside it's own narrow genre.
Yeah, I'm not really in disagreement, and certainly when I hear pure dubsteb against even quite closely related electronica, it does have a very different sound.
Will we ever see another Elvis or Beatles? I think we might. Actually, I think we will.
Yes, I should be careful what I'm saying there. There's very little doubt that artists will (and have) emerged that appeal to more people, draw bigger crowds, etc. But the contextualized setting of what made Elvis and the Beatles super stars is an unlikely thing to re-occur, where a technology driven explosion in the means of distribution of music is coupled with the previous period in which people just didn't have access to much of a range unless they themselves made great efforts, that leads to the small mainstream being swept aside by a new and much larger mainstream, and the stark contrast in musical styles that produces this lends to a sense that something about that time was incredibly creative and original by comparison to now.
Now everyone, and I mean everyone has a large collection of music and a wide appreciation of it by contrast to then. They seek out the corners of the medium, and if a new musical creation emerges, there were already millions of fans.
But that feeling of unusually innovative times earlier is unfair. It's like saying Columbus was unusually explorative. Yes he was, but so are many people today - however America has been discovered now, so what people do discover now tends to seem dwarfed by that.
Yeech - hobby horse
Ooops, thanks. Makes sense, really.
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