intrikate
My Steam account is old enough to drink. I've had it for some two-thirds of my life, not even adult life but life entirely. All of my games are already there. It's like if a friend invited you to come play video games in 1989 but he doesn't have the cool NES games you want to play, they're all back at my place. What, we're gonna play Clu Clu Land all day? Give me a break.
Even if I was to switch to Epic, outside of the supposed altruism of "We take less of a cut from developers!" what is the benefit for me as a gamer, or as a consumer? The Epic Games Store has very few games I can't get elsewhere, even on console, and the experience compared to Steam is just lackluster. It just is. Valve has had a lot of time to iterate on it, and Steam was absolutely despised for the first several years of its life, but the experience of using the two platforms could not be more different. Beyond that, if I do switch, I still need to have Steam installed because all like seven million of my games are already on Steam, and they can't be moved.
They are often songs that are attached to important emotional events in my life, sure, but there are also songs that come out of nowhere and still give me goosebumps. Some things are just that moving!
If you've written 100 REST APIs, you're probably pretty familiar with them. But Brainfuck is completely alien and something you would have to work to understand. Maybe the distinction is in the effort required for understanding.
Regardless, I think meaning is something one has to self-impose. It does not exist naturally in the universe, so if you don't think it matters, it doesn't matter.
I think there's something deeper than that, too. Almost a feeling of betrayal? I cared in part because I thought everyone else cared, too, like we were working towards a common goal. Asking a question in search of shared understanding only to be passed the modern equivalent of a LMGTFY link hurts in a very particular way. I thought they cared about this, too, but they're only trying to get the bag. I get it, times are difficult right now, but it doesn't make it hurt less.
They had beautiful, carved wooden dressers and wardrobes from their parents that they, naturally, did not appreciate and take care of, so they turned into garbage and were thrown away when they became too dilapidated to move to another building. They were replaced with the standard fare particle-board-and-laminate Ikea-type trash that I definitely do not want. It's falling apart already and they've only had it a few years.
If they had maintained the furniture they were given by their parents, I would love to keep them around in my home and give them to my children when I pass, too. But I don't want cheap, mass-produced garbage from my parents simply because it belonged to my parents.
It's gradual, it's not all at once and I am still slightly taller and heavier-set than the average American woman, so I do have an advantage through having more mass, but anyone that's larger than the average American woman will also have that so it's not really an advantage, just a fact of having a larger body.
We didn't stop playing chess when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. We don't stop swimming because boats are faster. We don't stop running, even though we can't outrun a car.
Humans do these things because they are gratifying to do. It is satisfying to train for and then run a marathon. It's fun (and rewarding!) to challenge yourself to pull the image out of your mind and place it on a canvas, an invitation to the inside of mind.
I don't care if The Beatles are considered a better band; my bandmates and I simply like making music together. It's fun.
Would you expect an author to disregard all of the conventions we've discovered and codified through specified language because it's just "more natural" if they let it flow out of them? No, I don't think you would. You'd find it difficult to read and interact with, both as a reader and a fellow writer. Music is the same.
Music theory is just the natural language definitions of the sounds we hear. A composer is absolutely thinking in those terms and using them to construct the piece they hear in their head. It gives you a way to communicate, with words, the sounds you are hearing in your own head. It does not constrain music in any way.
Yeah, this has been the hardest pill to swallow, as a creative and person that enjoys art. They know it's all least-common-denominator bullshit and they like it anyway. A lot of people truly just don't care about the meaning or any message in the art, they just like explosions and pretty people.
And that's fine, I guess. There's nothing wrong with it. It just... makes me feel a little empty inside.
Audiophiles are the easiest marks on earth, man.
I disagree. You cannot take your Akai MPC out of the box and ask it to play music. You have to load samples, you have to arrange them and you have to instruct it to play. That seems like a far cry to me from "playing themselves." You still have to... write the music.
If you don't want to have to solve these problems, that's fine, but please don't parade around as if these are insurmountable, unsolvable problems.
Her point isn't that "fitness is white supremacy," and not even remotely close. Just that the social media and culture around wellness and fitness can give off white supremacist, fascist energy by presenting an extremely unobtainable and yet highly idealized state of being, where everyone is very thin and white and fits within the stereotypes of the gender assigned to them, which is not remotely how the world at large can be.
Actually, reading it again, I don't see the author calling out anyone in particular, just noting that the culture around a thing they otherwise enjoy makes them uncomfortable, and why.
If I ask my partner to turn the volume "up," I am asking them to literally move the volume knob "upwards" towards the maximum limit. The physical motion doesn't literally track with televisions and remotes, for example, but you're still moving (turning) the volume upwards towards maximum.
That's how it shakes out in my head? You're moving something upwards towards the maximum. More is bigger, bigger is up.
Oh boy, back to this crap again. If that's true, for you to be acting this defensively sure is sending some signal.