Archives: Tweets

@JustinHowe Since curry’s a bunch of things (how many spices?) I’ll go with 참기름 and 김 .

(Or maybe steamed pork collar and a dash of Kikkoman soy sauce?)

@meganarkenberg Awkward confession: it took me SO long to realize that I didn’t necessarily *need* to rationalize HOW a given “impossible” narrator was narrating the story. (Like, how is this ghost narrating her story 1st person to a living audience?) Oh, how *deeply* it concerned younger me!

@KateSherrod Ha, yeah. I’d probably be all over it if I wasn’t spending half my waking hours on childcare! @KateSherrod Oh, and I meant to say thanks for the recommendation but there was an Octonaut-related crisis I was in the middle of sorting out. ?

@marc_laidlaw I’d watch that movie, multiple times!

@KateSherrod @QanonAnonymous If ever I have more time, I’ll give it a try, though I am not sure how much mental bandwidth I’m willing to devote to it, stretched as thin as I am these days!

“That’s the snowman I wanna make, papa! It’ll be terrifying for mama!” (A collaborative effort: I drew what I was told.)

I knew that. I didn’t know it started on 4chan. (Though maybe I should have guessed that; seems like a lot of the dumbest conspiracy theories and horrible movements these days do.)

One of the more succinct explanations of the idiotic movement known as QAnon:

https://t.co/OHwGsQyhnf

… explained by Canadian researcher @_MAArgentino. … and yeah, it’s as moronic as you guessed:
“Fundamentally, QAnon is a conspiracy theory that posits that Satanic cabal of pedophile global elites is responsible for all the evil in the world…” (And is trying to bring down Donald Trump, whom Qheads see as our Luke Skywalker.)

I mean, he kind of looks like he went to the same spa as Evil Cooper, to me. twitter.com/bryanbehar/sta…

@mcjulie … or even, maybe, living under generalized oppression could kind of erode the “switch” so you end up with people walking around with their sadism coping mechanism locked in the “on” position. How that manifests externally would vary between individuals and societies, of course. @mcjulie But fundamentally, this would be more of a systematic hack of a (relatively) universal feature in human minds. Marlantes’ example: parents bragging about how their kids don’t watch violent media or have gun toys—but in the backyard, kids are burning ants with a magnifying glass.

@mcjulie I mean, what I’m suggesting is more that this is an adaptive, wired-in capacity in everyone, but is primarily adaptive because it’s not switched on all the time in most people. (Loosely speaking, we tend to consider a person mentally ill or “toxic” when it is.) @mcjulie Which, since it’s a coping mechanism for stressful, under-attack conditions, suggests there exist social conditions where it’d be switched on all the time. Say, growing up in one or another form of privation: the economically dead steel town, the evangelical community..

@mcjulie (Marlantes talks about how many pilots describe a sense of euphoria during bombing raids, for example. People who don’t normally feel this way, I mean… and who struggle to reintegrate and cope afterward. But in the moment? They find pleasure in it, reportedly.) @mcjulie To be clear, he describes our capacity for sadistic pleasure as an obviously dangerous thing people need to admit, be conscious of, and learn to control or rein in. He just notes that for soldiers in a war zone, it seems to serve a coping purpose. (The evolution stuff is mine.)

@mcjulie Y’know, I tend to suspect that Karl Marlantes is right with his explanation. Well, he doesn’t *quite* make the argument directly, but he does strongly imply it, in WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR, that sadism is an adaptive psychological coping tool. (Which can go wrong, obviously.) @mcjulie Like, precivilization humans in competing bands, during some major geological or climatic crisis, in a world with multiple human species? They had to do pretty horrific things to survive, and needed a tool for coping.

@mcjulie Which, I mean, is probably a very effective way of producing a revenue stream and a captive audience, so it’s ALL WORTH IT, right? (Sigh. Though honestly I suspect a sadistic kink is actually a common driver in all this, deep down—the thrill of keeping folks captive & compliant.)

@futureconsf I’m honored, thank YOU! 🙂

@mythopoetica @JustinHowe @GigaNotoSaurus_ I really liked it! Thanks for mentioning it!

@mythopoetica @JustinHowe @GigaNotoSaurus_ *Goes off in search of Long Tango story (I’m so behind).* Oooh, ooh, here it is:

giganotosaurus.org/2020/06/01/a-l…

@mcjulie I know that feeling exactly, and was like, “So if you don’t happen to like me?” and then, you know, flames of hell. Terrifying sort of thing to cram into a child’s mind.

@mythopoetica @JustinHowe Good to hear, it’s in my list of books to get to sooner than later. (But I mean, it’ll probably still be a while.)

Should be a great weekend with some great people from all over the world, focused on global SF! See you there! twitter.com/futureconsf/st…

@JustinHowe Would you consider the mind a “body part”? 😉

@Toxagen Yeah, can’t help feeling like that, a bit. I mean, I’ll be teaching online and not going out again. But man, I hope the apartment building will at least start requiring people to wear a mask in common indoor spaces like elevators. @Toxagen (Because, frankly, I’m burning out on stepping out of elevators into hot hallways and waiting for the next empty one, just because some middle aged man feels HE’S safe and doesn’t care about anyone else. I’m going to start telling people off soon, which won’t help, but I’m…)

The arrival of a new Octonauts movie on Netflix? Major household event, as it turns out.

Oh, and I’m currently reading @Annaleen’s SCATTER, ADAPT, AND REMEMBER (2013). The chapter on pandemics was… an interesting read, from the POV of someone living in 2020. (Not a criticism of the book, which I’m enjoying!)

(And yes, this has been on my mind a lot lately. I have an in-law we’re worried about who’s been doing home worship with church friends… but at one another’s homes. It sucks saying, “No, you can’t come visit,” because who knows if one of them is also attending a church too?)

And, I will say, I’ve been struggling with how to respond to how almost most of my apartment building’s residents have decided, “Hey, I’m done with masks! Let’s cram into elevators and breath one anothers’ air!” My patience is failing me.

But churches have been a major culprit. So I wonder whether, in a couple of weeks when the really horrible numbers start dropping, we’ll start seeing people talking about “church addiction.” Addiction seems to be the default critical term for any antisocial behavior here (except binge drinking, ironically).

So, we’re back to “COVID-19 is spreading rampantly” now here in Korea. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the US numbers: just 279 confirmed cases in the past 24 hours (for a country with a population of ~51 million). Number of clusters linked to churches. Not all cases have been linked to churches, mind. One big (IIRC local) group meeting in a coffee shop with no masks that led to a cluster outbreak. (Sigh, people really don’t want to stay home and group meet over Zoom.)

But those are side effects. The primary benefit is that I’m musically more literate than I would have been without musical education, and can approach and follow all kinds of music I would have struggled much harder to understand without that basic grounding.

(That’s not to say there aren’t issues with how music education is implemented in schools. Serious issues. But… that’s a much bigger cake that won’t fit on this particular plate I have handy today.) Finally: as a writer/language teacher, I often use all kinds of things I picked up learning music. Structure & structural analysis. Theme/variation invention. Patient revision resembles focused practicing. Improvisation. In collaborative writing, “blending voices” & polyphony.

It’s not because it makes you classier: it’s just that it gives you the capacity to better appreciate more kinds of music (and, I’d argue, some other forms of art) *if you want to* than you would be capable of managing absent this basic grounding. As for instrument-learning: it’s just the quickest route to literacy. I took a music appreciation class in school with kids who didn’t play anything: the teacher was stuck pretty much only ever discussing song lyrics. (Anything else would have been gibberish to most students.)

Not that you should quiz your friends to shame them. It’s just that musical illiteracy is pretty much the norm these days, and maybe we should recognize that as an educational failing. And of course, some people will say, “So what?” They’re almost always musically illiterate—just as science illiterates don’t get why kids should learn science, or straight-up illiterate people don’t see a point in English lit classes. (We “force” some kids in these areas too.)

Can someone not formally trained develop that? Obviously yes. But it’s way harder if you have no basic grounding/instruction, and it almost never happens with people who also never learn an instrument. Interesting experiment: ask your friends, “Why do you like this music?” They will talk about fashion, style, the beat, mood, tone, or often the lyrics.

“Okay, so musically supports that?”

Most people can’t even manage, “It’s in a minor key,” or “It’s heavily syncopated.”

FWIW I’d argue that the obvious value of musical education is obviously that it helps kids become less musically illiterate. (A condition that’s incredibly widespread today, and which leaves people less equipped to appreciate diverse music of all kinds.) This is not to say, “leaves people less equipped to appreciate ‘obviously superior] classical music”: whatever you enjoy, you enjoy it more/get more out of it/appreciate the skill/art of it when you’re literate and have the tools to listen critically and respond thoughtfully.

Or, say, history. It feels like the equivalent argument would be, “Why force kids to write history papers? When’s the last time you wrote a paper about history?” I mean… why DO we ask kids to learn history? Because it rounds them out. It makes them less ignorant and illiterate. Because we think people shouldn’t be ignorant about history. We mock politicians (ahem) who tweet utterly ignorant things about history because we expect a passably educated person to at least know the basics. So why not for music too?

It’s hard to credit @robinhanson’s argument when it seems to hinge on taking for granted that the reasons fellow parents enroll their kids in music lessons is THE reason why people do it. https://t.co/HAAJAMhMvJ Also, using that logic, we shouldn’t be “forcing” kids to learn trig or read poetry or local lit or try out basic science experiments like we do in schools. (I don’t do simple physics experiments or geotrig much these days. Much basic education is “useless” in this way.)

@JustinHowe Which, the baby potatoes and cucumbers, or the corn and berries? (I went for the corn and berries, and left with the baby potatoes and corn.)

@JustinHowe Ha, over here they mostly bought up all the sweet corn on the cob and berries. Oh, and carrots. But there were baby potatoes and cucumbers left…

@JustinHowe 🙂 Our local farmer’s market was cleaned out a few days ago, but that was more because people didn’t want to pay jacked-up prices for vegetables post-typhoon. Sign, masks and library books sounds wise.

Worth reading. 🙁 twitter.com/BGGameWorks/st…

“Jazz may cause divorce!” twitter.com/Cloudchord/sta…

@jeremiahtolbert I mean, it’s where we landed for a country of 51 million when stuff plateaued, so yeah, it’s not great. Careful!

@jeremiahtolbert Wow.

@bananachangames Cool, good news all around!

@BorjimusP @vyderac @LotFP Wow!!!

@GameBiologist Yeah, Prompt #3 was v. challenging! It’s a tough line to walk, engaging creatively/playfully with memory and our feelings about them fictionally while also sufficiently respecting painful life events that others also share (painful) memories of. So much to consider. Hmmm.

@bananachangames Argh, and then I fell asleep and missed it. Hopefully preorders are a thing eventually. It looks fun. (And my brain keeps wondering, “How would I adapt this to an emigrant Korean family in a post-Korean War setting. Jiangshi aren’t a thing in Korea, but…)

FERMENTVM NIGRVM DEI SEPVLTI Now Out! gordsellar.com/2020/08/14/fer…