I knew a guy who was selling his art online, he was making tongue-in-cheek, technically bad art but it was very deliberate as part of what he was trying to get at, he had a real artistic vision to his work.
His work got picked by MOBA and was made fun of, but they totally missed the point.
There is a great podcast called Switched on Pop, which delves into music theory behind pop hits and their songwriting and arrangements, and analyzes them to show what makes them great. It will give you fresh perspective on how much thought and talent goes into some of these songs. https://switchedonpop.com/
I actually think the ending of it really prevented it from being that (at least for me). It started good, then the second act was like "Whoah, this is the most amazing sci-fi I've ever read", then the third act was just all over the place and completely lost me. And that's the revised ending, I didn't read the original one.
Same experience. So much promise that the way it collapses is disappointing, almost angry-making. I even gave it a second try thinking that maybe I'd just missed something. Nope.
It's good, but didn't leave that big of an impression on me, maybe because I didn't know all the SCP stuff beforehand, I just liked qntm's other works so I read it.
I know/knew a few, they usually balance things like teaching, magazine writing, maintaining social media accounts for brands, copywriting for ads, and tech jobs.
That reminds me of when I asked an arborist why the tree they were taking down was called a “Piss Oak”. They said wait until we drop it and you won’t have to ask. Sure enough the entire area smelled like urine for a couple hrs after they felled the tree.
I believe the polite common name is “Pin Oak” [1] a fast growing, short lived, and relatively red oak. Supposedly the smell comes from a bacterial infection that afflicts most of the Pin Oak population.
I've never been very fond of nature to begin with[0], but I never imagined becoming disgusted by trees. That's until seeing some four different tree species mentioned in this thread, whose common characteristic seems to be the aura of shite and decay that takes years or decades to break through people's desperate need to pretend that since it is nature and handles well, it must be good.
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[0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.
> I've never been very fond of nature to begin with
> [0] - Specifically at human/humane, live in and breathe in and admire it scale. I'm very fond of nature at population scale, and at molecular scale, both of which present interesting puzzles and applications.
I can relate to this a lot. I feel the same way about nature as I do about a tiger or a volcano; I think they're cool and I respect them, but I don't care to spend time up close with them.
I don't see why it's inconsistent for me to feel similarly about a small part of something as I do about the whole, or why it might not be rhetorically useful to help explain something by drawing a comparison between them
There's a reason people tend to burn down rain forests.
Well, two reasons: money from the cleared land, and rain forests tend to be unpleasant reserves of biodiversity with all sorts of nasty plants and flying insects that want to lay eggs under your skin.
Honestly, it's the money from the cleared land. Horrors of nature are the reason people stay away. People move in only when those horrors occupy resources people think can be put to a better use.
Yes, it's often enough dumb, short-sighted, self-destructive selfish behavior, which I absolutely do not condone. However, horror or disgust alone are nowhere near enough to get people to engage in such behavior. At most it gets people to try - and sometimes succeed - to clear invasive species out of the gardens they already have.
At least one street here got lined with those. A witty lesbian friend I was walking with identified the scent immediately, so at least the trees were good for some jokes.
