117. Your Self-Inflicted Artistic Purgatory
January 17th, 2022
1 hr 2 mins 56 secs
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About this Episode
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Lords:
- Brad
- @bradspendlove on Twitter
- Check out https://twitter.com/so_writing, especially episode 6
- Quil
Topics:
- What superpowers like shrinking and invisibility suggest about how we conceptualize reality
- Is there a point where you can call the silly things you make "art" and not feel like an absolute tool about it? Not a debate about what is vs is not art. But I feel weird if I make a bunch of bad music and call it "my art"
- Stinky meat and stinky feet
- Hope is a Thing with Feathers, by Emily Dickinson
- Visual novels are neat, but I'm never sure whether they belong in my video game queue or book queue and therefore I rarely play them because I always think I could be playing a "real" video game or reading a "real" book
- Cortical homunculus
Microtopics:
- Accidentally agreeing to be on the show.
- Doing nothing in Chicago.
- Computer creativity.
- Making an argument that a computer program is creative.
- "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" as a philosophical text.
- Using a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision.
- Imagining additional colors.
- Assuming the listener knows what cellular automata is.
- A platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude.
- Trying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata.
- The top four Live 'em Ups.
- A game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing.
- Putting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious.
- Calling your bad music your "works" because they make ye listeners despair.
- How you conceptualize the things that you make.
- Attaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing.
- Making a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse.
- Having done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel.
- Wanting to have the identity of being a creator.
- Something that is cool to be and do.
- How to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours.
- Ancient handwriting samples.
- Doing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song.
- Leaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard.
- Deciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor.
- A storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points.
- The melding of art and science.
- Piss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy.
- Trying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is.
- What it takes to know Bennett Foddy.
- The idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves.
- The euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill.
- How come there are still kids if kids keep growing up??
- Slurs in various stages of reclamation.
- How there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid.
- Jabroni origins.
- Replacing all your pejoratives with "ridiculous."
- Mario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears.
- The purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird.
- What is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird.
- Conceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early.
- Enclosing poems in letters to your friends.
- Making art for a person and sharing it just with that person.
- Reading "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice.
- Reading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel.
- Reading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life.
- Whether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing.
- Whether Machiavelli was doing a bit.
- A performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice.
- Getting famous for singing "All Star" and having to sing it for the rest of your life.
- The realm between video games and books.
- How the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games.
- Approaches to consuming media.
- Watching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of.
- A library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned.
- Mapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain.
- A Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop.
- Shrimp Obama Magnet.
- T-shirts about adrenal cancer.
- Angry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity.
- Too good an idea to just let be a joke.
- Symbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office.
- Max Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer.
- Seeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.