4 ms·

same here. different people like different things, but it was the opposite of what i'd like to see more of. fun yes, eclectic yes. silly? superficial? trite? no

by fargle 4y ago

same here. different people like different things, but it was the opposite of what i'd like to see more of. fun yes, eclectic yes. silly? superficial? trite? not so much. i appreciate the sentiment of _why, but quality, depth, rigor, and tenacity are also important. _why is no Richard Stevens. if you fold up and throw a tantrum the minute that your 5 seconds of fame is over and you get to experience some real criticism and apathy and all sorts of other unpleasant things that successful people have to handle, it sort of underscores the immaturity of it all. matz is still around, isn't he? hell, so is even larry wall.

derefr 4y ago
The thing is, _why never wanted to be successful — specifically in the sense of having any of his prose work depended upon by others as pieces of education; nor any of his programs depended upon as pieces of engineering. Rather, _why was pretty clearly an artist, and was trying — in both his prose and his programming — to make what one might call “experimental didactic art”: works that explore how to teach and how to learn (mostly, about programming), rather than works that use concrete teaching methods to teach particular concepts. The Poignant Guide, Shoes.rb, any of the libraries he spun off — they were all this. You weren’t supposed to use them; you were supposed to look at them, analyze them like a painting, think about the “brush strokes” involved in their construction, and from that, grow your perspective on education itself, and programming education in particular. But people weren’t doing this. People were treating his “software artwork” like he had intended it all as FOSS projects — things to be contributed to and to polish and to grow, even at the expense of the original goal of representing an exploration of a particular idea, to be absorbed and stolen from. And people were treating him as if he was a core contributor to said not-projects, someone to submit bugs and complaints to, rather than someone who made their own finished thing as a statement and only wanted to discuss its meaning, not keep working on it forever. matz and Wall are bad comparisons. A better comparison would be to someone famous for being a member of a particular band, who is now no longer in that band, but instead in a different band, making a different genre of music. Are they happy that people still appreciate their old work? Sure. Do they wish people would stop asking them about it? Also yes. Do they want to know that they played a wrong note on a song they recorded twenty years ago? No; what good would that do them now? Do they want you to fix that song of theirs for them, 20 years after release, because hey I’m a sound engineer and — no. Stop. It’s fine. It still works as art with the wrong note; and even if it didn’t, it’s long past its relevance; the people the art was aimed at, the people it was supposed to affect, already either got it or didn’t. If an engineer takes all their software down, you might call that “throwing a tantrum in response to criticism.” But if an artist takes all their art from one “period” of their works down, they’re just doing something artists do every day: ending a gallery exhibition, either because the message it communicated either succeeded in becoming culturally embedded, or failed to resonate. For an artist, the value of their art is in the communication of thought it enacts, not in the art itself; a piece of art doesn’t have to stick around forever, it just has to be seen by the right people at the right time to nudge the world in the way the artist desired. (In extremis, this is why so many artists are perfectly happy making performance art, where each unique showing is done once, only for those there at the time, to never be experienced again once it’s over. The art was never the point; the communication was!)
- andrei_says_ 4y ago
  This viewpoint makes a lot of sense and helps me understand better. I like to be able to say “experimental didactic art” is not for me - without implying anything negative about the art or myself. And I really like looking at the author’s actions as the acts of an artist, including performance art. Frees me from the need to comprehend motivation. Thank you.
- fargle 4y ago
  > if an artist takes all their art from one “period” of their works down Maybe I don't understand artists, but I'd be irritated if an artist did that too. Especially if it's supposed to be FOSS. And it's still throwing a tantrum anyhow (I guess artists are allowed/expected to be immature?) - I picture trope of the manic artist burning all his beautiful paintings instead of selling them to make rent. What, did all the folks using his FOSS ever know it was just a temporary art installation? I wonder why they assumed he was a core maintainer and why they didn't realize that these FOSS projects where actually "not-projects". I wonder if that was ever prominently mentioned during his 5 minutes of fame? Anyhow, yes, it leaves a bad taste when somebody is, as others have characterized it, LARPing as a FOSS core contributor and then just run off.
  - derefr 4y ago
    I would suggest picturing it more like a young and naive artist being pressured by a demanding community into gradually, accidentally assuming the role of a software engineer and project maintainer, when that's never what they intended to become, nor what makes them happy to do with their life; and is also something they had no training or skills to cope with the challenges of. What you might call a tantrum, I would call "asserting your boundaries." Like cutting ties with abusive parents who keep barging back into your life, by deleting your Facebook account, changing your phone number, and changing the locks on your house (or moving to a different city.) _why's software art projects are the hooks other people had in him, so that's what he had to drop.
    - fargle 4y ago
      So why burn everything down? I mean he failed to completely do so, but he really tried to destroy it all. That's the tantrum. Asserting your boundaries is - "look I put it out there, you can take it or leave it. I'll do X, but I'm not going to do Y or Z. Don't push me." It is NOT "you guys didn't love me enough 100% so I'm deleting everything with no warning". And there was nothing going on like an "abusive" relationship at all. Criticism != abuse. Work, commitments, expectations != Abuse. Just say "No. Hey I don't want to do this anymore, but I left all my stuff out on the curb". You don't delete it all out of spite with no warning. Option #1 gets sympathy. Option #2 is a major dick move. "Immature". Yes that part is right. But we knew that already from reading the crunchy-bacon riddled adventures. And people didn't mind the immaturity and fun of it (I didn't like it too much, but then I'm just an old buzzard). It didn't go wrong until he bailed and he didn't just bail, he burned it all down. That's the problem. That's the showing of the real person. He didn't just walk away and never look back. He said - if I can't have it, then I'll take it all back and destroy it. That's not just an "artistic temperament". That's an asshole who didn't like the prize he fairly won and decided to be a dick about it. Thankfully people who did care stepped up. I personally don't even like the stuff, but I never want to see it destroyed so those folks who stepped up are the heros. The system and idea of FOSS is the hero too.

by fargle 4y ago

derefr 4y ago

The thing is, _why never wanted to be successful — specifically in the sense of having any of his prose work depended upon by others as pieces of education; nor any of his programs depended upon as pieces of engineering. Rather, _why was pretty clearly an artist, and was trying — in both his prose and his programming — to make what one might call “experimental didactic art”: works that explore how to teach and how to learn (mostly, about programming), rather than works that use concrete teaching methods to teach particular concepts. The Poignant Guide, Shoes.rb, any of the libraries he spun off — they were all this. You weren’t supposed to use them; you were supposed to look at them, analyze them like a painting, think about the “brush strokes” involved in their construction, and from that, grow your perspective on education itself, and programming education in particular. But people weren’t doing this. People were treating his “software artwork” like he had intended it all as FOSS projects — things to be contributed to and to polish and to grow, even at the expense of the original goal of representing an exploration of a particular idea, to be absorbed and stolen from. And people were treating him as if he was a core contributor to said not-projects, someone to submit bugs and complaints to, rather than someone who made their own finished thing as a statement and only wanted to discuss its meaning, not keep working on it forever. matz and Wall are bad comparisons. A better comparison would be to someone famous for being a member of a particular band, who is now no longer in that band, but instead in a different band, making a different genre of music. Are they happy that people still appreciate their old work? Sure. Do they wish people would stop asking them about it? Also yes. Do they want to know that they played a wrong note on a song they recorded twenty years ago? No; what good would that do them now? Do they want you to fix that song of theirs for them, 20 years after release, because hey I’m a sound engineer and — no. Stop. It’s fine. It still works as art with the wrong note; and even if it didn’t, it’s long past its relevance; the people the art was aimed at, the people it was supposed to affect, already either got it or didn’t. If an engineer takes all their software down, you might call that “throwing a tantrum in response to criticism.” But if an artist takes all their art from one “period” of their works down, they’re just doing something artists do every day: ending a gallery exhibition, either because the message it communicated either succeeded in becoming culturally embedded, or failed to resonate. For an artist, the value of their art is in the communication of thought it enacts, not in the art itself; a piece of art doesn’t have to stick around forever, it just has to be seen by the right people at the right time to nudge the world in the way the artist desired. (In extremis, this is why so many artists are perfectly happy making performance art, where each unique showing is done once, only for those there at the time, to never be experienced again once it’s over. The art was never the point; the communication was!)

andrei_says_ 4y ago
This viewpoint makes a lot of sense and helps me understand better. I like to be able to say “experimental didactic art” is not for me - without implying anything negative about the art or myself. And I really like looking at the author’s actions as the acts of an artist, including performance art. Frees me from the need to comprehend motivation. Thank you.
fargle 4y ago
> if an artist takes all their art from one “period” of their works down Maybe I don't understand artists, but I'd be irritated if an artist did that too. Especially if it's supposed to be FOSS. And it's still throwing a tantrum anyhow (I guess artists are allowed/expected to be immature?) - I picture trope of the manic artist burning all his beautiful paintings instead of selling them to make rent. What, did all the folks using his FOSS ever know it was just a temporary art installation? I wonder why they assumed he was a core maintainer and why they didn't realize that these FOSS projects where actually "not-projects". I wonder if that was ever prominently mentioned during his 5 minutes of fame? Anyhow, yes, it leaves a bad taste when somebody is, as others have characterized it, LARPing as a FOSS core contributor and then just run off.
- derefr 4y ago
  I would suggest picturing it more like a young and naive artist being pressured by a demanding community into gradually, accidentally assuming the role of a software engineer and project maintainer, when that's never what they intended to become, nor what makes them happy to do with their life; and is also something they had no training or skills to cope with the challenges of. What you might call a tantrum, I would call "asserting your boundaries." Like cutting ties with abusive parents who keep barging back into your life, by deleting your Facebook account, changing your phone number, and changing the locks on your house (or moving to a different city.) _why's software art projects are the hooks other people had in him, so that's what he had to drop.
  - fargle 4y ago
    So why burn everything down? I mean he failed to completely do so, but he really tried to destroy it all. That's the tantrum. Asserting your boundaries is - "look I put it out there, you can take it or leave it. I'll do X, but I'm not going to do Y or Z. Don't push me." It is NOT "you guys didn't love me enough 100% so I'm deleting everything with no warning". And there was nothing going on like an "abusive" relationship at all. Criticism != abuse. Work, commitments, expectations != Abuse. Just say "No. Hey I don't want to do this anymore, but I left all my stuff out on the curb". You don't delete it all out of spite with no warning. Option #1 gets sympathy. Option #2 is a major dick move. "Immature". Yes that part is right. But we knew that already from reading the crunchy-bacon riddled adventures. And people didn't mind the immaturity and fun of it (I didn't like it too much, but then I'm just an old buzzard). It didn't go wrong until he bailed and he didn't just bail, he burned it all down. That's the problem. That's the showing of the real person. He didn't just walk away and never look back. He said - if I can't have it, then I'll take it all back and destroy it. That's not just an "artistic temperament". That's an asshole who didn't like the prize he fairly won and decided to be a dick about it. Thankfully people who did care stepped up. I personally don't even like the stuff, but I never want to see it destroyed so those folks who stepped up are the heros. The system and idea of FOSS is the hero too.