6 ms·

I do. Since that post went up, I've received quite a few emails from people thanking me for that drivel, too. So I guess it's not drivel after all? If my goal

by unalone 17y ago

I do. Since that post went up, I've received quite a few emails from people thanking me for that drivel, too. So I guess it's not drivel after all? If my goal was to write simplistic, overemoting drivel, I'd have namedropped Bukowski instead of Joyce.

araneae 17y ago
No, your goal was to sound smart. It's cliche... just like saying "we're all in this together." I'll break your essay down for you. A) A section in which you say you hate small talk. You use this fact to claim that you are deep, because small talk is shallow. B) A section in which you talk about your love of James Joyce, an author that pretty much no one can read, in order to sound smart. C) A section in which you talk about how lonely you are, because you're emo. You are very sad and lonely because the girls you date like different music than you. D) The conclusion, in which you try but fail to connect the fact that you are a) deep, b) smart, and c) lonely, by saying that we're all in this together. wipes away a tear If this sounds harsh, I've spent all day grading essays, so I'm out of tolerance for bullshit.
- RevRal 17y ago
  This is the sort of comment I would have liked to have seen in the submission about the article. Unfortunately, those submissions are dead. The recent article on Ribbon Farm might explain unalone's character: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/21/morality-compassion-and-the-sociopath/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/21/morality-compassion-and... . Maybe that's assuming too much.... I don't normally say things like this, but your analysis is wrong. I'm 22 years old, and I still haven't figured out how to respond to things like this. Your thought process is simply... wrong. It'd be like trying to explain something fundamental and simple. Something that people should just "get," and I'm just baffled when they don't. When they respond like this and completely miss out on something good. There's a certain dignity and standard that people like us hold ourselves to, and we resent those who don't. That's the point of "we're all in this together." We don't often meet people like us. And when we do... I don't know how to explain it. It's just great. Though he could have maybe picked better words... he didn't. It still communicates what he was trying to say. You have to look at things like this through a certain lens. It isn't published work. If he wanted to, he could edit it all day. It is on his personal website so he shouldn't have to. When I said I'm a discerning reader, and am discerning on HN... well, I'm discerning with everything. And it literally breaks my heart that almost everyone I meet is not like this. ---- Addendum: So unalone, what did you think of Circulatory System?
  - unalone 17y ago
    Oh! I didn't realize it was you. :-) I'll be the first to accuse me of a certain sloppiness. I usually try to write as quickly as possible and I don't look back over what I write before I publish. For pieces I want to submit places I do a much more thorough job — I'm writing one piece specifically for Hacker News that's like that right now, and I'm taking however many weeks it takes to make sure it gleams. re:Circulatory System — I'm not totally sure. It didn't hook me instantly like some of the other Elephant Six bands have, but the harmonies were pretty impressive. I'm going to give it another listen a few days from now; I feel like it's something I ought to take some time and let seep in.
- unalone 17y ago
  You don't sound harsh. You sound like any other punkass with a short patience. Take five seconds and look at anything else I've done. It's not like I'm coming out of nowhere and saying these things. I'm the Hacker News presence that writes essay responses to everything. It's not that I dislike people who small talk, it's that — honestly — when I talk these minute little essays shoot out. The people I hang out with tend to be people who talk about things comprehensively. It's not particularly deep. If anything, it's an inherently nerdy trait. But it's who I am. My love for Joyce is similarly something that I talk about a lot. He was the first major artist I fell in love with. Beckett was probably the second. Understand that I came across Joyce and Beckett before I developed a diverse taste in movies/music/art, and so they stick out in my mind in a way other things don't. But Joyce is utterly readable, if you know how to read him. I read Ulysses to thirteen-year-olds. They were stitching up. People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their head. Anybody with half an ear for tone can translate him into the hilarious Irish comic that he is. I mean, his hero masturbates and fantasizes about sex! It's a Seth Rogen comedy in the making. I thought that I clarified the whole "lonely existence" thing in my writing. In fact, I'm sure I did, because you're the first person to complain about that. The issue's not that I'm lonely, because I'm not lonely. The issue's that there's an inherent disconnect between the secular God I worship and the various things other people worship. My idea of a good time is different from a lot of other people's. I don't need to brag about the girls I date. The fact that I write about girls is because that happens to be a part of my life, as much as Joyce is. So I'm not allowed to write about smart people things or social people things? What am I allowed to write about? Lisp? I wrote what I did for other people, not for me. Last year I was in a shitty place; this year I'm in an awesome place and life is great. It's just that I happen to have an audience of hundreds of people, and I do my best to follow them when I have free time, and a good part of my audience is alienated/isolated/heartbroken/generally human, and I thought I had some ideas that might help them. I wrote that article, a lot of people loved it, and when it got posted to Hacker News it got a more fiercely emotional response than anything else I've posted here. I didn't post it, and I wasn't expecting HN of all places to react the way they did. It was not an article I wrote for Hacker News. But I'm glad that people found it and got some sort of strength out of it. If this sounds harsh, it's because you remind me of certain former professors of mine who were vain assholes and who killed my former ambition to become a teacher. Let's not mince words: I pity your students students if you're always such a nagging fucker.
- gcv 17y ago
  James Joyce, an author that pretty much no one can read Nonsense. I read Ulysses cover to cover. I happily admit that I needed help to do it and understand what I was reading: I listened to the Ulysses series of lectures from The Teaching Company, and read the chapters as the professor covered them. You know what? It's a pretty damned good book. So let me amend your statement. James Joyce is an author few people can read without some help from someone who already understands the work. With a handful of small guideposts, Ulysses is completely readable.
  - araneae 17y ago
    "Pretty much no one" != "no one" It's very nice that you enjoyed Ulysses. I did not enjoy it for 100 pages. Reading it is pretty much only useful for bragging, which I see is alive and well.
    - unalone 17y ago
      Funny. I don't read to brag. Not because reading Ulysses wasn't an important part of my life — it was. But when I brag, I brag about things I've made, not other people's things I've consumed. Fortunately for both of us, I can confirm that my life's rich and full enough for me to brag about things without resorting to modernist literature.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  Something seems misplaced about this reply. We call bullshit on each other a lot on HN, but usually when we criticize, we do it constructively. This seems like plain old criticism. Its interesting that you mention grading essays because I distinctly remember highschool essays (one in particular) that I got back with D's on them red-scrawled with "Disappointing" without further elaboration. A,B,C,D, how could someone who actually is deep, smart and lonely write an acceptable essay on being such? (Because you'll find a disproportionate number of just such individuals here on HN, because here, "we're all in it together".) I should note that I'm the last person who could actually judge the merits of the essay, (although I enjoyed reading it). Joyce bemuses me particularly. I've gathered through observation that he's either the pseudo-intellectual rambler that all others defer to, or a literary genius beyond the ken of mortal man, but am humbled by the knowledge that I lack the instrumentation to make that distinction.
  - araneae 17y ago
    You're right; it wasn't really constructive, because I was criticizing the content. A post bragging about how deep and smart you are and complaining that you're lonely belongs on LJ, not HN. And since posts on HN are selected, generally, on content, I figured it's a valid criticism. If you want constructive criticism, I could go after style. There was very little organization; this made it very difficult for a reader to tell where the author was going with the post. From the first few paragraphs, it does look like the author is going to talk about gods, and that's probably why it got flagged so quickly. If the purpose of the essay had been clear from the beginning (it's called an "introduction") then it may have not have been flagged. And re: your D in high school, I can tell you why there was no more elaboration. Grading bad essays makes you want to shoot yourself and/or the writer in the face. And if an essay is as bad as a D, there are so many comments that you want to make that it's impossible to do so without spending several hours writing it up. At 60 students (the number I have this semester), that's an immense amount of time writing something that the vast majority of students won't read anyway. If they really care, they'll come talk to you about the essay. By then you'll hopefully be calm enough to prevent yourself from calling them morons. It's much, much safer to write "disappointing."
    - 17y ago
- zackattack 17y ago
  [redacted]
  - unalone 17y ago
    Seriously? Hacker News has degenerated to outright flaming?
    - zackattack 17y ago
      (I couldn't help myself. You made things even more difficult by setting up the "flamer" joke.) But since I seriously do not understand your points, I submit the following questions: 1. What's your problem with Lil Wayne? 2. Why do you deliberately alienate yourself from someone based on their musical taste? 3. If we're in all of this together, then don't you understand that her preferences are just the result of her experiences? 4. Why do you cling to some sort of predefined me-ness?
      - unalone 17y ago
        Fair enough. I don't have a problem with Lil Wayne. I don't think he's particularly distinguished as a musician, though. He doesn't do anything that's really pushing at boundaries, and so when I go looking for music he kind of slips away. The moment I was trying to illustrate wasn't one where I hated somebody for liking Lil Wayne. Earlier in the evening I'd been belting out Katy Perry with some people, and Katy Perry's far "worse" than LW is. The alienation, though that's too strong a word for what it was — this is a friend we're talking about — was more that some people were sitting around in the mood to talk about music, and she picked Lil Wayne. That's background dancing music, not sit-down music. So it wasn't like a sudden hostility based on Lil Wayne. It was just a disquieting moment that I thought would illustrate what I was writing about well. It's not about some predefined special quality. I'm the biggest narcissist you'll ever meet, but that's because I love me, not because I love something in particular about me. But it is a trait that you find in some people and not in others, and I'd never seen an article written specifically about it so I figured I'd write one. In the article I defined it as worshipping human creation. More specifically: It's an attitude some people have towards what they consume in which they try first to understand the goals of the producer, then appreciate that for what it is. So, some people approach music looking for hooks and that's it. Classicists will look for certain traits in music — melody, harmony, counterpoint, chord progression — and disregard every other musical element. My approach towards music is what you'd call deconstructed: First I try to figure out what the music is trying to do, then I appreciate it on those merits. So I don't look for melody in a minimalist composition, I ignore lyrics and focus on production if I'm listening to pop, and within those constraints I decide what I like and don't like. So I prefer Lady Gaga to Britney Spears, and I understand that neither of them is comparable to Mozart and that you couldn't compare Mozart to them, either. The stuff that I love is the stuff that meets its ambitions on a spectacular level; stuff without ambition is what fails to grasp me. The reason that's important is that it's a very open, embracing, and somewhat odd way to approach art, but the people who approach it tend also to have other traits in common, which I also tried to define. The Joyce instance is one of them. Writers who like Joyce over Hemingway are also invariably writers with a more open stance on writing, and focus more on the craft than about the story. It's not like I get in a tiff when people say they like Hemingway more. It's that Hemingway developed one limited style and used that to tell the stories he cared about, whereas Joyce's style was constantly expanding. This happens in every field of creation you can name. So the loneliness and alienation doesn't come from people having opinions. There are people with such narrow worldviews, but I'm not one of them. I like almost everybody I meet to some degree. But there aren't many people who understand that distinction between the Joyce types of artists and the Hemingways, and when your personal outlook on life is so reliant on the difference between them, it means you can't really talk about what you're thinking on a deep level. That's occasionally frustrating. Does that clarify somewhat? Or am I still babbling?
algorias 17y ago
I really liked that article, it was moving in a strange way. It was also pretty off-topic for HN, so I understand why it was killed. Submitting with the vague title "God" didn't help, either.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  I think the title alone did more to get it quickly flagged dead than any other factor. I know I went in with the safety off on my flagger (as it were) and almost did so when words like worship, Allah, and Yahweh (I'm a scatter reader) jumped out at me.

by unalone 17y ago

araneae 17y ago

No, your goal was to sound smart. It's cliche... just like saying "we're all in this together." I'll break your essay down for you. A) A section in which you say you hate small talk. You use this fact to claim that you are deep, because small talk is shallow. B) A section in which you talk about your love of James Joyce, an author that pretty much no one can read, in order to sound smart. C) A section in which you talk about how lonely you are, because you're emo. You are very sad and lonely because the girls you date like different music than you. D) The conclusion, in which you try but fail to connect the fact that you are a) deep, b) smart, and c) lonely, by saying that we're all in this together. wipes away a tear If this sounds harsh, I've spent all day grading essays, so I'm out of tolerance for bullshit.

RevRal 17y ago
This is the sort of comment I would have liked to have seen in the submission about the article. Unfortunately, those submissions are dead. The recent article on Ribbon Farm might explain unalone's character: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/21/morality-compassion-and-the-sociopath/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/21/morality-compassion-and... . Maybe that's assuming too much.... I don't normally say things like this, but your analysis is wrong. I'm 22 years old, and I still haven't figured out how to respond to things like this. Your thought process is simply... wrong. It'd be like trying to explain something fundamental and simple. Something that people should just "get," and I'm just baffled when they don't. When they respond like this and completely miss out on something good. There's a certain dignity and standard that people like us hold ourselves to, and we resent those who don't. That's the point of "we're all in this together." We don't often meet people like us. And when we do... I don't know how to explain it. It's just great. Though he could have maybe picked better words... he didn't. It still communicates what he was trying to say. You have to look at things like this through a certain lens. It isn't published work. If he wanted to, he could edit it all day. It is on his personal website so he shouldn't have to. When I said I'm a discerning reader, and am discerning on HN... well, I'm discerning with everything. And it literally breaks my heart that almost everyone I meet is not like this. ---- Addendum: So unalone, what did you think of Circulatory System?
- unalone 17y ago
  Oh! I didn't realize it was you. :-) I'll be the first to accuse me of a certain sloppiness. I usually try to write as quickly as possible and I don't look back over what I write before I publish. For pieces I want to submit places I do a much more thorough job — I'm writing one piece specifically for Hacker News that's like that right now, and I'm taking however many weeks it takes to make sure it gleams. re:Circulatory System — I'm not totally sure. It didn't hook me instantly like some of the other Elephant Six bands have, but the harmonies were pretty impressive. I'm going to give it another listen a few days from now; I feel like it's something I ought to take some time and let seep in.
unalone 17y ago
You don't sound harsh. You sound like any other punkass with a short patience. Take five seconds and look at anything else I've done. It's not like I'm coming out of nowhere and saying these things. I'm the Hacker News presence that writes essay responses to everything. It's not that I dislike people who small talk, it's that — honestly — when I talk these minute little essays shoot out. The people I hang out with tend to be people who talk about things comprehensively. It's not particularly deep. If anything, it's an inherently nerdy trait. But it's who I am. My love for Joyce is similarly something that I talk about a lot. He was the first major artist I fell in love with. Beckett was probably the second. Understand that I came across Joyce and Beckett before I developed a diverse taste in movies/music/art, and so they stick out in my mind in a way other things don't. But Joyce is utterly readable, if you know how to read him. I read Ulysses to thirteen-year-olds. They were stitching up. People that call Joyce unreadable are people who never learned to hear an author's voice in their head. Anybody with half an ear for tone can translate him into the hilarious Irish comic that he is. I mean, his hero masturbates and fantasizes about sex! It's a Seth Rogen comedy in the making. I thought that I clarified the whole "lonely existence" thing in my writing. In fact, I'm sure I did, because you're the first person to complain about that. The issue's not that I'm lonely, because I'm not lonely. The issue's that there's an inherent disconnect between the secular God I worship and the various things other people worship. My idea of a good time is different from a lot of other people's. I don't need to brag about the girls I date. The fact that I write about girls is because that happens to be a part of my life, as much as Joyce is. So I'm not allowed to write about smart people things or social people things? What am I allowed to write about? Lisp? I wrote what I did for other people, not for me. Last year I was in a shitty place; this year I'm in an awesome place and life is great. It's just that I happen to have an audience of hundreds of people, and I do my best to follow them when I have free time, and a good part of my audience is alienated/isolated/heartbroken/generally human, and I thought I had some ideas that might help them. I wrote that article, a lot of people loved it, and when it got posted to Hacker News it got a more fiercely emotional response than anything else I've posted here. I didn't post it, and I wasn't expecting HN of all places to react the way they did. It was not an article I wrote for Hacker News. But I'm glad that people found it and got some sort of strength out of it. If this sounds harsh, it's because you remind me of certain former professors of mine who were vain assholes and who killed my former ambition to become a teacher. Let's not mince words: I pity your students students if you're always such a nagging fucker.
gcv 17y ago
James Joyce, an author that pretty much no one can read Nonsense. I read Ulysses cover to cover. I happily admit that I needed help to do it and understand what I was reading: I listened to the Ulysses series of lectures from The Teaching Company, and read the chapters as the professor covered them. You know what? It's a pretty damned good book. So let me amend your statement. James Joyce is an author few people can read without some help from someone who already understands the work. With a handful of small guideposts, Ulysses is completely readable.
- araneae 17y ago
  "Pretty much no one" != "no one" It's very nice that you enjoyed Ulysses. I did not enjoy it for 100 pages. Reading it is pretty much only useful for bragging, which I see is alive and well.
  - unalone 17y ago
    Funny. I don't read to brag. Not because reading Ulysses wasn't an important part of my life — it was. But when I brag, I brag about things I've made, not other people's things I've consumed. Fortunately for both of us, I can confirm that my life's rich and full enough for me to brag about things without resorting to modernist literature.
noonespecial 17y ago
Something seems misplaced about this reply. We call bullshit on each other a lot on HN, but usually when we criticize, we do it constructively. This seems like plain old criticism. Its interesting that you mention grading essays because I distinctly remember highschool essays (one in particular) that I got back with D's on them red-scrawled with "Disappointing" without further elaboration. A,B,C,D, how could someone who actually is deep, smart and lonely write an acceptable essay on being such? (Because you'll find a disproportionate number of just such individuals here on HN, because here, "we're all in it together".) I should note that I'm the last person who could actually judge the merits of the essay, (although I enjoyed reading it). Joyce bemuses me particularly. I've gathered through observation that he's either the pseudo-intellectual rambler that all others defer to, or a literary genius beyond the ken of mortal man, but am humbled by the knowledge that I lack the instrumentation to make that distinction.
- araneae 17y ago
  You're right; it wasn't really constructive, because I was criticizing the content. A post bragging about how deep and smart you are and complaining that you're lonely belongs on LJ, not HN. And since posts on HN are selected, generally, on content, I figured it's a valid criticism. If you want constructive criticism, I could go after style. There was very little organization; this made it very difficult for a reader to tell where the author was going with the post. From the first few paragraphs, it does look like the author is going to talk about gods, and that's probably why it got flagged so quickly. If the purpose of the essay had been clear from the beginning (it's called an "introduction") then it may have not have been flagged. And re: your D in high school, I can tell you why there was no more elaboration. Grading bad essays makes you want to shoot yourself and/or the writer in the face. And if an essay is as bad as a D, there are so many comments that you want to make that it's impossible to do so without spending several hours writing it up. At 60 students (the number I have this semester), that's an immense amount of time writing something that the vast majority of students won't read anyway. If they really care, they'll come talk to you about the essay. By then you'll hopefully be calm enough to prevent yourself from calling them morons. It's much, much safer to write "disappointing."
  - 17y ago
zackattack 17y ago
[redacted]
- unalone 17y ago
  Seriously? Hacker News has degenerated to outright flaming?
  - zackattack 17y ago
    (I couldn't help myself. You made things even more difficult by setting up the "flamer" joke.) But since I seriously do not understand your points, I submit the following questions: 1. What's your problem with Lil Wayne? 2. Why do you deliberately alienate yourself from someone based on their musical taste? 3. If we're in all of this together, then don't you understand that her preferences are just the result of her experiences? 4. Why do you cling to some sort of predefined me-ness?
    - unalone 17y ago
      Fair enough. I don't have a problem with Lil Wayne. I don't think he's particularly distinguished as a musician, though. He doesn't do anything that's really pushing at boundaries, and so when I go looking for music he kind of slips away. The moment I was trying to illustrate wasn't one where I hated somebody for liking Lil Wayne. Earlier in the evening I'd been belting out Katy Perry with some people, and Katy Perry's far "worse" than LW is. The alienation, though that's too strong a word for what it was — this is a friend we're talking about — was more that some people were sitting around in the mood to talk about music, and she picked Lil Wayne. That's background dancing music, not sit-down music. So it wasn't like a sudden hostility based on Lil Wayne. It was just a disquieting moment that I thought would illustrate what I was writing about well. It's not about some predefined special quality. I'm the biggest narcissist you'll ever meet, but that's because I love me, not because I love something in particular about me. But it is a trait that you find in some people and not in others, and I'd never seen an article written specifically about it so I figured I'd write one. In the article I defined it as worshipping human creation. More specifically: It's an attitude some people have towards what they consume in which they try first to understand the goals of the producer, then appreciate that for what it is. So, some people approach music looking for hooks and that's it. Classicists will look for certain traits in music — melody, harmony, counterpoint, chord progression — and disregard every other musical element. My approach towards music is what you'd call deconstructed: First I try to figure out what the music is trying to do, then I appreciate it on those merits. So I don't look for melody in a minimalist composition, I ignore lyrics and focus on production if I'm listening to pop, and within those constraints I decide what I like and don't like. So I prefer Lady Gaga to Britney Spears, and I understand that neither of them is comparable to Mozart and that you couldn't compare Mozart to them, either. The stuff that I love is the stuff that meets its ambitions on a spectacular level; stuff without ambition is what fails to grasp me. The reason that's important is that it's a very open, embracing, and somewhat odd way to approach art, but the people who approach it tend also to have other traits in common, which I also tried to define. The Joyce instance is one of them. Writers who like Joyce over Hemingway are also invariably writers with a more open stance on writing, and focus more on the craft than about the story. It's not like I get in a tiff when people say they like Hemingway more. It's that Hemingway developed one limited style and used that to tell the stories he cared about, whereas Joyce's style was constantly expanding. This happens in every field of creation you can name. So the loneliness and alienation doesn't come from people having opinions. There are people with such narrow worldviews, but I'm not one of them. I like almost everybody I meet to some degree. But there aren't many people who understand that distinction between the Joyce types of artists and the Hemingways, and when your personal outlook on life is so reliant on the difference between them, it means you can't really talk about what you're thinking on a deep level. That's occasionally frustrating. Does that clarify somewhat? Or am I still babbling?

algorias 17y ago

I really liked that article, it was moving in a strange way. It was also pretty off-topic for HN, so I understand why it was killed. Submitting with the vague title "God" didn't help, either.

noonespecial 17y ago
I think the title alone did more to get it quickly flagged dead than any other factor. I know I went in with the safety off on my flagger (as it were) and almost did so when words like worship, Allah, and Yahweh (I'm a scatter reader) jumped out at me.