I saw a post about the Homestuck game and tried to remember liking Homestuck.  I mean, I still like Homestuck – the parts of it I liked have not changed (well, except for the blue arms) since I read them back in 2011, and although my taste has probably changed, that’s not what’s making me see it this way.  I think what’s happened is basically that I’ve grown to dislike Andrew Hussie, and that makes it hard to immediately enjoy (as opposed to “enjoy by remembering how I used to enjoy it”) anything in his very distinctive style.

I should clarify – Andrew Hussie may well be a great guy if you know him in person, I have no idea and don’t mean to suggest ill of him.  By “dislike Andrew Hussie” I largely mean “dislike Andrew Hussie’s style,” but it’s more than that – maybe “dislike Andrew Hussie’s creative persona.”  His public comments on his work, and his pattern of behavior (in update schedule, interactions with fans, etc.) seems like it forms a continuous whole with the style.  I’ll just write “Andrew Hussie” in quotes, to distinguish this from the real human being.

“Hussie” feels very … limited.  There’s a brilliance to his style, but you get the feeling he couldn’t possibly create anything that wasn’t obviously created by him; you don’t get the feeling he ever learned the ordinary rules of art or fiction or humor or even the English language, although it’s easy not to care, since his breaking of rules is so often clever or interesting rather than just clumsy.  He can write, for instance, in this particular tone of ironic grandiloquence which is full of crunchy, tasty turns of phrase and arresting images and metaphors, but you don’t ever see him dial this down to an “normal,” unironic, subtler elevated style – you get the feeling he can’t do any of the constituent pieces on their own, just the whole thing, like a gesture he can do with his hands but can’t explain.  He has his own distinctive sense of humor, which is obsessed with fiction tropes (specifically, declaring that reality “should” follow tropes, whether it really will or not), and with lovingly detailed ribbing towards “bad” media.  This is often hilarious by anyone’s standards, but he does it – that specific brand of humor, down to the individual beats sometimes – more consistently and repetitively than anyone would unless they couldn’t do anything else.

“Hussie” also has a creative persona which resists all criticism and asks all to trust in the artist’s sacred creative vision.  This fits with the style: he cannot adapt to criticism, he cannot be what anyone else wants him to be, he can only do the one thing he knows how to do, and push it to further and further heights, and trust in the fact that the rest of humanity has generally been delighted with this eccentric performance so far.  The voice he uses when talking as “Andrew Hussie, creator of MSPA” feels not too distinct from “Andrew Hussie, the narrator of MSPA”; both write in a way that superficially feels very artificial, knowingly bombastic, hiding everything behind an ironic wink and an assurance that if you just relax and let yourself enjoy the show, the master magician will deliver.  This can be immensely frustrating, because you want him at some point to let up the act, to step out from the various ironic personae and “this is so much like that one bad movie” framing devices and talk to you straight, as a creative adult who puppeteers personae and framing for fun and profit.  But that never, ever happens.  Whether or not this is as deep as Hussie goes, it is as deep as “Hussie” goes.  Scratch the surface and you keep finding more surface; nothing is ever not a joke or a reference or a put-on, nothing is ever not implicitly in quotation marks (or more aptly, being recorded on a low-budget movie camera).  The hall of campy mirrors is endless.

If it isn’t already clear, I find this all very #relatable, and have often felt like I am doing tricks for the world in exactly this way.  But maybe it’s this that makes “Hussie” just so frustrating to me.  You want him to perform the final trick that is making the audience forget they’re at a magic show, to perform so hard he breaks through into the territory where you literally can’t tell his “acting” from anyone else’s “real behavior.”  I feel like I’ve reached that point in a lot of my, well, life, and it feels wonderful.  Whether he wants to or not, “Hussie” never quite gets there, and being who I am, it can be painful to watch.

Actually, he did get there, for a time.  Homestuck at its height can give you this feeling of transcendence, where every frame you can try to box it into does not fully capture it, and for a time “Hussie’s” style feels not notably limited but notably limitless.  The geeky, referential comedy is pulled off with such finesse that it feels like the work of some godlike being who’s whimsically decided to try its hand at a dorky webcomic and (accidentally, because it performs any act with equal godlike power) creates a dorky webcomic that is better than most things on planet earth.  The absurd plot, full of tropes and comic book powers, is somehow sustained by a crystalline deterministic structure of incredible intricacy which you feel you’d need a seminar course to fully understand.  The characters are crude cartoons, and yet they speak in such eerily animate voices you can’t quite believe any of them aren’t real people.  Everything works on every level of irony and non-irony, self-awareness and naivete, crudity and brilliance.  You stop checking Hussie’s antics for formal compliance with ordinary-person standards because he keeps passing your tests, even though he’s doing something clearly ridiculous.

Who cares if this weird kid’s fourth-grade teacher says he can’t do any of the homework and should be held back a grade?  He just proved the Riemann Hypothesis.  Admittedly, instead of concluding the proof with the customary “Q.E.D.” or Halmos symbol, he scrawled “OMG BUTT LAZERZ” all over the final page, but you see that’s actually a masterstroke of construction when one takes into consideration its echoes of his earlier work [five page explanation follows].  The weird kid is being being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.  It is for his novel Stacey is Annoying Because She Keeps Asking Why I Get to Have Cookies Even When I Have Told Her a Lot of Times That My Mom Packs My Lunch and I Don’t Really Get a Choice, Also She Keeps Talking About Weird Girl Stuff: A Comic Opera (in Prose).  The synopsis doesn’t really do it justice, but read it, and you will understand.

uu: WHAT MOST GIFTED ARTISANS WILL TELL YOU. IS THAT. CIRCLES ARE BASICALLY FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO DRAW.
uu: TRUST ME.
uu: IT’S LIKE A PARADOX. A SHAPE WITHOUT ANGLES. WHAT??
uu: SO I FUCKING CHEATED.
uu: I NAVIGATED THE IRRATIONAL PERIMETER BY MAKING A LOT OF EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE, TOTALLY LOGICAL MARKS. FORMING A WHOLE BUNCH OF LITTLE RIGHT ANGLES.
uu: THE CHEATING PART HAPPENS WHEN I DO THIS A LOT. SO IT GOES IN A ROUND DIRECTION.
uu: THIS ONE CAME OUT WELL I THINK. BUT THERE’S ROOM TO IMPROVE.
uu: I HAVE THEORIZED THAT IF I KEEP MAKING BOGUS CIRCLES LIKE THIS.
uu: WHILE DRAWING MORE AND MORE ANGLES. BUT SMALLER. SO SMALL THAT YOU START CAN’T SEEING THEM.
uu: THAT THE ILLUSION OF THE CIRCLE WILL BE COMPLETE! AND PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IN THE FAKE CIRCLE. LIKE A BUNCH OF SUCKERS.
uu: I BET NOBODY HAS THOUGHT OF THAT CIRCLE STRATEGY. I THINK I’M THE FIRST AT THIS IDEA. AND BEST AT IT ALREADY.
uu: PEOPLE THINK I’M DUMB. ESPECIALLY THE VOICE IN MY HEAD.
uu: AND THEY MAY BE RIGHT ABOUT ME BEING DUMB.
uu: BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE SPECIAL WAY I DO THINGS. WHICH IS ALWAYS ACTUALLY. THE PERFECT WAY.
uu: I AM.
uu: A GENIUS!

But after 2011 “Hussie” was up to nothing except his old tricks, and those tricks got a little worn out, and “Hussie” was always – reliably, infuratingly – himself.  The finale was an animation about a frog, which the weird kid had been dreaming about for a decade – executed by a team of up-and-coming artists who had become his acolytes.  It was, sources quote him as saying, “totally epic.”  The weird kid’s next novel is also about a frog, because frogs are cool, but this one has a funny top hat and raps about how dumb Stacey is.  The new frog’s flow is impeccable, but the critics focus sensibly on other matters, and they are ruthless this time.

In my fullest period of Homestuck obsession, I frequently compared “Hussie” to Nabokov.  This was a cute way of elevating “Hussie” and making myself sound smart, but there’s a real similarity there: the arrogant, seemingly artificial public persona; the unique and somewhat cramped sensibility, which is always great without stopping to be good; the indifference to all creative work besides their own and certain cherished reference ponts; the endless self-satisfied running-the-hands-over the artist’s own prior work and pre-existing obsessions; the elevation of those obsessions, in all their petty particularity, to higher and higher reaches of formal brilliance and technical achievement.  (See also.)  They take the treasured trivialities of their former years and make them “worthy of legitimate attention” by associating them with ingenuities of formal structure; to coin a word, they’re “nostalgebraists.”

Nabokov fooled them all, and got his star on the canonical map in the end, but “Hussie” may never pull it off.  It feels, anyway, like he had a chance and then lost it.

Ph.D blues (don’t reblog, will probably delete later, just a standard freakout that will pass, and soon it will be done and there will be no more of those)

Keep reading

A period which didn’t really get any representation on there was the bad relationship in 2014 and the contemporaneous writing of the first ~50% of Floornight – it’s disappointing because I want more memories of that period, not of the badness (which I remember in a lot of detail) but where my mind was when the badness wasn’t happening

It feels very weird that I was writing Floornight during that time, the influences on it are obvious but it occupies a totally different space in my mind

I wrote most of the first LUDWIG chapter on that girlfriend’s couch while she was out, and the very idea of just feeling safe and okay while on that couch is hard to remember retrospectively

nostalgebraist:

I was listening to my iTunes library in “most played” order and some songs came up that gave me very specific nostalgia for particular times in my NYC / grad school years (because I’d listened to them many times in a short, specific period of time), and I realized I wanted to catalogue all the songs that do that, so I made a playlist

Not necessarily the best songs I listened to in those years, although I liked them enough to listen to them a lot – just ones that I associate with very specific memories of a particular few weeks or months

(They’re in chronological order, but no attempt was made to make a comprehensible narrative.  Although some narrative trajectory may emerge in parts of it naturally I guess)

This is clearly, at least in large part, an illusion due to the associations (which I can’t transmit), but I have this strong feeling that if you listen to these songs you’ll gain some deep understanding of me

It was a pretty isolated time (especially the first three years or so) and a number of different little ecosystems got the chance to successively develop in the fertile echo chamber of my mind

I was listening to my iTunes library in “most played” order and some songs came up that gave me very specific nostalgia for particular times in my NYC / grad school years (because I’d listened to them many times in a short, specific period of time), and I realized I wanted to catalogue all the songs that do that, so I made a playlist

Not necessarily the best songs I listened to in those years, although I liked them enough to listen to them a lot – just ones that I associate with very specific memories of a particular few weeks or months

(They’re in chronological order, but no attempt was made to make a comprehensible narrative.  Although some narrative trajectory may emerge in parts of it naturally I guess)

Just remembered a conversation with my old undergrad thesis adviser (early 2010), where I was getting close to done, and he remarked “you may be discovering a certain compulsive element in yourself”

That was very much the sort of thing that sounded natural and non-patronizing coming out of his mouth (physics prof in his 70s, with the reputation of being a “deep thinker” and the elderly gravitas to match), and it was also clearly true.  I was thinking about this as I wrote more labored exposition for my graduate thesis.  I was thinking my writing probably sounded like it did in my undergrad thesis (7 years ago!), and on a whim I re-read some of my undergrad thesis, and it did.  Because I always want to clarify everything conceptually, spelling out “there is this and then there is this and here’s an analogy that helped me understand how they are different,” saying why we’re doing X and not X’ by launching into a list of all the ways X and X’ differ or might differ, breaking everything down into discrete distinct cells with explicitly explained boundaries between each and its neighbors

I’m not a wizard with mathematical manipulations or with vaulting abstraction, and I’m not especially “creative” in mathy stuff, either.  If I am good at anything it is taking the stuff people have already said, thinking over it for way more time than anyone else would need to understand it “for practical purposes,” and then spitting out a lovingly compulsive account the stuff they said as a formal structure – one presented in long-winded prose, not in actual specs

I’m just not very good at attaining the “for practical purposes” sense of any technical concept that people are expected to in the mathematical sciences – if I try to, I get a concept formed the wrong way, and I make bad inferences from it, and I end up the dim bulb in the room.  (I do try, and that is what happens.)  Either I don’t get it, or I get it, and once I get to the latter state, I can at least explain the thing in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a dim bulb.  A way I’m proud of.  I explain the fuck out of those things.

In the folder for my undergrad thesis, I opened up a text file, and it was full of many earnest notes to myself, categorizing the papers I was reading (in terms of “software,” “problem,” and “sophistication,” the latter referring to a three-point, precisely defined scale for model complexity I had invented earlier in the notes), trying to reconcile statements I’d read in papers or textbooks that seemed contradictory (I have since learned that academics sometimes write things that are not strictly true, because the intended reader will “know what they mean”), noting down conceptual things I didn’t understand and then the solutions I’d figured out.

I forgot just how much systematic thought I put into that thing!  I wonder if anyone ever read it.  (I’m not whining about this; I knew at the the time that no one reads undergrad theses.)  I mean, I didn’t even finish doing the scientific thing I actually set out to do anyway.  But the exposition of the background material (which comprises 80% of the text) was good, in that compulsive way!  When I had to, say, describe the models I’d been reading about in the literature, I did invent a precise definition of the “type of model” they were and give it a made-up name and corresponding acronym, but you know, that was a sensible thing to do!  It helped!

Just in the course of writing this post I remembered that, when I’d been horribly confused by the very informal textbook for a first-year graduate course, I briefly took to writing up my own set of TeXed notes, written like a textbook with an authorial voice (“so future students won’t have to be confused,” I thought bombastically).  I only got 11 pages in before giving up, and the thing is full of stuff like

Scaling arguments are formally similar to perturbation theory arguments. The difference is that in a scaling argument, we do not consider small deviations from an “unperturbed problem,” but instead cause certain terms in a problem to become small by pulling out factors that reflect estimates of the size of each term in the problem. Typically there will be no identifiable “basic” state relative to which “small deviations” are occurring.

(Later, “the scaling procedure” is specified as a 6-point list.)

Of course, there’s a certain group of people in this territory who love to insist on strict conceptual clarity – the pure mathematicians.  But I like applications (and, TBH, am just not that abstract of a thinker).  You can get books and papers that present a given application “for mathematicians,” but with those the conceptual clarity hitches a bunch of other baggage for the ride.

I’m starting to feel more and more affinity for the programming/CS world, because it tends to be compulsive about concepts and their boundaries the way I am – in my case just by nature, but in programming you need to be that way, both (trivially) because you have to state things precisely to program a computer, but (more interestingly) because bad abstractions quickly start causing real consequences and real headaches for real people, and “carelessly conflating two very similar categories” is not a pedant’s pet issue but the kind of thing that actually makes things break.

Posting any kind of potentially controversial stuff on here stresses me out – like I woke up this morning worried that someone might have yelled at me for that post last night.  Which wouldn’t be the end of the world, right?  I dunno, it’s stupid and oversensitive, but that kind of thing does stress me out, to a extent comparable to other, “bigger deal” stressors.  I think because of the “latent sense I’m a bad person which will reassert itself if presented with the slightest apparent confirmation" thing.

I was sick yesterday and spent a lot of the day reading Trump news + tumblr and getting scared about everything, and all the Spencer-punching-euphoria was making me extrapolate even more scary realities, but I don’t think posting actually helps with any of that.  I should just be a friendly #quotes merchant and that sort of thing, I’m too much of a delicate flower for discourse

(Read more books, Rob, don’t look at the computer – reading books can even give you historical perspective on the present if you want)

I’m working on the introduction to my thesis now, and it’s actually been really fun, because I’ve had to do a super-speedy tour of a bunch of tangentially relevant literature (much of which I’d only read a very long time ago, if at all), and I have a much better understanding now of various things that confused me on my first encounters with the same material.  Some of that is more “scientific maturity” or w/e, but some of it is just that if you breeze through enough papers in a short enough time, you get a clearer sense of how vague some of the terminology is.

Some terms get used in different ways by different authors, and if you’re ingesting papers at a slower rate then it’s easy to chalk this up to some confusion of your own.  But when you blast through a bunch of papers and get them simultaneously in tabs/windows you start to notice that, no, one author clearly means something different by this term than some other author – once you place a paragraph from one paper next to a paragraph from the other, it’s inarguable.  In one case today, I even found an author carping about the ambiguity of one of these terms in a footnote!  And it sure feels good to know that sometimes it’s not me, it’s them.

aprilwitching

replied to your post

“I identify as a rando Like, my anxious/self-hating fantasies have…”

i dont think so. like a “rando” in this sense is usually someone who’s being rude or mean or egregiously invasive, and *knows it*. sometimes maybe they think their rudeness/meanness/invasiveness is justified, or funny. sometimes maybe they are having a hard time regulating their tone and making good choices about how to approach strangers on the internet due to some brain-detrimental factor, like say maybe they’re drunk, or bipolar, or seventeen.

certainly i have some sympathy for some of those people. i’ve been told off for my chronic Foot-In-Mouth Disease a whole lot in my life, and even if you know you fully deserve to be told off it’s still really embarrassing and it can still hurt your feelings. but i just dont think youre like that, really– sometimes you can be a little socially tone deaf, perhaps, but ive never seen you engage with literally anybody by insulting them, mocking them, throwing around wild

accusations about their beliefs, character, intentions, etc. if you make a habit of harassing strangers on the internet, it’s sure news to me! i think a lot of socially anxious people, or people with histories of being bullied/mistreated/ridiculed for being kind of awkward or harmlessly odd, end up with this idea that theyre really big jerks, or somehow hurting/burdening/harassing other people just by existing or trying to interact with anyone in any way. this is sad,

and not true! i DO think that it can result in increased understanding and compassion for people who are socially off-putting or difficult to like in any way, which is admirable. but sometimes, in some people, i think that tendency can slide into a failure to recognize real malice, or into making excuses for interpersonal behavior that is seriously out of line and should be rebuked. like, i am thinking now of that whole conversation surrounding dick pics from early 2016.

also i am thinking of an attitude i occasionally see that….hm. somehow being….not even a jerk really, but just, like, sort of unfriendly, or exasperated, or snarky….in response to someone who IS in fact being a jerk, who is indisputably being a jerk, is, like, THE MOST TERRIBLE THING IN THE UNIVERSE. worse than the jerk’s unprovoked jerkitude by far, at any rate! this is a pretty backwards attitude even in cases where you can make the argument that the person

being jerked at could and should have responded more politely (or just ignored the jerk). uh, these are way too many thoughts for this post already, man, im sorry. i hope you dont feel flooded! but my last one was, i guess– you specify in this post that in your fantasy, the takedown would be stern but fair/polite/measured. well, that wouldn’t be so bad, really, would it? that’s a world away from mockery and ostracism (which, beg pardon if im totes off base here, kinda sounds like it might be what youre actually afraid of?) …i mean, when someone rebukes or corrects you in a way that’s not rageful or gratuitously insulting/embarrassing/aggressive, in a way that makes it clear to you what (they think) you said or did that was wrong/hurtful, isn’t that a kindness? far from treating the “rando” as less than human (as one response to this seems to be implying), or making him a target for schadenfreude, that sort of response says “listen,

you’re being a real asshole right now, but i believe in your capacity to not be an asshole. i am demonstrating this belief by engaging with you in the best faith i can, by actually taking the time out of my day to explain things to you". i’m not saying super mean, mocking rebuttals don’t happen (they sure as hell do) or that a lot of people don’t enjoy reading the occasional savage takedown of Some Blowhard Or Jerk Or Ignoramus On the Internet. i’m just saying that’s not what youre describing here and…well, actually maybe you know that, and ive read this whole thing wrong. sorry rob. thanks for ur time

No problem!!

I think I’m generally not a very angry person – like, I really do not get angry that often, compared to what is the norm as far as I can tell – but also, this fear I’m describing causes me to be less forthright, and less insulting / flippant, than I otherwise would be.  So what you’re seeing is kind of an overcorrection?

It isn’t that I think I’m this rowdy, fight-starting person by temperament (I’m not) – the fear is that if I do, on some occasion, act aggressively, this will be perceived as baffling and inappropriate.  People will ask “what was that guy’s problem?” as a non-rhetorical question, because they’ll actually be confused.  What I feel kinship with is not the drive-by anon who makes a predictable objection (“lol, typical leftist scum…”), but the person who has a totally unanticipated pet issue and thinks you are just the worst for not anticipating it.  Because that is the way I expect (I mean, this self-hatey part of me expects) my aggression to be received, as making a big deal out of some out-there thing.

And so in that context, a “properly mean” response would be almost … dignifying? validating? … since in that case we would be two angry people having a fight, on the same plane, as though my thing is the sort of thing people have fights about.  Whereas the “graceful” responses can feel like I’ve made this “aberration” in the social fabric that is being quickly and efficiently closed, that people are telling me “look, I don’t know why you thought that was OK, and I’m going to explain why, but now let’s calm down and pretend it never happened, all right?”  Like the primary issue is not that I’m even wrong, or mean, but that I’m “acting up” like a child who inexplicably gets up and starts body-slamming the wall or throwing school supplies on the ground, and the socially indicated response is to convey with stern maturity that this is a Nonsense Action and get the kid back to their seat, not to engage them on their own terms (whatever those even are).

(To be clear, I’ve never even been that kid, not when I was a kid, I had Tourette’s but I was meek even back then)

I identify as a rando

Like, my anxious/self-hating fantasies have always been about committing some egregious moral error to the horror of perfectly decent strangers, whose stern but graceful rebukes are then roundly applauded by all, just like some stranger on tumblr/twitter/Facebook who pops up out of nowhere in a rage and gets a snappy yet controlled takedown in response, and some deep part of me feels that that is just the kind of being I am, fundamentally