Neocities.org

Sounds like it was a fun journey

it's like i was really there

As a kid, I remember reading novels while my sister watched Drake & Josh or whatever was on Nickelodeon at the time! That's so bizarre to me now. I don't know how I did. Now even just the sound of Japanese, a language I don't speak, emanating from the anime my girlfriend watches is enough to make reading impossible. I have to either put earplugs in or wear headphones and blast Merzbow

that being said, I've been desensitized to music, and I definitely think you're on to something with your "hottest take". I worry that having constant access to music has distorted my relationship with it, which perhaps has lead me to the most extreme and least musical music possible.

we are on the same wavelength, down to the former competitive pokemon obsession. i also remember telling my friends "nobody really just sits down and listens to music any more", but they just told me i was being pretentious. though i think some people like to have background noise because otherwise they feel lonely -- people have been playing the radio for company for decades

i'm more concerned with people who play podcasts all the time, like they constantly have information drip fed into their skull. anyway, i love the one-thing-at-a-time heuristic! i hadn't thought about it in that particular way. thanks for sharing.

https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/05/regular-pokemon-players-pikachu-brain

re: music, there is a part at the end of Steppenwolf where Harry argues with illusory Mozart about the efficacy of listening to Handel over the radio. Harry says that it's a terrible corruption to be able to listen to this music in situations it wasn't intended for, at horrible audio quality. Mozart counters that despite all that, the magic of the music still somehow breaks through.

But I wonder if listening to the same music over and over desensitizes us to it. I really like your metaphor of addiction, which I don't think I've seen used this way about music before. It really does feel like there are a lot of parallels.

e.g. i'm (supposed to be) studying math right now, and i find myself yearning to listen to YMO because i remember all the nice warm times i've had with them in the past while studying. this is almost the exact same way that my caffeine addiction manifests itself -- i start writing, then remember the one summer i drank enormous amounts of energy drinks and spent all day writing my novella and how "happy" i was

oh yeah, i forgot about podcasts, they're a good example... the popularity of podcasts baffled me for years, like who has time to listen to a random 3-hour conversation between some other people, until i realized that everyone just puts them on in the background.

i had music combined with addiction on the mind lately because i got extremely obsessed with this one song for a few months, played it constantly, thousands of times maybe, showed it to everyone i know, etc.

at one point while putting it on again i likened it to "slipping back under the covers after going to pee on a cold morning", a feeling of relief. i once heard a smoker describe nicotine addiction in a similar way - rather than an addition to one's normal state, it's like a lack that's relieved by a cigarette

anyways after about a month or two of almost nonstop listening, it felt like i'd milked the song completely dry and built up a tolerance to it, listening to it no longer "did" it for me at all, and i could still recall clearly how much "better" it used to sound to me just a month or two ago

then i came back to it and listened to it a single time after what could be seen as a 2 month "tolerance break" of not listening to it at all and it was AMAZING

soooo what was the song?

Totally agreed. I'm working on an essay now with a similar theme, except it's about saving my brain simply by not consuming most media. I do not regularly watch TV, movies, or read fiction and, despite being exposed to them at a young age, I have never played video games. My brain is so sensitive to narrative that if I consume it I will walk around in a haze of fantasy and not have any life of my own left to live.

yea, i agree, multitasking is mid [i say as a person who cannot multitask for the life of me]

not sure if i can resonate with the music take. i am the kind of person to listen to music all the time, i can't imagine leaving my home/commute without my headphones, but i am sensitive to the vibe the music brings to me, so i am generally mindful of the type of music i pick. different occasions have different music, much of it i genuinely admire.

say, i listen to actress [minimalist, repetitive] when i need to focus on something, spin evaboy [energetic, bouncy, has fun things to latch onto] when i move between places, and when i choose to listen to music attentively/critically, i choose to do it whenever and try my best to keep attention on it and engage with it. but generally all the music i spin is the music i engaged with critically at some point.

that said, an interesting observation regarding listening to things on repeat, as i am generally very keen on doing it myself. think im gonna put together a playlist of my top last.fm tracks just to feel something now.

Dude for the month of May I basically quit listening to music for like three weeks & it fixed me.

just an fyi: that biko post has been archived at https://archive.ph/W2GE5

actually, in my flex against entropy, i managed to capture more than half of biko's writing, which admittedly was a bit of a time-sensitive task, but since biko's had enough of a profound influence on me for the short time i've even been aware of them, i'm kind of proud of that feat. not sure what to do with all that writing besides reading it myself tho.

i included the link there mostly as a citation but i do have somewhere else the archived post may come in handy...

perhaps you can compile the archived writings into a pdf and distribute it like samizdat in the smoky backrooms of the internet (email and DMs)

very cool post. i love your mega css file. tufte is indeed a very interesting person! never knew someone could have such strong (and well-formed) opinions about powerpoints.