Neocities

thanks for the comment on my essay about revision -- so happy it struck a chord! i guess it goes without saying but i think "i would be more satisfied with my writing" is a perfectly good justification to edit!

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americasdecline 1 week ago

love this! I was going to comment something similiar — part of my attraction to the slow web is that I don't have to focus on what would get maximum views if I don't want to. Good writing should always keep audience and context top-of-mind, but at the heart of great writing is authentic self-expression. That's the sort of stuff that sticks with people, as opposed to something they "like", scroll past and forget.

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saddleblasters iwillneverbehappy

2 weeks ago

responding a little late re: rote learning. a lot of the people in the classical chinese study discord i'm in, especially the ones that are most generally knowledgable, often post pictures of long texts they've copied, all with very careful and neat handwriting. i think copying, especially by hand, is very much a comprehensive learning method: you're not necessarily conscious of all the things you learn doing it

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saddleblasters 2 weeks ago

copying is essentially a very slow kind of reading. back when the literary language was often very different from the spoken language, comprehension wasn't some immediate thing that could be taken for granted. even the surface grammatical meaning of a sentence might not be obvious. struggling with all of that leads not just to the thoughts the author intended, but all sorts of other alternate possibilities

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saddleblasters 2 weeks ago

the same thing happens when i read mathematics (esp. research papers). for close readings, you treat the written proofs as a "cookbook recipe" for reproducing the argument in your own brain. often there are steps that are unclear at first and which require deep thought, but in the course of trying to understand those, you learn other things the author perhaps didn't intend, or didn't find worth writing

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saddleblasters 2 weeks ago

e.g. many of the developments in algebraic geometry up to the 80s or so could essentially be characterized as ideas people had while reading EGA and SGA.

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saddleblasters 2 weeks ago

I guess what I'm trying to say is simply that reading is a much slower and more complicated process than we might give it credit for, so rote methods of learning like copying and memorizing are ways to trick ourselves into slowing. of course this only works when one is doing it willingly. when forced to memorize or copy by a teacher, many people manage to learn to do so without actually paying attention to the text

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saddleblasters 2 weeks ago

(sorry for writing so much -- in retrospect this probably should have been an email...)

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saddleblasters 2 weeks ago

Also, rereading these now, I realize I was basically doing some version of "redoing" by writing these: taking the ideas you wrote about and reworking them into my own words. I guess this is the particular sort of "copying" that a modern university education generally trains it's students with (as you noted with your reference to "the last few hundred years of scholasticism")

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iwillneverbehappy 2 weeks ago

Thank you for the thoughtful comments and no need to apologize, these are all great. What is interesting to me is how pointless (close) reading is if you don't apply yourself to it 100%, yet how useful it is in learning something. And there's no external way to tell the two apart; it's even difficult for the learner themselves to tell if they are in fact learning something. The "inefficiency" of rote learning (1/2)

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iwillneverbehappy 2 weeks ago

and how easy it is to make it an utter waste of time, plus the fact that the yields aren't immediate or quantifiable, might all be part of the reason why it's looked at so negatively in American schools nowadays, but we lose a lot if we banish it entirely. (2/2)

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asterion saddleblasters

3 weeks ago

2024-12-01. Thank you for following my website.

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

3 weeks ago

saddleblasters

records.html

translation/lyrics.html

translation/index.html

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saddleblasters 3 weeks ago

New record (about dogs, Zazen Boys and the heavenly principle) and added a section for translations (just some song lyrics for now)

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projectc190 3 weeks ago

cui jian mentioned....

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

4 weeks ago

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siqu 4 weeks ago

wondering if you ever found something as meaningful as newpants in your searchings of new music. It seems like there's a wall after a certain age where one is fated to keep playing the same tunes

saddleblasters

1 month ago

I added a new saddle record today, though the update's been suppressed because I was editing some old posts this morning and (foolishly) thinking I wouldn't post anything else today, I'd deleted the update notification. Read it here: https://saddleblasters.neocities.org/records#twentytwo

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siqu 1 month ago

Games are strange to think back on for sure. That tendency to try to pull more meaning out of it is pathological probably since it was an all-encompassing presence. And that if you somehow figure it out you could recover the joy from it -- also, I wonder if there's a term for what you described: those trying to hype and slather makeup on something that feels hollow

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daliwali 1 month ago

i've checked out some of those bands you linked to, you have quite the interest in "no-audience underground" music. i honestly don't know much about Chinese rock beyond Cui Jian, or more recently, Chinese Football (and that is only because i'm a fan of American Football).

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saddleblasters 4 weeks ago

@daliwali thanks for looking at the bands i link to -- at least 50% of why i write on this website is to trick other people into exploring the music i like. cui jian is great, especially his lyrics, and chinese football is definitely a big part of the zeitgeist in shanghai: i feel like that's become the default sound for college students starting their first band to imitate.

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saddleblasters 4 weeks ago

i do like some popular rock bands! thanks to your comment, i spent some time today cleaning up this essay i wrote last year about New Pants, which is simultaneously one of China's most popular rock bands and is (or at least once was) very good imo: https://saddleblasters.neocities.org/essays/231130

saddleblasters 4 weeks ago

@siqu yeah, i think a lot of the issue for me is the gulf between what was once "an all-encompassing presence" for my childhood and even early 20s, and the fact that now video games have come to more or less a dead end for me emotionally. a lot of the other things i cared about as a kid did continue to grow into something that still has relevance to me now, yet video games still seem to lie dormant inside of me

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siqu 4 weeks ago

it seems like the only way to extend videogames is to make videogames, but it's just such an endeavor

saddleblasters 4 weeks ago

and that was precisely the problem I had with making games: I was ultimately just trying to turn all of that emotional investment accumulated over the years into something "valuable". By it's very nature this forced me to constantly be empathising with my previous selves, taking all their feelings seriously, which was too exhausting (though maybe this is just an excuse)

siqu 3 weeks ago

don't think there's anything wrong with trying to get a return on investment. it'd be cool to make a videogame, and that alone is enough justification. it's just frustrating since it's a multi-disciplinary product -- music, sprites, sounds, design, story and then the actual programming. you'd have to _really_ want to make a videogame to push through all of those roles, to where it makes more sense to invest elsewhere

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saddleblasters

1 month ago

Would anyone be interested if I started an East Asian literature webring? Maybe doing so would motivate me more to write about some of what I've been reading lately...

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projectc190 1 month ago

i cant say ive been very immersed in easian literature myself but id be interested to hear about what youve been reading and i might have to get into chinese classics tbh

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iwillneverbehappy 1 month ago

I would be interested! I think I remember a while back someone had a chinoiserie reading group on neocities. I didn't participate at the time but I thought it was really cool.

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siqu 1 month ago

instead of an article it could be excerpts and thoughts on those excerpts, to lighten the task

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iquehistoria updated iQue History Club 神游历史爱好俱乐部

1 month ago

twitter.html

updatelog.html

iQue History Club 神游历史爱好俱乐部

saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

1 month ago

saddleblasters

records.html

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palmistshouse 1 month ago

Doddodo mentioned >:-)

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saddleblasters 1 month ago

I relistened to her after writing this and feel bad calling her "just a distant memory". I need to listen to her some more!

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

1 month ago

saddleblasters

records.html

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saddleblasters 1 month ago

putting up some old micro-saddles I wrote a few weeks ago but never actually posted. I have another one for tomorrow hopefully that I need to clean up a bit first.

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saddleblasters museariadne

3 months ago

I've been feeling bad about not participating in this since the very first prompt, so I decided to submit some incredibly late entries for prompts I like from months past. Here's my attempt to write about "time" for the april 1st prompt: https://saddleblasters.neocities.org/muse/2

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tehuan 3 months ago

this was such an awesome read. i love the way you think & explore that thinking in it :] super cool to hear about

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

3 months ago

muse/index.html

muse/1.html

muse/2.html

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

3 months ago

saddleblasters

records.html

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

3 months ago

saddleblasters

journal/index.html

journal/misc1.html

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suttaslime 3 months ago

"Deep knowledge is never full knowledge, yet it contains many times the burden that one has happily and willingly half-knowing" - this is a sentence i'll carry with me now, somewhere in the back of my head. i hope i take it to heart!

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

3 months ago

saddleblasters

journal/reflected.html

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

4 months ago

saddleblasters

essays/240829.html

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saddleblasters updated saddleblasters

4 months ago

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palmistshouse 4 months ago

I’ve never heard of WEC before, I’ll have to check it out

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saddleblasters 4 months ago

There's definitely plenty in it to like for Neocities people. It's a lot of fun to flip through, even if I find it a little obnoxious sometimes

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poptartbox saddleblasters

4 months ago

this is absolutely my favorite site on neocities. every time i come back and make an update, this is the first place i come to. i hope you never stop writing here. and if you do, then i hope i can continue to learn about your experiences some other way.

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saddleblasters 4 months ago

thank you so much! i'll try my best to never stop writing, though i'm sure the frequency with which i post on here will continue to be sporadic, unfortunately

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saddleblasters

5 months ago

My friend Balckwell's novel is now free! A lot of what you might have read on my website started out as conversations with him. If you've enjoyed any of my writing, then please take a look at his! https://balckwell.itch.io/only-in-dreams

9 likes