Neocities.org

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

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

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.

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

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

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")

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)

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)

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

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).

@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.

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

@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

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

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)

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

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

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.

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

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