The Packbats' Weblog

rambling about Classical Music™ and advocacy therefor

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:07:47 GMT

So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.

Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.

The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.

The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.

The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.

Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.

...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.

Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!

But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.

We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.

I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.

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no more turing tests

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 15:18:49 GMT

the question "is this human" has expired - it has become a torment of con artists and cash grabbers

the one, perpetually remaking their machines to deceive us

the other, perpetually demanding that we become harder to fake so they can keep selling us to advertisers

the doppelgangers yell, "I am human!"
the marketers yell, "Prove you are human!"
we all tuck ourselves into corners trying to find respite from the noise

why? why are we being yelled at? why for humanity are we being yelled at?

Alan Turing started with "can machines think?" and went from there to "can machines make humans think they are humans?" but listen to his imaginary machines

his machines talk about poetry, arithmetic, chess, Mr. Pickwick and winter's days

his machines speak honestly to their interrogators, try to understand, try to help

our phone makes a noise after half an hour, because we asked it to in a way it understood

our friends speak honestly, because they want to us to know that they miss clubbing, they like umbreon, they think of a sunrise as a sun, rising

why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make?

why "are you human" instead of "are you good"?

why not "are you good"?

can you tell if something is good to you over a teletype connection? are you good to it?

(edit: followup)

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requires javascript (indiepocalypse social repost)

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 18:35:00 GMT

(thread)

okay, no, actually, I think it's actively harmful when a page is intended to display static information - text and images you can't edit - and requires javascript to do it

any website building tool which functions that way is actively doing harm

no we will not explain

( *proceeds to explain* )

yes, we hate these things because they're rubbish

but we hate them more because they're born out of indifference and callousness at best, and active hostility at worst

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A half-thought-out thought about load times (Blaugust #5)

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 23:20:48 GMT

(Apparently there's some kind of official organization of Blaugust with a Discord or something? Consider this illicit Blaugust content.)

We were talking to Manifold Mindmesh a.k.a Many (cw: 18+-only content) the other week about loading times, and since that conversation, we've started playing with the metaphor of load times as public transit.

If we want to play FTL, for example, we metaphorically hop on a bus, wait for a goodly number of seconds, and then the bus drops us off in the game, where there's basically no load times we've noticed. One bus trip, of some time.

If Many is launching a new world of Dwarf Fortress, fae has quite a formidable trip ahead of faer as the system simulates a whole history before the embarkation fae will be playing.

And if we click a Twitter link ... we have a fair few seconds of bus transit to get to the page at all, and then an additional stop on the bus line every time we scroll down or up on the page. Anything off screen was yanked away and needed to be recovered if we wanted to see it again, and we had to wait for all of that.

And yeah, a long bus trip can be frustrating, but you can at least sleep through it or listen to a podcast or whatever. An incessant series of bus transfers gives you no chance to do that.

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spelling is fake, it's fine (weirder earth repost)

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:53:18 GMT

(original thread version on Weirder Earth, a Mastodon instance using the Hometown fork. Lightly edited.)

"mastodon" is spelled "mastadon" because the 'o' there is reduced to schwa and 'a' is the most schwa-like vowel letter in English. Same thing behind "definite" and "definate" - a schwa got spelled with an 'a', it's phonetic as hell. It sucks when it's in a hashtag because that splits the hashtag, but mostly it doesn't matter which you use - it's just an "uh" sound, it's the most generic sound possible.

Anyway all writing is a lie, if people understand you then you succeeded, go push the grammaticasters into a pool and live your life.

Sorry, that was kind of judgey.

What you're feeling when you cringe at "mastadon" is damage that was done to you. It is all the people who fucked you up because it was more important to them that you looked like a rich white person than that you survived intact - probably because they got fucked up the same way, because that's what generational trauma is. It fucking sucks and I get it.

But the answer to generational trauma isn't to pass it on, it's to heal.

And everyone knows what "mastadon" is. It's the "calling all photocopers xeroxes" word for the microblogging side of fedi.

20 year old Packbats: I know I'm on the Internet, but I'm going to spell everything correctly, with proper grammar, because that's just the kind of man I am!

37 year old Packbats: I'm not a man and spelling is fake and that makes me really mad because "actually, 'muchly' has been a part of English since the 1620s" is a really cool historical fact and completely irrelevant to why this jackass needs to shut the fuck up about our grammar

(yes, we're still bitter about the person who said that "thanks muchly!" was incorrect to us last year - they knew exactly what we meant, they were able to paraphrase it perfectly)

(don't be like that person, thank you and we appreciate it)

Addendum the next morning:

We care about this because that "you must spell it this way" damage isn't just a thing for those of us who do spell it the way we're told, it's a thing for those of us who can't.

Like, listen: we suck at remembering names, they slide right out of our head, they're arbitrary sounds and they barely come up most of the time ... and for a lot of people, that's spellings of words.

Plus there's disabilities affecting writing.

Plus there's differences of education.

And the thing about mocking people who don't spell it the way they "must" is that that mockery always always always lands on those who can't, over and over and over, and is used as justification for shutting down anything they have to say.

It has a discriminatory impact.

It marginalizes people.

Addendum 2: everything we know about schwas we know from that one Language Files video from two years ago. Shoutout to Tom Scott, Molly Ruhl, and Gretchen McCulloch.

(Emeto content warning on video for brief comment+animation about almost throwing up.)

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"free" as in software (dragon.style repost)

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 17:12:59 GMT

We found ourselves ranting a bit about software terminology on dragon.style this morning, and it's the kind of thing that probably should be a blog post, so here is a blog post. Went ahead and added some links to it while I was transferring it over.

( 548 words )

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This is an essay about games.

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 02:27:53 GMT

There are few tools as good as photography at documenting what is there. The camera almost inevitably captures an enormous wealth of detail in that span of time when it admits light into its lens - photography can record the visual element of history with incredible speed, accuracy, and fidelity. This is something to be celebrated.

...but the capturing of images with a camera does not cease to be photography when it is used to other ends.

( 550 words, including mention of food )

- 🐲

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novice pluralblogging: who am I now?

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 01:57:12 GMT

We're ... actually, less new to self-realization as plural than we feel, maybe - 8:52 a.m. on January 11th, 2020 was a hundred and fifty eight and a half days ago, more than five months - but still new.

The hardest, hardest part is knowing who the heck is fronting ever.

Okay, no, maybe times when we have to pretend to be a singleton are worst, but we personally don't have to do that a lot, and we spend a lot of time not knowing who's fronting. Or not being sure. And feeling guilty, because are we being assholes not telling people?

...wow, that's a negative self-talk sentence. I don't endorse that - we don't deserve that.

We struggle because we have - so far, so far as we know - similar priorities, similar skills, and similar memories. Shared memories, as far as we can tell. And we switch seamlessly and reflexively. There are just not very many clear who's-fronting signs, or we-just-switched signs, and we're a bit prone to checking out in case of distress which makes everything much much harder.

Just ... complaining, really, because we couldn't think of anything to write about.

Telling who's fronting is hard.

- 🐍 (I think)

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Link: The Facts In The Case Of Dr. Andrew Wakefield

Thu, 20 May 2010 20:21:23 GMT

Via elynne: the real story of the autism-vaccine saga, in easy to read and visually attractive comic form.

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Paul Cornell's anti-unChristianity

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:06:57 GMT

Via Making Light, Paul Cornell: Wish Me Luck, I'm Going In. What with the recent stalling of the Equality Bill in Britain, he's had enough.

I wish there were a Christian organisation like British Muslims for Secular Democracy, who could liaise with the various gay Christian organisations, but also include those who aren't directly involved, who just think this cause is just. Then there would be a phone number for that liberal voice that the UK media could lay their hands on. If they ever wanted to call it.

In the meantime, I've started a hashtag on Twitter: #godlyforequality. If you're on Twitter, go and have a look, and let's see if we can retweet the message a long way. It's only a tiny thing. It's the least I can do.

I'm not a Christian, and I think that Christianity is factually wrong - but what he's doing here is fighting homophobia, and on those grounds he's fighting for the side of good.

Good luck, Mr. Cornell. Do the right thing.

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Greta Christina: The Top One Reason Religion Is Harmful

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:54:41 GMT

On AlterNet.

Caveat: If the title suggests that you don't want to read this, then please don't read it. I'm mostly posting for my own reference.

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As you know, Bob, Tony Perkins lies a lot for money.

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:14:41 GMT

A link to pass on: Slacktivist explains the lie Tony Perkins is telling for money about the expansion of hate crime legislation to cover LGBT persons. Money quote:

The only extent to which hate-crime protections pertain to "thought" is in the way that all criminal law does, which is to say that motive matters. If you truly believe that the law should make no distinction between accidental manslaughter and premeditated first-degree homicide, because you truly believe that any such distinction constitutes the establishment of "thought crime," then I will accept that you are making this "thought-crime" objection to hate-crime legislation in good faith. (I'll think you're kind of an idiot, but at least a sincere idiot.) But you can't accept that distinction and still argue in good faith that hate crimes are "thought crimes."

P.S. If anyone you know is concerned that hate crime legislation could infringe their freedom of speech, two words: Fred Phelps.

P.P.S. On a related note, a riddle courtesy of eyelessgame in the comments: What terrorist organization has killed more Americans than al Qaeda?

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"and if you’re against it, then get out of the way."

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:36:09 GMT

From baldanders, here and there:

Alan Grayson (D-FL) is my hero. Seriously, he tells it like it is, without fear of the insurance companies, and certainly not without fear of the Republican lie machine:

"We as a party have spent the last six months, the greatest minds in our party, dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote on health care reform. I want to remind us all that Olympia Snowe was not elected President last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of one percent of America's population.

"What America wants is health care reform. America doesn't care if it gets 51 votes in the Senate or 60 votes in the Senate or 83 votes in the Senate, in fact America doesn't even care about that, it doesn't care about that at all. What America cares about is this; there are over 1 million Americans who go broke every single year trying to pay their health care bills. America cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that there are 44,780 Americans who die every single year on account of not having health care, that's 122 every day. America sure cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that if you have a pre-existing condition, even if you have health insurance, it's not covered. America cares about that a lot. America cares about the fact that you can get all the health care you need as long as you don't need any. America cares about that a lot. But America does not care about procedures, processes, personalities, America doesn't care about that at all." [. . .]

"Last week I held up this report here and I pointed out that in America there are 44,789 Americans that die every year according to this Harvard report published in this peer reviewed journal because they have no health insurance. That's an extra 44,789 Americans who die whose lives could be saved, and their response was to ask me for an apology." [. . .]

"Well, I'm telling you this; I will not apologize. I will not apologize. I will not apologize for a simple reason; America doesn't care about your feelings. [. . .] America does care about health care in America. And if you're against it, then get out of the way. You can lead, you can follow or you can get out of the way. [. . .] America understands that there is one party in this country that is favor of health care reform and one party that is against it, and they know why.

"They understand that if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation. They understand that if Barack Obama could somehow bring about world peace they would blame him for destroying the defense industry. In fact, they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon.

"But that's not what America wants; America wants solutions to its problems, and that begins with health care."

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The PA "Seduction Community" Dialogue - Another Response

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 03:40:45 GMT

Day before yesterday, Jerry "Tycho" Holkins commented on his fascination with the deeply disturbing "seduction community", and Mike "Gabe" Krahulik stepped in to play devil's advocate.

I completely see where both of these people are coming from, here. But in this particular case, Tycho is very straightforwardly correct, and Gabe's instinctive fairmindness is misplaced. And normally I wouldn't be so confident staking out my spot in this minefield, but I happen to have an advantage: just last month, a completely unrelated community which I have been involved in discussed this question, and the conclusions of the discussion are pretty clear.

The seduction community, or pick-up artist community, or whatever it's called, explicitly treats sexual relations between persons as a game in which the player - singular - seeks to win against opposition. This attributes an explicit status imbalance in which only the man is an actor (cf. Bark/Bite, "Do You Tell a Football What Time the Superbowl Starts?") and in which sexual congress raises the status of the man and lowers that of the woman. It's sexist, offensive, and wrong.

End of line.

P.S. Obviously, two days being an eternity in the wonderful world of cyberspace, I have been preceded in remarking on this discussion - goblinpaladin, pandagon's Amanda Marcotte.

P.P.S. If there are people reading this is frustrated in their desire to find sexual partners, recall that people are complicated. Anyone offering shortcuts is lying.

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