[HN Gopher] What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?
___________________________________________________________________
What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 165 points
Date : 2022-02-12 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (douglasadams.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (douglasadams.com)
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Adams himself says "I like to think he's the kind of person who
| would have an Apple Mac", which suggests an existence for the
| character that is not strictly confined to the sequence of words
| published in the books.
| mattl wrote:
| He had a beige PowerMac G3 and he ran Rhapsody on it and he loved
| it.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Strange. Not funny. But the key of creating of an artificial
| world is not that they are artificial but it is a world. And we
| concern with the character because that world is linked to this
| world. Obviously some question is crazy. But what is his
| favourite food in earth, what tv programme he liked to watch ...
| all valid questions. The storyline may mean it is not what the
| writer want to create. But the world is independent from the
| author somewhat. If he cannot add to it, we can. That is the
| fundamental argument for the arthur not the only voice matter in
| the world it created.
| bombcar wrote:
| I feel this answer is really the only fair one - unless you DO
| have it as part of the story or the story background these kinds
| of "fan questions" lead to flippant answers that are designed to
| fit the current day.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I'm not well versed in fiction. I am curious though, is there a
| subset of authors that are more into comprehensive world building
| than Douglas Adams? Would JK Rowling respond the same way? I
| suspect not
| blahedo wrote:
| N.K. Jemisin is a currently-active author who is _phenomally_
| good at world-building. (Also, resists the urge to show off the
| world just-because, and instead reveals it organically as the
| main POV characters interact with it. Highly recommend.)
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| In fantasy, I'd recommend Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, and
| Malazan as some of the best examples of deep worldbuilding.
|
| Wheel of Time in particular.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| Oh boy do I have an answer for you.
|
| Steven Erickson, Ian C. Esslemont and their friends spent a
| decade world building while playing table top games. First
| Erickson then Esselmont started pouring over that world into
| the Malazan series.
|
| It is, without question, the largest, most complicated, most
| inspiring entertaining engaging and satisfying collection of
| plots, sub plots, sub sub plots, sub sub sub plots, super
| plots, super super plots and possibly super super super plots.
| I'm only 2 re-reads in - people who are into their 4th or 5th
| re-read tell me they are still discovering layers.
|
| The downside is that the first book in the series - Gardens of
| the Moon - is ridiculously difficult to get started with.
| There's a read-along blog that Tor did that helped me get
| through it - but it's still a challenge. I had to downgrade
| from an audiobook to an ebook and then to a paperback because I
| kept flipping back to remind myself who someone/something was.
| nottorp wrote:
| You mean the kind of comprehensive world building that ends up
| with the book reading like an AD&D manual? Not everyone enjoys
| that.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| It doesn't have to be in the book, it can still influence the
| book to make it internally consistent and well motivated.
| davidgerard wrote:
| that's not a plus point for Rowling, it's turned out
| throwanem wrote:
| Look to the subgenres of science fiction called "hard" and
| "high concept".
|
| In hard sf, scientific plausibility is a major desideratum -
| Andy Weir's _The Martian_ is a widely known recent example,
| with the entire story built on a foundation of entirely
| plausible near-future space engineering. (It 's also a somewhat
| rare example in which this focus on feasibility does not come
| at the cost of characterization.)
|
| In the related but distinct high-concept sf, the story is
| designed around a given concept such as "what if humans became
| telepathic?" or "what if FTL communication was possible but FTL
| travel was not?", and serves to explore the consequences of
| this idea in great detail. Unlike hard sf, the concept doesn't
| have to be plausible, but like it, one often encounters stories
| where the concept outweighs the characters. I think Adrian
| Tchaikovsky's _Children of Time_ is a good example here,
| outdoing the reputation of its field by using its concept to
| tell a compelling and beautiful story that also happens to be
| about giant sapient jumping spiders.
| Macha wrote:
| Tolkien is the obvious example. The Silimarillion always struck
| me as a worldbuilding reference forcibly turned into a story.
| George R. R. Martin is a modern example.
|
| The level of importance of world building really depends on
| what the goal is. I don't think h2g2 would have been majorly
| improved by a lot of world building, but I can appreciate the
| world building that's been done for Pratchett's Discworld,
| though that's as much a reflection on the length of that series
| than Pratchett's priorities
| fragmede wrote:
| Douglas Adams has build numerous comprehensive worlds so I
| don't think it's that. Computers, and the speed with which
| they've changed, are a particular detail of world building that
| makes the sort of snarky answer given by Douglas Adams
| necessary. You see, if he'd written that Arthur Dent had an
| Apple ][, with a 1.023 MHz CPU, 4 KB of RAM and an audio
| cassette interface, as was the newest thing available in 1978
| when the first version of the story aired, then any readers
| later on would have been jarringly taken out of the carefully
| built world, and forced to check when a computer with 4 KB of
| RAM was modern, assuming their eyes didn't glaze over first.
|
| JK Rowling exercised similar authority in the world she created
| for Harry Potter, as the Muggle Prime Minister was never named
| and naming the Prime Minister Sir John Major or Tony Blair
| would have done a similar disservice to that world.
| II2II wrote:
| Dirk Gently had a reference to the Macintosh II. Perhaps not
| a specific model, but enough to date the book. I think the
| truth is he was an enthusiast and simply dropped in
| references on whim. Besides, he never really struck me as a
| world builder since the stories seemed to craft the world
| rather than the other way around.
|
| You are right about technology references being jarring. I
| nearly died laughing while reading the Wrath of Khan about a
| decade after its release. The size of a game mentioned in the
| book was dwarfed by games at the time I was reading it by
| over an order of magnitude.
| throwanem wrote:
| Adams says as much as that he's not a "world builder" in
| the linked article, yeah.
|
| I get it. I've done extensive worldbuilding for a couple of
| stories, and it can be a lot of fun! You find yourself
| researching everything from the geological and
| climatological history of Earth to the detailed mechanics
| of gravitational slingshots. And then most of that ends up
| not really mattering all that much to the story, because
| for the most part what matters in a story is the characters
| and their relationships, and the worldbuilding mainly goes
| to determining what situations and circumstances can
| feasibly arise. And then you probably end up throwing out
| or reworking a bunch of it anyway, when you have a
| compelling scene that the research says can't happen, and
| the scene does more for the story than all the
| worldbuilding in the world.
|
| Worldbuilding is best done with caution and in moderation -
| it's useful to an extent, but it can also easily become a
| rabbit hole at the cost of the story it's meant to support.
| You'll rarely err by spending less time in research and
| more with the characters whose stories you are after all
| trying to tell.
|
| (Granted, given Adams' prior experience as a _Doctor Who_
| scriptwriter that gave rise to his most famous series, and
| also his legendary work-shyness, I don 't really credit him
| with having thought the whole thing far enough through to
| identify the general case. But who cares? His most famous
| series is famous for a reason, and I've never really felt
| the lack of a concordance describing the complete history
| of the Vogon bureaucracy or a Wikipedia page about
| Milliways.)
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The Macintosh II was released in 1987, the same year that
| Dirk Gently was published. Specific models (like the IIx)
| weren't released until the following year. Despite his
| reticence in TFA it's obvious that Adams knew exactly which
| computers his characters were working with, because they
| were exactly the same computers that Adams worked with and
| loved.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Adams also often made jokes about the Macintosh Portable.
| In particular about how non-portable it was (it came with a
| huge lead-gel battery)
| wildzzz wrote:
| The lack of cell phones seems obvious at first but then you
| realize that wizards don't need them. I liked how Harry
| Potter could have taken place at almost any point during the
| 20th century and beyond.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I'm reminded of an excellent tweet from a while back:
|
| > Someone told me that Harry Potter is supposed to take
| place between 1991 and 1998 which is ridiculous because not
| once in seven books does a single character say, "Man the
| Chicago Bulls are having a hell of a run huh?".
| rjsw wrote:
| The books are set in a fantasy version of the UK, you
| would have been very unlikely to hear any reference to
| the Chigago Bulls during that time in real life.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Then surely someone would at least mention the Spice
| Girls
| randallsquared wrote:
| The story timelines largely predate the availability of
| cell phones, but Rowling was quite specific about when it
| is set, with exact dates mentioned for key points in the
| story:
|
| https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Dating_conventions
| aesthesia wrote:
| Not quite: at one point there's a reference to a non-wizard
| character having a PlayStation, which I found kind of
| jarring to read at the time, precisely because it pinned
| the story down to a very particular point in time.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Yeah, but it was a very minute throwaway line.
| abruzzi wrote:
| If you take a creative writing class you'll find it is very
| common to give characters agency beyond what the author wants
| (e.g. I was going to have her do this, but she disagreed and
| did that...) and part of that is building a larger world,
| creating backstory for the characters. A great example is in
| the Quentin Tarantino film "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" the
| main character stars in a Hollywood wester TV series. Even
| though the movie only shows a tiny bit of the series while
| they're filming a couple scenes, apparently Tarantino wrote
| several full episodes of the hypothetical series. This kind of
| backstory writing seems to be pretty common. (My MFA is in
| creative writing, so I spent a lot of time with other writers.)
| jancsika wrote:
| > "What kind of Apple Mac did Arthur Dent have?" is a completely
| unanswerable question.
|
| No, he just doesn't want to answer it. Which is fine.
|
| But there are like, hundreds of other writers who would expound
| in great detail on the type of computer and its relationship to
| the story-- until their handler scoots them off to sign
| autographs or pay bills or whatever.
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| And they would all be less funny and insightful than Douglas
| Adams.
| jancsika wrote:
| That's just an appeal to authority. You're essentially
| claiming that the question is unanswerable because Douglas
| Adams-- a funny and insightful author-- said so. Meanwhile,
| I'm quite sure Frank Herbert would talk at length about
| little details of his characters and goings on in the Dune
| universe.
|
| Hell, even Linus understood this-- see the "s is sad"
| commit[1] from a four-year-old and Linus' relevant rant[2].
|
| It's delightful to me that the world's crankiest operating
| system maintainer is more willing to entertain trifles than a
| fiction writer!
|
| 1: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/l
| in...
|
| 2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255
|
| Edit: clarification
| Veen wrote:
| It's not that the question is unanswerable, but that there
| are competing conceptions of what fiction is. For some
| writers, what's in the book is all there is. The characters
| don't have a life outside of the book. Nothing happens to
| them after the narrative or before it or outside of it.
| There is no world beyond what they create. If a detail
| isn't included in the text, then it doesn't exist. Asking a
| question like "what mac?" is a sort of category error. It's
| like asking Edvard Munch what the man depicted in _The
| Scream_ had for breakfast.
| iqanq wrote:
| ...yet he still chose to specify that his computer was an Apple
| computer, and not just a computer.
| fartcannon wrote:
| At the time, that meant something. Now that'd be like saying
| your coffee is from Starbucks. It's expensive, bad for the
| environment, has a lot of blood on its hands, supports slave
| labour, and is a symbol of status for billions. It says
| something different about the character in today's world.
| iqanq wrote:
| And the original question says:
|
| >Was it a snazzy little all in one number, or a hideous boxy
| thing?
|
| Which would also say something about the character.
| fartcannon wrote:
| As I wrote it, I was thinking about the character and
| honestly? I think he'd still have a Mac. Arthur was kind of
| an asshole.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Exactly. Trying to define the machine dilutes it's
| symbolism; it's not an SE/30 or a IIx, it's a Macintosh.
| A literal plot device.
| Schiphol wrote:
| Well, I don't think Dent's heart is mentioned in the Hitchhiker's
| books but still he has one. Why? Because he is a human being, and
| by default those have hearts (although Adams could have made it
| otherwise).
|
| The general point is that inevitably works of fiction drag truths
| from the real world into the fictional one. Many things (and
| perhaps which Apple computer Dent had in particular) are neither
| true nor false in the relevant fictions, but that doesn't mean
| that inquiring whether they are is nonsensical or misguided.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I have the same kind of bafflement that he does here whenever
| anyone starts really getting into the details of fictional
| characters. I see it often when people get upset when a character
| on a TV show or in a video game changes in some way. I can't
| relate to it at all, I don't understand it. If you were perfectly
| willing to pretend this character exists at all, why can't you
| just pretend they're still the way you want them to be? None of
| it is real, it can be anything you want to imagine!
|
| Why _would_ anyone care what kind of computer Arthur Dent had?
| ksherlock wrote:
| The book (So Long and Thanks for all the Fish) was published in
| November of 1984. At that time, there were only two models of
| Macintosh - the 128 (released in January) and the 512 (released
| in September). Numbering and naming didn't start until the 512
| was released so the Mac 128 was originally named simply
| "Macintosh".
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| That's right. There were no variants of the gen-1 Macs (if you
| ignore Lisa.) The 512 was nicknamed the Fat Mac, and IIRC there
| was a hardware upgrade path from the 128 to a 512: as a result
| many former 128s "silently" became 512s and you wouldn't notice
| this fact unless you looked carefully at the back (or popped up
| "About this Macintosh...", or wrote the check yourself.) I
| think we ended up with 128s that went all the way to 1MB (Mac
| Plus?) internals eventually, but my memory may be playing
| tricks on me.
|
| Here's Douglas Adams' Mac SE in the UK computing museum:
| https://twitter.com/andytuk/status/731523049221181440?s=21
| pmarreck wrote:
| > and IIRC there was a hardware upgrade path from the 128 to
| a 512
|
| Yep, my parents paid for that upgrade, on my incessant
| prompting... and now I honestly can't remember if we went to
| 512k or 1MB... There were some things, I believe, that
| required at least 512, like I think VideoWorks (which
| eventually became what everyone now knows as Flash, and which
| was REALLY fun to play with at the time!)
| axegon_ wrote:
| TIL:
|
| * Douglas Adams has a website which is still operational.
|
| * He died in 2001(I was left with the impression that he died in
| the first half of the 90's for some reason).
| adolph wrote:
| It's interesting that Adams didn't have a particular model in
| mind, that Apple Macintosh could be a generic reference given
| that Adams did do HyperCard development. Maybe he saw that from
| the eyes of a storyteller and not a technologist.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599
|
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19777599
| spdegabrielle wrote:
| Woo cgi that's takes me back. How old is the software running
| this site?
|
| > `cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2`
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I want to believe that cgi script is running on Arthur Dent's
| Macintosh computer and it makes me wonder what model it is.
| Macha wrote:
| Given that it supports TLS 1.3, (HTTPS at all really, given the
| age), IPv6, etc., someone has been maintaining it all these
| years. I have to imagine the dynamic content has long since
| been statically archived, as I'm not sure I'd trust the
| security of any late 90s perl cgi script.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybe they are using Nginx in front of a 90s Perl CGI script?
| bbarnett wrote:
| Or, as you suggest, someone over time kept updating the
| scripts and backend...
|
| EG, small changes over time, is often less work than a
| rewrite.
|
| It's not illegal, or insane to use cgi and perl.
| indymike wrote:
| Every day I visit a site that reminds me how durable code
| really is. I'm starting to see programs that are outliving
| their developers. In many ways it is surprising given the
| amount of churn there is in the techniques and tools we use
| to build software.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Something about CGI and perl always rubbed me the wrong
| way.
|
| On every request, you're spawning a new process from disk,
| reading the entire script's source code (including
| everything it imports), compiling it, and running it, just
| to throw all that away.
|
| I do appreciate how simple it is, and how much it
| inherently frees its own resources, but it seems super
| wasteful. I'm actually quite shocked how common it was in
| the early days of the internet.
| bityard wrote:
| Spawning processes on unix is very cheap, Perl was very
| fast, and even back then disk cache in RAM was a thing.
| It's a perfectly fine solution if your site doesn't need
| to scale, and most do not.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I'm definitely aware, having done a lot of CGI
| programming in perl myself back then. But nowadays it
| just seems so strange to boot up an interpreter and start
| parsing/validating/executing a script from scratch on
| every request. Even if you have disk cache and fast
| process launching, it's just a lot of work you have to do
| each time.
| psd1 wrote:
| What if I told you that my team does that today, for a
| million hits a month, and the process it spawns is
| powershell.
| rabbits77 wrote:
| Perhaps it's reasonable to reflect on how performant CGI was
| and still is. Right now that site is probably receiving more
| traffic than it ever has before and seems to be ably holding
| its own against the hug of death.
|
| Of course CGI has scaling issues, that is not deniable, but it
| is still a quite strong technology. I would argue that the main
| reason to avoid CGI is not for performance reasons, few sites
| will encounter those usage levels, but rather because CGI
| coding patterns ultimately end up breaking MVC best practices.
| zajio1am wrote:
| I do not think that it is unreasonable question. I generally
| assume that authors have more ideas about their fictional worlds
| and characters than are revelaed in their books. But there is
| clearly difference between authors about level of their internal
| worldbuilding, where one extreme is Tolkien and opposite one is
| perhaps Douglas Adams.
| twmiller wrote:
| The thing about Adams with regards to world building is that it
| was always story first. This is why he wrote four different
| versions of the actual Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy story.
| One for radio, one for the book, one for the television series,
| and one for the movie. There are differences, sometimes subtle,
| sometimes not, between all of those versions. Many of those
| tweaks were there to make the story fit the intended medium
| better.
|
| He also wasn't afraid to co-opt his universe and shoehorn in a
| story from a different source, if needed. I believe that the
| third book started life as a Doctor Who script.
| usrusr wrote:
| And one for Infocom?
|
| I wonder how much remaining approachable for listeners who
| only jump in on nth episode was a driver of the creative
| process. "Story first" must have meant something very
| different from what we might effect today.
|
| My first contact was hearing it on the radio some night, a
| German language radio version likely created long after the
| books became the defining version. Makes me wonder which
| original version it was closer to. Could have been a close
| translation of the original radio version, could have been a
| radio reboot based on the books.
| arrrg wrote:
| "Did you think of a particular model of Mac when writing that
| Arthur Dent had one?" would be a better question then, but I'm
| not sure that's a particularly interesting question to ask?
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| Even Tolkien was not able to satisfactorily answer fundamental
| questions like the origin of orcs.
| msh wrote:
| I thought that was explained in the Silmarillion
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Read the Silmarillion if you haven't. It's dense (like a
| history book), but explains the machinations of Morgoth and
| Sauron, the creation of Dwarves and Orcs, and clears many
| things up.
|
| The only pity is that J.R.R. Tolkien never finished it, so
| some things like where Hobbits came from or where the Blue
| Wizards went remain (mostly) unaddressed.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| One point of discontent for me: there seem to be no Orcish
| women mentioned ever, but Bolg is a _son_ of Azog.
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| Some of Tolkien's other writings show that he wasn't happy
| with the explanation that ended up in the Silmarillion. He
| had multiple other explanations, and none of those is fully
| canon either.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Seems like the kind of thing that never would have been
| finished no matter how long he lived.
| topynate wrote:
| The Road goes ever on and on...
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Tolkien had an answer that he himself wasn't satisfied with -
| because an "evil race" was fundamentally irreconcilable with
| his Catholic faith.
|
| He talks about it in one of his Letters - and says that's why
| he ended up having to reduce the amount of "orc talk" because
| it was making them sympathetic and he didn't really know how
| to handle it - for the story he wanted generic disposable
| "baddies".
| zajio1am wrote:
| Yes, but it is not that Tolkied did not think about origin of
| orcs, he thought about it but dit not settled on definite
| answer or changed its ideas during time.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I will have to paraphrase this as I do not have a copy and
| cannot find an ebook version for sale - in Languages of the
| Night Ursula K. LeGuin was asked by some famous editor to do a
| talk / article about her research on Earthsea, show the maps,
| lexicon of the language and so forth to which she replied
| something like
|
| "Dear famous Science Fiction editor,
|
| While I know that this is the way many people write, it is not
| the way I do it. "
|
| Her description of her process was that she made it up as she
| went along but because of her characters or locations there was
| always only one reasonable choice. So for example when Vivian
| is biting on Reginald's ankle he says "I do not think this is
| at all pertinent to the matter at hand", because, being
| Reginald what else could he possibly say? (anecdote about
| Reginald and Vivian from the article although no doubt mangled
| by the years between reading and now.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| > Her description of her process was that she made it up as
| she went along but because of her characters or locations
|
| That is a very "local" view of causality and story logic,
| which could lead to an inconsistent world (like a location
| being both a rainforest and a desert), which might not matter
| for the small lart of the world history that is the story, or
| one that leans heavily on defaults inported from the aurhor's
| experience (which might or might not be same as the readers')
| fortyseven wrote:
| I suspect this question's answer was more just an opportunity to
| write what he did for comedic effect, as opposed to any actual
| impossibility of answering the question being asked.
|
| I mean, his entire writing career was dedicated to inventing
| details about people who don't actually exist. That's writing.
| Veen wrote:
| He created the world to tell the story; he didn't tell the
| story to create the world. The story is primary, and if a
| detail is irrelevant to the story, why invent it? Some writers
| do it the other way around: they invent a world and then make
| up stories that happen in it, but I don't think Adams
| approached writing in that way.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The answer is about the story writing process, which is more
| interesting than philosophizing about the model of Dent's Mac,
| which is why I think he chose to answer that way.
| BruceEel wrote:
| What kind of Apple Mac? A Mac!? Somehow I'd convinced myself he'd
| bought a IIGS, I was way off...
| BirAdam wrote:
| Douglas Adams was a comedic genius. His writings covered science
| fiction, philosophy, and adventure... and were constantly amusing
| and hilarious. He wasn't really a world builder in the sense of
| Rowling, Tolkien, or Martin. His worlds were often never fully
| explained as that wasn't the point of his work. His work was to
| raise a laugh and provoke thought, not to convey a complete
| imagined world. The original radio broadcast was in '78. The BBC
| TV series was in '81. The game was in '84. The books were
| released in '79, '80, '82, '84, and '92. It is safe to say that
| in the earliest tellings, Arthur would not have had a computer.
| If he had, it would have been one of the 8bit early micros. By
| '84, he'd likely have had a Macintosh 128k. By '90, he could have
| had a plus, se, 2, or something similar.
|
| The real answer is, Douglas Adams was a Macintosh fan. It's that
| simple.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > Arthur would not have had a computer
|
| Well, at least until he got a hold of one of those Hitchhikers'
| Guides :) (which for all intents and purposes seem like a
| portable, possibly intermittently-networked Wikipedia computer)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| To me, Douglas N. Adams' worlds were always much more
| convincing than Rowling's. They have that accidental, chaotic
| quality, that seems to be the way the real world is rather than
| the way Tolkien's is where everything is viewed through the
| lens of history so thoroughly explained and everything has
| meaning.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Both authors had different aims. Tolkien's aim was to build
| an entire fictional word with a rich history. Adam's aim was
| to reflect upon, and poke fun at, the human condition. (A
| simplification of course.)
| BirAdam wrote:
| That is likely largely because much of Adams's world is
| poking fun at ours.
| jvanvleet wrote:
| Way back when Adams also posted occasionally on his own Usenet
| group. When he did the answers were often very similar. I got the
| distinct impression of someone who had found something he was
| very good at but not particularly interested in doing.
| barrkel wrote:
| Or, someone who was creative and enjoyed creating things, but
| when one or two of them get a fanbase, it becomes a burden,
| because fanbases by their obsessive nature want more of the
| same.
| khendron wrote:
| This brings to mind the time I was at the national art gallery
| listening to a tour/talk by a well renowned sculptor.
|
| Somebody in the group gestured to one of the pieces and asked
| "does the transition of the floor from green to grey signify the
| subject's disillusionment with current environmental policies and
| the increasing hopelessness of contemporary civilization?"
|
| The artist's reply was "I ran out of green."
| Cass wrote:
| The fun thing about art criticism, and the reason I firmly
| believe in the "death of the author" school of critique, is
| that even the choices an artist made in the face of
| constraints, or as a snap decision at three am, often do carry
| some meaning, and not always one the artist themselves
| recognize, either.
|
| Presumably they could've gone out and gotten more green. They
| could've transitioned to bright blue, or purple, or yellow. But
| they looked at the piece done in grey, and instead of going
| "Yikes, that's way more bleak than I thought it would be, I'm
| gonna buy some more green and redo this," they seem to be
| satisfied with the final piece.
|
| And that means that interpretations that find meaning in the
| color choice aren't necessarily invalid just because the artist
| wasn't consciously thinking about what they were doing when
| they ran out of green at 3 am. Or, for that matter, that an
| interpretation of an art piece can't be valid just because it's
| counter to what the artist themselves had in mind.
| echelon wrote:
| I like that we're looking at random gesticulations in state
| space traversal and ascribing complex social meaning to them.
|
| Nobody ever ponders whether the artist's blood sugar was low
| or if their gut microbiome was misbehaving.
|
| I think it speaks volumes for how the human brain works. How
| we interpret the world and look for the meaning in things.
| willhinsa wrote:
| I believe in "death of the author" because I know how GIF
| should be pronounced!
|
| I hope this comment is a _gif_ t of laughter to you in your
| day.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Does this mean that 'char' is also pronounced 'care'?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| When it's short for character, sure.
| mordymoop wrote:
| Or "charisma"!
| SllX wrote:
| Today I learned I have been pronouncing "gift" wrong my
| entire life and I should have been conforming to the "g" in
| "gif" or in "ginger".
| jjulius wrote:
| Gee, I know some gigantic, gentle, geriatric giraffes who
| would take umbridge with that pronunciation.
| PickledHotdog wrote:
| "What if F Scott Fitzgerald came up to earth, said "It's
| pronounced Jatsby", then left?"
| nosianu wrote:
| Because everybody knows GIF means Giraffe Interchange
| Format!
|
| It was invented by rangers in the Serengeti for keeping
| track of Giraffes changing between areas. They made
| graphics illustrating those movements, and the format
| they used became knows as GIF. That's the secret history
| of the image format.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Yikes! The gig is up,after all that overwhelming
| evidence.
| kennywinker wrote:
| To push back a little on this "it's not that deep" line of
| thinking - maybe not in this case but certainly in the past
| when colours were rare and expensive - "i ran out of green" is
| something an artist with a patron or a wealthy background would
| be much less likely to say - while another artist with less
| sound financials might be constantly running short of green.
|
| The colours used by an artist can hint at their financial
| position, it is certainly influenced by the science of pigments
| at the time, and even global trade patterns, extreme weather
| events in the past, war, etc.
|
| I ran out of green can mean different things depending on
| circumstances. Some of those things are pretty interesting.
| Sometimes even a not that deep reason is actually pretty deep.
| :)
| ivanhoe wrote:
| The realistic style of old times also forced the authors to
| use subtle and hidden symbolism to express themselves so that
| the main story of the image (which was usually pre-ordered)
| was not affected. Paintings were meant to be a decoration or
| a source of religious inspiration, and certainly not an
| artist's personal expression - and they'd be out of business
| very quickly if they didn't follow the rules. Now we view the
| art very differently.
| code_duck wrote:
| This is what drove me nuts about literary and art classes, in
| addition to working in an artistic field. I would read artist
| statements from other artists and think wow, that's a bit
| overblown, then talk to them, and it turned they thought it was
| BS too. But it was what curators and collectors were looking
| for. In literature classes, teachers would have specific
| interpretations about symbolism of small details and expect us
| to share the same interpretation and repeat it on tests.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Curators and gallery owners absolutely demand this.
|
| "Everything you need to know is already hanging on the wall"
| is not considered an acceptable response.
|
| The work needs to question, challenge, interrogate, and
| subvert, and artists definitely need to Be Interested in
| specific culturally niche things.
|
| Lit crit, curation, the gallery scene, and visual and musical
| criticism are _alternative industries_ - somewhere between
| symbiotic and parasitic on the creators who make the art.
|
| You can make a very fine career for yourself by developing a
| reputation for making outrageous statements about other
| people's work. Popular music journalism isn't too bad at
| this, but by the time you get to academia it all gets very
| rarefied, meta, bullshitty, and (in reality) aggressively
| careerist.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I mean... They're kind of both right? That's the wonderful
| thing about art: it is kind of a free-form catalyst to your own
| interpretation
|
| EDIT: ah I see others have said essentially the same thing
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| One day I was doing a presentation about my startup and one of
| the video files wasn't playing so I had to stall for time. I
| gave an anecdote about my background and after the presentation
| people started asking me if I did standup comedy and I
| responded "I guess I do now".
|
| Also, I think I was stalling too well because people remember
| me being funny instead of what the presentation was about ...
| dbuxton wrote:
| Reminds me of this James Blunt tweet I saw the other day:
| https://twitter.com/JamesBlunt/status/1485182825070567432
| Digit-Al wrote:
| James Blunt is always entertaining on twitter. He's one of
| the few people who manage to turn that toxic turd into gold.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Samuel Beckett on the question who or what is Godot answered
| "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." [1]
|
| [1]
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/r...
| voidfunc wrote:
| I have a liberal arts degree and this reminds me so hard of
| basically every literary or artwork analysis I did. People
| spending way too much time trying to come up with the most
| bullshit interpretation of things.
| prox wrote:
| Studied too. First thing my teacher said "You have the world
| of artists, we create whatever we feel the need to create.
| And there is a completely different world of the art critic.
| Never let the two meet. There is no license to paint."
| fossuser wrote:
| It reminds me of that pg essay - the more bogus the liberal
| arts the more bullshit is used to obscure and complicate
| meaning.
|
| It was specifically about writing, but the attempt to over
| complicate still applies imo.
|
| "And then of course there are cases where writers don't want
| to make it easy to understand what they're saying--in
| corporate announcements of bad news, for example, or at the
| more bogus end of the humanities. But for nearly everyone
| else, spoken language is better."
|
| http://paulgraham.com/talk.html
| sircastor wrote:
| This reminds me of reading Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six" many years
| ago after being a little familiar with the Game. I recall one of
| the characters doing some espionage work and unpacking his
| explicitly stated Macintosh PowerBook. Clancy was an avid Mac fan
| and I feel like a lot of us at the time (especially the rough
| days of the mid 90s) it was a nod to other Mac fans.
|
| I never finished the book, I wasn't really into Clancy.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Clancy could always be seen wandering around at Macworld Expos.
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