Because content only a few people will care about beats no content…
Stingray plays a subtlety rogue. I play a protection paladin. He has the legendary daggers. Right now he is making me take full advantage of the fact that I have two taunts and a threat/damage wipe.
Rogues to be emergency offtanks in next expansion
I’ll hurt the first son of a bitch who gives it to him.
Blogfriend Blunt Object has an ongoing series about fiction and its dangers.
The gist of his point is that the act of consuming fiction is essentially the act of absorbing and accepting someone else’s narrative, in a form in which its biases and errors of construction and perception go down much more easily than had the same person simply asserted them to you as fact. At one point he describes it as an “unpatched security hole” in our cognition.
With respect, I disagree. If the human taste for fiction and narrative is an unpatched security hole in our thinking, our taste for sports is an unpatched security hole in our bodies. Sports cause us no end of problems- they expose us to physical danger unnecessarily, wear down our bodies more than normal life would, and cause us to divide into little rival tribes. Every game of sandlot baseball is an opportunity for someone to lose some teeth or get concussed or break a limb. Across the animal kingdom, studies of play have shown that it exposes those who engage in it to much more physical risk than they gain in reward in the form of practice or physical development.
But, almost no one questions the benefit or healthiness of physical play, even to the point where we really probably should. It’s self-evident that physical play builds coordination, encourages self-directed exercise, and that children aren’t quite right and really can’t stay on an even mental keel without it. It exposes us to risk and injury, but even if we can’t quite quantify it, the benefit is more than worth it to the point where we engage in national navel-gazing in how we can manage to encourage more of it in children and adults alike.
One of the most interesting theories I’ve seen on the subject of humans and their art- including fiction- is that art is actually a form of cognitive play. All small children, no matter their culture, will draw and color if given an implement that will make marks, and all of them enjoy storytelling and story games. The author’s assertion is that these activities are as much a part of our development into mentally normal humans as crawling and running around is important to developing our motor skills, and I think he makes a very strong case. (The details of said case are worth actually buying the book, though I had a lot more use for the first half than the second.)
Storytelling is specific exercise for a specific cognitive skill, one that develops late: abstract reasoning. In order to create a story, you need to create multiple purely abstract concepts and string them together in a way that makes sense and communicates something interesting enough to be worth paying attention to. Speculative fiction in particular is an exercise in changing a few variables of the known universe and then taking the results to as logical and interesting a conclusion as the author can imagine. A strong storyteller must specialize both in social skills (making the audience empathize with the abstractions and believe the premises of the created world), abstract logic, theory of mind (creating characters with believable motivations), and many other human cognitive specialties. It’s as much exercise for our particular kind of mind as Parkour is exercise for our particular physical specialties.
Blunt isn’t wrong about the dangers of absorbing someone else’s worldview uncritically in story format, but if we’re both right that leads to an interesting conclusion: literary education as valuable beyond the simple study of fiction. Given that English lit classes teach students to analyze fiction, pull it apart, identify its aims, values, and goals, examine it in context of the time and place it was produced and the life and worldview of its author, it’s essentially a self-defense course in fiction. Once you can ably dissect it, you can see its seams and pick out the author’s worldview from your own more reflexively. Once you understand how to pick out themes, ideas, and decide how well (or badly) it’s been developed, you can more easily examine a narrative’s premises as well as its desired conclusions.
If we are both correct, it’s a strong argument for required liberal arts education.
Fashion It So, which has been distracting me thoroughly and hilariously for the last two days and looks to keep right on truckin’ through the weekend until I run out of archive. The thing about pretty much all incarnations of Trek is that it’s like a lasagna of good, bad, and cheesy, and the bad and the cheesy are actually as much a part of the appeal as the good. It’s kind of like a stadium hot dog in that sense. You take your servings of bad with the good because it’s part of the experience, and wouldn’t be the same without it. The people writing this blog are watching Trek for pretty much exactly the same basic reason I am, except vastly more focused on the costuming choices.
So the context for this is the folks at Valve had Cave Johnson’s voice actor record a whole bunch of new lines for a new level creator downloadable content package for Portal 2, so that the lines play more or less at random at the beginning of created levels. That’s actually not really important, nor is having played any Portal game ever or knowing who the hell Cave Johnson is. This is all of those lines stitched together in a 25 minute sequence. The experience of hitting “play” on this is like having a mad scientist CEO who took acting lessons from the William Shatner school of scenery chewing come into your work space and emit a stream of consciousness. It’s the best background to reading my news feeds I have ever experienced. chariots chariots
David Sunflower Seeds now comes with a reclosable zip-top bag, so you don’t have to rip an awkwardly sized hole in it that you optimistically try to crumple closed after you’re done with your feed seed bag for the moment. Stingray, who always has various seed and nut bags in various stages of consumption strewn around his desk because he is actually a parrot, is very excited about this.
There’s really no way to set this up or lead in gently, so I’ll put it bluntly: it’s an emotional robotic ass. Its whole reason for existence is to be a butt that conveys emotions the user can perceive, although I think they have not entirely succeeded in this given that my ass does not vibrate when I’m scared or pulse when I’m happy. Or at least I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. I’ve never noticed anyone else’s ass do this either, although I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in cartoons drawn by John Kricfalusi.
If I had to take a guess as to why someone has gone to the effort to create an interactive emotional mechanical ass, I’d speculate that gluteal muscles are a lot easier to simulate mechanically than the tiny muscles in the face responsible for expression, and thus it’s an easier target. This is pretty much just wild speculation, though, as the subtitles explaining the robot ass seem to take it as self-evident that users would want to interact with a buttbot and read its feelings. I still really, really want to read the grant proposal for that, though.
Question as posed by the subtitles: “And second is to raise the argument as to what perceptions will be manifested in the minds of people who communicate with SHIRI”
and answered by Stingray: “I think topping the list will be ‘why am I talking to this ass?’”
So President Obama has gone ahead and come out in support of same-sex marriage.
One would think I’d be pleased about this, since I’m also in favor, but I’m not especially. I AM pleased that it is possible to have a sitting President who is in favor, and view that as positive progress.
You could characterize my overall lack of other forms of pleasedness as personal distaste for Obama, which is probably not entirely untrue, but I note that a lot of same-sex marriage advocates have had pretty much exactly the same reaction as I have: that this is a nakedly opportunistic political calculation in an election year, and not a statement of intent or meaningful support.
Basically, it goes like this: liberals saw him as tepid in his support of gay rights, conservatives saw him as secretly supporting gay marriage no matter what he said, and moderates saw him as a waffler. He had nothing left politically to gain from maintaining a pretense of opposing it, and the political math was better to look like he was taking a firm position of some kind given that the people who’d be legitimately put off by it are mostly lost causes at this point, whereas younger voters who see gay rights as their generation’s civil rights struggle would be very much energized.
Having someone who is secretly in favor of your side of an issue is exactly like having someone who doesn’t support it. Having someone who is now in favor of your issue but supports the states deciding it (as he was careful to qualify) is having someone who supports the status quo. While it’s nice he’s not going to actively roll back progress made, it’s not exactly helpful either. Even to the extent that being publicly out in favor is nice for generating support/enthusiasm, it would have been a hell of a lot more useful BEFORE North Carolina decided to write a ban on even so much as the possibility of civil unions or domestic-partner benefits into its constitution.
Having someone powerful in your corner who’ll do exactly as much to help you as his aides calculate is politically beneficial is not that much of a warm fuzzy feeling.
One of the better of several available screeds pointing out that the “People’s Rights” amendment would pretty much exist to give the government the ability to summarily muzzle, sue, or disband any entity larger and more profitable than a garden party that it disapproved of.
I feel others more qualified than I have done a perfectly fine job of presenting the idea that a)This is what it would effectively do, and b)This would be a very bad thing, bad far out of proportion to the ills it’s meant to address.
What I would like to note is on the subject of the entities this particular broad stroke is no doubt aimed at: lobbying groups, PACs, special interest groups, all conglomerations of persons whose business is to bother legislators and the public at large in the name of their particular goal: I am glad that they exist and I wish them continued existence.
There are a large number of issues, policies, and subjects in general that I care about, and I do not have anything like the time or energy to pay attention to all of them all at once. I don’t have the time or energy to pay attention and due diligence to any one them, in fact. I am downright pleased as punch that there exist groups whose paying jobs and reason for existence revolve around professionally caring about things that I do and exerting influence on people who have a direct relationship with these issues.
This system is not without its large and systemic flaws. Groups who represent the interest of majorities wield more force than those who represent minorities; they suffer profoundly from principal-agent problems; they sometimes “represent” me in ways I truly wish they would not; they pursue goals I consider irrelevant or actively counter-productive; they blow issues that are not of particularly critical relevance out of proportion in election cycles; they are a primary contributing agent to how legislation winds up bloated, byzantine, and full of irrelevancies.
There’s also the fact that people I consider my sworn ideological foes have access to exactly the same processes and have their own leviathan lobbying platforms, but I consider this acceptable. My only wish is that they be more self-evidently stupid or hateful more often, not that anyone have the power to make them go away.
But, without the professional issue-obsessers and interest-pushers, my- and every other individual with those various enumerated rights we’re supposedly being protected by such a bill- influence over the actual process of creating policy relevant to various issues we care about dwindles to effectively zero. There’s this blog, which doesn’t stay on a single topic for more than a day or two, and there’s the standard letter to the congresscritter, which the critters mostly don’t read, and that’s about it. The remaining source of influence dwindles to the government and whoever happens to be immediately buddies with the people in it, which takes the fundamental problem of said government having an extraordinarily narrow and blinkered perspective on the country and the world in general and makes their isolation total. (Remember, media corporations would get their rights stripped, too.)
It’s a terrible voice, but it beats the hell out of no voice.
“Bucharest just won the international Hideous Public Art competition.”
“I kind of want it.”
“It does have a sort of fantastic awfulness to it that’s strangely appealing, but it’s still awful.”
“If it was man-portable it’d be perfect to wheel into the guest room to stand at the foot of the bed in the middle of the night.”
Strangest dream I’ve had in awhile, and that’s saying something given the competition: Doug, Rise of the Machines.
A ways back in the week when I was pretty crunched for time and motivation, Blunt Object ranted about an article on Slate badly misunderstanding genetics and what we can know from it. It’s pretty typical boilerplate biology-is-scary stuff, or at least the part he’s ranting about is; there’s essentially one paragraph of raw stupidity in the middle of an otherwise reasonable piece talking about the implications of fetal genotyping. The relevant paragraph:
What fetal genes might one day suggest about a baby’s eye color, appearance, and intellectual ability will be useful to parents, not insurers. But with costs coming down and insurers interested in other aspects of the fetal genome, a Gattaca-like two-tiered society, in which parents with good access to health care produce flawless, carefully selected offspring and the rest of us spawn naturals, seems increasingly plausible.
Well… no, not really. To put it mildly. If the world worked like this I’d be able to write poetry in Linear A, but merely finding something that does something in particular and making some more or less educated guess as to what it does does not translate into being able to use it for engineering.
The analogy Blunt used was programming, and it’s a pretty good one; I set out to quote it for effect but wound up concluding it really just needs to be read in its entirety. It’s not long, and is resistant to excerpting.
The only issue with his analogy is that it doesn’t even capture the impossibility of pulling off something like the Slate author’s scenario adequately; at least a piece of computer hardware and its programming were produced via a process we could find relatively intuitive. Genomes were produced by evolution, with no one on hand trying even remotely to ensure that the code was efficient or clean, let alone commented. Kludges and elegant solutions exist side by side, sometimes in several different copies, some of which are broken and others of which do subtly different things in each version. Much of the information is if-then instructions and operating instructions, sometimes to provide for cases that are remote or no longer exist. If your computer were equivalent, it would have every operating system and program you had ever used installed at once, with the instructions for which pieces work for what and are active at any given time being completely hidden information. All possible hardware styles and protocols are present as well, and which ones are active or not is equally obscure.
Among the list of what the fetal testing is meant to do: determine Rh-factor, sex of child, presence of Down’s syndrome. Testing for any of these things is not like looking for a line of code in a computer program; it’s like seeing if a hard drive rattles or not when you pick it up, or how many USB ports there are. The number of chromosomes as well as what kind there are at pair 23 is determinable by technology we’ve had since the early part of the twentieth century; it is to genotyping as correctly naming a shape to be a square is to polygonal geometry.
Let’s tackle the first line in the author’s GATTACA scenario piece by piece:
What fetal genes might one day suggest about a baby’s eye color, appearance, and intellectual ability
1. Do you know we currently have no idea how eye color genetics work beyond two genes that happen to handle “blue” or “brown” relatively straightforwardly? Beyond that we know that there are many more genes that affect eye color, that there are two more genes that definitely do something though we’re not positive what, that there might be as many as 16, and that green and gray and hazel are handled somewhere entirely different, but you’re simply not going to know what color a baby’s eyes are going to be based on even its entire genome- because we only know what two genes are going to do and can’t even find the rest to see if they’re present and what they’re going to do.
2. You can know everything about a baby’s appearance that is determined by a single, stand-alone trait that we know about, understand to be a trait influenced by a single gene or at least a manageable handful of them, and know exactly which gene does that. Compared to all factors of a baby’s appearance, the number of traits this describes is teeny tiny. If the driving force of your curiosity is knowing whether a baby boy’s ears will have attached pinnae, you’re in luck*.
3. We don’t currently even know what intellectual ability quite is. We can’t nail down a single test accurately measuring “general intelligence”, all the tests we currently have produce wildly different results from one another, and while we know more or less that there are different cognitive domains and skills, we can’t nail any of them down particularly well either. Worse than that, we understand vaguely that intelligence is more of an emergent property of many systems and skills, but we can’t quantify or measure it well. For something like a car, “speed” is an emergent property with no corresponding part of the car that develops out of nearly every other part of the car- but we can concretely and easily measure speed.
Most of what we know about genetics and intelligence can be summed as this: 1)It seems to be, broadly, heritable, and 2)cognitive impairments are much, much easier to detect and quantify than variations in normal intelligence or extremely high intelligence. This is, in fact, what IQ tests were originally designed for- picking out those sufficiently impaired to need different schooling. We can expect legitimate bioethics issues surrounding the ability to detect those sorts of cognitive impairments caused by developmental disorders that are known and genetically quantifiable- not engineered superbabies versus dull “naturals”.
So, of the author’s three projected super-baby traits, one of them is a simple thing that turns out very much not to be on the genetic end, and two are emergent gestalt qualities we cannot even quantify, let alone reverse-engineer. Provided we develop the ability to directly engineer in the first place, which currently we can’t.
As science-fiction-come-reality scares go, I’m not that impressed.
*Actually I’m lying. This old chestnut of simple Mendelian genetics, as well as sex-linked traits, turns out to involve multiple alleles of opaque effect as well. Surprise!
Or, how Tank came to be all bloody. Part II; don’t you hate it when sequels replace established characters with “the next generation”?
Contextual information: Indy was occupying our guest room over the weekend.
~Prologue~
LabRat: *Rises weekendishly late, feeds dogs. Notes outside front windows, Indy balancing precariously on on two crates while Stingray does something purposeful with a hose. Considers. Decides all things duly considered, would be better off not being involved and walks away to water the plants.*
In background: *excitement involving the rain gutters*
~Much later that night~
All humans: *watching Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil* *decide to pause for bathroom, soda refill, popcorn, etc.*
LabRat: *goes to let the dogs in, where they have been camping most of the night due to its being unseasonably cool out* “Dogs! Inside! Tank! Kodos!”
Kang: *way too sleepy for this BS*
Kodos: *also too sleepy, glares mournfully from comfy spot outside*
Tank: *is clearly otherwise occupied but paying attention*
LabRat: *cheerleads for a bit*
Indy: *returns from bathroom, joins varsity dog cheerleading squad*
Tank: *runs to join his fans*, *is also covered in blood on his face and left shoulder*
Kodos: *moseys unenthusiastically to join his fans*
LabRat: “Oh good lord. Here, hang on to Kodos while I look him over.”
*examines bloody areas extensively* *finds no actual wounds*
Stingray: *joins conversation* “Check Kodos. He probably busted a nail and then they were playing or something.”
Indy: *hangs onto Kodos while I examine his legs and feet*
Kodos: *endures stoically, is horrified I might cut his nails*
LabRat: *finds intact nails, no wounds*
Stingray: “Well… neither of them seems hurt, and neither of them is spun up at all…”
Indy: “Maybe they caught something?”
Stingray: “And Tank rolled in it. The face-to-shoulder roll.”
All: *To the yard! With flashlights!* *search!*
Tank: *pines from behind back door*
Kodos: *without words* “Screw you guys, I’m going to bed.” *exits scene*
LabRat: “Ah. Found it.” *shines light on late rat*
Regular Rat: *is very emphatically late* *is also somewhat squashed, as though rolled upon by exuberant 100-pound puppy*
Indy: “Ah, guess we don’t have to worry about the rat that was in the gutter anymore.”
Stingray: “It’s a big rat. He might have got some licks in.”
LabRat: “He’s a big dog. I don’t think any of it was his own blood. Here, I’ll keep the light on it while you go get a plastic bag.”
Stingray: *withering look at me* *picks up rat by hind leg, starts in direction of outdoor trash*
LabRat: “Or… you can just… do that… whatever.”
All: *join trek to garbage can for rat disposal ceremony*
Stingray: “Here, catch!” *flings rat at friend, in fit of high spirits*
Indy: “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” *undignified scramble*
LabRat: “…OK, from this end, that IS hilarious.”
Kang: *has slept through ALL OF IT* *does not give even one single damn*
~Fin~
Moderately heavy traffic whose speed fluctuates constantly between the upper end of where your car is happy in fourth gear and the lower end of where your car is happy in fifth gear.
Via commenter BH, an Atlantic article arguing that everyone has missed the point of Makode Linde’s “brilliant” golliwog cake.
The article does go into some detail missing from the original reporting on it, the important bits of which were a) The culture minister and her entourage had no clue what she’d be walking into other than that it was purportedly about female genital mutilation, and b) the minister had been under media fire previously for supposedly being pro-censorship of art, or at least heavily critical of “provocative” art. So yes, it was basically a setup meant to put a politician in a no-win scenario, which banked on her going along with it, which was a pretty good bet.
It also argues that it was actually a brilliant piece of art whose point was to demonstrate Sweden’s disconnect from the reality of Africa and Africans and illustrate the alienness of the experience of being black or African in Sweden. The article concludes:
There’s no doubt that Adelsohn-Liljeroth and the many Swedes involved in campaigning against FGM seem to be kind-hearted, noble-minded people who oppose racism and would like to help the victims of female genital mutilation. Linde, even if he has corralled them all into a disastrous photo op that could even cost Adelsohn-Liljeroth her job (it shouldn’t), probably doesn’t mean to embarrass them personally so much as draw attention to the subtle racial politics of Sweden’s popular conceptions of FGM and Africans generally. That’s not an easy thing to explain to people in words, but a screaming cake seems to have done it.
To which I would reply: no it didn’t. If it had, neither the Atlantic article nor the Africa Is A Country article explaining it would need to exist.
For one thing, that’s not what Linde said it was supposed to do at any point, and as the artist one presumes he would know. (His statements on the cake have been mostly semicoherent and range from LOL I TROLL U to “you’re just not sophisticated enough to understand”, and reinforce the “performance artist as unrepentant and undirected attention whore” impression.)
For another, if your art needs to come with a lengthy explanation of what exactly it’s supposed to express, it has essentially failed as art. Guernica doesn’t need to come with a “war is horrible” pamphlet in order to understand the painting, although if you’re unschooled in art history you’ll probably wonder what the point of having everyone’s features squashed on one half of their face is*. Even if you don’t know it was painted during the Spanish Civil War in the aftermath of a bombing, the idea that it’s about senseless suffering and chaos comes through just fine on its own. It’s not standard representational art, but it’s not enigmatic either.
Not all art is even meant to express something other than “pretty!”, or for that matter “ugly!”. It doesn’t necessarily need to. But when it IS meant to express a particular thing, it’s on the artist to make sure their point is even possible to take from the result, much as it’s on the writer to communicate their ideas efficiently and not on the reader to possess advanced detective skills to find it. Dumb audience members who aren’t going to get it and probably don’t want it exist, but when almost the entire world can’t find the expressed idea, that’s not on the audience as a failure, it’s on the artist.
It’s entirely possible that all that’s being expressed is that it’s possible to make really racist images and have people go along with them as long as you manipulate them in the correct ways, and then deduce that what makes this possible to accomplish is a meeting in Swedish culture of norms of avoiding conflict with the abstractedness of Africa and Africans to most Swedes. But I really do not think that makes the cake, or the artist, brilliant. Upsetting people by being blantly offensive not a high-order skill, and sadly neither is manipulating politicians who are feeling public opinion pressure.
At the end of the day it’s still just a really offensive cake.
*The point of cubism is to show all perspectives from one point of view. That’s pretty much the entirety of it.
Dear Federal Government,
Lick the private sector’s taint.
Sincerely,
Everybody who wants off this asshole-choked rock (and the less misanthropic group who just think space exploration is really really cool)
Private space-mining possible by 2025? I could drive railroad spikes with this erection.
It helps to know that gibbons* are extraordinarily strong for their size (that makes sense when you contemplate how they get around), like most primates prone to go for the face, eyes, hands, and testicles when attacking, and as we see here, bright enough to be bloody-minded.
Sleep tight.
*Because I am an insufferable pedant: It’s an Agile Gibbon, not a monkey. They’re apes. They don’t have alpha males- gibbon groups don’t have individual leadership. They are, however, VERY territorial, and it is the males that do the actual tearing and biting for the most part when groups meet.
Ten minutes ago out of pretty much nowhere lightning struck close enough to rattle the windows and make me jump out of my chair.
Tank: Leaped up from his nap, barked, hackled, went charging through the house looking for the responsible party. Finding none, trudged crankily back to his nap spot and went back to sleep.
Kang: Perked her ears briefly. Went back to sleep. It’s only thunder, you hysterics.
Kodos: is still pacing around the office peering outside and then returning to breathe nervously on me. He’s upset because Kang is sleeping behind me and thus he can’t tuck himself in and breathe nervously there.
Same breed, same breeder, same upbringing… I’d like to change the settings on one of them if that could be arranged.
All the reviews I read prior to deciding it was worth theater price to check out said that it was basically impossible to talk much about the movie itself without spoiling it to hell and gone, but that it was awesome. This turns out to be because this is the truth.
I am 100x more hopeful about Avengers now that I have seen evidence that Joss Whedon can do a new project without indulging all or even any of his bad habits and well-worn ruts.
That’s right up there with Behind The Mask as one of my favorite genre-exploring horror movies. Maybe even above. We’ll see how the rewatches go after the DVD comes out.
Best movie ticket payoff since… *thinks*… Iron Man.
So, I saw this link mentioning a racist cake, and went “It’s a cake, it cannot be THAT bad”, and then I clicked on the link, and I scrolled down to the picture, and I went “HOLY FUCK!”
Now, there’s a debate in the comments over whether the cake can really be racist, since the artist is black (that’s his head serving as the cake’s head). I feel ill equipped to decide the question, beyond noting
a)It’s in such incredibly bad taste that “is it racist” is kind of a semantic decision when it comes to accurately describing its overall wrongness
b)Given that all other examples of the artist’s artwork I can find are of various permutations of old, incredibly racist blackface parody, it’s safe to say he has Issues and a bunch of them are old National Geographics with naked Africans…
I want to know how many people looked at this idea before it was implemented, and thought it was a good idea to carry though. How many people had to sign off on “Yes, let’s have an appearance by the Minister of Culture in which she cuts into a cake that is a representation of every single hideous European stereotype of Africans ever, plus also it will be screaming and crying and begging for mercy. Let’s also make sure we get a nice photograph of her winning smile as she cuts into it and feeds a bit of itself back to it.”, and go “yes, this will be hip, edgy, artistic, and above all cultural“. Bonus points if someone caught the Hottentot Venus reference and thought THAT was a really good idea.
I’m sure at this point the Swedish Minister of Culture is muttering to herself something along the lines of “God damn, my country had an African colony for about fifteen minutes in the seventeenth century, why am *I* getting this shit”, but… given the sheer self-evidentness of the bad idea, I don’t have a ton of sympathy.
….Or, well, it is, in the sense of being a thing that happens to you from the age of 5 or so to 18, it just in no way will resemble the rest of your life.
Backing up a bit, last week I ran across this post at Jennifer’s place, featuring a video by Felicia Day and the Guild crew. They seem to do one big music video release per season, and they are always awesome, and this one is no exception. As is a common theme with geeks and other people who spent middle and high school on the part of the social totem pole which is buried in the ground, and go on to wind up as perfectly respectable and likable people who are awesome in their own right, the theme is celebrating going from the bottom to the top.
I tapped my foot along with it and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Then I got to thinking, successfully transcending the social realities of high school isn’t that much of a thing to celebrate so much as getting over with as quickly as possible, just because life immediately ceases to be like school the second you leave it. Lots of people continue going through the motions as though it were, but it’s because the only patterns they know and no one bothered to tell them that contrary to preparing them with rigorous accuracy for adult life, school gave them a highly artificial reality that must be adjusted away from. There should really be some sort of an exit briefing at or after graduation, just so you are warned, whether or not you choose to listen to any of it.
1. Never again will the norm of your life involve moving through a highly regimented schedule you did not choose with a peer group that all closely resemble each other, monitored by authorities who take an interest in everything you do.
Unless you go to prison or join the military, which are the only two adult-life environments that have any close resemblance to school. Even in the military you volunteered to be there and the end goal is for you to either leave after having performed adequately, or become the authorities. Only in prison are you treated as an incompetent population to be managed as closely as possible for a time-based sentence.
After school, you are free- and expected- to manage your own time, which you may do as well or poorly as you choose to, though if you consistently do it badly you will find yourself with a shortage of people willing to give you money in exchange for your time and efforts. Authorities largely do not care about your life beyond your performance, though strong leaders may take an interest in helping you manage those areas of your time that relate strictly to your job. If no one is paying you for your time currently, you can do whatever the hell with it you wish so long as it’s not actually illegal, and no one but you will care. This is the point in your life where you find out for yourself that staying up all night all the time and eating ice cream for dinner actually make you feel like crap with no input from your parents or any other authority at all.
This is one of the areas of transition from the school system to universities that is easiest for students to miss completely. College looks like school, and feels like school, but now you have a lot more freedom, including the freedom to look at a scheduled class you don’t really want to go to and then not go. However, instead of being warehoused by an educational system, now you are actually paying to be taught things at specific institutions; using your freedom to blow off “authorities” is actually a shot downrange at your own feet. This phenomenon is one of the major disconnects between adult students and students transitioning in from high school.
2. Your social life isn’t a zero-sum game anymore.
You are no longer bound to a particular age and location-based peer group who can only be escaped via a major life upheaval that can only be ordered by some other authority. Never again will you be with any people other than your family who care what you did when you were thirteen, unless that something was the sort of thing that will get the justice system to try you as an adult. If they find out anything about your life when you were in school, it will be a mildly interesting background note in contrast to who you are now, rather than finding out Who You Really Are.
If there’s a clique and they don’t like you and exclude you? You can just leave, and find some people who enjoy your company. They need have no relevance to you at all. At the absolute worst, they could be your co-workers, but at least then you can be making an evaluation of how much your job is worth to you in money, time, and aggravation factor to remain there even though the working environment is chilly and hostile- and you can go get a different social life outside of work.
You still do need social skills, you don’t get allotted friends, and acquiring them may be an uphill battle if you were raised by wolves and are essentially starting from scratch.
However, you aren’t restricted to a single pool of people who all know each other and have all known YOU since the third grade, you aren’t in a hierarchy in which every person who gains in popularity must do so at the expense of someone else, and the people you think are really cool may not think this of themselves and probably don’t really think of themselves as being in any way above you or others. (If they DO, this is generally because they are a narcissist. People behaving the way high school students do normally as adults are behaving pathologically.)
If absolutely no one wants to spend time with you and you are regularly expelled from the company of others, it may be time to do some serious self-examination (especially if you have the vague inkling you may have been raised by wolves and do not know any of the social rules others seem to take for granted), but for the most part even obnoxious trolls can find other trolls to share under-bridge space and trollish camaraderie with.
3. Your hobbies are just your hobbies, not your identity.
Adolescents are in a weird psychological space where they’re transitioning from having their identities mainly defined by their parents to being self-generated, and being adolescents in a social species, they tend to accomplish this first by letting anyone OTHER than their parents start providing some of the definition. Our culture has a lot of easy tropes for kids to fall into and build a self-image around, so that art mirrors life and life mirrors art pretty much Because. This is how a kid can believe whole-heartedly by the time he’s twelve that if he excels at math he must shun athletics, or if he excels at athletics as part of the conditions for membership in his tribe he can never reveal he really likes Star Wars.
In the adult world, your hobbies are what you do or work on because you enjoy them, not defining aspects of your identity. At your job you’re just another person in a business suit or uniform, and no one gives a shit if you were a geek or a nerd or a jock or a stoner or a metal kid or what have you. You can be a powerlifter and also have a serious investment in your D&D group and no one will care. Your gym buddies will probably not want to talk about your campaign and your DM will probably not want to know about your squat PR, but who knows, especially if members of both groups are actually friends rather than just friendly.
Speaking of, nothing of what you internalized in school about what you can and can’t learn or do, for fun or otherwise, is true. Even if you were fat and slow and uncoordinated in school, you can be a powerlifter or rock-climber or be a speed skater or whatever the hell you want to, as long as you’re willing to put in the work and practice at it. Even if you sucked at math, you can learn it later, and better yet you can shop around for a teacher who can show it to you in ways you can grasp. If you really want to you can put all your focus into developing your strength to mass ratio and join the damn circus, though it will be a tremendous amount of work and sacrifice for not much unless you REALLY want to be an acrobat.
The bad news is that seriously doing anything takes work, practice, and tolerance for frustration and failure, and due to the limited number of hours in the day and weeks in the year, you have to pick only a handful of them to be really good at any of them. But you aren’t restricted from any of them because of what little tribes in the artificial world of school you belonged to.
4. You can never count on everyone having closely shared experiences again unless you work at it.
In school, everyone is your age, most other people are probably your ethnicity, if they aren’t the standard norms of gender/sexuality they probably won’t have admitted it yet, you’re probably from about the same socioeconomic background, and everyone is, obviously, in school together. If nothing else they have a shared experience called Mrs. Johnson’s Math Period.
As an adult, any given other person you meet may be from a radically different background from yours, may be from an entirely other country or culture, may have had formative experiences so different than yours you may as well be from different countries. You may have nothing whatsoever to relate to each other over other than whatever experience you are currently sharing.
If you work hard enough at it, you can avoid this as much as possible, and some people do spend their adult lives making as sure as they can that everyone they are likely to encounter is going to be extremely similar to them. This does come with the downside of having the same narrow perspective, and the same constant experience of everyone constantly comparing each other to everyone else, forever. It can be very refreshing to be dealing with a group where nobody thinks to make very many comparisons because there are very few meaningful ones to be made.
5. In the real world, people’s tolerance for bullshit is directly proportional to the rewards of putting up with it.
The most common incentive to put up with inefficiency, byzantine and bizarre rule sets and authority structures, bureaucracy that exists for its own sake, and other soul-suckers familiar to anyone who’s been through a school system, is called a paycheck and it can make up for quite a lot. In school you do it because the alternative is not-school, which is generally a much harder row to hoe, in real life you are much freer to put it down and walk away, and people will. This is particularly true if whatever activity you’re engaged in is a for-fun hobby group where the paycheck incentive is absent.
In an extra-curricular group in school, you do it because you signed up to do it and because it will nebulously look good on your college transcript. You learn a handful of things about how people behave in small groups and if you are very lucky one or two other things.
In a local sports league, gaming group, book club, cooking circle, or any other collection of enthusiastic amateurs who get no rewards other than those intrinsic to the group or the activity, either someone or several someones have excellent skill at managing people with no reason to be there other than those rewards, or you find out what it looks like when a group of people collectively realizes they do not have to put up with bullshit and the only authorities are self-appointed.
If you were wondering, I went to a good school (private), and while I definitely wasn’t climbing the social ladder, I wasn’t the fat kid in the cafeteria getting milk poured on her either. You can make things better or worse with different school systems and approaches, or you can sign up for an entirely different set of problems via homeschooling, but a lot of things that make school a weird and artificial world stem entirely from the fact that the people inhabiting them are children, and as such are not yet mentally or emotionally mature. Everything that happens in school is of devastating emotional import even when the people involved are worthless jerks because the world of a schoolchild is very small, because they ARE still a child.
We shouldn’t celebrate becoming better and stronger and cooler people than we were in school, though broadly speaking being better and stronger is always nice. We should celebrate having left the world where any of it matters more than an footnote.