I lean toward “efficient entertainment”, but I do sometimes wonder what that chunk of my free time would look like otherwise.
I’d like to see the author prove that beetle counting is more productive than creating game tutorials. People make all kinds of baseless assumptions that are biased by their personal values.
Since we live under the hell that is capitalism, I’d argue the game tutorials are better!
- Revenue generation via ad views
- Will likely encourage additional sold copies from people that stumble on the series
-VS-
- A book about beetles in some niche village somewhere no one will ever go.
Fuck your beetles.
(this is a joke, beetles are cool)
Yeah the people who were cataloging all the species of beetles in Germany were upper class types. Most people in 1820 were tilling fields or working in desperately terrible factories.
The 1800s gave us the likes of Michael Faraday the 2000s gave us the likes of Hank Green.
Came here to effectively say this. If we were people in 1820’s Germany, 99% of us wouldn’t have nearly enough spare time to even think about cataloging those beetles.
Hank Green is awesome.
Don’t forget the insane rates of drinking and alcoholism in the 19th century.
That reminds me I need to swing by the liquor store I’m out of bourbon.
Please, I need these YouTubers for things like the “Coin Collector” subset of achievements in Super Mario Sunshine, you really have to get every single one!
I run a company that does something very specific for some of the largest companies in the world. Key infrastructure is only functional because of what we do. One of the key skills that differentiate our people from the rest is something I often see in some of the top video game and TCG players. I always wonder, “what if they had focused that weird brain of theirs towards X or Y”.
You can’t just tell us gamers that and then not tell us how to get that bag
Do you guys really need some intense clickers?
What’s the skill tho?
The ability to see the entirety of an environment as a single entity, find synergistic relationships and figure out how to exploit those relationships to force a system to do something it was not designed to do. Like those people that make really niche character builds that suck 99.99% of the time but given this unique set of environmental variables it will suddenly hit you with infinite fireballs with one million points of crit damage or something like that.
The problem is that a mind like that is one requirement, another is years of experience (been there, done that, I know what that is) and really deep and wide knowledge in the field, which is also very hard to find. Finding someone with all of them is like finding a jedi unicorn. These are the people that make very high six or low seven figure salaries.
I’m being relatively vague on purpose.
Explain your vagueness!
Just being cautious about security non-disclosure agreements. It is possible to inadvertently disclose client vulnerabilities by discussing how certain specific skills are necessary, how precarious certain environments are and how fragile they can be without said skills. It is also possible to alert bad actors to the fact that certain skill sets are a weak link in certain client’s infrastructure.
If you are a teenager with a very strong knack for synergy, build crafting, etc., please consider pointing your obsessive mind towards technology (not software development or tech support).
Imagine enterprise level applications as complex living organisms where one insignificant misconfiguration in a peripheral and, as far as everyone was concerned, unrelated system can snowball into bringing down and entire service provider. Sure, someone will eventually do an incident investigation and maybe figure out what went wrong back then, but it is far more valuable to have people that can look at a set seemingly unrelated and not at all concerning metrics and flag the lot as a priority action item BEFORE the system crashes. It seems like black magic fuckery to some, but what it really is about is a combination of deep and wide knowledge of all moving parts related to the application, experience, and the ability to think holistically and understand the synergies.
I would imagine every generation had their vices (lack of better word) that previous generations harped on. Why back in my day it was MTV (ok, occasionally they were right). But I’m sure when newspapers came out it was similar to tablets and phones. When tv came out, the radio-heads bitched about the “idiot box”. So on and so forth. Any history buffs out there care to elaborate?
You can find newspaper articles from the late 1800s IIRC, that decry the slothful youth wasting all their time reading novels instead of playing outside like the glorious generation before them
Well, I’d rather the youth were reading books instead of watching 5 second clips
Longer than that. 2500 years ago ancient greek philosophers complained about the youth in the same ways.
One of the oldest written works that we have, and can translate, was written centuries before the Roman empire and it is complaining about “kids these days”.
This crap has been going on for millennia.
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
It is commonly attributed to Socrates or Plato, but apparently the real quote was made by some student for his Cambridge Dissertation in 1907
Pastime I think is the correct term.
Thank you very much for sharing that article! t’s an awesome read.
“idiot box”
it was called the boob tube
“Stop sitting so close, you’ll damage your eyes! Sit farther back!”
Which is okay. Focusing on a happy life is imho better than to strive for becoming an efficient worker in some way or another. There is a lot more to life than this.
Well, it’s not to say they wouldn’t be happy with the beetle cataloging. But yeah, you never know how either the beetle catalog or the sonic ring tutorial might positively affect another human being - so they’re both contributions. I find that if you’re doing most anything in life with true joy and enthusiasm, you’re contributing!
They still have the option to catalogue beetles, that was never off the table. But they chose Sonic because it makes them more happy.
So if someone wants to watch those videos on collecting all the rings in Sonic games, where might a link to said list be? You know asking for a friend.
If people didn’t have weird obsessions, then sciences like geology probably wouldn’t exist.
I don’t know but I know if you raise this topic usually you will get stoned to death by downdoots and comments like “I could be doing meth or killing people but I am a gamer instead”
In my opinion it is delusional to not notice that these things are mostly just slop. Sure there are some games that actually enriched your life and changed your perspective but compared to movies they are few and between. It’s the lowest entertainment for pleb in most cases.
Take something like call of duty what does that game brings into your life? It’s nothing just digital heroin straight to the brain. On the other hand there are sophisticated games such as disco elysium.
There’s nothing bad with slop but if you only consume slop your brain will turn into it. It’s all common sense
TL;DR :
-There are good games and bad games but both are inferior to movies since videogames are “the lowest entertainment for pleb in most cases”
-Good games entertain you
-Bad games entertain you, buuuuuut they are bad games
Damn, you sound like that one asshole elitist teacher
They probably have a gun collection that would make people pause.
I just like to face reality and not pretend that dopamine escapism is cool. Sorry if that personally hurt you but it’s better to be self aware and still do the thing than delusional that it is the same as more worthwhile forms of time spending.
Dopamine escapism IS cool. It’s fucking amazing we can hack our electric meat that hallucinates “reality” and has cool memetic self reproductive patterns.
Pretending we’re anything but wet sacks of chemical reactions is weird to me…
I find the best games are challenging ones where I can watch myself improving at them, like training a skill. It’s not a transferable skill, of course, but I think the act of building your tenacity and accepting success/failure is healthy and good for the ego.
When I try games that I would consider “slop”: fetch quests and walking simulators in between cutscenes, I can feel my brain rotting and I don’t enjoy it.
There is currently a 20yo in Germany, working tirelessly to document every beetle in their province.
The world is large and diverse. Its fine.
Either document beetles, or get REALLLY in to opium
It’s not video games keeping me from doing my niche interests. It’s my 60 hour a week job consuming all my mental resources. Then I have to go home and do all the other things necessary to keep myself alive. Not much left for getting immersed in cool projects after that.
And then there’s the voynich manuscript, an old hoax/fantasy book documenting plants and animals that don’t exist, in a made-up language.
That some people have dedicated their lives to “noble” pursuits and others to “wasting time” is entirely a function of who is telling you the story and how much money they stand to make off that other person’s work. You get one life, do what you want with it as best you can.
Generations of monks did nothing but pray, work, and copy books for their entire lives. Is that a waste because they weren’t writing novels instead? Because every one of them wasn’t Mendel, obcessed with growing peas?
Play some video games, work on stuff if you want, or don’t. Most people in history worked very hard and have been completely forgotten, all their works erased. With how easy it is to share your work online, you could even be famous for being good at video games (speed running, lore analysis, gimmick runs, etc) which may not change the world but objectively has more impact on more living people than writing small business websites or small farming rice in South Asia.
It is not clear that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax/fantasy book. The plant illustrations, whilst ambiguous, do look like plausible real plants (though some have features of multiple species), and while nobody has decoded the text, the letter and word frequencies are consistent with it being natural language rather than gibberish.
Perhaps you’re thinking of the Codex Seraphinianus?
Hey I just wanted to say, thank you for sending me down the rabbit hole of both of these texts. Fascinating!
Regarding the Voynich Manuscript, and to be fair to the person you’re responding to, with no current decipherment, there is a good possibility it’s a hoax.
Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is either a synthetic forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman), or else a forgery, as the preeminent theory. However, he concludes that, if the manuscript is a genuine creation, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author.
Also the Codex Seraphinianus is much newer and self-admittedly describes an imaginary world in an imaginary language.
Anyway, thanks again for the Wikipedia adventure. :D
But I dont want to cure cancer, I want to make dinosaurs!
This answer scares me from a user named Mechaguana. You aren’t planning anything the rest of us should be aware of are you?
Just in case you’re not in on the joke:
Thanks for sharing the source! (Sincerely)
Literally listening to the author’s podcast as I came across this (Elliott Kalan, and he has a few podcasts, but the OG and my favorite is The Flop House).
People can spend their time how they want, but when I hear people bragging about spending literally thousands of hours on game X and/or Y, it kind of makes me sad.
That being said, sometimes they’re well adjusted and satisfied people and that’s just what they want to do with the majority of their free time.
I do hear people make those kind of comments, but then in other conversations I hear them talking about how they’re dissatisfied, life is unfair, their life sucks, they can’t find a girlfriend, school is stupid, they hate their job, they have no friends, etc., those are the people that make me feel sad.
Those people are psychologically manipulated to spend money. There’s no legislation for this sort of thing so they will remain abused forever since this is a huge money maker.
Have you ever heard of rat park? People who are deeply satisfied with their lives (good job, happy and stable relationships, food and housing security) don’t typically spend thousands of hours mindlessly playing games or doing drugs or other forms of escapism. Addiction can affect anyone but it has a stronger hold on those with nothing else.
One of the things I’d like to put on the table is that most people who spend thousands of hours on video games are actively engaging on a mental level, most people spend thousands of hours in front of a TV basically disassociating. Could I be going out training to climb everest sure, that’s not what I want to do, and the same could be said for most people who don’t play video games.
If someone was bragging about the thousands of hours of television they watch and was then later complaining about their dissatisfaction with life, I would feel the same way. It isn’t watching TV, playing video games, or training for climbing everest that’s the problem, per se. It’s how much a given activity consumes of your finite time, how much of an effect that has on the rest of your life, and your level of satisfaction with that exchange.
Learning to play music, having friends and a social life, being really good at video game X or Y, having a significant other, excelling in your career, educating yourself, and so on: these are all time-intensive tasks and there are only so many hours in a day. Letting any element of your life consume a majority of your time necessarily comes with sacrifices in other areas.
I get sad when people can’t seem to connect the sacrifice of having thousands upon thousands of hours invested in various video games with the dissatisfaction in their lives caused by not giving time to other areas. Again, I know people who balance video games into their life and are satisfied. I also know people that basically game and work and that’s it, and they’re satisfied. I’m not judging how “full” someone’s life is, as far as that goes.
I just sometimes see people that think it’s unfair they don’t just automatically get those other aspects of their life, but they are simultaneously unwilling to give up some gaming to spend the time working on them. Sure, gaming is easy, immediate, and can be fulfilling. But, it can also feel like “what did I do for the last ten years that weren’t in-game accomplishments in games I don’t play anymore?” That’s really up to the individual.
That’s fair. I guess my point was more it isn’t a problem unique to video games and people tend to overlook their vices and say well at least I’m not addicted to <insert different time sink>.
