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[Yoink]

Noes.  giving money is liberating.

Fubar, yo monies.


besides, Id much rather give monies to a poor hobo who was interesting to talk to than a street performer.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and a sharp mind in a dull situation is closing in on the circles of hell.

Pssh, hell naw. I only give money to buskers. I mean, if they're the clearly homeless and doing it out of financial desperation, I'll give them money regardless of their music's quality (unless it's really, really offensively bad, but I can only think of one instance of a homeless busker meeting that requirement), but... wait. Were you talking more about actual beggars, who sit there on the footpath with a hand out (and usually a cardboard sign with some sob story scrawled on it), or people who appear to just happen to be out and about for whatever reason and ask for a bit of money?

Because I do occasionally give a bit of coinage to the latter if I have some on hand and there aren't any buskers nearby.
Beggars, though, fuck 'em. They can at least dance or grab a couple of sticks and bang on some trashcans or something if they want my money, jeez.
At least make an effort, then I'm happy to meet 'em halfway.

[Loud Whispers]

RIP wise combat hobo, winter got him

I once accidentally gave £20 to a homeless man from Greece, never seen a man so happy at the sight of money as if he were meeting a long lost child

[Neonivek]

PFFFT!

Someone was refunding Battlerite and I jokingly said "Good gud noob" and went further to explain that it is exactly what the internet would say.

That they basically treat not liking a game as "your problem" instead of you simply not liking a game.

And he responds to me like 2 hours later and admitted I was right, that is exactly what happened.

[Frumple]

PFFFT!

Someone was refunding Battlerite and I jokingly said "Good gud noob" and went further to explain that it is exactly what the internet would say.

That they basically treat not liking a game as "your problem" instead of you simply not liking a game.

And he responds to me like 2 hours later and admitted I was right, that is exactly what happened.

... "Good gud noob"? That... that was a typo, right? Please, gods, tell me that was a typo.

Because the internet would not say that. The first word would be "Git". Good gud noob is even more nonsensical than MMO trash talk normally gets.

[Draignean]

The idea about postmodernism is to challenge preconceptions about art, which apparently to artists nowadays just means "it should be disgusting and meta and incomprehensible"

Well, there's two sides to that. On the one hand, the guiding star of modernism is that effort will lead to the discovery of truth. Now for much of what is referred to as 'modern art' demands that the viewer do work to understand a piece or an object, and thus discover their own truth by action of effort. Notice that it isn't about one truth, or about correct effort, just that effort->truth.

Now, postmodern art, on the other hand, puts forth the concept that you shouldn't really need to bother with the whole effort thing, and that every object is inherently artistic, and has as much artistic value as any other object. Thus, the Mona Lisa, a star, a particularly strong fart, a practicing artist's still life sketch, and an empty Snickers wrapper are all of precisely equal artistic value.

Honestly, it's hard for me to tell which is more detestable from an artistic sense. The one that gives me an empty Snickers wrapper and tells me that it's art because it's a sophisticated dialogue about the hollowness of consumerist culture reflected upon our own self-destroying consumptive needs, or the one that tells me an empty Snickers wrapper is art because 'Fuck you, that's why'.

[Owlga]

An empty snickers wrapper isn't art.

Spoiler: This however, is art (click to show/hide)

[Frumple]

... the rocket snake has the chocolate Christmas D?

[itisnotlogical]

An empty snickers wrapper isn't art.

Spoiler: This however, is art (click to show/hide)

That isn't art, that's just worst girl

[Owlga]

You're both so peasant right now that I can't even fucking.

You both are so trash it's ruining my sex life.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Postmodernism gets a bad rap because it can be abused by lazy people, but I think it possesses merit. Take The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone Living. Yes, it's just a dead shark. But a dead shark can mean something. It invokes the fear of the shark, the fear of dead things, the fear of a living thing (like you) being stuck in a formaldehyde tank and paraded around years after your death for other living things to look at. It's not art with a plot, but it is art.

Or for something you're more likely to be familiar with, Metal Gear Solid 2, which was explicitly made to be a postmodernist video game and pattered off of the famous postmodernist book Simulacra and Simulation. It's all about the exploration of the idea that we don't experience the world as a real thing, but through the biological equivalent of batch searches called simulacra. It's why we generalize concepts more than we specialize them, and the reason people skew themselves out of the real world. Raiden (as the player) conceives of war through VR simulation and so treats it as being like a game (with the irony that MGS2 is in fact a game). He's weird and kind of deluded, because his conception of violence was framed a certain way and is reluctant to move from that way. Then, in the last third, Raiden stops being a meatpuppet of the player and starts to act under his own identity, showing that he is in fact already very mired in the absolute horror of killing through being a child solider in the Liberian Civil War. This culminates with the ending, where still kind of mindfucked by everything that happens, he fully rejects his role as the main character by throwing away the dog tags you made at the start of the game and just walks off into New York. It's also somewhat positive towards the idea of meaning for a postmodernist work, what with Snake talking about how any memetic influence you leave behind gives your life purpose, and that you should embrace that.

There's plenty of other angles in MGS2, like the GW being the representation of the simulacra that is American political culture, but I'll let it drop there. And no, it doesn't mean it was all a computer simulation, that's not the kind of simulation it means.

I'm also going to take a moment to defend Dadism, which is not explicitly postmodernist only because it predated it. This is the "fuck you, that's why" justification, starting with Henry DuChamp's The Fountain. What people don't get is the message is not "anything can be art", the message of the "lazy art" is "fuck you". It's a tongue in cheek protest, not meaninglessness. The Fountain was "made" in response to DuChamp's disgust with his art colleagues playing ball with the nepotistic and corrupt New York art scene at the time. The message was "you think we should only have art from our friends? Fine, here's your 'art'. Also, you all drink piss, fuck you." It requires a certain level of context to not look stupid.

Incidentally, a lot of modern non-sequitur internet humor is also dadist in nature.

[Loud Whispers]

Postmodernism gets a bad rap because it can be abused by lazy people, but I think it possesses merit. Take The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone Living. Yes, it's just a dead shark. But a dead shark can mean something. It invokes the fear of the shark, the fear of dead things, the fear of a living thing (like you) being stuck in a formaldehyde tank and paraded around years after your death for other living things to look at. It's not art with a plot, but it is art.

I thought that art box was about how you are presented with a mortal threat but believe you are safe from death, because the shark can't get you. But it is certain you die anyways, just not by formaldehyde shark

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Maybe, though if that's from the maker I'm just going to laugh at the idea of a postmodernist artist trying to invoke authorial power over the meaning of something.

The idea that I got from looking at it was a confrontation with a deadly yet dead thing turned into an exhibit, which I guess isn't that different.

[Draignean]

Agreed on the abuses of lazy people. The thing about modernism and postmodernism is that it's a helluva lot easier to be absolute piss with than, say, material from the Sturm und Drang movement or Romanticism.

As far as art being 'cheeky'... bleh. Tongue in cheek protests are tongue in cheek protests, that does not necessarily make something art.

Mine is not the only belief, and I see no desire to make others see as I see. Art, as I see it, is something that I can find beauty, effort, longing, or emotion from long after everything that surrounded it is dead. Art that acts as an 'in-joke' doesn't resonate with me. If I have to know the author to get the art, it general loses a lot of punch for me.

Again, that's just my impression of it, and there are exceptions. Art is like pornography, you'll know it when you see it, and one person's fetish is another person's GAH-FUCKTHISSHITWHEREISMYEYEBLEACH.

[itisnotlogical]

I dislike art where the only value at all is in the meaning, and the physical thing itself doesn't matter at all because the artist just wants you to think, man. Art should have some sort of surface-level engagement, whether it sounds nice, looks interesting, is placed meaningfully in a room, tricks the eye, has some other novelty value, etc.

Displaying a random piece of anything and saying "There, solve it" is not interesting and, in my opinion, not art. I just turned a mug on my desk upside-down and called it "The Death of Diana Ross". Figure that one out.

The shark thing is cool because holy fuck, it's a giant dead shark in a tank. THEN the artist is allowed to ask the viewer to figure something out.

[Frumple]

You're both so peasant right now that I can't even fucking.

You both are so trash it's ruining my sex life.

The gex life's still going though, right?

... though yeah, I don't really keep up with as much as I used to, by a fairly long shot. I'd apologize, but cross continental anaphrodisiac memetic transfer is a pretty neat superpower.