#love reflecting on my music taste and how much I cant define what it is lmao | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jumoonjae · 6 years

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Gashina

YonngixReaderxMino

She was a wreck who cover it all with her prettiest smile. When she thought everything was settle when she moved away from hometown and live with her dream, she was wrong. Her past found his way to her and she was positive it was impossible for her to love again. But God has greater plan for her.

A sheer of the prettiest shades of red emerged with orange filled the skyline that evening which framed perfectly like a painting on the art-studio’s window.

Its almost dark outside and its her favorite view from the art room. She was alone working for her project for hours now. Then she heard a footstep and didn’t bother to look back as she already saw Jin’s reflection on the window.

“Aren’t you too early for the stargazing thing Y/N?” Jin mocked playfully while skipping a bit to her side. She shrugged ignoring her best friend mockery because he always did that. She let him wander around the art room as usual, circling her around. She then saw him at the corner of the room looking at the painting with eyebrow crooked, hands on chin as if he trying to solve something mystery in the painting.

“Are you playing find the hidden thing again oppa?” She chuckled by the sight of her elder friend stood like a philosopher trying to define the painting and about to spit some philosophy shits.

“No, I’m bored. Hungry. Tired. Etcetera. Etcetera. Can we go now? Its already 8. I need to eat Y/N. Have mercy please.” He leaned back on the wall with the back of his hand rested on his forehead, eyes closed and another hand on his tummy. She rolled her eyes and laugh at his dramatic posture.

“Don’t pressure yourself to much for the upcoming art exhibition. You’re going to do great Y/N.” He fixed his stance and walked to her intended to help her packing up at first but ended up eating her sneakers bar that he saw poked out from her bag pocket. She let him eat her last bar so he can stay in silent for a minute while she cleaning up her work station.

“You think?” She asked after a while and gained an eager nod right away from him which made her chuckle again. “Let me clean my stuff first.” She stand up collecting her brush to clean them up.

Jin was ranting nonsense when they were walking past the dance studio. The music was louder than usual because its after school. There was a few people inside which she recognize as Hoseok, the dance senior, Jimin, second year student and Jungkook, the freshman.

“Y/N! Jin hyung!” Hoseok who was in the middle of packing his stuff and about to turn off the large speaker waving at them in glee which Jin waved back in the same fashion.

“Where to?” Hoseok asked after locking the dance studio with both Jimin and Jungkook standing behind him lost in their own conversation. They always tag along but she never had a long talk with them, she just know a thing or two about them but they’re still in her circle of friends.

“I’m kind of hungry too. But I think I need to clean up first. I smell like I’ve made of paint.” She chuckled.

“Oh why don’t you just cook dinner for us Y/N? You’ve made a promise remember? Besides, You haven’t officially introduce your housemate to me.” Jin said. Hoseok nodded eagerly to Jin’s word.

“You know I can’t cook Jin.” Her statement made all four boys burst into laughter. “Besides my housemate don’t really like company. Maybe next time okay.” She paused. “Next time when he wasn’t around.”

“He? Your housemate is a guy?” Hoseok half gasp. “Yea. You know him. Suga? Yoongi? Whatever his name is.” She try not to care so much about him. Its not that both of them not in a good term. Its just that he’s someone who doesn’t speak or even bother to have any eye contact with her.

“It’s the only place that I can afford right now after you know.” She shrugged a little. “Yea after you punch your roommate for being so loud. Unbelieveble.” Jin mocked which make her to smack on the back of his head real hard and he winced like a girl.

“I need to work on my important project that week and she really need to took her friends to stay in the room till midnight and you know ‘girls’. They giggled and laugh and whispers. Its freaking annoying.” She gritted her teeth in frustration while fisting the air gaining a good laugh from the boys.

After dinner with the boys, she decided to sketch for another idea for her slot at the upcoming exhibition at the living room balcony where the night sky and the city light are visible. The thing she really loves about the apartment. A good split of pay with Yoongi, and a nice view from the balcony. It’s on the 16th floor by the way, she couldn’t hear any unwanted noise from any vehicles during the morning and night and Yoongi always worked in his room only out to eat or drink something.

She started to sketch anything that came up to her mind. Letting her mind take control of her hand and its almost midnight when she heard someone knocked on the main door.

“Did he forgot the password or something.” She left the one seated couch and place her tools scrambled on top of the coffee table before hurried to the door. Without checking on the peek hole, she opened the door and her eyes met a gaze that once become the reason she left hometown for good.

“Kyungsoo?” She managed to whisper before a hard punch landed on her left cheek. It was so strong making her body stumbled down on the floor producing a loud thud. She landed on her butt and sprained her right wrist while trying to support her body. She could taste blood inside her mouth and the inside of her cheeks stings like hell.

“You still remember me princess? I’m fucking honored.” He step forward, and a kick landed on her ribcage. A small grunt escaped her lips and she couldn’t think of doing anything other than drag her body with her sprained wrist away from him. Run. Is the solution she could only think of. Just like in the past. Run.

“You still take my hit pretty well aren’t you.” He snickered moving forward toward her. “What do you want Kyungsoo.” It wasn’t a question, and it came out stronger that she intended it to be. Her voice trembled in fear, anger and hatred. She curse herself to not cry and giving him the satisfaction to see her being so weak.

“I found you. How long do you think you could run away from me?” Yet another punch landed on her face, another kick on her body non stop. She tried her best to shield herself from his strong punches and kicks.

“Till death do us apart. Remember?” His last word and those intimidating stare send shiver down to her spine. He pull her collar but her energy was already drained to fight back or even shield herself from his attack because she couldn’t even move her limbs. She was staring straight to his eyes before he gave another smug smirk and his last punch hit her face. The last thing she could remember is the sound of the bone inside her nose cracked and she was chocked by her own blood before passing out.

“Y/N-ah.” A plump pinkish lips smile that shaped like a heart greets her. A smile that she miss dearly. She didn’t see anything except for him. There was a room. A blinding white room. The smile never left his face. She was about to take a step towards him then suddenly everything turns black. Everything was gone.

“Y/N. Save me.” His voice whispered.

“Kyungsoo.” She muttered as her eyes shot open. She was catching her breath through her pained broken nose and she suddenly felt pain start surging all over her body. She then heard a faint sound of machine and indistinct chattering which made her head to throb painfully.

“Y/N-sshi? You awake?” A deep voice ring in her head replacing Kyungsoo’s. It was awfully familiar but she cant recall who was the voice belong to. Suddenly she felt a cold hand touches her arm caused her to flinch. Her eyes trace the pale hand that was so cold to his face. His black locks hidden inside his beanie. She never notice his detailed feature and maybe forgot how sharp his jawline was. Or how small his eyes were. She try to smile but she could feel how hard her cheek was. The skin on her face were all tight and she couldn’t talk or move the muscle on her face properly.

“Y/N-sshi?” He called again this time managed to gain her attention. “How do you feel? You want me to call the doctor?” His deep voice were soft and welcoming. Unlike the first time they met, cold and distant. She shake her head and try to sit on the bed with his help.

“How long am I out?” She asked and even blurting the short questing cause so much pain on her face. “Since midnight. I’m glad I came home last night.” A glint of guilt written all over his face.

“What happened when you came back?” She asked again ignoring the throbbing pain on her face this time. “I came back last night and saw a guy wearing all black came out from our apartment. I thought it was your boyfriend so I just ignored it. But when I came in, I saw you laying on the floor unconscious and bleeding so bad I thought you’re dead but I saw your body still moving a bit. I carried you to my car and drive straight here..” He paused.

“Who was he by the way? Nothing in our apartment went missing. I don’t know about yours, but everything was in place except at the front where I found you.” He asked warily trying not to barge at her personal life.

“He’s just someone from the past..” Her word trailed. Yoongi decided to just stop asking since she starting to zooned out.

After a few words from the police and agreement with the university to keep the matter as a secret, they both went back to their shared apartment.

“I can just grab a cab you know. You’ve done enough for me.” She look for his gaze but his eyes were on the road. “Nah, don’t bother. I feel guilty for not make it in time last night. Well you know I should take care of you as a house mate.” A great silence engulf them suddenly. Its awkward and her eyes wavered to anywhere else except to him.

“I mean we should care of each other as a housemate. Sorry its awkward since we never bat an eye on eachother’s matter. But you know what I mean. Right?” His words stumbled a bit but she get it.

“Yea. I got you. But thank you anyway.” She give him a small smile which he replies back with his. She turn her head back to the streets again. It’s the first time she saw him smiling since they met. Almost three month living together they never talked except for the first day she moved in. They both busy with classes as they both are on their last year and participating as the bureau at the art exhibition, she notice him during the meeting but never had the chance to spoke each other.

“If you need anything just knock on my door.” Yoongi scratch the back of his head as they both got into their apartment. “Or you can just call me you know. I left my phone number at the fridge if you notice.” His gestured his hand to the fridge and she just nod. Finally giving up to the pain on her face and decided to just shut up.

She waved him good night after eating dinner together which Yoongi insisted to cook by himself after she cut the onion way too thick and spend more time wiping her tear than cutting the little onion. He’s a great cook though. They didn’t spoke during the dinner only exchanging awkward eye contact.

As her hand reach for her doorknob and trying to speed up the process of entering her room because she couldn’t stand the awkward air surrounding the living room, her room was locked. She tried to turn the knob again but couldn’t. She heaved a long sigh before leaning her forehead on the door.

“Yoongi.” She called. Head still leaned on her unopened door. She heard him hum to her calling. “Do you happen to have the duplicate key to my room?” she asked voice full with hope. There’s a silence and yoongi was already standing behind her trying to help what he can. But seeing her slumped shoulder and hand still on the knob he understand how a simple question could be a burden to her in this moment.

“You can sleep in my room. I take the couch.” She immediately turn her body facing him and shake her head violently then regret it almost instantly. Her body wobbled and she leaned her body on the door while massaging her temple. She felt a hand on her shoulder and she know whats going to happen next.

“The couch’s quite comfy you know. My uncle gave it to me when I first move in. It’s a antique but.. yeah. I’ll be fine until I call the owner tomorrow ask for your key.” He know she couldn’t argue and walked her to his room.

His room is the master bedroom, so it was big and he made it almost looked like a studio. There’s a single sized bed at the small corner near the closet and the rest is his equipment which she dind’t recognize any of it, keyboard, two seated couch that might belong to the same set with the one at the balcony and the living room. He noticed her stare.

“Sorry its kinda messy. I didn’t have time to tidy this place up since the preparation with the exhibition thingy.” He nervously scratch the back of his head.

“No its great. You haven’t seen mine.” She wanted to explain more but is too tired to say more. She let out a thanked him after Yoongi took his sheet and blanket before replacing it with a clean one and left her with his clean clothes on his bed to clean up and rest.

I wrote this one way before Stargazing, but I got stuck with the plot and here it is half way done. Enjoy..

#BTS suga #winner mino #song minho #min yoongi #bts angst

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my-motherflippin-blog-son · 4 years

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SOME POSITIVE REFLECTIONS FROM QUARANTINE

I think it’s important to acknowledge just how non-linear, progress is. You’re gonna bounce all over the place for a long time before you start feeling like you actually put some distance between where you started and where you are now. And even after all that effort, all that struggling, progress, on anything, often feels underwhelming.

I spent a whole year struggling with a lot of anxiety over this project, really worried about having a senior project that feels substantial. Something that can make up for my weak ass portfolio. Something that feels honest but smart, something funny, something to better myself, something that could make a positive change in the world beyond me. I needed it to solve all this because i was scared of being a failure. I already knew that anxiety made me waste a lot of time throughout school, it had skewed how I lived my life so dramatically. I thought I could make up for everything I knew I did wrong if I could just do something something substantial and meaningful. And in my subconscious, I felt like I if I could do that, it would define who I really was beyond that anxiety, beyond all my fuck ups.

It took me a solid half a year to come up with an idea I liked. I wrote dozens and dozens of pages of research. I wanted to make sure that each step I took toward that abstract end goal was the right one. Then problem after problem was thrown in my lap, forcing me to alter my idea. And I can blame my lack of progress on all the constant shit thrown in my lap, but I know the real reason was all that anxiety. It was paralysis, something keeping me too afraid to move forward or make a wrong move.

Part of it was I needed to know I was doing the right thing in everyone else's eyes. And at first glance, that’s not a bad thing. The world is empathetic, you’re only as good as the value you can bring to everyone in your life. How much love can you give? How many problems can you solve for others? Can you give back more good to the world than you add to the bad? I still think those ideals are what part of make the world a kinder place. At the end of the day, ya just want the most amount of people to be happy. Theres so much good in the world you want to be a part of. It wasn’t bad thinking, it wasn’t toxic, but it was partially a need to please everyone in order to validate who I was. It’s those sorta thoughts that were informing my mentality. But you can’t define yourself as long as you’re doing it through the lense of others.

So there were all these hiccups, there was all this anxiety because of the democratic primaries and graduation, and on top of that, then the virus hit. And I felt more paralyzed than ever. I’d designed a whole project around focusing in on a specific evil, approaching it with some wit and levity, and making a change. But then the rules of the game changed and i just couldn’t care anymore. And why would anyone else? When you’re drowning, It’s hard to care about someone complaining about how cold the water is. That’s kinda where I was at, it was just a lot all at once. And honesty what affected me emotionally the most is that this was a project about me having something to say and being able to say it with a little bit of wit, and I just had nothing funny to say. I couldn’t find anything funny. I had nothing productive to say, no clever solutions, nothing that added to the good. No one wanted to hear another white dude complain about capitalism without offering any solutions, especially me. MAYBE you could argue listening to someone vent is fun, but the only reason listening to someone vent is fun is because you don’t see your feelings articulated as well anywhere else. But it’s like, when the whole world is screaming, what’s the point in screaming too? I just wanted a distraction. But I didn’t realize that till later.

I spent almost 2 months having done virtually nothing. Then I met in a big group with all of Anthony’s advisees, where it turned out everyone had been affected in some way. Most people now had to make a change to how they were going to present their ideas but were still about to go on with their project, and some people were even close to done. But I just wasn’t. So when it got to me i just kinda plopped all my baggage on the table. I said I’m depressed in every possible way but outright saying it and still talking about my project, not even realizing i was doing it. I shouldn’t of done that, but was exhausted and drained so I had no filter. and after i said my piece, they talked at me for a while trying to help me find some peace in not feeling up to creating anything, but the question that stuck in my head was Anthony asking “so if this wasn’t for senior project, what would you be doing right now?”

And honestly the answer was “nothing”. I didn’t wanna do shit. I wanted to play animal crossing and watch Buzzfeed Unsolved for 16 hours a day and listen to the same 5 Tennis songs over and over. I left that meeting feeling a little nihilistic. I had no ideas and nothing clever to say. I felt stripped of everything. This project was already my hail mary as it was. There was no way I was ever going to make something that felt substantial in time. No matter what i did, it was going to feel underwhelming to me.

But the fun thing about nihilism is that sometimes it leads to optimistic nihilism. Optimistic nihilism feels like kinda surrendering yourself to the universe, theres a feeling of clarity. If I was going to be a disappointment, who cared what I made? people are going to be underwhelmed no matter what. What future is there to worry about when every future plan you had was scrapped? Fuck it. It doesn’t have to be meaningful anymore; If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

But I kept thinking about Anthony's question and realized that if I were to be forced to make something, it would be little animation loops. Its all I felt like doing. They’re fun to make. everything else felt forced. Something simple and pretty like the “How To Forgive” visualizer.

And in the past, being inspired by a piece of media would make me anxious people would think I was copying or worse, that I was doing something derivative of something better and people . But recently, I wrote a “manifesto” for design issues about the current design trend which I called “Behance Style”. This manifesto made me break down everything these trendy designers were doing. using the same imagery, the same image making techniques, the same style fonts, there was so much of “the same”. It all felt so derivative of each other. But it didn’t matter to me. I liked it anyway. I was still entertained. And because now that I understood how this trend worked, I knew if I wanted to, I could subvert it, so I wasn’t afraid of making things in that style.

I’d been asked some variation of “forget the grade, what would you normally make? what do you want to make?” many times throughout this project. But I spent the last 6 years not making anything for myself, it was all to try and meet some standard. So when people asked about my personal projects, I didn’t know how to make any. Anxiety made me work non stop on school stuff, I never gave myself the time for stuff outside of what was required. And was always too anxious about school to feel compelled to make anything for myself. It was a distraction controlled by anxiety and self hate. I’m still struggling with the idea of making things just to make them without being influenced by outside forces, but this felt like a big step in the right direction.

Saint Cloud by Waxatachee dropped and it was just so pretty and cathartic and that was all I listened to for like 2-3 weeks. Between Saint Cloud and Swimmer, I had all these ideas for little pretty loops. Gabe Gundacker started his new project and I’ve been loving everything he’s released. I started listening to a lot of love songs. The Midnight Gospel came out and while the narratives are so thoughtful and engaging, that show partially felt so inspiring because the visuals feel like they were made with the mentality of “lets have fun with it.” It all felt really nice to just be able to appreciate something purely for being pretty. I didn’t care if people judged my music taste for being basic or thought my visuals we’re corny, I just wanted to make stuff to distract myself.

I just realized im writing in the past tense, even though i’m currently still in the middle of this project. Maybe to solidify the reality I want to exist?

Im still working on it now, who knows how this’ll all turn out, but all this feels like a nice step in the right direction. just moving one very small step at a time and then often thanking another step backwards or sideways feels exhausting but eventually you make progress, and it’s the only way to go about it, especially when you feel like you’re starting from nothing.

maybe edit that last paragraph tomorrow. i wrote it and it feels like a conclusion but i definitely didn't mean for it to, im just tryna wring out the last ideas i got in my head before going to bed. you might even wanna delete it and move shit around. i wanna come back to this tomorrow. really explore this and get to the bottom of shit. theres more i wanna say but i cant come up with the words that feel right. it s 5:04 am.

#5/1

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years

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The secret of savor: why we like which is something we like | Tom Vanderbilt

The Long Read: How does a anthem we detest at first discovering become a favourite? And when we try to look different, how come we end up looks a lot like everybody else?

If you had asked me, when I was 10, to forecast my life as an adult, I would probably have sketched out something like this: I would be driving a Trans Am, a Corvette, or some other muscle vehicle. My residence would boast a mammoth collecting of pinball machines. I would sip sophisticated alcohols( like Baileys Irish Cream ), read Robert Ludlum romances, and blast Van Halen while sitting in an easy chair wearing sunglasses. Now that I am at a point to actually be able to realise every one of these feverishly foreseen flavors, they view zero interest( well, perhaps the pinball machines in a weak minute ).

It was not just that my 10 -year-old self could not predict whom I would become but that I was incapable of suspecting that my flavors could experience such wholesale change. How could I know what I would want if I did not know who I would be?

One problem is that we do not apprehend the effect of experiencing situations. We may instinctively realise the authorities concerned will tire of our favourite meat if we gobble too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we are to be able like something if only we consume it more often. Another issue is psychological salience, or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers cashback, the offer is claiming our courtesy; it is likely to be have influenced the buy. By the time we get home, the salience fades; the cashback croaks unclaimed. When I was 10, what mattered in a car to me was that it be cool and fast. What did not matter to me were monthly pays, side-impact crash shield, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the impression of is available on a midlife crisis.

Even when we look back and be seen to what extent much our flavors have changed, the idea that we will change evenly in the future seem to be mystify us. It is what remains tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have identified the illusion that for numerous, the current is a watershed instant at which they have finally become the person or persons they will be for the rest of their lives.

In one venture, they found that people were willing to pay more money to check their favourite strap play-act 10 times from now than they were willing to pay to see their favourite banding from 10 years ago play now. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old-time photo album, when you visualize an earlier picture of yourself and declare, Oh my God, that “hairs-breadth”! Or Those corduroys! Just as photographs of ourselves can appear jarring since we are do not ordinarily read ourselves as others encounter us, our previous appreciations, viewed to areas outside, from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. Your hairstyle per se was possibly not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary penchant. We say, with condescension, I cant believe parties actually dressed like that, without realising we ourselves are currently wearing what will be considered bad flavor in the future.

One of the reasons we cannot predict our future preferences is one of the things that stirs those very preferences change: novelty. In the social sciences of experience and likings , novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one side, we crave originality, which defines a arena such as manner( a battlefield of ugliness so perfectly unbearable, quipped Oscar Wilde, that we have to alter it every a period of six months ). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the status of women designer storey of the flagship store: The first thing “the consumers ” asks when they come into the accumulation is, Whats brand-new? They dont want to know what was; they want to know what is. How strong is this impulse? We will sell 60% of what were going to sell the firstly four weeks the very best are on the floor.

But we too adore intimacy. There are many who believe we like what we are used to. And yet if this were exclusively true , good-for-nothing “wouldve been” change. There would be no new prowes forms , no new musical genres , no new makes. The economist Joseph Schumpeter was contended that capitalisms character was in educating people to want( and buy) new situations. Makes drive economic change, he wrote, and buyers are taught to want brand-new happenings, or circumstances which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using.

A lot of days, people dont know what they crave until you demo it to them, as Steve Jobs gave it. And even then, they still might not miss it. Apples ill-fated Newton PDA device, as charming as it now examines in this era of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably more new at the time of its release, foreseeing the requirements and actions that were not yet amply realised. As Wired described it, it was a entirely new category of invention passing an entirely new building housed in a pattern part that represented a completely new and daring design language.

So , novelty or acquaintance? As is often the instance, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway spot of some optimal U-shaped curve storying the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he worded the MAYA stage, for most advanced, yet acceptable. This was the moment in a product design repetition when, Loewy quarrelled, defiance to the unfamiliar contacts the threshold of a shock-zone and fighting to buying changes in. We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.

Anticipating how much our flavors will change is hard-boiled because we cannot find past our intrinsic resist to the unfamiliar. Or how much we will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty is also possible. When you had your firstly swallow of beer( or whisky ), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, Where has this been all my life? It was, Beings like this?

We come to like beer, but it is arguably incorrect to bawl brew an acquired feeling, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett indicates, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. If beer gone on savor to me the room the first sip tasted, he writes, I would never have gone on drinking brew. Place of the problem is that booze is a scandalize to the system: it savours like nothing that has come before, or at least good-for-nothing delightful. New music or prowes can have the same effects. In a New Yorker profile, the music farmer Rick Rubin recounted that when he firstly sounded Pretty Hate Machine, the album by Nine Inch Nails, he did not care for it. But it soon became his favourite. Faced with something discordantly novel, we dont ever have the reference points to absorb and digest it, Rubin alleged. Its a bit like memorizing a new expression. The album, like the brew, was not an acquired savour, because he was not hearing the same album.

Looking back, we can find it hard to believe we did not like something we are today do. Current popularity gets projected backwards: we forget that a now ubiquitous hymn such as the Romantics What I Like About You was never a make or that recently in vogue antique babe identifies such as Isabella or Chloe, which seem to speak to some once-flourishing habit, were never popular.

It now seems impossible to imagine, a few decades ago, the gossip provoked by the now widely cherished Sydney Opera House. The Danish inventor, Jrn Utzon, was essentially driven from the country, his mention extended unuttered at the ceremony, the sense of national gossip was palpable towards this harbourside monstrosity. Not exclusively did the building not fit the traditional anatomy of an opera house; it did not fit the conventional word of private buildings. It was as foreign as its architect.

The truth is, most people perhaps did not know what to shape of it, and our default setting, faced with an insecure unknown, is detesting. Frank Gehry, talking about his iconic, widely admired Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, admitted that it took a couple of years for me to start to like it, actually. The inventor Mark Wigley suggests that maybe we only ever learn something when some structure we think of as foreign causes us and we withstand. But sometimes, many times, in the middle of the fighting, we end up loving this thing that has elicited us.

Fluency begets liking. When shown personas of buildings, designers have rated them as least complex than laypersons did; in other words, they read them more fluently, and the buildings seem less foreign. The role of the inventor, shows Wigley, is not to give the client exactly what he was asking for in other words, to cater to current taste but to change the notion of what one can ask for, or to project future delicacies no one knew they had. No one supposed an opera house could look like the Sydney Opera House until Utzon, taking his idea from a peeled orange, said it could. The nature changed around the building, in response to it, which is why, in the strange messages of one architecture commentator, Utzons breathtaking build appears better today than ever.

A few decades from now, person will inevitably look with dread upon a new house and answer, The Sydney Opera House , now theres a build. Why cant we construct acts like that any more?

This argument for example, Why isnt music as good as it used to be? manifests an historic collection bias, one colourfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. Make me let you in on a little secret, he writes. If you are hearing about something age-old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old-time stuff, but lots of parties still talking here shitty brand-new material, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasnt better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.

The only guarantee we have of savour is the fact that it will change.

In a 2011 sketch on the substantiate Portlandia , the obsessive sardonic catalogue of the hipster mores of the Oregon city, an exaggeratedly posturing persona known as Spyke with chin whisker, lobe-stretching saucer earrings, and a fixed-gear bike is evidence treading past a prohibit. He pictures some people inside, equally adorned with the trappings of a certain kind of cool, and establishes an supporting nod. A few days later, he agent a clean-shaven guy wearing khakis and a dress shirt at the bar. Aw, cmon! he hollers. Guy like that is hanging out here? That barroom is so over ! It exclusively gets worse: he ensure his straight-man nemesis astride a fixed-gear bicycle, partaking in shell artistry, and wearing a kuki-chins beard all of which, he churlishly warns, is over. A year later, we check Spyke, freshly shorn of whisker, wearing business casual, and having a banal gossip, roosted in the very same barroom that produced off the whole cycles/second. The nemesis? He procrastinates outside, scornfully swearing the bar to be over.

The sketch wonderfully encapsulates the notion of savour as a kind of ceaseless action machine. This machine is driven in part by the oscillations of originality and knowledge, of hunger and satiation, that strange internal calculus that effects us to tire of food, music, the colouring orange. But it also represents driven in part by the subtle the two movements of parties trying to be like one another and beings trying to be different from each other. There is a second-guessing various kinds of skirmish here , not unknown to strategists of cold warera game theory( in which players are rarely behaving on perfect information ). Or, indeed, to readers familiar with Dr Seusss Sneetches, the mythical star-adorned mortals who abruptly trench their decorations when they detect their challenger plain-bellied counterparts have idols upon thars.

That taste might move in the kind of never-ending repetition that Portlandia hypothesised is not so far-fetched. A French mathematician named Jonathan Touboul identified a phenomenon of searching alike trying to look different, or what he called the hipster influence. Unlike cooperative systems, in which everyone might concur in a coordinated fashion on what decisions to build, the hipster result follows, he hints, where individuals try to make decisions in opposition to the majority.

Because no one knows exactly what other people are going to do next, and information is also possible noisy or retarded, there can also be the times of brief synchronisation, in which non-conformists are inadvertently aligned with the majority. Spyke, in reality, might have had to see several people doing shell art maybe it even suddenly appeared at a store in the mall before soon jam-pack it in. And because there are varying degrees of hipness, person or persons may choose to wade into current trends later than another, that person is followed by another, and so on, until, like an astronomical adventurer chasing a dead whiz, there is nothing actually there any more. The quest for distinctiveness are also welcome to generate conformity.

The Portlandia sketch actually goes well beyond appreciation and illuminates two central, if seemingly contradictory, strands of human behaviour. The first is that we want to be like other parties. The social being, in the degree that he is social, is virtually imitative, wrote the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in his 1890 notebook The Laws of Imitation. Imitating others, what is known as social learn, is an evolutionary adaptive strategy; that is, it helps you exist, even prosper. While it is considered to be in other species, there are no better social learners than humen , none that take that knowledge and continue to build upon it, through consecutive generations.

The sum of this social learning culture is what draws humans so unique, and so uniquely successful. As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich documents, humans have foraged in the Arctic, reaped cultivates in the tropics, and lived pastorally in deserts. This is not because we were “ve been meaning to”, but because we learned to.

In their journal Not by Genes Alone, the anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson use the sample of a bitter flower that turns out to have medicinal value. Our sensory structure would understand the fierce as potentially harmful and thus inedible. Instinctively, “theres no reason” we should want to eat it. But someone eats it regardless and experiences some curiously beneficial make. Someone else assures this and imparts it a try. We take our medicine in spite of its bitter experience, they write , not because our sensory psychology has progressed to make it less bitter, but because the idea that it has therapeutical quality has spread through the population.

People imitate, and cultural activities becomes adaptive, they insist, because learning from others is more efficient than trying everything out on your own through costly and time-consuming trial and error. The same is as true for people now speaking Netflix or TripAdvisor evaluates as it was for primitive foragers trying to figure out which nutrients were poison or where to find irrigate. When there are too many alternatives, or the answer does not seem obvious, it seems better to go with the flow; after all, you are able to miss out on something good.

But if social reading is so easy and effective, it creates the question of why anyone does anything different to begin with. Or indeed why someone might vacate innovative activities. It is an issue asked of evolution itself: why is there so much substance for natural selection to sieve through? The master or innovator who was attacked in his daytime seems like some kind of genetic altruist, sacrificing his own immediate fitness for some future payoff at high levels of the group.

Boyd and Richerson hint there is an optimal balance between social and individual learning in any group. Too many social learners, and the ability to innovate is lost: people know how to catch that one fish since they are learned it, but what happens when that fish dies out? Too few social learners, and beings might be so busy trying to learn situations on their own that national societies does not thrive; while people were busily fabricating their own better bow and arrow, person forgot to actually get food.

Perhaps some ingrained sense of the evolutionary utility of this differentiation is one reason why humans are so snapped between wanting to belong to a group and wanting to be distinct mortals. Parties want to feel that their feelings are not unique, hitherto they experience anxiety when told they are exactly like another person. Think of the giddy anxiety you feel when a co-worker is demonstrated by wearing a similar clothe. We try some happy medium, like the Miss America player in Woody Allens Bananas who responds to a reporters interrogate, Differences of mind should be tolerated, but not when theyre extremely different.

If all we did was conform, there would be no delicacy; nor would there be penchant if no one conformed. We try to select the right-sized group or, that the working group is too large, we elect a subgroup. Be not just a Democrat but a centrist Democrat. Do not just like the Beatles; be a fan of Johns.

Illustration by Aart-Jan Venema

When discriminating yourself from the mainstream is becoming too wearying, you can always ape some version of the mainstream. This was the premise behind the normcore anti-fashion tendency, in which formerly forcefully fashionable beings were said to be downshifting, out of sheer tirednes, into humdrum New Balance sneakers and unremarkable denim. Normcore was more conceptual skill activity than business case study, but one whose premise the most different stuff to do is to reject being different altogether, moved the manifesto seemed so probable it was practically wish fulfilled into existence by a media that feasts upon novelty. As new as normcore seemed, Georg Simmel spoke about it a century ago: If obedience to fashion consists in impersonation of an example, conscious inattention of pattern represents same mimicry, but under an inverse sign.

And so back to Spyke. When he felt his drive for peculiarity( which he shared with others who were like him) threatened by someone to areas outside the group, he moved on. But all the things he experienced were threatened the chin beard, the shell arts and that he was willing to walk away from, were no longer practical. We signal our identity simply in certain regions: Spyke is not likely to change his label of toilet paper or toothbrush merely because he hears it is shared by his nemesis. When everyone listened to records on vinyl, the latter are a commodity material that allowed one be interested to hear music; it was not until they were nearly driven to extinction as a technology that they became a mode to signal ones identity and as I write, there are stimulates of a cassette revival.

In a revealing experimentation carried out within Stanford University, Berger and Heath sold Lance Armstrong Foundation Livestrong wristbands( at a time when they were becoming increasingly popular) in a target dormitory. The next week, they sold them in a dorm knows we being somewhat geeky. A week afterwards, the number of target dorm circle wearers dropped by 32%. It was not that people from the specific objectives dorm detested the geeks or so they said it was that they thought they were not like them. And so the yellow segment of rubber, tattered for a good stimulate, became a means of signalling identity, or savour. The only path the target group could avoid being symbolically linked with the geeks was to abandon the feeling and move on to something else. As much a sought for novelty, brand-new experiences can be a conscious rejection of what has come before and a distancing from those now enjoying that penchant. I liked that stripe before they got big-hearted, becomes the common refrain.

What our flavours say about us is primarily that we want to be like other people whom we like and who have those appreciations up to a extent and unlike others who have other savors. This is where the idea of simply socially reading what everyone else is do, get complicated. Sometimes we read what others are doing and then stop doing that act ourselves.

Then there is the question of whether we are conscious of picking up a practice from someone else. When someone knows he is being influenced by another and that other person to know each other very, the hell is exhortation; when someone is unaware he is being influenced, and the influencer is unaware of his influence, that is contagion. In delicacy, we are rarely presumed to be picking up happenings haphazardly. Through prestige bias, for example, we learn from people who are regarded socially substantial. The classic rationale in sociology was always trickle-down: upper-class people hugged some preference, beings lower down followed, then upper-class people scorned the taste and cuddled some brand-new taste.

Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other parties; they can change when we are trying to be like other people. Groups transmit experiences to other groups, but savor themselves can help create groups. Small, apparently insignificant differences what kind of coffee one boozes become real spots of culture bicker. Witness the varieties of mark now available in things that were once preferably homogeneous merchandises, like coffee and blue jeans; who had even heard of single ancestry or selvage a few decades ago?

There is an virtually incongruous cycles/second: private individuals, such as Spyke in Portland, wants to be different. But in wanting to express that difference, he seeks out other persons who share those changes. He conforms to the group, but the conformings of these working groups, in being alike, increase their gumption of change from other groups, just as the Livestrong bracelet wearers took them off when they accompanied other groups wearing them. The be adopted by delicacies is driven in part by this social jockeying. But this is no longer the whole picture.

In a famed 2006 venture , an organization of people were given the chance to download anthems for free from an internet site after they had listened to and ranked the hymns. When the participants could see what previous downloaders had chosen, they were more likely to follow that behaviour so popular songs became more popular, less popular songs became less so.

When parties established selects on their own, the choices were more predictable; beings were more likely to simply pick the sungs they said were best. Knowing what other listeners did was not enough to completely reorder publics musical penchant. As the scientist Duncan Watts and his co-author Matthew Salganik wrote: The best carols never do very badly, and the most difficult anthems never do extremely well. But when others alternatives are evident, there was greater risk for the less good to do better, and vice versa. The pop chart, like delicacy itself, does not operate in a vacuum.

The route to the top of the charts has in theory get more democratic, less top-down, more unpredictable: it took a viral video to assistants induce Pharrells Happy a pop a year after its liberate. But the hierarchy of popularity at the top, formerly launched, is steeper than ever. In 2013, it was estimated that the top 1% of music acts took residence 77% of all music income.

While record firms still try to engineer notoriety, Chris Molanphy, a music critic and obsessive analyst of the pa maps, disagrees it is the general public fouling one another who now decide if something is a reach. The viral wizard Gangnam Style, he notes, was virtually coerced on to radio. Nobody operated that into being; that was clearly the general public being charmed by this goofy video and telling one another, Youve got to watch this video.

Todays ever-sharper, real-time data about people actual listening action strongly fortifies the feedback loop-the-loop. We always knew that people liked the familiar, Molanphy responds. Now we know exactly when they flip the depot and, wow, if they dont already know a lyric, they truly throw the station. For the industry, there is an almost hopeless is making an effort to alter, as fast as possible, the brand-new into the familiar.

Simply to live in a large city is to dwell among a maelstrom of options: there are seemed like it was gonna be by numerous guilds of importance more choices of things to buy in New York than there are preserved species on countries around the world. R Alexander Bentley is an anthropologist at the University of Durham in the UK. As he applied it to me: By my recent count there were 3,500 different laptops on the market. How does anyone make a utility-maximising alternative among all those? The costs of reading which one is truly better is nearly beyond the individual; there may, in fact, actually be little that scatters them in terms of quality, so any one acquire over another might simply manifest random copying.

For the Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset, columnist of the 1930 pamphlet The Revolt of the Masses, journalistic shipments from adventurers seems to thrust one into a vertiginous global gyre. What would he stimulate of the current situation, where a spurt of tweets comes even before the interrupting report proclamations, which then turn into wall-to-wall coverage, followed by a recall piece in the next days newspaper? He would have to factor in social media, one has a peripheral, real-time awareness of any number of people whereabouts, achievements, status updates, via any number of platforms.

Ortega announced this the increase of life. If media( large broadcasters creating audiences) helped define an era of mass society, social media( audiences establishing ever more gatherings) help define our age of mass individualism. The internet is exponential social discover: you have ever more ways to learn what other parties are doing; how many of the more than 13,000 reviews of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas do you need to read on TripAdvisor before making a decision? There are ever more ways to learn that what you are doing is not good enough or was already done last week by someone else, that what you like or even who you like is also liked by some random being you have never met. This is social learning by proxy.

People have always wanted to be around other people and to learn from them. Metropolis have long been dynamos of social alternative, foundries of art, music, and manner. Slang has always beginning in metropolitans an upshot of all those different, densely jam-packed people so often exposed to one another. Cities drive taste change because they furnish the greatest showing to other parties, who not amazingly are often the innovative parties metropolitans seem to attract.

With the internet, we have a kind of metropolitan of the sentiment, a medium that people do not just exhaust but inhabit, even if it often seem to be repeat and increase prevailing municipalities( New Yorkers, already physically exposed to so many other parties, use Twitter “the worlds largest” ). As Bentley has argued, Living and working online, people have perhaps never imitation each other so profusely( because it typically costs good-for-nothing ), so accurately, and so indiscriminately.

But how do we know what to copy and from whom? The age-old ways of knowing what we should like everything from radio station programmers to restaurant steers to volume critics to label themselves have been substituted by a mass of individuals, connected but apart, federated but disparate.

Whom to follow? What to prefer? Whom can you trust? In an infinite realm of selection, our options often seem to cluster towards those we can see others representing( but away from those we feel too many are preferring ). When there is too much social affect, people start to think more like one another. They take less information into account to make their decisions, yet are more confident that what they are thinking is the truth because more beings seem to think that way.

Social imitation has gone easier, faster, and most volatile; all those micro-motives of trying to be like others and hitherto different can intensify into explosive erupts of macro-behaviour. The big-hearted ripples have got bigger, and we know that they will come, but it is harder to tell from where, in the vast and random ocean face, they will swell.

This is an edited extract from You May Too Like, published on 30 June by Simon& Schuster( 12.99 ). To ordering a transcript for 10.39, going to see bookshop.theguardian.com or announce 0330 333 6846. Free UK p& p over 15, online guilds only.

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years

Text

The secret of savor: why we like which is something we like | Tom Vanderbilt

The Long Read: How does a anthem we detest at first discovering become a favourite? And when we try to look different, how come we end up looks a lot like everybody else?

A few decades from now, person will inevitably look with dread upon a new house and answer, The Sydney Opera House , now theres a build. Why cant we construct acts like that any more?

The only guarantee we have of savour is the fact that it will change.

Illustration by Aart-Jan Venema

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

The post The secret of savor: why we like which is something we like | Tom Vanderbilt appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

apsbicepstraining · 7 years

Text

The secret of savor: why we like which is something we like | Tom Vanderbilt

The Long Read: How does a anthem we detest at first discovering become a favourite? And when we try to look different, how come we end up looks a lot like everybody else?

A few decades from now, person will inevitably look with dread upon a new house and answer, The Sydney Opera House , now theres a build. Why cant we construct acts like that any more?

The only guarantee we have of savour is the fact that it will change.

Illustration by Aart-Jan Venema

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

The post The secret of savor: why we like which is something we like | Tom Vanderbilt appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2ts5WsS via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes