I got in this fight with a friend who had a painting created by another friend. It was skull, lighter, knife.
He asked me what it meant, and I don’t remember what I said… But he jumped up with this victorious expression and went “No! It means nothing, it’s just skull, lighter, knife. Other friend painted it, and”. I got into some death of the artist philosophy and he started to get pissed the more I insisted it doesn’t matter what the artist though, it’s what you get out of it. The artist had a snug smile behind the other guy
I got terrible grades in the essay portion of every AP lit test because my takes were different than the consensus. I just remember one of them where I tried to defend my take… But what I took out meant nothing to the author, but he insisted the critics were definitely way off
Here’s the thing - no one does anything for one reason, or even zero reasons. Artists usually don’t have a hidden message beyond the story structure - all creation is a reflection of the creator. There’s no arbitrary or random - humans aren’t capable of that.
It’s like looking at someone’s bedroom… There’s no version of a bedroom that says nothing about the occupant
Cool story bro. I do mean that sincerely, it has the sort of energy that made me want to say that, but I am genuinely glad to have now heard that story, it’s pretty interesting
My first thought was it might be a non sequitur, but it seems like it has too much structure for that or to be the earliest recorded troll.
What I find fascinating is that we might find the answer - language has math, AI research has made us start looking at language as high dimensional shapes in information space. Turns out, not only do languages have a consistent rate of information expression when spoken, but there’s a common human shape to language
Having just a few examples of writing and distance in time makes it harder, but with the combinations of studying language evolution (they have shockingly clever methods with a solid mathematical basis) and the many things we’re learning about the math of language (now that we’ve discovered it’s incredibly important technologically)…
We might understand the joke one day, maybe even soon. Or maybe we won’t, because not enough information remains to definitely declare an answer. Or maybe this is the first troll, and over time more humans that had ever existed when the author wrote it will spend lifetimes trying to understand this weird, unsolved language puzzle.
Maybe, as humans grow in number and specialize more and more, this specific joke spawns multiple fields of study
I got in this fight with a friend who had a painting created by another friend. It was skull, lighter, knife.
He asked me what it meant, and I don’t remember what I said… But he jumped up with this victorious expression and went “No! It means nothing, it’s just skull, lighter, knife. Other friend painted it, and”. I got into some death of the artist philosophy and he started to get pissed the more I insisted it doesn’t matter what the artist though, it’s what you get out of it. The artist had a snug smile behind the other guy
I got terrible grades in the essay portion of every AP lit test because my takes were different than the consensus. I just remember one of them where I tried to defend my take… But what I took out meant nothing to the author, but he insisted the critics were definitely way off
Here’s the thing - no one does anything for one reason, or even zero reasons. Artists usually don’t have a hidden message beyond the story structure - all creation is a reflection of the creator. There’s no arbitrary or random - humans aren’t capable of that.
It’s like looking at someone’s bedroom… There’s no version of a bedroom that says nothing about the occupant
Removed by mod
Cool story bro. I do mean that sincerely, it has the sort of energy that made me want to say that, but I am genuinely glad to have now heard that story, it’s pretty interesting
My first thought was it might be a non sequitur, but it seems like it has too much structure for that or to be the earliest recorded troll.
What I find fascinating is that we might find the answer - language has math, AI research has made us start looking at language as high dimensional shapes in information space. Turns out, not only do languages have a consistent rate of information expression when spoken, but there’s a common human shape to language
Having just a few examples of writing and distance in time makes it harder, but with the combinations of studying language evolution (they have shockingly clever methods with a solid mathematical basis) and the many things we’re learning about the math of language (now that we’ve discovered it’s incredibly important technologically)…
We might understand the joke one day, maybe even soon. Or maybe we won’t, because not enough information remains to definitely declare an answer. Or maybe this is the first troll, and over time more humans that had ever existed when the author wrote it will spend lifetimes trying to understand this weird, unsolved language puzzle.
Maybe, as humans grow in number and specialize more and more, this specific joke spawns multiple fields of study
Regardless, that dude was epic.