[scotty79]

I'm terribly sorry. I know some people delight in carefully chosen phrasing and meandering narratives. It's just a shrinking set. Other just want only relevant information at a snappy pace and internet makes them aware that's what they actually like.

Your comment deserves tl;dr and it doesn't have one. You have no idea how tempting it is not to read it.

However I did and it was a slog.

So let me tell you what I got from it.

0. You don't agree.

1. Perhaps reading wrong books gave me wrong impression. (It's just a politeness, you really believe 2.)

2. I don't get books as I am not cultured enough to understand what they try to be.

3. To get art one needs to make effort. Only then reward comes.

4. Then comes a relatable example that fighting games don't need a story and demanding that of them is objectively wrong. Because art of fighting games is something else.

5. Then you agree that art sometimes is partly built of filler content.

6. Then a quote that says that everything has something interesting about it if you look intensly enough.

7. Then you claim that things gets better when you look at them longer. And you say that maybe I don't see value not because there's none but because my inability to focus prevented me from looking long enough and how can I tell.

8. Then you concede that it's possible that even if I looked as long as humanely possible at something I might still not like it.

Congrats. You created a comment in a style of a mediocre book. Hard to parse through, filled with a lot of words and just a few thoughts that don't particularly go anywhere.

I'll make an attempt at a response.

Your disagreement is entirely understandable given your occupation. Thank you for the attempt at politeness however I read many good books so it's not just because of happening to stumble only on bad stuff.

Now to the core of the argument ...

I don't agree that the only correct way of appreciating given form of art is doing it on its own terms.

I believe that criticizing fighting games for lack of plot is a valid position. Somebody might argue that Injustice 2 was the best fighting game ever and in sense that is important to him it might be objectively true.

I believe that appreciating art on my personal terms is equally valid and from my point of view way more important.

Great art does not require prior effort. Great art captures you in a way that gives you no option to avoid giving it your effort.

Mediocre art is a book that you read for half an hour every day and you think it's hard but rewarding.

Great art is a book that you finish reading at 4am because you couldn't possibly imagine falling asleep before you found out all that there was to find out.

As for my appreciation, sometimes the longer you look the more repulsive some creation becomes in your eyes. Like the form of your comment.

[boveus]

I am not attempting to take a side in either direction here, but I noticed something interesting about the format of your reply in contrast with the person you're replying to. The person you were responding to broke their post up into paragraphs that were organized into sentences (sort of like you'd expect in a book). Your reply seems to be broken up into individual paragraphs that are >240 characters (coincidentally the same character limit as Tweets).

I don't mean this as an attack. It seems interesting to me that the way people can communicate in writing can be influenced by what type of media they consume.

[scotty79]

I'm quite aware of the differences in style. Style of the other person was so hard for me to parse that in order to respond I needed to reformat it into my style. Only then I could construct the response using my translation as reference.

I'm not quite sure that my style comes from the content I consume. I think I acquired it earlier, by doing math problems at school, by learning math in college and by learning programming. In all of those contexts I needed to extract meaningful stuff from all the baroque elements.

So I developed appreciacion for high ratios of important elements to fluff words and for writing that has clear, traceable backbone that has a point.

I think shortness of what I wrote is a result of my preferences not the key factor that shaped them. Best writing advice for clear communication is to write short sentences. Information split in short portions provides natural places to pause to appreciate it and is easily skimmable where you can skip sentences or paragraphs that you already understand to get a grasp of how they fit in the surrounding context.

This is btw not an endorsement of twitter which I personally hate and didn't manage to find a single reasonable use for it since its inception.