[markdestouches]

This is the kind of literary nonsense that has annoyed me ever since I turned 20. If you don't have anything to say, no one care if you're human, and no one should. I see zero virtue in making inspired noise, even if you're famous, more so if so.

[watwut]

Good thing about written text is that absolutely nothing is forcing you to read it. It is not even like sound that you can't prevent to hear.

Not every text have to be deeply virtuous. It is OK for them to be just about figuring things our and manipulating own head.

[rat9988]

Great, but it's ok to write it's not interesting too then?

[watwut]

There is difference between "I am not interested" and "no one should be interested and you should shut up you virtuosity projecting xxxx". I was reacting to the latter. If op stopped at "I do not like them" I would not be reacting.

Not liking something or not being interested and going into angry burst because the thing exists are two different categories.

[DonHopkins]

I think you'll appreciate Chip Morningstar's hilariously scathing satirical take on pomo litcrit!

https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

>How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure

>Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities

>"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman

>This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale.

[...]

>Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired ("Po-Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them.

[...]

https://www.wired.com/1993/01/hypelist-19/

>Wired Magazine: Jan, 1993: Hype List: 2. Po-Mo Gets Tek-No

>Look out, the post-modern crowd is invading computer science, leaving jargon and dazed academics in their wake. The recession woke up the post-modernists to the fact that technology, not comparative lit, is where the money is. So now we have Marc Poster writing on "Lyotard and Computer Science," and Kathy Acker talking about "the author as hacker." Although the hypertext field has already succumbed, some neo-nerds are trying to keep the po-mo forces at bay. At the last Cyberspace conference, the tech heads in the audience refused to be intimidated by quotes from Frenchmen, and heckled the po-mo's off the stage. Personally, I'd much rather have Foucalt quoted at computer conferences than Dijkstra. And hey, computer scientists need new jargon - I'm still hearing "paradigm" used in the Kuhn-ian (non) sense. (Dig that hip po-mo parentheses trick!)

[tinideiznaimnou]

See also, the Sokal affair, and the Postmodernism Generator (https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/). Though that one's coming back to bite us in the butt, what with the LLMs and all.

A pity really - I still believe that actual, rigorous deconstruction of a text is technically feasible, and used to wonder why nobody is even trying.

Of course, a humanities scholar with the hacker rigor doesn't become a literary theorist or think tank talking head - they become a badass fiction writer that we probably haven't heard of.

[tinideiznaimnou]

>This is the kind of literary nonsense that has annoyed me ever since I turned 20.

No one cares, buddy.

>If you don't have anything to say, no one care if you're human, and no one should.

This sentence left me speechless. Do reflect on what you just said.

---

Such a clickbaity article, what is it even doing on HN? A minimum-effort paragraph of introduction regurgitating the bloody trope that "no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams", then a copy-paste-powered compilation of a bunch of... quotes from some writers describing their dreams? To think that someone probably got paid for this article, and here we are worrying about ChatGPT lol

Guess what, I couldn't bring myself to read any of that. But if an acquaintance of mine (or even you, @markdestouches) decided to tell me all about some dream they had the other night, I'd listen attentively, maybe play the game of ascribing meanings to it. Because why the fuck not?

Sure, most people's dreams are boring nonsense, but so are their lives. What is more "useful" to talk about anyway - salaries? All the things we hate about JavaScript? The food you ate last week? "The economy"? A dream, on the other hand, is a piece of someone's mental activity that is completely detached from real-time sensory input, and I find that kind of shit positively fascinating!

---

I'm reminded of a somewhat dream-like real life story about dreams:

An ex-partner used to have these very long and vivid dreams that had more interesting imagery and symbolism than half of the sci-fi/fantasy films, books, all that genre fiction (of which I was an avid fan; and she much less so, but still somewhat immersed in that kind of media.) However, what I absolutely hated is that she always recounted her dream from last night in the evening as we went to bed. And, since they made for such nice bedtime stories, of course I would always drift off to sleep. Then she would ask, "are you sleeping?", and get really mad at me for dozing off while she was telling her dream. Which was obviously more important to her than letting her man get some rest at the end of the day.

Okay, I get it, I see how this kind of experience (even if it's in a milder form, but compounded with other interpersonal frustrations) can make someone compulsively unreceptive to others telling them their dreams. (Especially if they're the superficial kind of person that comes to HN for the cultural content and life advice lol) And yeah, she was an abusive kind of b...person the rest of the time, too - I'm really glad that the only way I can ever meet her any more is... in the occasional nightmare.

Now, here's the rub: I still remember the sheer vividness of her dreams. (It really was good stuff - could've worked as one of those abstract European movies; except it would probably take a bit more of a CGI budget than is par for the course.) But since it was >10 years ago, and she never bothered to write em down, I only remember their content very vaguely, as if in a dream: something something colors, something something a journey, etc.

That is, I remember someone else's dreams from 10 years ago with the same level of detail as my own half-forgotten dream from last night.

Inception, huh?

Seekers of forbidden techniques, take note - I think this is the kind of stuff yall show up to bother me about every once in a while? See how easy it is to get me to spill the beans if you just do the opposite and leave me well alone? (And no, I don't think it works without the acute negative reinforcement, but yall already do that kind of crap for no reason whatsoever, so that's on you. By all means try it on someone, it's not going to help you with the predicament but I'm developing quite the taste for watching it backfire.)

---

Just remembered another "cute" story about listening to others' dreams, as recently recounted by a friend.

This one involves another classic trope: that of a woman getting mad at a man because she had an unpleasant dream about him.

So they wake up, and she's really upset about the dream she's had and wants to know his opinion of what it all means.

He listens to all the heartbreaking things he's been up to in her dream, considers the matter, and has the following realization: "oh, that's a dream about how you would feel if I started treating you like you've been treating me."

This, paradoxically, calms her down. She is relieved to hear this. They take the matter no further. Soon after, they have a violent argument, and break up.

What practical thing did I learn from this story? Dreams can be helpful when you have difficulty bringing some information to the threshold of your awareness; or others'.

[dxdm]

Thank you for taking the time to write this. Best comment I've read on HN this past week.

[thealchemistdev]

Yeah. Ditto to what my sibling said. Love it.