Probably the most obvious for this community is being very enthusiastic about technology but loathing anything with "smart" in the name. (I still use a flip phone and 15+ year old appliances)
Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers
I find myself in this weird cross-section of software devs who do enjoy coding, but also love experimenting with new AI stuff and I don't quite care yet if it's more or less efficient.
It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.
It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.
So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.
I have gotten into watching Street Fighter tournaments online and recently found out about Tool Assisted gameplay for emulators. Not sure I have time for hacking ROMs but do enjoy those tournaments
Oh. That's definitely my ~6 years old kid. I should spend >= 90 minutes of high quality time with him every weekday after he comes back from school, but nowadays I'm only spending 45-60 minutes. And I'm not reading much to him these months. The "good" news is that grandparents will go back next month, so I gotta pick up more time with my kid. Not sure about the quality, though. Sometimes I don't enjoy doing things he enjoys to do, so I fake for about 15 minutes and call a break. I can't wait for the him he reaches 6 -- I'll gift him a RPi loaded with DOSBian, sit with him every Wed evening to code QBASIC games. I'll ask him to do the design and I'll code it before him. He doesn't read yet, but maybe by then he can read some simple words.
The other one is efficiency. I spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with the objectives that I set. If I measure myself using the Carmack productivity metric[1], I probably won't even finish 1 CD every day. My productivity has gone down a lot since I completed my previous learning project at the end of Jan so it really sucks. I feel that I'm wasting my life away.
So anyway, these are the two symptoms that show I'm a bit messy inside.
[1]: Brian Hook once wrote in his blog that John Carmack used to measure his own productivity by playing CD while working. If he stopped working, even for going to the bathroom, he would pause the play. At the end of the day he counted how much time the player played.
Most anime is either a guilty pleasure or a guilty displeasure for me. The stuff I like, I feel embarrassed of the part of me that likes it, and I feel embarrassed about what I'm willing to overlook to enjoy it. Then the stuff I don't like, I feel closed-minded about it, like what's wrong with me that I'm too stuffy to enjoy it or too dumb to get it. But I don't have friends or acquaintances who are into it, so it never comes up with other people, and I generally don't think about it.
Alice in Chains for me. I developed my taste for music in the 90s and love the grunge and punk from that era, but just not AIC. I can't explain way exactly, just drives me batty.
+1 but I don't see that as a guilty displeasure to be honest. I also formed most of my musical taste in the 90s and to this day Dirt, Sap and Jar of Flies sound just as good as they did back in the day.
I feel like this is something we shed bit by bit as we age. When people talk about becoming a more authentic version of themselves as they get older, I think this is part of it.
Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.
In theory I'm ok with drugs being legalized, but I will admit that I have a strong distaste for people who routinely use drugs and drug culture.
I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.
I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.
Came here to say the same. At first I couldn't even relate, but then another phase of my life came flashing back to me. All the angst around the pretense, wondering why I like somethings in a particular space but then not others that I was supposed to like...
And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling
Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like
I just can't bring myself to care about fantasy role playing games, entertainment based on comic book superheroes, or board games. I have friends who are very serious about some of these topics, and I struggle greatly to pay attention when these things are being discussed. I have some very nerdy interests, but these are not among them.
On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.
I love hearing about people's vivid dreams. Especially weird ones. I feel guilty for hating it when people talk about sports. I just walk away because I cannot participate in the conversation, even if I want to. Which I don't. But it feels rude.
I love TMBG, and I tried to get my wife into them, but it never really vibed with her, which is fine.
That said, we went to a TMBG concert in Brooklyn about 11 years ago, and she actually had a really good time, and was even singing along to some of the songs. With music, the context of "how you're listening to the music" is equally important to the music itself.
I listened to TMBG early on in my music life and eventually came to "not particularly enjoy" them. Talking Heads, on the other hand, have only gotten better and better in my opinion.
No argument from me about opera. The music is often fabulous but the “acting” is histrionic, the plots are generally overwrought, and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool but now we’re in the fourth act and why can’t this tenor stop yelling?
But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.
Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.
> and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool
Not sure if you know, but the Indy 500 only goes to 200 laps; watching the 400th lap has got to be super boring :P. OTOH, the Wienie 500 [1] ran at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was only two laps; I guess there's a 100x inflation in the miles number there, but I'm ok with it.
The great outdoors. Hiking, skiing, camping in the wilderness. I always aspired to be a person who genuinely enjoys this shit but at 50 I decided that yeah, this ain't going to happen. All indicators point to me being the kind of person who likes this stuff - locale, income level, fitness level, age etc.
I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.
I'm the same way. I kind of hate going outside, but I have this kind of fetishized perspective of the "primal man, livnig off the land". I have friends who like to hike, so occasionally when they'd invite me to come along I would come with them, and then spend the entire trip trying to convince myself that I'm having fun.
Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.
That sounds like you just don’t like the climate + ecology of the place you happen to live / the places people around you enjoy visiting. Ain’t no mosquitoes or cold or rain in Arizona.
Yeah, I'm not American and haven't been to Arizona. But from my understanding it can and regularly gets hellishly hot there, no?
But there is something to what you say in that I can definitely spend more time outside on a mellow sunny day in Spain than on just about any day in Eastern Canada where I reside. But it's still not what I yearn for. I'm not a couch potato though as I'm a pretty hardcore freestyle swimmer. So it's not an issue of low energy due to lack of exercise.
Meh at best. Even in ideal conditions say, skiing in the Alps on a -5C sunny day feels like a bit of a chore. When I'm out there I sorta, kinda can convince myself that I like doing it but the chore of getting the gear packed, lining up for lift tickets, changing into the clumsy gear and all that other ceremony makes it on balance, not worth it. Same goes for all other outdoorsy stuff.
Probably the most obvious for this community is being very enthusiastic about technology but loathing anything with "smart" in the name. (I still use a flip phone and 15+ year old appliances)
Similarly I grew up always enjoying video games but it feels like a burned out husk in the modern era. Most of the big dollar "video game" market is now just MTX gambling and even a LAN party probably routes everything through Steam or Epic's servers
I find myself in this weird cross-section of software devs who do enjoy coding, but also love experimenting with new AI stuff and I don't quite care yet if it's more or less efficient.
It feels more efficient and feels like I'm outputting much better products with it. Indeed I feel like I am able to tackle harder, more encompassing problems than I otherwise could.
It may take my job, but tbh I'm having fun on the ride there.
So while I do enjoy coding, it's not the end-all, be-all for me.
I have gotten into watching Street Fighter tournaments online and recently found out about Tool Assisted gameplay for emulators. Not sure I have time for hacking ROMs but do enjoy those tournaments
Oh. That's definitely my ~6 years old kid. I should spend >= 90 minutes of high quality time with him every weekday after he comes back from school, but nowadays I'm only spending 45-60 minutes. And I'm not reading much to him these months. The "good" news is that grandparents will go back next month, so I gotta pick up more time with my kid. Not sure about the quality, though. Sometimes I don't enjoy doing things he enjoys to do, so I fake for about 15 minutes and call a break. I can't wait for the him he reaches 6 -- I'll gift him a RPi loaded with DOSBian, sit with him every Wed evening to code QBASIC games. I'll ask him to do the design and I'll code it before him. He doesn't read yet, but maybe by then he can read some simple words.
The other one is efficiency. I spend a lot of time doing things that have nothing to do with the objectives that I set. If I measure myself using the Carmack productivity metric[1], I probably won't even finish 1 CD every day. My productivity has gone down a lot since I completed my previous learning project at the end of Jan so it really sucks. I feel that I'm wasting my life away.
So anyway, these are the two symptoms that show I'm a bit messy inside.
[1]: Brian Hook once wrote in his blog that John Carmack used to measure his own productivity by playing CD while working. If he stopped working, even for going to the bathroom, he would pause the play. At the end of the day he counted how much time the player played.
Most anime is either a guilty pleasure or a guilty displeasure for me. The stuff I like, I feel embarrassed of the part of me that likes it, and I feel embarrassed about what I'm willing to overlook to enjoy it. Then the stuff I don't like, I feel closed-minded about it, like what's wrong with me that I'm too stuffy to enjoy it or too dumb to get it. But I don't have friends or acquaintances who are into it, so it never comes up with other people, and I generally don't think about it.
Alice in Chains for me. I developed my taste for music in the 90s and love the grunge and punk from that era, but just not AIC. I can't explain way exactly, just drives me batty.
+1 but I don't see that as a guilty displeasure to be honest. I also formed most of my musical taste in the 90s and to this day Dirt, Sap and Jar of Flies sound just as good as they did back in the day.
It was Deftones for me.
I love Deftones and Alive in Chains. both quintessential bands of my teen years
I feel like this is something we shed bit by bit as we age. When people talk about becoming a more authentic version of themselves as they get older, I think this is part of it.
Winter is my guilty displeasure. I live in Alberta, where winters are relatively long/cold, and I'm near places where I can ski, so I should probably make the most of winter. But, I'm happy with indoor hobbies, and the occasional toboggan/skate/snowball fight with my kid.
In theory I'm ok with drugs being legalized, but I will admit that I have a strong distaste for people who routinely use drugs and drug culture.
I'm not talking about people who drink during the holidays or smoked weed in high school, those people don't bother me. I'm talking about the people who need to lecture about how great weed is and feel the need to smoke it every day and make it a vital part of their identity. I find people like that insufferable. I think the people wearing cannabis-leaf t shirts are generally annoying, and I hate how everyone who smokes a joint and watches a Carl Sagan video seems to decide that they're a philosopher.
I'm a pretty boring American liberal, I think drugs should be legal, but I guess that's more in an abstract sense, sort of a NIMBY thing. I'm ok with people doing drugs, as long as I don't have to deal with those people and they do it far away from me.
I acknowledge the hypocrisy in this. Can't help how I feel.
This is entirely normal. I think jet skis and French arthouse cinema should be legal, I just don't want either of them anywhere near me.
I'm just so glad I'm past the phase where I'd worry about these things. It's very exhausting.
Came here to say the same. At first I couldn't even relate, but then another phase of my life came flashing back to me. All the angst around the pretense, wondering why I like somethings in a particular space but then not others that I was supposed to like...
And then slowly over time the realization that most people were in the same boat and it's just virtue signaling
Now I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like
I just can't bring myself to care about fantasy role playing games, entertainment based on comic book superheroes, or board games. I have friends who are very serious about some of these topics, and I struggle greatly to pay attention when these things are being discussed. I have some very nerdy interests, but these are not among them.
On one hand, I want to be supportive and happy for them that they are involved in something nerdy and creative, but on the other it's like hearing about somebody's vivid dreams. Neat for them, not great for me.
I love hearing about people's vivid dreams. Especially weird ones. I feel guilty for hating it when people talk about sports. I just walk away because I cannot participate in the conversation, even if I want to. Which I don't. But it feels rude.
I'm supposed to like They Might Be Giants and Talking Heads, but I just can't. Even after a Terry Gross marathon of Fresh Air.
I love TMBG, and I tried to get my wife into them, but it never really vibed with her, which is fine.
That said, we went to a TMBG concert in Brooklyn about 11 years ago, and she actually had a really good time, and was even singing along to some of the songs. With music, the context of "how you're listening to the music" is equally important to the music itself.
They Might Be Giants is in an interesting space.
Their lyrics are very clever and interesting.
But their music is terrible. What the world needs is for someone with musical talent to redo the music to TMBG's corpus.
I listened to TMBG early on in my music life and eventually came to "not particularly enjoy" them. Talking Heads, on the other hand, have only gotten better and better in my opinion.
I mean COME ON https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xphLY5ucIpQ
No guilty pleaasures or displeasures. like what you like and accept it.
( I like Nickelback, they were pretty solid at what they were. There i said it.
I should like house of leaves, but I couldn't get into it. Same for early Bruce Sterling. )
people
No argument from me about opera. The music is often fabulous but the “acting” is histrionic, the plots are generally overwrought, and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool but now we’re in the fourth act and why can’t this tenor stop yelling?
But I don’t have any guilt about my displeasure. I’m a snob about some things, a reverse snob about other things, and some things I just like or dislike for whatever reason.
Some people wrap a lot of their social identity up in passing an invisible bar in the level or type of interests they hold.
> and the singing is like watching the 400th lap of the Indy 500. First two laps were kind of cool
Not sure if you know, but the Indy 500 only goes to 200 laps; watching the 400th lap has got to be super boring :P. OTOH, the Wienie 500 [1] ran at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and was only two laps; I guess there's a 100x inflation in the miles number there, but I'm ok with it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyES63Rgvg
Its soo relaxing. I fall asleep every time and its not anything to do with interest or bordeom. Also if its in a foreign language. Super deep sleep
The great outdoors. Hiking, skiing, camping in the wilderness. I always aspired to be a person who genuinely enjoys this shit but at 50 I decided that yeah, this ain't going to happen. All indicators point to me being the kind of person who likes this stuff - locale, income level, fitness level, age etc.
I spent decades trying to learn to ignore mosquito bites or frigid cold or vicious rain to no avail. It's just not me. I wasn't cut from that cloth and never will be. The sad part is though that my dear son and to some degree my wife ARE cut from that very cloth. And that means that most of the family activities that they thrive on have always been an endurance test for myself.
I'm the same way. I kind of hate going outside, but I have this kind of fetishized perspective of the "primal man, livnig off the land". I have friends who like to hike, so occasionally when they'd invite me to come along I would come with them, and then spend the entire trip trying to convince myself that I'm having fun.
Eventually I realized, NOPE. I don't enjoy this. I don't like walking on uneven terrain, I don't like getting dirt all over myself, I don't like being far away from cell service, I don't like camping, etc. Genuinely not trying to convince anyone else to change their opinions, if you like this stuff by all means keep doing it. Sometimes, though, I think it's worth doing an "emotional inventory", and actually questioning how much you enjoy the things you think you enjoy.
That sounds like you just don’t like the climate + ecology of the place you happen to live / the places people around you enjoy visiting. Ain’t no mosquitoes or cold or rain in Arizona.
Arizona has cold. I used to visit a place where you could see ski lifts; although I was never there when they were operating.
Yeah, I'm not American and haven't been to Arizona. But from my understanding it can and regularly gets hellishly hot there, no?
But there is something to what you say in that I can definitely spend more time outside on a mellow sunny day in Spain than on just about any day in Eastern Canada where I reside. But it's still not what I yearn for. I'm not a couch potato though as I'm a pretty hardcore freestyle swimmer. So it's not an issue of low energy due to lack of exercise.
What about like easy day hikes on 70 degree days?
Meh at best. Even in ideal conditions say, skiing in the Alps on a -5C sunny day feels like a bit of a chore. When I'm out there I sorta, kinda can convince myself that I like doing it but the chore of getting the gear packed, lining up for lift tickets, changing into the clumsy gear and all that other ceremony makes it on balance, not worth it. Same goes for all other outdoorsy stuff.