Quote from: jeff37923;1092297Punkinstein's Monster.

Which, ironically, would be an awesome name for a punk band.

Quote from: Chris24601;1092298Reminds me of art school. Everyone kept going on and on about how they were embracing their individuality, while all of them all wore black, dyed their hair black, got piercings, etc. As someone who had come back in my late 20s for a second degree (and a commercial/digital art degree at that, so I didn't have time for that "finding myself" bullshit*) it was actually pretty hilarious as I'd often be the only person even wearing color in a class (I was also much closer to the age of my actual instructors so all their appeals to authority and experience by instructors in their 30s-40s that might have worked on me at 18-19 got challenged pretty regularly by a 26-27 year old me).

* How little time did I have for that bullshit? When one of the sculpture projects required an "artist's statement" (and my definition of an artist statement is "when your art has failed so completely that the average person can't distinguish it from roadside garbage") I threw a rock and a scissors in paper bag and wrote a paragraph of complete gobbledygook titled "Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Eternal Struggle*" and in four point font underneath the statement had the line "* all of the above is complete bullshit. The meaning of this 'art' is that I want a passing grade on this project."

Only one person ever read the fine print (it wasn't the teacher) and they later declared me the king of all bullshitters.

The point? Just about every social group that sets out to be non-conformist ends up with their own standards of conformity and ostracizes others based on adherence to those standards. The number of people willing to completely forego conformity to one group or another is actually vanishingly small.

Do you think danger hair is a direct consequence of rebelling against the Emo phase?

I cant keep track of the change of fashions.

Quote from: Shasarak;1092319Do you think danger hair is a direct consequence of rebelling against the Emo phase?

I cant keep track of the change of fashions.

Nah, Emo and Dangerhairs are both warped inbred bastard mutations of Punk.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;1092271Shit like the RPGnet uproar over Cyberpunk 2077 is why we need to take the Punk out of Cyberpunk.

Actually, good Cyberpunk should include more Punk - all aspects of punk's history, especially the animosity between subgroups and the selling of non-conformity by the corps to the masses which becomes the rules of conformity and the cycle continues.

You want the story of the street punk band who gets popular, seduced by the corps and winds up as a useful cog in the system they used to rail against, and then when they rebel against their corporate masters to reclaim their true punk souls, its far too late because the corps have already used their media power to "prove" the punk band is a total sell-out, thus destroying the band's credibility with the masses.

SJWs fit perfectly as both protagonists and antagonists within the cyberpunk genre. Especially because the world IS repressive in a cyberpunk dystopia and Trump would be Gandhi compared to the leaders in such a world. Our real world SJWs are pathetic because they aren't "raging against the dying of the light", they are whining coddled toddlers whose lives are too easy. In cyberpunk, those warriors trying to achieve justice in society are neck deep in shit, and would make fine PC concepts.  

Quote from: Chris24601;1092298Everyone kept going on and on about how they were embracing their individuality, while all of them all wore black, dyed their hair black, got piercings, etc.

I wonder if this is just humanity. I have no idea if the great artistic movements of the past from the Renaissance to the 19th Century were all full of artists conforming to same dress code, behavior and thought. You can see that conformity in 20th century artists involved in various art movements, but it would funny if its just the Nature of Man.

Quote from: Chris24601;1092298When one of the sculpture projects required an "artist's statement" (and my definition of an artist statement is "when your art has failed so completely that the average person can't distinguish it from roadside garbage") I threw a rock and a scissors in paper bag and wrote a paragraph of complete gobbledygook titled "Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Eternal Struggle*" and in four point font underneath the statement had the line "* all of the above is complete bullshit. The meaning of this 'art' is that I want a passing grade on this project."

And then you ascended to godhood? 'Cuz that's some demigod worthy 36th level throwdown!!!

Awesome!

I knew a talented, although lazy and unmotivated, artist when I was at UCLA. He habitually would wait until the last second to do his projects. His grand achievement was when he put two glass bowls next to each other, one filled with water and one filled with pennies with a nice calligraphy note that read "Make a Wish". The result? He told me his "piece" was chosen for the dept's annual gallery showing and received universal praise from numerous teachers for the "depth of his statement".

The sad part was it really hurt him. It was obvious he wanted to be hammered down for being a lazy dumbass, not rewarded for his non-effort. I remember he got pretty dark and nihilistic after that. It shook me up too because I was 20 and still thought college was something special, especially a prestigious "tough" school like UCLA. LOL, how young and full of dumb!

Quote from: Spinachcat;1092326You want the story of the street punk band who gets popular, seduced by the corps and winds up as a useful cog in the system they used to rail against, and then when they rebel against their corporate masters to reclaim their true punk souls, its far too late because the corps have already used their media power to "prove" the punk band is a total sell-out, thus destroying the band's credibility with the masses.

*Writes that shit down in case he ever gets a chance to run Cyberpunk again.*

Quote from: Spinachcat;1092326And then you ascended to godhood? 'Cuz that's some demigod worthy 36th level throwdown!!!

Nah, ascension was two years later in the required to graduate course with the head of the art department.

Bear in mind, I was in my late-20s by then (everyone else in that class was 21 tops) and in the commercial/digital/3d modeling program who'd already freelanced for probably half-a-dozen years by that point (but needed the degree to actually get a full time gig with one of the ad agencies in town)... he was late 40s/early 50s with a fine arts background and had never had a job outside academia.

Anyway, part of the course was an "artist's survey" where you had to answer questions about your artistic style and vision and then we all discussed them around the table.

- What artist's statement would you put on an exhibit of your work?

"If I need an artist's statement for someone to understand why what I'm doing is art then I have failed as an artist."

- When do you feel that what the public considers art and what is true art diverged?

"It didnt. The idea that the public doesn't understand your art is just an excuse used by the mediocre to explain why the public rejects them."

- What is your artistic vision?

"Whatever my client pays for it to be."

But the most epic of them all only emerged in the actual discussion...

-What sources do you turn to for inspiration with your art?

I listed of a whole bunch of bands and composers since I get a lot my ideas for things from my imagination being stoked by music.

"No, no, no." said the department head when I read my list (I was first for that one). "What ARTISTS do you go to? Say you have a lighting problem in your composition. Which artists do you go to looking for a solution?"

"Oh, I do 3d modeling so I just play with the lights until it looks good."*

You could see the veins on his temples throbbing. Everyone else went dead quiet and slid down in their chairs. It was a solid minute before he spoke again. He never called on me again the whole semester. He had to give me the minimum grade promised to anyone who showed up to every class with all the work done.

I graduated with honors in spite of him. My favorite part of the whole experience was probably my final project for sculpture/3d art where it had to be a kinetic piece (meaning some part of it had to move). No one believed me when I told them what mine would be. The professor made me sit in class doing nothing rather than let me go where I could work on it because she didn't believe me either.

But after everyone else showed off their slinky dogs and things that spun on casters I made them all come out on the art building lawn... because there was now way a fully functional trebuchet with a 10' arm and a 300 lb. counterbalance was going to fit through the doors (it barely fit in the back of my dad's pickup). The looks on their faces as I lobbed water balloons across the pond made it all worth it. One of the other students even collapsed into a fit of hysterical laughter because they couldn't believe I'd actually pulled it off.

As to your earlier point... definitely Basic Human Nature. We are constantly at war with ourselves in the desire to stand out and the desire to belong. Outside of the rare few who just don't care about conformity, most who want to stand out will just glom onto what someone else has already done so they can seem rare and special without the risks of being the actual trailblazer.

It's why you can often name various artistic movements after a particular founder. They were the original, everyone else glommed on to be part of the hot new thing (until the next hot new thing comes along). The follow-ons are basically the artistic equivalent of the "Early Adopter" in technology.

Humans are a whole bunch of contradictions that I blame mostly on us having driven so far out of our evolutionary niche we can't even fully process why we're doing what we're doing. We're a people with the base instincts of band society hunter-gatherers trying to function in a world where nothing you need to do to survive and find a mate bears any relation to band society, hunting or gathering.

* While it may sound flippant, this was actually me being honest. What a paint and canvas artist would call lighting if they looked at a single frame render in 3d modeling is actually a function of interactions between light nodes, surface material properties and render settings on multiple objects that are often in motion. Referencing the chiaroscuro used by Leonardo daVinci doesn't tell you a damned thing about whether the problem is from another object blocking a light node (or reflecting light from a different node), whether your specular settings on the surface are causing too much glare or if your ambient occulusion settings are too high for the given light sources.

So you fiddle with things until they look right.

This was also about 20 years ago back when the 3d modeling department was barely two years old (I was one of the first class of graduates from the program). The differences between media simply did not compute for someone whose entire frame of reference involved paint, clay and maybe some artistic markers if they were feeling new fangled.

There have been many times over the years where I've thought 3d animation departments would be better served if they were moved to the engineering schools at various universities. It really takes more of an engineer-like mindset (checklists help a LOT) to solve problems when they arise because the problems are almost always something structural (ex. your lighting is in the wrong place to produce shadows on the object or you didn't account for the displacement map on the model when you were figuring out whether to meshes would clip each other... or my personal favorite, you forgot to turn back on "casts shadows" for the hair that you turned off so your test renders only take 10 seconds instead of 5 minutes each for the final render so the shadow on the wall behind them is of a bald person).

edit: Moved to a new thread.

Quote from: Shasarak;1092291Ha, Punks are conformists and Nazis are Socialists.

What an upside down topsy turvy world we live in.

The Nazi platform did take quite a few of its explicitly articulated planks from socialist thought, planks that would be called "left wing" today (universal employment, free health care and education among others). It took others from the body of nationalist tradition that is often today called "right wing" (the Blut und Boden, "Blood and Soil" emphasis on nation and family and on traditional family structures, as well as being virulently "anti-Communist" in the sense of opposing the Communist International organization of Russia).  In their own words, they claimed to be of "neither left nor right," which was part of how they were marketing themselves to the Weimar Republic voters: as the answer to the paralyzing factionalism that had crept into the Reichstag.

For myself I consider them ultimately a "left wing" party primarily because I believe any party that resorts to totalitarian policies in the name of its subjects' good, however that good is defined, is "left wing", and that to be "right wing" is to be anti-totalitarian by definition. But I recognize there are differing schools of thought on that.

Likewise, when declaring a person or movement "conformist" or "noncomformist" we have to remember it's a transitive property: what are people (not) conforming to?  A subcultural rebel can be nonconformist to the mainstream middle class and still conform to much of his own community; indeed, it's hard to have a "community" if the people in it won't conform to some shared values, tenets, or behaviours. This is exactly why the purity spirals in deliberately norm-defying subcultures can become more vicious than anything in the original mainstream -- by definition, internal norms in a subculture founded on defying external norms are going to be, and feel, more fragile, and nothing is more of a betrayal than to have the person who threw over your old norms with you suddenly turn around and look like he's throwing over the new norms you thought you both shared. It's a vicious circle, and can be seen in a lot of Protestant theological history as well as in pop subcultures.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1092484The Nazi platform did take quite a few of its explicitly articulated planks from socialist thought, planks that would be called "left wing" today (universal employment, free health care and education among others). It took others from the body of nationalist tradition that is often today called "right wing" (the Blut und Boden, "Blood and Soil" emphasis on nation and family and on traditional family structures, as well as being virulently "anti-Communist" in the sense of opposing the Communist International organization of Russia).  

I think you forgot militarism (point 2 of the manifesto), colonialism (point 3 of the manifesto), racism (points 4, 5, 6 and many others), and xenophobia (points 7 and .

I'd also like to remind you that we do not need to limit our judgement to the NSDAP electoral promises. Since they did come to power, we can also look at their actual track record.

QuoteFor myself I consider them ultimately a "left wing" party primarily because I believe any party that resorts to totalitarian policies in the name of its subjects' good, however that good is defined, is "left wing", and that to be "right wing" is to be anti-totalitarian by definition. But I recognize there are differing schools of thought on that.

You bet.

Quote from: Michele;1092539I think you forgot militarism (point 2 of the manifesto), colonialism (point 3 of the manifesto), racism (points 4, 5, 6 and many others), and xenophobia (points 7 and .

I'd also like to remind you that we do not need to limit our judgement to the NSDAP electoral promises. Since they did come to power, we can also look at their actual track record.




You bet.

Go far enough to the left or right and you become so certain that your way is the one true right way that you wind up enforcing it on people.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1092326I knew a talented, although lazy and unmotivated, artist when I was at UCLA. He habitually would wait until the last second to do his projects. His grand achievement was when he put two glass bowls next to each other, one filled with water and one filled with pennies with a nice calligraphy note that read "Make a Wish". The result? He told me his "piece" was chosen for the dept's annual gallery showing and received universal praise from numerous teachers for the "depth of his statement".

The sad part was it really hurt him. It was obvious he wanted to be hammered down for being a lazy dumbass, not rewarded for his non-effort. I remember he got pretty dark and nihilistic after that. It shook me up too because I was 20 and still thought college was something special, especially a prestigious "tough" school like UCLA. LOL, how young and full of dumb!

I found this story to be profound in its beauty.

His talent -- through the inspiring well of laziness -- draws deep an ambiguous and simple work. He means it as a flagrant blow off of an assignment, but forgets that art also derives imbued meaning from observer as well creator. Like the budding horror that the world's authorities are naked... Yet truly instead it is he who forgot that the artist is not the sole animus involved.

It is like the reversed Hierophant (the "priest of rebellion,") and upright Hierophant ("priest of the status quo,")... when speaking dogmatic truth one must not forget 'Thou Art Not The Truth'. He spoke his truth of laziness, and his talent did him in with a reflection of unintended depth. He did not see worthy his praised art for it mocked his intent, and thus mocked his (and others') talent; all he saw was a joke dragged out too far and lost respect for the order of things and what he felt was his calling.

His soul was blasted with the realizing horror that meaning in art can be divorced from him -- and even in his flippancy he can accidentally touch deep meaning in others. It is Art Greater That The Artist, Meaning Beyond One's Intent. The trial of the Hierophant thru the Tree of Life embittered him by reflecting his own crapulence, making himself, his professional world, and his calling all feel like a fraud.

I am sure nihilistically chasing oblivion felt welcome from that horrific, humbling, knowledge. "Thou Art Not THE Truth. Thou art but a messenger." What an exquisite display of karmic chastising torture.

(If I wrote it as a play I might have an angel persuading the panel judges for him to win. It is such a worthwhile test of one's spirit: mercy and charity as a punishing lesson in modesty. He sounds like he went on to self-flagellate in full measure afterwards. I wonder if it destroyed him... Or maybe he decided to amble onto another of life's branches.)

I love hero stories with didactic lessons.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1092552I found this story to be profound in its beauty.

As the Spinal Tap quote goes, "It's such a fine line between stupid, and uh ... clever".