Superstimulus | Sam FM @ Superstimulus

Sam FM

samfm@superstimul.us

Sam FM

1 week ago •

Sam FM
1 week ago •

So I've been listening to Hadestown 2010. One of my favorites is Hey, Little Songbird. It's just such a pushy, patient, practical, sinister vibe, and pushes the narrative forward at the same time.

Lyrically:
The extended bird metaphor is really fun. Especially with all these phrases that are flipped from their typical positive connotation.
"fly south for the winter" [south = the underworld]
"I could use a canary" [He wants a songbird for music, but this line comes right after a reference to "down in the mine"]

Structurally:
Whenever Hades comes back in after Eurydice's part, he overlaps on her last word, which adds to the pushy feel to the song. (Eurydice doesn't start singing till he's fully finished.) Also, Hades' part has this lovely AABBC structure. The extra C line on each stanza makes it feel like he's taking his time.

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Sam FM

2 weeks ago •

Sam FM
2 weeks ago •

Lately I’ve been enjoying listening to the album Inside by Mother Mother, which is very much about pandemic isolation. Makes me think: wow I sure do love a concept album!

Common features in concept albums that I really enjoy:

- Explorations of the same ideas from different angles.
- Connections between songs — a song about infatuation hits different after you hear it referenced later in a heartbreak song.
- figuring out the gestalt ideas and the way they’ve changed in the artist’s head over time.
- Taking the time to explore the little details and nuances that fit between the radio singles ab peak experiences.
- Intros, outros, interludes. Having a structural dynamics like this makes listening to the whole thing a satisfying longform experience.

Happy to hear any recommendations for other compelling concept albums, or other music that hits the above features. (I mostly listen to indie rock, folk, pop, psychedelic, etc, but happy to try new things!)

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

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Daniel Filan

in reply to Sam FM • 2 weeks ago • •

Not sure if this quite counts but I think the original 2010 Hadestown album is pretty great.

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Sam FM

in reply to Sam FM • 2 weeks ago •

ooh, yes thanks for the reminder I've been meaning to listen to this!

Sam FM

3 months ago •

Sam FM
3 months ago •

I finally got around to trying Stardew Valley (no spoilers please!) and I have all sorts of thoughts about it.

First: Woah they added an official local coop mode? And it’s not even bad?? “Retrofitted splitscreen coop for a single-player story game” sounds so dubious, but honestly it’s only very slightly janky!

It’s delightful how well the game still works with a tacked on extra player. You can work together, or split up and specialize. There’s still a narrative, but most of the character and relationship stuff is separate, so you can make your own choices there.

Several aspects of the game feel like they should break with the addition of a second player, but it kinda just works anyway. Cutscenes just run duplicated, side by side, somewhat out of sync (this isn’t as bad as it sounds, honestly). Certain special objects are soul-bound to your side of the game, and just invisible to the other player. Occasionally it’s a little weird, but mostly it’s just fine!

As the person I am, I strongly prefer playing ga

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Ben Millwood

in reply to Sam FM • 3 months ago • •

I think the thing that happened to my Stardew game is I ended up romancing an NPC because I felt like the game wanted me to, but I wasn't really into it, I just wanted to grow crops. Now I have a girlfriend but I felt bad for stringing her along so I stopped playing the game :P

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Ben Millwood

in reply to Ben Millwood • 3 months ago • •

don't date unless you want to: good advice for Stardew and life in general

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Sam FM

4 months ago •

Sam FM
4 months ago •

There’s this classic phrase: “It’s more of an art than a science.” It points to a real dichotomy, but it’s just so absurd to me to name the sides of this dichotomy “art” and “science.”

Art and science are broad concepts, but personally, I’d define them something like:

Science is process of predicting, testing, and measuring used to learn about the world. Art is a process of examining, communicating, understanding experiences and ideas through a variety of media.

But back to that godawful phrase. What definitions does it imply? All it does is set a dichotomy of “intuitive processes, that require monitoring and adaptive strategy” vs “calculated processes that involve executing rigid plans.”

Planning a dazzling firework show, or baking a cake isn’t “science” just because you have to measure ingredients ahead of time. These activities aren’t remotely motivated by learning.

And what, deft negotiators and motorcycle maintainers are “artists

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kip

in reply to Sam FM • 4 months ago • •

SURE, it's not really right to say e.g. baking is a science whereas cooking is an art. Technically both are skills involving both instructions and intuitions, and neither is literally about doing science or creating art

HOWEVER!!

I think people do basically understand that "this is more art than science" means "this is more about intuition than being good at following straightforward instructions." Therefore: communication win

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Sam FM

in reply to kip • 4 months ago •

My issue with the phrase is not that people are misunderstanding each other, but that the use of this phrase reinforces a frustrating characterization of "art" and "science" as sets of aesthetics and tools.

I think we lose a lot when we forget that the core value of science is to learn things by following the scientific method. Art has harder to define value, but I think it's a mistake to put so much emphasis on valuing how mysterious and inscrutable someone's creative process is.

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kip

in reply to Sam FM • 4 months ago • •

So you're thinking that there's a relationship between people using the word "science" all willy-nilly and people misguidedly glamorizing science? ("I fucking love science", "scientists say X")

Or some other issue?

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Ben Weinstein-Raun

in reply to kip • 4 months ago • •

I read Sam as saying something more like, "people understand each other fine when they say the phrase 'more art than science', but actually they have kind of wrong mental pictures about what it's like to actually do art or science, and this phrase typifies / reinforces that misunderstanding."

Art actually often requires exactly the kind of technical skill that people are referring to as "science" in this dichotomy: e.g. photography, sculpture, and painting all involve tons of technical aspects despite being ~central examples of art.

And science is in fact not centrally about its technicalness; it's about the process of learning, which in many central cases involves an intuitive stage followed by a technical stage (e.g. iiuc most physics and math starts as the inscrutable intuitions of a highly trained specialist, and only gets formalized as a way of shoring up and communicating the correctness and detail of that intuition).

I'm not sure about the specific problem Sam means to point to, but one issue I see actually feels related to your

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Ben Weinstein-Raun

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 4 months ago • •

e.g. people go through high school and come away thinking that math is about learning algorithms, and so they're like "eh, I guess math is basically about following the rules the teacher told you. Mathematicians must multiply some really big numbers, I guess". Probably there have been at least some such people who would actually have loved "mathematician math", i.e. the process of discovering, understanding, and proving new mathematical truths.

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Sam FM

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 4 months ago •

Yess. And like, most disciplines involve some combination of technical study + intuition. So you get all these cutesy claims like, "jazz improv is *actually* more of a science" just because it involves studying technical music structure. The next step is to get confused and judge jazz improv by the merit of it's technical complexity.

Side note here: when I was in art school, my professors were actually very dismissive of building technical skills. This was very frustrating for me at the time, and probably an overcorrection. But I think they were trying to push back against a tide of technical-but-meaningless artworks, and re-center expression/communication/interpretation as the core of what it is to participate in art.

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Sam FM

in reply to kip • 4 months ago •

@kip yeah I think the misguided glamorization is pretty core to this thing. Pages like IFL Science feel like the result of treating science like an aesthetic, or putting the people in science jobs on a weird platform.

I see a similar thing happening with "rationality," being used more often to refer to "certain Berkeley weirdos" than "careful truthseeking." It's not hard to imagine a IFL Rationality page that just reposts ideas from "certified rationalists" that you are now expected to believe with 100% confidence and no skepticism.

@kip

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kip

in reply to Sam FM • 4 months ago • •

(side note: very amusing to try having a conversation with Sam through text in Ben's cool new internet living room. We were in the same room IRL and could've cleared things up extremely fast by speaking out loud)

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Ben Weinstein-Raun

in reply to Sam FM • 4 months ago • •

I wonder if there's a setting or plugin to collapse comment threads. It's a little annoying that they can get super long, and take up all that space in the timeline.

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Ben Weinstein-Raun

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • 4 months ago • •

Oh, wait, it seems like maybe that was the threshold for collapsing to start 😅

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Sam FM

in reply to Sam FM • 4 months ago •

Yeah I'm trying to get a better sense of how content is structured here. It feels like a strange fb/twitter hybrid. The "posts with comments" structure feels like fb, but then the comments are treated almost like posts of their own sometimes. Scrolling through a list of "replies to various posts" feels more like Twitter

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