Larfen Writes Longer Posts

  I smoked a little too much weed and spiraled last night. It was triggered by a relatively minor series of events, I simply noticed that a LOT of smashers were having trouble with their flights both to and from Genesis, with delays and cancellations causing difficulty for tons of the people I follow. This observation can of course not be divorced from the numerous US plane crashes in the news lately, which is all pretty clearly being caused by President Trump’s absolute gutting of the FAA, with hundreds of flight traffic controllers being laid off. I really try to avoid thinking about federal politics whenever possible. I’ve realized over time that my influence over decisions made at that level is basically zero. I can vote every two years for congressional and sometimes presidential candidates, but living in Illinois means that a democratic candidate is going to win every single time in my state. I would vote D over R anyway, but that’s irrelevant. What matters is that I and my o...

This may not be as big of a hot button term these days, but for a long time it felt like every day you were hearing something about “Postmodernism”. Anime fans were using it to describe shows that they liked, and conservatives were using it in the same tone they now use the word “woke”. Similarly to woke, it was also rare to find anyone describing themselves as postmodernist.  Back when this term was more widely used, I would try to understand what this word meant and every source I found trying to explain it would tell you what it isn’t , but rarely what it is. I’ve read enough at this point that I feel like taking a crack at describing what this term means to me, and hopefully anyone who’s confused about the word can get a base understanding of what the fuck people are talking about. Even though it’s not a widely used word anymore, I think the reason for that is because its logic is so widely assimilated into our culture that it doesn’t feel like something distinct anymore. In ...

I was once one of the best in the world at something. Toribash is a free-to-play ragdoll physics fighting game that I played just about every day for 5 years starting in 2009, when I was 14. I am currently one of 67 players who have been honored as a “legend” of the game, with a golden forum username to match. If you narrow it down to my field, I’m one of 23. Unfortunately, very few people have even heard of Toribash , so I quickly learned that telling people of my accomplishments led to a very short conversation. Would it have been better if I had dedicated myself to a more well-known endeavor? Would I have been capable of being a “legend” in anything else? I was an above-average fish in a smallish pond. I’ve recently been reading Benjamin Labatut’s novels, which largely focus on the scientists who made the breakthrough discoveries of the early 20th century. These are the people who first laid out things like quantum mechanics, computer architecture, and artificial intelligence. Isaa...

This piece was prompted by a great article I read in the latest Harper’s about the rise of fake/ghost artists on Spotify . I recommend reading it if you’re not familiar with the phenomenon. I have a lot of thoughts about the state of art in general today, and we’ll see if I can work myself up to that. For now, I want to focus on the history of music as an artform in western culture, and where I think it may be going.  To begin the discussion, I want to lay out a framework that I’ve been brainstorming lately. My thesis is that music is actually three separate forms of art, though the third is a recent development. First, there is the composition of music, where an artist arranges and communicates notes such that a piece can be replicated. Up until the invention of the player piano*, this replication was exclusively the domain of the second art of music, performance . This is what people usually imagine when they think of the word “musician”. The performer replicates a composed pie...

  Welcome to the Larf awards! I’m going to write a bit about my favorite media from this year in each of the major mediums I engage with. For the most part I’m going to try and limit it to things that came out this year (as is tradition for year end lists) but if I didn’t consume enough new shit then I might bring out something old that I found out about for the first time this year. The TV Show of the Year: Real Housewives of Salt Lake City I don’t really watch much TV these days, as it’s a huge time investment for what is usually low quality programming. The only fictional TV shows I currently follow are Severance and White Lotus, neither of which had new seasons this year. I liked Succession too while it was on. I still think fictional TV can do it for me, and “prestige TV” still has some juice in it, but to have prestige TV you have to actually make something good. In the meantime, we have reality TV. The other shows I enjoyed this year are The Traitors and (as always) RuPaul’...

  In this blog I’m going to be outlining the history of my engagement with recorded music. That is, I’m going to be writing a bit about the artists and albums that I believe had the greatest impact on my taste throughout my life. I feel like I’m reaching the end of my big youthful musical exploration journey and have settled into my taste a bit, so it’s a ripe time for some retrospection. My thoughts on listening to new music are nicely summarized in this tweet.   I’ve always wanted an excuse to organize this for my own benefit, and a personal blog seems like the place. I’m not sure what value others will get out of this, but I hope that it illuminates some of my personality and maybe gives you ideas on how to expand your taste. My first exposure to music came from two sources: piano lessons and my dad’s collection. My parents started me on piano lessons at a very early age, which I continued until I was around 12. I can still play a bit, but the most important thing I got fro...

  Hi! Welcome to reality. You are a human being, a mammal with a rather large brain. You are on Earth, a planet in the Milky Way galaxy. You’re probably going to stay on Earth your whole life despite all the other planets and stars up there, so get used to it here and keep it nice. You probably have a lot more questions, which is normal. Unfortunately we haven’t figured everything out yet, but we’re working on it. You can even become one of those people if you’re interested. If you want to see what we’ve figured out so far, most of that information is going to be in books or online on Wikipedia. If you apply yourself, you can grasp any ideas that we have come up with so far, I promise. Speaking of online, use that thing sparingly, there’s a lot of people trying to trap you there. Here are some of the things you might want to know that we haven’t figured out yet:  Why does reality exist, since it seems like not existing is much more probable? We’ve found that just about everyth...