paulgorman.org

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Fri Dec 8 08:39:22 EST 2017 Slept from ten-thirty to seven-thirty. Woke around three, and had trouble falling back to sleep. High of thirty-two and mostly sunny today. Goals: - Work on Go stuff Done. - Buy paint at Games Workshop store No, but I actually did a little painting. https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match That sample game was exciting. Watched The Last Lovecraft on Amazon. Dumb fun. Did a couple of the http://adventofcode.com problems. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/young-and-dumb-inside > It's hard to describe now how the scene worked and what it meant to us. Briefly, we made our own fun: we were in bands, made fanzines, put on shows in community halls, and basements, started micro record labels — an entire sui-generis media empire run by children. But we also functioned as a cell of a larger network of like-minded people — and the line between artist and fan was blurred, where it existed at all. > The culture spread from person to person via shared experiences and handmade physical objects. Even the "stars" of the scene were people we could _know_. > For a bunch of (mostly) middle-class (mostly) white kids in central Connecticut, punk was the closes thing we had to a cultural identity. [...] > The band didn't play again for twenty-one years, until they announced to much fanfare that they would play Riot Fest 2017. I went, in honor of my fifteen-year-old me. The crowd went banannas from the first note. > I bust into tears. > I was struck by an emotion so powerful and raw that I had a hard time identifying it at first: grief. I stood there in that ecstatic crown and _mourned_. I mourned all of us dumb kids. I mourned our graying hair and slakening bodies. I mourned some unnameable forgotten truth I used to know. I mourned Harold. I'd thought that I was there for nostalgia; turns out I was there for an opportunity to grieve that I didn't know I'd needed. > And that's kind of the crux of fandom, isn't it? You love the thing for itself, but you love it more for its ability to take you somewhere, to someone. Music is a time machine. Twenty-minute walk around sunset Lunch: lasagna, coffee Dinner: popcorn

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