Big Red?
Then again, Big Bird in Polish is Żółtodziób (yellow beak), and in Spanish he’s Abelardo Montoya, which is just a name.
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I was put into all sorts of “gifted and creative” classes in elementary school, but the ironic thing is that I was absolutely lousy at being creative, at least the way our classes went. Give me a blank sheet of paper and tell me to write a story or draw a picture, and you’d get a frustrated confused little boy and a blank sheet of paper. But tell me to write a story within specific guidelines or draw a picture of a specific thing, and I’d try my best, even if it sort of sucked. Creating from scratch never interested me; fulfilling and exceeding a set of expectations did. Probably why I became a graphic designer and not a fine artist.
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I’ve always described this as “having a hard time shifting gears”. I was a non hyperactive but ADD kid when if you weren’t bouncing off the walls you didn’t get diagnosed, and even for them the system was not very supportive. I don’t take verbal directions or multitask well, but can hyperfocus on a task easily, well, more easily before the Internet. College would have worked for me if I had been allowed to take only 3 classes, but there was always pressure to “normalize” and take 5. Even by the mid 80’s there was more recognition of and space made for impairments like mine.
But this child sounds like the problem isn’t creativity per se but filtering and situation appropriate behavior. Usually that’s accompanied by the tendency to run at the mouth and not do a lot of listening to other people’s words or visual cues. A lot of creative but non spectrum kids will sit at their desks drawing or writing but not disrupting. I drew full page sailing ship naval battles.
It’s funny how minds work. My daughter who’s a terrific writer was recently blank about an story topic but given a random silly line wrote an amazing one.
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Wait- so getting called “fag” for knowing things wasn’t a joke? Next you’ll tell me “You’re so smart, block this fist” wasn’t a koan!
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I’m reminded of a bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Pirsig set his class a creative writing task, aimed at breaking them out of their usual patterns. The instruction was to find a brick wall and write about it.
He had one distressed student who came back empty, claiming that it was impossible. So he had her start with the top left brick, write about that, then move on to the next one, and so on.
It worked; the floodgates broke and an essay came pouring out.
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never verbalized it before, but yes. Me, too.
Very frustrating. I’m good at problem solving. “Do whatever you want” is not solving any problems. Finding a solution is the creative part, for me. I’m good at writing and drawing, but those are skills–tools–nothing about them is inherently creative. I guess it is expected that a good writer or artist is creative because those skills are often developed by people that want to get their ideas out there? Never really thought about it. But I’m a better craftsman than some of these folks, but it’s all just skills. Tell me what you want and I’ll provide a solution. It’s also a great motivator. Doing it “for me” is no motivation, unfortunately.
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I’ve often said, contrary to Edison, that 90% of successful invention is identifying a good problem to solve. While I’ve made my career solving mechanical design problems for clients, I’m not as good at coming up with problems to solve as I used to be. But I’m such a pessimist about the whole marketing thing that I’ve never tried to market an invention myself and only licensed a design once, and that was a disappointment due to the company’s mishandling it.
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‘Creative’ is a word that’s depreciated in meaning, at least for me. Somebody says ‘oh, that’s creative’ when, depending on the context, they actually mean ‘innovative’ (solves a problem via novel or unexpected means), ‘imaginative’ (a muddled term itself; could mean anything from ‘expresses a novel perspective of subject’ to ‘shows playful thinking’), or ‘generative’ (fosters/provokes further consideration/discussion of the subject; a springboard for more ideas).
Sarcastic use of ‘creative’ can put some sharp teeth on either of these last two connotations.
“Creativity is the enemy of innovation.”
That’s from artist Tom Sachs, who felt much the same way.
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I’m a trans woman and on my right hand, the ring finger is longer, but on the left hand they’re equal. Wait, maybe it actually depends on how I hold my hands? It seems I can get a range of results.
Hmm, I looked it up and it appears the gender correlation is pretty minor, with the ring finger being longer for the vast majority of both men and women:
(X axis is ratio of index finger to ring finger)
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Those curves look a little clean. Are they just means and standard deviations?
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Not sure what he meant, but it evokes to me all the times I’ve seen overdesigned crap that clearly just served somoene’s jollies.
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My working interpretation of this quote is pretty similar. Identify the problem. Don’t ‘brainstorm’. Ground yourself in hard data (this includes qualitative data such as the experiences of others). Revisit what’s already known to work. Abandon convenient assumptions. Look where no one else is looking.
All of which readily applies to disciplines like engineering and programming. Translating these lessons to music and th visual arts is tricky. Often there is not a problem to solve, at least in the analytical sense.
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Shit, I think that human death should rank at least as important as animal death. What bothers me isn’t that people care, but that people care so damn much that you wonder if they care about people at all. And don’t give me that, “I can care about more than one thing.” Maybe you can, and I accept that, but society at large seems to waste its compassion on dogs and give “undesirable” people a giant middle finger by comparison. People have gotten harsher sentences for kicking a dog than for raping a woman.
And it does seem to be specifically dogs, sometimes cats, never the Hornfisted Uglyass Smelly Penis Warbler-- it has to be adorable and push the neotony button.
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We get no respect…
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There’s a likely physiological explanation for that.
Most humans cannot taste ethanol; it’s pretty much flavourless to them. However, a minority of the population have a few extra types of tastebuds, some of which are sensitive to ethanol.
Most of these folks describe the taste of ethanol as “like licking an ashtray” or something similar.
There’s another subgroup who, for similar reasons, experience coriander/cilantro as tasting like soap.
Personally, I can’t stand celery; it’s horrendously bitter. The tiniest hint of it in a vegetable juice drink is enough to make it unpalatable to me.
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[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:64, topic:92330”]When it comes to animals, no matter how cute & furry, I like 'em and I’m good to 'em, but I’m not very sentimental about their mortality.
[/quote]
I love animals; I enjoy interacting with them, and a fair part of my current profession is centred around preserving and protecting them. I get very, very angry when I hear about or witness the wilful mistreatment of animals.
I also used to kill and dissect animals on a regular, professional basis.
Although his extremist acolytes are scum, I have great respect for the ethical work of Peter Singer. Singer’s key point regarding animal welfare is that the lives and suffering of animals matters; it is not a thing that can be casually disregarded.
But that does not mean that all animal lives are always of equal value; if I’m faced with the choice between one human and a hundred rats, then a hundred rats will die and I make no apology for that.
I respect animals for what they are. I do not respect people who anthropomorphise them [1]. It’s disrespectful to the animals, and causes great harm when taken to extremes. That possum or whatever is not a little furry human, and if you act like it is, the possum (or whatever) is going to suffer and die. Life is not a cartoon.
[1] Within reason. I did use to refer to my rats as “little dudes”…
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I think the community just got older, and more staid. Experimenting with weird designer drugs just doesn’t have the appeal it used to. By west coast standards, I don’t think I’m all that weird, though that still makes me fairly eccentric by the reckoning of most people out east where I live now.
Me too. There was something about the pre-internet counterculture that we’ve lost now. Uncle fester was like a real-life Walter White before it was cool.
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To be truthful, I don’t even know what weird means anymore. The world has gotten much weirder than it was when I knew I was weird. (How weird was I and how long ago? I used to buy BB when it was printed on paper, and I was involved with actual social BBSes where we would meet up IRL.)
If you really think you’re weird, 45% chance that you just need to broaden your horizons, 45% chance you’re trying to hard, and 10% that you are truly weird.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” A jelly donut for the first person to attribute that quote.
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- I really love the look of old software rendered 3D, or 3D from that era in general; to me Thief: The Dark Project is an incredibly pretty game.
- As it came up a couple threads over, I armchair lawyer for fun.
- (subweird) My parents tried to get me to enter law school, something I’m not interested in, but apparently degrees for the field I am pursuing are enough to qualify for certain bars in my state. Who would’ve figured.
- Bisexual; technically pansexual, but I’ve always thought the latter sounds kind of dumb.
- I’m pretty jealous of Electrical Engineers; that’s another hobby of mine (and another I’ve brought up on here, went and calculated how much power you’d be getting out of some solar panels.)
- I tend to think of dumb stuff, then try and think through the implications of it as deeply as possible. It’s fun as an exercise for building worlds.
- I’ve never been religious, much to some of my family’s chagrin, but I’ve always really liked religion. I often mentally lament the fact that people still believe in all this religion stuff because it gets in the way of appreciating all these awesome stories and the lore built around them.
- I sometimes worry that I’m a sociopath who managed to trick myself into thinking I’m normal; I have a natural wariness of power because of it.
- I’m ambidextrish: in some things I’m right-handed, in others I’m left-handed, some things I’m ambidextrous. Sometimes which hand I use for what is entirely random at that moment.
- Socially awkward like everyone else here, apparently.
- I have long hair! Longest was down to the small of my back. I’ve been told by a friend that I’d look really intimidating if my hair wasn’t the way it is, so I guess that’s a reason to keep it. It’s also apparently just really nice hair, every female friend I’ve had has asked to brush it at least once.
- Having read way too many of those sherlock holmes style puzzle books as a kid, I sort of just automatically try to make inductions from scattered information. It really helps with point 5, it means I can flesh out some pretty detailed ideas and worlds from only a small set of anchor points.
…Pretty sure that’s at least most of my weirdness.
EDIT:
A big one I forgot: Velveeta and american cheese are abominations which should be struck from the Earth. Cheez Wiz is required for certain foods.
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