This process is really important for developing and maintaining the technical skills of working in traditional media, because if you are not able to establish cultural and observational reference points you lose the ability to "see" as you work. Like, after you have been working on something for several hours everything sorta looks correct and wrong at the same time, and if you don't have something to ground it you'll drift in ways you don't want to.

It is also a really important set of skills for learning, because you can go to an art museum and look at works that inspire you and figure out (or make an educated guess at) the technical processes that their author used to make them, and then you can apply your learnings to making something new. You don't go to the museum to find things to copy without understanding.

One of my peers from that art program once remarked to me that she's seen interesting things happen in the works of artists that either don't have this training or only reference art made by other amateurs - work that is not anchored in either a cultural tradition or naturalistic observation or both tends to drift in strange ways

the example she gave was a self taught artist who only referenced manga, but was not familiar with the techniques or anchors the mangaka they were copying themselves knew, and so said artist's style ended up exaggerating all of the stylistic elements of the manga they were referencing

my point to all of this is, I don't at all believe you can look at / watch / read / listen to something and not be changed by it even in a small way. the human brain is a hungry for patterns to learn from, and everything you learn is eventually pruned or mutated through continuous re-encoding. you need to keep absorbing high quality examples and information throughout your career to preserve your skills. I think this applies generally.

this is why I think slop is so damaging, especially so as it gets harder to spot, because you're feeding yourself with vacuous garbage that superficially resembles information. if you accept it as valid, every related skill that you've worked hard to sharpen up to that point is fundamentally at risk because as they get re-encoded they will be adapted to accommodate the miscategorized noise.

now, not everything you see in the world is going to help your career as an artist, and I think it's true that there's plenty of things you can internalize that are destructive to your ability to make the things you want to make. that sounds pretentious, but I don't think it is: a simple example is internalizing the idea that you shouldn't make art because you don't already have the skills to do it with perfection is effective at preventing many from ever developing those skills.

anyways, my conclusion from this right now is it may be a good idea as a professional programmer who wishes to retain her hard earned skills, to make a regular habit of going to the museum as it were~~regularly reading the source code of successful projects that have non-superficial high standards, understanding how it works, why it works, why it is the way it is, and also looking at the history of how it grew over time.

I say "non-superficial" because strict adherence to a random grab bag of engineering best practices is not holding yourself to high standards if you don't understand any of them. That's just posturing.

@aeva I like this as a reference of what happens when NIH takes over https://www.youtube.com/@Wintergatan

@pupxel I had to unsubscribe from his channel. it got too painful to watch after a time. the first marble machine was perfect and "I need to make a better one" is something that consumed him.

@aeva @pupxel The guy started with the classic mistake of trying to reproduce a viral success and (accidentally?) turned that into a transition from "musician" to "niche youtuber". I guess it's going pretty well for him, but yeah, I was much more interested in his music. =/

@whbboyd @pupxel every time i tune in it seems like he's gone farther off the deepend and every time he's grasping at straws at how to turn it around. if he's making a decent living off it, love that for him, but i don't get the feeling that he's on track for his own personal good ending

@aeva @whbboyd @pupxel yeah that's what it looks like to us :(