I appreciated OP sharing their thoughts. But this piece didn't land for me.
I think it's a question of conflating aging with ossification. I know I will die, leaving things undone, unmade, unsaid. My body is falling apart in a lot of dreadful ways. Yet I can still grow, still learn. I intend to gather, change, be protean, until life draws the curtain closed. What a thrill!
As I age, I come to see the vistas I imagined when younger as shallow, half-baked. I wanted shallow things, having nothing to compare my desires to, no context for the myths and narratives of my own life aside from the media and socialization I was exposed to early on.
How could I -really- picture the world beyond, the richness and pains I would stumble into, almost entirely on accident? How could I imagine anything true or close to the source, having lived for such a short time, tasted so little of the complexity of our substrate?
Which brings me back to the OP's lament: of course they failed to make good art: they were not guided by an interest in touching the true thing, only in being recognized as someone that can touch the true thing. Trading the vulnerability of unfiltered experience for the rigid belief in their deserved/desired social status. What good fortune they yet live, can yet grow and change and make art!
I am reminded of Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the Stalker's Prayer:
"Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being! Because what has hardened will never win."
I love this mindset. I don’t buy the other perspectives. When you fall in love with the craft… time, perception, age, etc matter much less. You care more about adapting yourself no matter how old to perfect the craft.
Your comment (re: "no matter how old") made me think of a beautiful bit from Hokusai, who did The Great Wave Off Kanagawa
At 74 (he painted the great wave a little before this iirc):
"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'"
The severance package looks decent, but damn, I wouldn't want to be a developer in such a niche market space looking for new work. I wish the best to everyone getting the short end of the stick here.
I would hardly say the platform is dead. Apple just launched the Vision Pro. That's not a silver bullet but I'm sure they are looking for more apps and games. I hardly think VR is going away.
Not at all saying it's dead! Just a vastly smaller market space than say, doing crud stuff or ML in the year of our Lord 2024. I'm a huge VR enjoyer and I hope the medium flourishes.
I’m pretty sure they’ll be fine. I can’t imagine a CRUD agency being like “VR? No transferable skills! To the breadline with you!” Realtime state management is a highly sought after skill.
Nice qualifier about 'biological' there, was totally necessary to make your point, really. Because, you know, if you're a trans woman you totally won't get harassed in the Tenderloin. So insightful, you must have a deep understanding of both presenting as a woman and living near the Tenderloin.
I think you might get harassed as a trans woman in the Tenderloin, but the reasons would be different from the reasons you would get harassed as a cis woman.
If, by some chance, this actually caught on and was some kind of indicator of quality, it would be in a predictive model's best interest to integrate the logo into any kind of web design it produces. Furthermore, no human-curated content farm would hesitate to include this symbol, regardless of the content's human 'purity'.
I think it's a question of conflating aging with ossification. I know I will die, leaving things undone, unmade, unsaid. My body is falling apart in a lot of dreadful ways. Yet I can still grow, still learn. I intend to gather, change, be protean, until life draws the curtain closed. What a thrill!
As I age, I come to see the vistas I imagined when younger as shallow, half-baked. I wanted shallow things, having nothing to compare my desires to, no context for the myths and narratives of my own life aside from the media and socialization I was exposed to early on.
How could I -really- picture the world beyond, the richness and pains I would stumble into, almost entirely on accident? How could I imagine anything true or close to the source, having lived for such a short time, tasted so little of the complexity of our substrate?
Which brings me back to the OP's lament: of course they failed to make good art: they were not guided by an interest in touching the true thing, only in being recognized as someone that can touch the true thing. Trading the vulnerability of unfiltered experience for the rigid belief in their deserved/desired social status. What good fortune they yet live, can yet grow and change and make art!
I am reminded of Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the Stalker's Prayer:
"Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being! Because what has hardened will never win."
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