111–120 of 249 posts
The James Blunt documentary has similar qualities of the insanity and the banality of fame. "You look just like..." type commentary, from ordinary encounters. Both reviled and admired, he managed to leverage haters on Twitter into an image of self deprecating humour. Combined with some PTSD from his army career and stage effects. Ed Sheeran gives off what i suspect is a very carefully managed vibe of ordinariness. If…
> especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless. My dad flew 32 missions over Germany. He watched men die. 80% of his cohort did not return. He expected to die and made his peace with it. He told me once that when he returned home, he was struck by the trivial problems people had and obsessed over. After all, they weren't flying a mission tomorrow with near cer…
I always feel put in a position when I'm in an interview and they ask about handling pressure in the workplace.
That's how most people function. People work their asses off so that they can do something fun two weeks a year.
> Another thing about being a pop star is that you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid.
Because even though people clearly have different levels of intelligence, saying this out loud goes against values of the society, and keeping the society together is more important than being truthful. This is one of those things that "normies" understand subconsciously but never articulate, while autists rarely understand because it's never articulated.
> Another thing about being a pop star is that you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid
Pop star gets successful by playing a role of a stupid person. Some people think she's actually stupid. It doesn't take a degree in social sciences to connect the dots.
> I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger
Jealously has existed since the dawn of time. Various cultures have sayings along "nothing makes one happier than someone else's misery".
> the patriarchal society
I've noticed that many people who see themselves as oppressed get tunnel vision and attribute lots of unrelated problems to said oppression. This is one of those subconscious biases that exist because having them gives you massive social advantage because you can get all the pity you want.
> Over recent years some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I’ve never really understood.
Rich and famous people have power. They're expected to use that power for good regardless of how they got the power.
I thought this was a really good piece of writing. It’s rare to do something like this because the job discourages it by putting PR filters on everything you say. My uncle was a pretty big pop star in the 1960s. His group at one point had a big fanzine, they were household names across the country, over time they had stalkers and weird fans and all that, made movies and albums, had big parties and knew other famous p…
It was interesting and a fun read, but not a “good piece of writing” in my opinion. Apart from some spelling mistakes, the sentences droned on and it read more like a semi-coherent rant than a thoughtful piece on “being a pop star”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was interesting and a fun read, but not a “good piece of writing” in my opinion. Apart from some spelling mistakes, the sentences droned on and it read more like a semi-coherent rant than a thoughtful piece on “being a pop star”.
The sentences do drone on, but they're fully coherent; this is above-average writing. It wouldn't likely meet publishing standards, but it's a lot better than you'd expect a randomly-chosen person to produce.
The problem is there are too types of writers who don't get the help of an editor, those who are too big and famous to accept one and those too poor to afford one.
I sort of feel the people who are saying it's bad aren't very able to separate their own preferences from determining quality
https://medium.com/luminasticity/to-speak-meaningfully-about...
Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ ) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it. The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits…
> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse. I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_…
this is a good point and also I believe obviously wrong.
What are the stats on people making 500k a year on losing that going broke? Do they outperform sports stars etc.?
If it is the same then that implies that on the average people do not handle 500k basic financial planning well, or two that basic financial planning won't do what you say with that amount of money (for what, 5 years?). At any rate it would mean that generally people suffer this way and thus it is doing a disservice to point out how dumb they were for not doing basic financial planning.
If it is not the same then it implies that there may be something about the career that makes it harder then it does for other people in which case you are doing even more of a disservice.
I believe it is actually there is something about the career that makes it harder (this belief is formed by just thinking about it and doing absolutely no data analysis because I just do not have the time to devote to it past this HN post)
But I think we can create a thought experiment that shows why it is different
Many of us here are familiar with careers the top of which make 500k a year, there are a few engineers who could make that much. Or management at tech firms, it doesn't matter. There are people who can make that much.
Now if you lose your 500k job in tech what happens? You probably fall down a level to a lower paying job in tech. Let's say 390,000. That's a significant drop, but it's still a pretty nice wage.
The reason for this is because the tech career is a pyramid, 500k at or near top. And a pyramid means that the levels lower than the higher levels are wider (this being an analogy) and being wider has more entries for you to fall into.
Sports is also a pyramid. Or really several pyramids. There is the small pyramid of multi-million dollar players who can fall into single millions and then into the hundreds of thousands. But mainly the pyramid you are dealing with is an inverted pyramid. That is to say the sports career chart is top = player, most players, when you fall out of player level you fall into a level with fewer slots - coaches, commentators, agents, recruiters. If you can't fall into one of these slots and perform adequately (perhaps because you are doing a high paying job that also has high risks of causing brain damage [depending on sport obviously]) then when you lose your 500k sports job you are probably significantly worse off than most of us are when we lose our 500k programming jobs (obviously counterexamples abound, like if you lose job due to illness that means you won't get 390000 programming job either)
Anyway I believe your point that these people should not be pitied over much because they could handle their problems with basic financial playing probably is a bit mean, and one I often hear around here.
It is correct to be skeptical of people who parlay their fame in one domain into another. The most powerful man in the US right now is just a reality TV star. At best, it allows "celebrities" to hop into any domain of their choosing without any real qualification or having earned their way in that particular field.
> The most powerful man in the US right now is just a reality TV star. That's a strange characterization; he was famous across the country before there was even a concept of "reality TV".
Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ ) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it. The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits…
> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse. I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_…
To be a good "team player", it's good to be liked by your teammates. If you want to be friends with your teammates, who all spend money like there's no tomorrow, it probably helps if you do the same.
I'm not saying you can't save up as an athlete, but it's probably harder than we think.
I had to go on Youtube to listen to some of the music mentioned here, as I'm pretty out of the loop on it. Given what I heard I honestly think we're basically at the point where AI can generate equivalent or even better music. It's just very simple and doesn't feel particularly innovative or noteworthy. Point being, I think it's likely this person is one of the last pop stars. Actually, as I'm writing this, I realize…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just I often think this is the biggest word in the English language. Similar to how I think "might as well" may be the most expensive phrase.
Can you expand on that? I feel like it’s the most misused and overused word in my vocabulary and one I wish I could just get rid of a lot of the time and never seem to manage. It just creeps in.
It just creeps in, but why? Why does it creep in? Often because we do not want to do the complicated analysis as to why things are the way they are because then it does not validate our preferences which are often emotional and not movable by logic anyway.
Just exercise more, fatty, says that the problem of being a fatty has a simple solution that anyone can see and there is no need to argue the point here. Start jogging!!
Just in the rather archaic meaning nowadays as being right and proper and what should happen in a fair and balanced universe is tangentially related, the archaic meaning of Just is memetically echoed in the assertive mode of Just doing things. If the world was fair and balanced and most of all really simple then Just jogging would cure the fatty, but it doesn't.
on edit: changed than to then.