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Comment by famousactress | Hacker News Reader

“It’s so weird in this day and age to just do an art project.”

Like I needed more reasons to be super fucking happy I haven't moved to the bay, but anyways. Here's one more.

I mean: just to be clear, as the giver of the quote, the context for it is that I was summarizing the feeing of other people who saw the book. I was a super strong supporter of the idea that this was too well-done to be a marketing stunt.

That said, it was just incredibly labor intensive for something with no commercial or even reputational return.

> it was just incredibly labor intensive for something with no commercial or even reputational return.

Yah, but I still declare that a pretty insane and incredibly myopic outlook on making something beautiful. You and I both have two year olds... How much commercial or reputational return are you counting on for yours?

Mine seems pretty smart, and plausibly in the height percentile to be headed to WNBA... but not really counting on returns, and she's the most labor intensive experience in my life so far :)

It's possible -- and I know this is a stretch -- but it's possible that good people can occasionally do something good for all of us, something that's good for society and feeds back, at best, only indirectly to the self. Maybe if it's just a statement, like this one, that forces some iota of reflection, that will be enough for the author.

Yeah, reading that just made me sad. That's some next level everything-that-can-be-done-in-life-has-to-have-some-monetary-ROI-on-it, kind of bullshit.

Particularly knife-in-the-gut to those of us who adored trips to SF in our youth specifically because of the seemingly endless number of artists and musicians that populated the city.

Precisely my sentiment as well. It's possible that the articles on this site give a narrow view of what's happening there, but I doubt it. I can't help but feel as if I forever missed the opportunity to live as an adult in that vibrant and thinking city I once knew in my youth.

You did. For now, and the foreseeable future. It's still an awesome city on a bunch of levels... but in my twenties I'd go up there to play in bands and see friends and I remember really tripping out on the diversity of social groups. There was clearly massive socio-economic variance in small area but a general consciousness that those weren't the lines at which to draw social boundaries along. Lots of gaggles of friends at bars or coffee-shops with wildly different backgrounds, jobs, and outlooks.

Now it's a sea of fucking bearded hipster macbook pro startup dev nerds. To be clear: I'm a bearded hipster macbook pro startup dev nerd. I don't get credit for not being that. I DO get credit for not piling on by joining the cultural dog pile.

Personally I consider it close to a cultural and professional imperative to avoid living in the bay as a developer, for a whole host of reasons.

It breaks my heart every single day to be here, having spent my entire childhood wanting to live in a city that disappeared by the time I was finally able to move here, and now I spend an incredible amount of time and energy trying to figure out where to go from here.

People totally still make art projects in SF. It's just that they're all burning man sculptures in the shape of mythical creatures that shoot fire and play bad EDM.

Glad that you're here to tell us about how their art is bad.

I didn't say their art was bad, but i'm glad you're here to misinterpret snarky HN comments. (The EDM is pretty bad, though.)

Where do you live and work, instead?

I live in north San Diego county, and I work (remotely) for a company based in SF.

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