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What's something that took you a long time to like?
The first time you encountered it, you were lukewarm at best or completely put off at worst. Over time though, you changed, and slowly you came around to it, changing your position from one of distaste or disgust into something rooted in genuine fondness or appreciation.
Tell us that story.
Anything is fair game: foods, movies, people, ideas, careers, etc.
That is an insane amount of pages read per day. How much time would you say you spent per day reading in that 30 year time span?
I had quite the opposite experience with reading. I was reading so much that sometimes I would but heads with teachers because I had a book under my desk reading during class.
Hot damn... during my good couple year stretch of very focused reading I only managed ~100 pages a day, generally over the course of 3-4 hours. Can't imagine 300! But, props to you for some impressive reading.
Do you feel you've retained a good deal of it? Or... at least the ~important~ parts? That is, the impression a book may have left on you... or a particular passage/idea, etc..
I had the same issue as you! I’m a lifelong reader who used to read at least 100 pages/day. Then I noticed in the last few years I read 0 books...quite a shift.
I’m working on a way to get back to reading and it’s helped a lot! I’ve read 5 books so far this year, so I’m trending up.
What helped you overcome your hurdle with reading?
I too started late and read a lot. These days i'm reading less and less. This year i wasn"t able to finish a book yet. I drop it after a week of not reading...
It is the f*cking internet/netflix.
Oatmeal.
I generally do not like foods if I can't decide whether I need to drink it or eat it. Anytime I'd been given oatmeal in my childhood, it was the most goopy, unappetizing gruel. I also had an (unfair IMO) reputation as a picky eater in my family, which didn't pair well with older relatives who were adamant that I would eat what I was given or else... but by about age 8 they realized it was simply best to avoid the oatmeal/porridge confrontations altogether.
I only decided to give it another go about two months ago, having always felt cheated whenever someone talked about how it was such a cheap, filling, versatile, nutritious breakfast. Now that I was making it myself, I stumbled onto the (glaringly obvious in hindsight) game-changer on literally my first try - why not use less water? I discovered using a 1:1 ratio would gave me a palatable, soaked-cereal texture, rather than the 2:1 ratio that seems standard and results in soggy mush.
I've probably had oatmeal 4 days a week since then lol, making up for lost time with various flavor experiments.
Next time try overnight oats; just put your oatmeal and milk (because oatmeal with water is for plebs) with whatever flavorings you like in a jar and let it sit in your refrigerator overnight. In the morning you'll have a breakfast ready for you to eat or take with you on your commute.
My personal favorite flavors to add to oatmeal is bananas and nutmeg.
One thing I like along those lines is just eating raw rolled oats in a bowl of milk, like breakfast cereal. Keeps the texture and they pair well, especially with something like bran flakes mixed in for sweetness.
You're starting to get into muesli at that point, which is great. Add some seeds, fruit and nuts, and you're there.
When I was little I played 6-year-old Harlan in a community theatre production of Clarence Day's Life With Father. For a long time afterward I was scarred by this scene in which the family's having breakfast and Harlan complains about his oatmeal. Before the play, I liked oatmeal just fine. But after performing nightly for several weeks, eating the cold, bland, runny instant oats our stage manager threw together before curtain each night, I couldn't touch the stuff again for years. That play got in my head!
(That was back in the '90s... I'm over it now, but in retrospect it makes for a great answer to OP's question in this thread.)
Fancy beer. I found them too bitter until my friend introduced me to a bunch of different beers and explained to me what was good about them. Now I love all kinds of beer.
It took me a while to get into all of the crazy kinds too, but oh the fun.
For people who think they hate beer, there's always Lindemans. I enjoy dropping those like bombs on unsuspecting beer haters and watching their eyes bug out over the apple, peach, and raspberry. This stuff is as close to ambrosia as I've ever found. They'll have it at most beer stores.
I very rarely drank beer of any kind until I moved to Michigan, which had (and has) a pretty active craft beer culture. Some friends I acquired here did much the same, advised me on what terms ment, helped me find what things I liked. They also wisely advised me to quit drinking all soda/sweet drinks for at least a few weeks, so that my brain stopped expecting everything to be super-sweet. Not a big ask since I was trying to cut back anyway. Never looked back.
Home brewed beer a number of times, great way to kick back and relax on a patio on a nice spring/summer day with friends and watch a pot boil.
Keeping up with the news. I just remember getting into the car with my Dad as a kid and he'd have it tuned to some AM station that was news 24-7. They had "weather on the 5s", "traffic on the 10s" and non-stop talking about whatever stupid thing was happening that didn't affect me. This was before there was a cable TV 24-hour news cycle. All I could think was, "Can't we just listen to some tunes? They don't even have to be good ones. JUST MAKE THE PEOPLE STOP TALKING!"
Now I have a more balanced view of things. A bit of news is useful for staying current and getting some understanding of the world at large. But I certainly don't go overboard like my father did. I do listen to a bunch of podcasts when driving (which I haven't done much of in the past year thanks to the pandemic). But they're a mix of science, music, and other interesting things. Together they constitute some form of news, but aren't "the news".
Did we have the same dad? I can still picture myself bashing my head against the padded seat in the back while hearing the dynamic AM radio anchor voice, “680News time: 7:41. Time for traffic and weather together on the 1’s. For that we switch to our eye in the sky, Marty Jones in the 680News traffic ‘copter, Marty?”
But yeah, way more interesting as an adult, and a great way to kind of get in the zone when driving in traffic.
Git. I came from a much simpler version control system. Git still bugs me that it has inconsistent commands and flags, but I can't deny how powerful it is and how good it is at what it does well.
It’s the most useful tool with the WORST UI. The commands could have been greatly simplified if they spent any effort at all in making it easy to use.
I resisted for so long, forcing all my teams to use another DVCS, Mercurial. But...git won, so here we are.
100%. Just a little consistency between sub commands that do the same thing across similar main commands would be a start.
Git is terrible. I thought about making that my entry, but then realized that I haven't come around on it. I still hate it. The thing about git to me is that it very obviously was created in a way that took cognitive load off the developers writing it and put it onto the user. There is so much context you need to be aware of when running commands. I could go on for days about it, but I'll restrain myself.
To be fair, that was very much the case. Torvalds wrote it purely for himself (just as Linux was, originally, a project just for him to tinker with operating systems, this fancy "UNIX" thing, and i386), and he did so alone. That it became the de facto VCS of the software world, used by both hobbyist and the largest companies in the world, was just a quirk of time.
I can sympathize; many of my own one-off tools have godawful UI that makes no sense. No thought to the naming, sometimes I reuse flags because I'm too lazy to change the argument parsing, etc. Thankfully those stay with me.
Yoga. I hated it about the first dozen times. Then, finally, something clicked. Maybe I felt for comfortable, or my shoulders and knees didn't ache so much. But after that, it started to feel great when I was finished, like I was high.
Naked yoga with an SO makes for a great introduction.
What's an SO?
Significant Other. Gender-neutral for Girlfriend and/or Boyfriend, generally synonymous with romantic partner.
Thank you!
Rap music. This will be extremely long, but to me is an extremely important transition. Rap isn't a monolith, but I would bet there's a subgenre for everybody.
I don't know how I got this mindset, but I thought all rap was "thug shit." Honestly, that may even be true for the era I grew up (born in 90, that era was aggressive, and that's ignoring gansta rap). I never listened to the "greats" like Tupac, Biggie, NWA, hardcore like Wu Tang, or conscious rap like Public Enemy. I missed an era. To date, I've listened to a few songs from then, and can appreciate it, even if it's not music I specifically want to listen to. It's a genre preference and individual taste, instead of a blind dislike. I also don't doubt that race dynamics of the time had a hand to play in it, being a poor-to-middle-class white kid in southern California, I definitely took in the dominant narrative of those around me, which skewed Regan/Bush conservative and at minimum slightly racist against non-white people.
So: What changed? I heard Busdriver's Imaginary Places playing Tony Hawk's Underground at 15. It was the only rap song in the game I liked. I found more of his music, and really liked it. It was safe, comfortable, and to my fragile white ears, not "too black," which, considering Busdriver's politics and ideology, which were increasingly overt in their expression in his music, also comes across as a heinous insult. But it opened the door to normalizing my appreciation of rap music. A few years ago I saw him opening for Brother Ali, and him starting that song in his set is one of the greatest moments of my life.
I found MC Frontalot a few years later, white, safe, rapped about stuff I actually was interested in and understood. I went down the nerdcore rap route for a while, but only really like Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme (and Andy Hartpence's work on Supercommuter later), because the rest of it was too... pandery. I still follow these two. This is, however a branch that went dead, and the only two artists I really listen to are Frontalot and Optimus in this subgenre.
Around 2014 I had taken a literature class with a slightly intensive poetry section, and the notion of rap as poetry really landed somehow. I knew this aspect was central to it, but it hit. This sent me on another Busdriver binge, and I found this group he'd worked with this group Hellfyre Club (since defunct, and rebuilt after some financial issues with a different roster). This first roster was impressive, including people I still follow today, like Open Mike Eagle (who you may know as the host of "The New Negroes") and Milo (or R.A.P. Ferreria, I believe is his newest pseudonym). Their music was hyper-political and extremely uncomfortable for me, because it caused me to confront my own biases and issues, simply through them talking about their personal experiences with race, or life in general, along with the ever-radicalizing music of Busdriver who, free of a major label contract, was able to spread his wings a lot more and explore issues he believed in more directly through his music. I got really turned onto Open Mike Eagle after his collaboration on Busdriver's Werner Herzog
I found every other rapper through collaborations with these three people, or networks off of those collaborations. Danny Brown and Aesop Rock were artists I found through their collaborations with Open Mike Eagle (Brown on Cobra Commander) or Busdriver (both on Ego Death. I went back through their discographies and, at least in the case of Aesop Rock, found tracks I'd initially written off on albums that are really great, but hadn't been able to appreciate before. I also eventually went back through some classics, like Del (another older favorite of mine), his work in Hieroglyphics, the entire MF DOOM discography, El-P (his Def Jux/solo work), and many others and found stuff I enjoyed.
Other notable artists I found are Billy Woods, ELUCID, their project Armand Hammer, Rob Sonic (through his features on Aesop albums, then Hail Mary Mallon), RA the Rugged Man (through Gift of Gab, and a track they did, Freedom Form Flowing, AFRO, a dude who won a contest RA held), Prof (buying Aesop and Brother Ali albums, I was curious about Prof's new album). My story pretty much ends/continues at this constant quest of discovery, basically finding a subgenre for any mood. If I went back and told myself fifteen years ago that rap music would be a majority of what I listened to, I would seriously doubt it was actually me saying it.
I cannot listen to American rap because I don't understand what they're saying. That's a shame. But I've listened to quite a lot of Brazilian rap since my youth. Racionais MCs is the Brazilian rap classic, very politically engaged narrating the life in periferia.
Emicida seems to be the most prominent Brazilian rapper nowadays. He's a genius of rap battles.
I can't understand rap in anything but English, so we'll call it even? The cultural universality of hip hop is definitely a great thing to see, though.
Deciphering rap lyrics is definitely a skill developed over time, and not an easy one either. My guess is that's how it goes in any language. Funny thing is, I've listened to so much rap that my ears kinda default to that mode of listening, and when there's actual singing I usually won't make out the words unless I concentrate.
I had a similar experience with rap. Because I grew up in the late 90s and early 2000s when 'gangster rap' was becoming ultra-popular it put a really bad taste in my mouth. It didn't help that I was a goodie two-shoes christian growing up, either. But that era was full of then-popular rap songs that I still don't like today for almost the same reasons. They were all about people acting like idiots, getting high, picking fights, committing crimes, and treating women like sex objects (which I can't stand above all else to this day).
What kind of sucks about my experience is that I actually like the hip-hop that was popular before that, and there was a lot more variety in the contents of those songs. And of course at the time I probably wasn't mature enough to understand why rappers would be talking about their gang behaviours. Heck, most of the people I knew at the time who listened to rap were really immature themselves, so the stuff I would have been exposed to probably didn't have the deepest of meanings.
While I don't have a single song or performer who changed my mind, and I still don't care much for the genre in general, I can say I definitely appreciate it now. I can say that there are even some rap songs that are so good that they could be new American standards. Some rappers are more than just poets; I'd call them modern day sages.
So, who's your top 5?
It's not in any order:
How much Rhymesayers did you get into? I feel like Eyedea (RIP) would be right up your alley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEirlFavg6c
Of their active artists, it's Aesop Rock, Brother Ali and I found Prof (whose recent album is on his own Stophouse). Ones I've really listened to and enjoyed, but didn't make my normal rotation, were Murs, Eyedea, and Atmosphere. I think it'd be fair to say I've listened to all of their active and recent artists, tbh.
With the exception of "Demon Days", most of the Gorillaz albums. First listen is always "wtf is this?!", but then there's always at least one song that sticks in my head so I give it another listen...then another...and then I branch out to the rest of the album some more and before I know it I like the album. I heard Demon Days first, so the self-title album took a few listens, "Plastic Beach" took years. "Humanz" took a few months. Haven't had a chance to listen their most recent album, but I'm sure it'll be that pattern all over again.
I find this to be the case with most of the music that I ended up really liking. I listen to it a little bit and think, "Hmmm... yeah I don't really get this." But then I hear it again later and think, "Hey, this is better than I first thought! I should give this another listen." And then I generally like it more after that and like it for longer than things where I liked it immediately upon hearing it.
I'm a HUGE Gorrillaz fan, have been since I found them. I feel like I go through the same process every time they release a new album. Plastic Beach seems to be the one for everyone that grows from an "eh" album to a "holy shit, this is actually great" over time. For me I had that experience with "The Now Now" - I didn't really "get it" until I went through maybe 3 or 4 times, but now I listen to it when I know I need some chill, relaxing vibes to "mood out" with.
Both "Humanz" and "Song Machine" were rough starts for me but definitely grew over time. I think what separates those albums from the greats (Demon Days, Plastic Beach, Now Now) are the fact that I can go through the entire album without hitting a song I dislike. Compared to Humanz and Song Machine where I tend to skip ones that don't fit "the vibe". (Hallelujah Money is just plain WEIRD and Friday 13th doesn't do it for me, can't really pin down why.)
Hallelujah Money is so damn weird and the music video's even weirder. Absolutely hated it when it dropped, swore it was the worst song I'd ever heard. But then it got stuck in my head and now it's one of my favorites off of Humanz.
My one complaint about post-DD Gorillaz is that Damon's singing seems to be utilized less and less, which is a real shame. He's got a unique voice that defines Gorillaz for me.
That's actually one of the two major reasons I like "The Now Now" so much - the album seems pared down and focused on the basics and I think it worked wonders for the music. It's also the reason why I like songs from the more recent albums like "Busted and Blue" and "Aries".... reminds me of the "good ol' days".
Not to say I don't like other influences on Gorillaz songs but, like you said, Damon's voice is so great and I'm sad it doesn't get as much presence.
Did you ever give "G-Sides", "D-Sides", and "The Fall" a listen? Curious to hear your opinion on them if so. (Sorry if this is getting off topic, this is literally the first time I've ever been able to talk about one of my favorite bands like this)
Looks like I'll be breaking into "The Now Now" today!
I've not listened "The Fall", but D/G Sides are great albums. "Hong Kong", "We Are Happy Landfill", and "Bill Murray" are my favorites off of D-Sides. And "Ghost Train", "12D3", and "The Sounder" from G-Sides. How about you?
I consider this one Damon's first attempt at a "solo" album for 2D. While it has some good parts, I think "The Now Now" is a much better execution of that idea. Damon builds and improves on more of the concepts that he explored originally in "The Fall".
--- Update when I got back to my computer
G/D are great albums, with some strange music but I think that's why I like them so much. I wouldn't consider them as polished as songs that came from the standard studio releases, but they're still rather..... formidable.
G Sides: Ghost Train and 19-2000 are probably the two best from that one imo
D Sides: "Highway Under Construction" and "Spitting out the Demons" are both tied for my second favorite song on this one, but the easy choice for #1 is the Jamie T's Turns to Monsters Mix of "Kids with Guns". I consider it one of the more creative remix's that I've ever heard, from any artist or genre.
Small dogs, especially Chihuahuas. Now I'm the owner of a lovely half-Chihuahua mix!
All the ones I met growing up and in my early adulthood were snappy, yappy, awful little things. Once I started teaching puppy classes and met owners who cared about their dogs being well-behaved, I did a complete 180 on liking them. Now I just dislike owners who let them get away with everything or think their snarling is "cute."
Eggs. As a solo food, not as an ingredient in other things (like cake).
Pretty sure it stemmed from when I was a kid, my mom made eggs over easy for breakfast one morning. I decided I didn't like it and refused to eat it, and got into a contest of will with my mom who insisted that I at least finish that one.
As a result, I hated eggs in any form but scrambled for many many years. This last year or so though during quarantine I've been doing a lot of cooking, so started learning how to cook eggs over easy, sunny side up, fried, toad in a hole, and french omelets. Decided they're not so bad.
Hard boiled or deviled eggs though, can't bring myself to try those yet. It's a texture thing mostly, yuck.
I had a weird relationship with eggs growing up, as well. I remember eating them when I was a kid, especially scrambled with cheese, but at some point the texture just made me gag.
I think it may just be because I had someone make some for me at one point without any seasoning or flavors and that was what made me think I hated it.
I'll eat them now, though I'm still kind of picky about how they're prepared. Though to be honest it's only relatively recently that I've even learned how to enjoy yolks, which I credit to buffet-style eggs benedict that had been sitting under the heat lamp so long that the yolk thickened. And now eggs benedict is one of my favorite breakfast items (when cooked properly, of course).
Can't stand boiled eggs but I love fried eggs. Have you tried those?
I have! I enjoy having one with toast and sausages for breakfast.
Cutting firewood.
It's fun sometimes now, and the feeling of "look, a task with real and palpable reward" is something you learn to appreciate in a world so full of mindless work that only benefits shareholders and upper management.
Also I love how the top three responses so far are reading, getting the news, and oatmeal. This question might as well be "How can you best exude oldness using the fewest words." I'm not complaining.
I lived a large portion of my life heating the home with a wood burning stove in the basement. Every fall I get nostalgic over chopping wood and filling the storage shed.
History. Had very little interest most of my life until maybe a few years ago. Now I love almost everything historical, whether reading stuff, listening to podcasts, watching films or TV shows set in historical settings, and documentaries. I especially love learning about history when I visit places, whether it's reading plaques or signs in parks, or visiting museums, or even simple little tourism signage or installations. I love being able to touch old or historic things, whether it's running my hand over the bricks of some historic building, or leafing through a hundred-year-old book.
Coffee and hot sauce (obviously not together) - didn't really like either much until I hit my 20's.
Gorgonzola. The first time I ordered a quattro formaggi pizza, I dug the other 3 cheeses but I thought the Gorgonzola was like a rotten spot or something and after being told that it was supposed to look like that I tried it and found it super gross.
But because I liked the other 3 cheeses I kept ordering it since I didn't want to get back to my usual pizza at the time (Margarita). After many times of ordering it though I love it nowadays.
It has to be good Gorgonzola though. I've also ordered a few that had like replicas or cheap alternatives and that stuff tastes terrible. But real Gorgonzola is amazing.
I also had a similar reaction with Pecorino Romano, didn't really knew how to use it.
Not sure if I've tried that one yet but it looks pretty good.
Olives. I hated them as a kid. As an adult I love them. I can't get enough of them.