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@teratology @dcc @jesu @kasdeya @kitsunecafe @lispi314 @miscbrains I think it's only funny if you think that matters much in terms of mass appeal; Fight Club was also wildly popular.

Good artists tend to be up to wacky shit. William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson and Philip K. Dick, people like that, they basically just monetized the degeneracy, and the world is a better place for it. So musicians overdosing and actors pulling their dicks out and authors being completely unable to write a book while sober and that kind of thing, like...do you want art or not? You kick out the degenerates and you get people that can act normal, and people that can act normal are either normal people (and probably make shitty art) or they're psychopaths (and tend more towards sadism and power games than good, old-fashioned buggery). (The exception to this rule is, of course, child actors. That guy that pulled his dick out at Shirley Temple should have been dragged into the street and shot, and it is to this city's shame that he wasn't, but it is a small comfort that she just started laughing uncontrollably and left the room when this made him angry.)

People at the extreme end of any endeavor are like that. Hamming said that the problem with Bell Labs was that AT&T shifted hiring policy for researchers: the researchers were in charge of hiring, and this moved to the business guys that didn't understand the research, and he said that a lot of researchers are off-putting. I forget the exact quote (I will canbearsed to extract the clip from his lecture at some point) but it was something like, "Someone with novel ideas about physics will also often have novel ideas about appropriate behavior or personal hygiene." So, you want good code, you need to let the guy that looks like the dude from Falling Down arrange his pencils, the guy in the hoodie that never shows up before lunch, the whole programming socks crowd; you are going to waste some talent when you fire someone for making fart noises during a presentation by HR on acting normal. (My old boss told me a story about Yahoo's "naked sysadmin". He would just strip naked and work directly in the machine room, with the desert-level humidity and deafening fans and his dick out. The compromise was that he worked at night when no one else was there and any company recognition of the nudity was to remain completely unofficial: "don't ask, don't tell, don't get caught".)

All the people doing interesting things are weird fuckers. You just need to rope off the "weird fucker zones" and not let the normies into them. This industry turned to shit when they started saying "You can't sleep under your desk, I don't care how interested you are in the problem."
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