Favorite things

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What is going on with favorite things?

Revisiting

What happens when you watch something, and it is your favorite film and you revisit it and it is different. It doesn’t hit the same. It is no longer your favorite.

What state does that film exist in, if you were never to revisit it? You have it as your favorite in your head, if you were to revisit you’d like it less, but you never do. How does that differ - when it stands in a space of quasi-favoritism? Even fresh, after watching something, your favorite falls into this state of “possibly, until next time I experience it.”

But it probably isn’t the problem that these favorites are all not evaluated at the time of declaration of favoritism. Often my favorite things will have an element of surprise. They’ll cling to me when I didn’t realize. I might not even fully like them at first, or understand.

Worse, it could be that we hasten the demise of our favorite things by loving them. By overuse they become worn and weary. The favorite pen, first to get lost and run out of ink. The favorite forest, over trodden and people saturated. Perhaps the best way to love something, to favorite it, is to keep it mentally and from afar. (but also, certainly not).

Losing favorites

It is true that all favorites will be lost though. Like your favorite CD that will not exist forever and will decay, quicker by use. Your brain which to enjoy it will decay and you’ll feel no joy listening to it. I recall reading something about Weimar cinema and the extent which it is lost. Certain films exist only in reviews of the films, a fascinating thought. Can you derive a favorite only with a review? Surely there was a favorite there for someone anyway.

You can be disconnected from a favorite. A live service ceases to exist. A show ends.

Colors

What is my favorite color? When these people answer to definitively, “BLUE” with no elaboration. Like it was decided upon in the past and is set in stone.

Is it a deeper love than my blue? Which I feel like falling into the sky, or piercing the sea in dive. Even here I’m collecting objects and senses that are blue. Love of blue in that sense isn’t even love of blue, it’s love of a collection of senses that are blue. (My love of blue is not a blue jay, or that the thing I love most is blue or that the majority of elements I love are blue). I also see a flaw in this example of a joy of blue. I’m selecting a favorite based on idealized, beautiful images that relate to the color. If it were my favorite, would it encompass all facets of the color - the blue blemish of a bruise, or something horrible or ugly.

Is the nature of their favorite unknown to them? Roots to a deeper understanding of it, that are true, but unobserved to them.

When I think of my favorite color, I feel many things at once. I can’t pinpoint a favorite. I could walk down a path, and explore a sense of a color and say that is my favorite (like I’m a painter and when washing my hands off at the end of the day I discover the water is red - it’s unknown to me, till I inspect and say “oh, I suppose it is red that I love”).

Franz Liszt was a composer who was known for asking performers to play with color. He was noted telling his orchestra to play the music in a “Bluer Fashion,” since that is what the tone required. Synesthesia was not a common term in Liszt’s time; people thought he was playing a trick on them when he referred to a color instead of a musical term.

When does a hue shift within a color range (say light green to saturated green) become less favorable (say someone likes light green but as it goes to dark green, they prefer a light blue over dark green)?

I imagine a future where the favorite color question becomes trite, along with having a favorite color.

Imagined response:

“I grew so tired of Tinder plebs asking me my favorite color, when my favored is a gradient is an acutely slanted mellow yellow flowing towards a dusty rose remate. It cuts through it like a daffodil comet, or a pollen fingered rasqueado.”

Actually traverse in RGB color space rather than a single point destination if you want to get to know me.”

On the sense of a favorite color or a synesthete - I’m almost wondering if a gradient is what they’d experience (say listening to a song with various) but they’d in fact lack the expressive vocab (maybe even mechanistical transformations to be necessary) to describe. They’d say something like “I get of a sense of blue because I can tell you that, but it’s actually blooming like ink in the sea.” It’s easier to transmit “blue” than an ebbing blooming transform. A more precise expression eludes or just isn’t present.

The unexperienced favorite

What about the space of favorites not yet discovered? I see it like nodes that you haven’t accessed yet, on a plane you are traversing. But you are at your place where you are most receptive, but you simply do not wander into contact with it. What to make of these disconnected favorite nodes?

At some point I will die. A song will be made after I die. At some point something that would have been my favorite will be created after I die. I’ll never experience it.

It’s like how everyone has a sense that their favorite is something they’ve experienced, rather than something missing from their life (the hidden slice). “Oh, my favorite pizza place happens to be Domenico’s, about 5 minutes away”. (I understand the real meaning here, and probably prefer this simple favorite to some quantum slice.)

Algorithms

I’ll take joy in recommendations that I think my friends will like. Often they go unexperienced. I think of this in my own situation, where I’m also often given recommendations for things (sometimes things I just haven’t gotten to, or something I have already seen, or something I know I wouldn’t like). However, since I am so often giving recommendations, I’ll try my hardest to push a recommendation experience to the top of the pile. It’s only fair that since I recommend so much, that I should engage with their own recommendations.

I was also thinking about this with my music feed, on Soundcloud. I’ve been on Soundcloud for many years and every day I’ll scan my feed of recent posts and re-posts. What I have is a semi-curated engine of music, that is catered to my interests (roughly). Thinking of the tabula rasa, fresh Soundcloud account versus my account, I’ve made my feed a particular style by associations. By following certain musicians, I get more of what they like (with enough drift that it is inherently interesting and not stale or one note.)

But thinking back at that initial point of deciding upon my favorites, I must have followed a single artist which lead to other artists. There have been periods where my feed has gone through trends, like more danceable music, or even something I don’t really like as much (when it seemed like Wave-genre took over.) My point is that my path of favorites was guided by me, but also this engine of others.

But these favorites are they just flavor of the weeks? What’s the delta distinguishing a favorite from the other, or the previous? I’ll find a song, and it’ll take root and be a perceived favorite for a few weeks? But how does it take root and become something deeper? Is it time or memories associated with it? Is it rediscovery after listening to it over and over, so it became almost part of me in how woven it became to my thinking?

Arbitrary

Do favorites exist? Like a favorite color, is my favorite song just a current that passes through all songs, even songs that I don’t like?

And I recently saw that graph that showed that favorites remained fixed in an young era, and most people do not develop favorites after that. This is so unique to me. I feel it cannot be the case.

What about the concept of a favorite “of a people”? Review scores, say for an arbitrary game will be almost arbitrary on an individual level. But generally you can find a public consensus (the film or game will find scores averaging 8s, the whole “Metacritic” concept.)

What is that object that is most favored by humanity? And what is my feeling of towards it?

Lists

Oh I have that on my list

Everyone has lists of media in their head. Favorites. Backlogs. Someone will recommend something and you can see them accept the recommendation, but will the unspoken awareness of both parties that they’ll never get to it, or that the recommendation is off.

Even systems that tend to support feeding you content like Youtube or Netflix have lists built in. It really tends to be the main, if only, organizational structure provided for end users.

But sometimes here I am and I love these things and I am informed and I am offering it up to you. And still no. But I understand.

It was an important moment when I externalized some of these lists, with technology. I’ll log every single film I watch (a rating system isn’t something I can settle upon).

NOTE

I’m frustrated when recommending something, and realizing that in the moment I cannot provide any info (“what’s your favorite love story?” of course there are many, but in that second I cannot think of — any)

But having the record of watches this becomes much easier. I can directly query the datasource of all movies I’ve seen now.

Last docs I watched: select top 5 a.Title where a.Genres.indexOf('Documentary') != -1 order by a3.Created desc

Strongly rated scifi last couple of years watched select a.Title, a['IMDb Rating'] where a.Genres.indexOf('Sci-Fi') != -1 && a.Year >= 2022 && a.Year < 2023 order by a['IMDb Rating'] desc

Rating System Philosophy

This was my problem with creating a rating system for film watches, which is tangentially related to this topic of favorites.

What kind of granularity is necessary? For an extremely granular system you’d need to rank each film independently, so you’d need as many ranks in your system as there are movies (possibly even more, to create hypothetical films).

Otherwise you’d end up with conflicts, which soon becomes apparent with certain systems after you use it for enough time. Your ratings will birth contradictions relating to the relativity of ratings (“I’ve rated this a 5, but it couldn’t possibly be better than this, which I’ve already said was worse than that.“) This is also problematic because you haven’t seen every film, so you’ll never flesh out fully the underlying rating structure which the entire enterprise is based on.

If you do a 5 star system, do you break it down into .5 increments, or 1 star increments. Do you add nuance to the system with a multiple star rating associated with traits (i.e. 2 stars for plot and 5 stars for aesthetics).

With a 10 star ranking system that IMDb uses I realized that I normally centered my ratings on an above average (7) range with my favorites getting to 8/9 but seldom using a 10.

I kind of settled on not using it. So I almost feel that a simple system paired with a discussion is the best, such as a recommend or not recommend binary. This is because quite often a film will have flaws but still be worth watching, or a meaningful experience.

Only favorites

Perhaps the best way to deal with this is to classify every single thing is existence as a favorite. Every experience will be a mental exercise in formulating why something is a favorite (similar to the least interesting number paradox?)

Here is an example that I have devised that might work.

The case of the documentary “American Movie” or even “Best Worst Movie” - documentaries that are based on objectively bad films. We can say the documentaries are much stronger relative to the source films. (This might even be flawed, and I can imagine in a pure favorites count some of these will flip, but we’ll carry on.)

So “American Movie” about the filming of “Coven” is one of the classic, top documentaries of all time. In a networked system of ratings there is a relationship between the two films. Does “Coven” gain value by the creation of “American Movie”. It’s easy to see direct connection here but maybe there’s something

1. to the aggregating of influences (inspired by works of…)
2. standaloneness

I propose a system of connectedness where by virtue of existence, and persistence of art a networked film (every film) is a guaranteed 10 rating.

Since a hypothetical 10/10 documentary could be formed around the creation of the film and the existence of that 10/10 documentary is predicated on the existence that other film.

Like everything people

Perhaps this is the end goal of those people on social media who like literally everything. It shows up, they like. At first I didn’t understand these people, but perhaps they are simply enlightened.

Creators

Thought from reading The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom > What if in order to create “original” creative work, you had to deprive yourself of your would be favorite things lest “suffer” their influence?

Fragments

Are favorite things composed of fragments of favorites?

A favorite artist of mine came out with a new album. I was struggling to determine favorites when asked which. The first album is so wound into a period of my life. It has been given time.

Macro album level sort didn’t make sense. There might be connections between the albums, singles released between the two, unreleased tracks etc.

Is the favorite multi-dimensional?

What sense is there for a linear sort? It might be moments of life, tied to me, tied to fragments of the song.