I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.
I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.
If you don't put them on a pedestal, you won't ever be crushed when they can't stay on top of it. Appreciating people and the results of people's work doesn't require worship. People don't have to be perfect or even good to make good things. Coming to terms with this and being able to take people as they are instead of how you want them to be is just another part of growing up and leaving behind childish attachments.
> I have an explicit rule not to meet or look up my heroes. Been burned way too many times.
I mean, don't put them on a pedestal, but meeting them can still be fun. Carmack may have developed some really unfortunate rich-guy political views, but it was nice to get to go to Dallas to meet him.
I'd _love_ to meet Notch or DHH live and have a chat, both would have some pretty good stories. Hell I'd even have a beer or two with Neil Gaiman.
It's mean to convey "don't look up the personal details of artists, just enjoy the art as-is". Similarly I don't interact with the fandoms of any of the media I follow. There are a few good ones, but the majority are insufferable (to me).
There are multiple people I'm fine with in software circles - Daniel being one of them, but then we have Notch and DHH who used to be cool, but some of their current hot takes are kinda oof.
Specifically way too many authors whose books I've loved have turned out to be not very good human beings. David Eddings and Neil Gaiman are pretty good examples of this.
Rowling / Harry Potter comes to mind, too, and Heinlein. You need to be able to separate the artist from the art, the programmer from the program. It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics.
> It’s ok to appreciate a work even if you disagree with its creator’s morals or ethics.
In the case of Harry Potter... the perception of the work tends to follow the perception of the author. There's a bunch of issues with the original books that's widely seen as problematic today - character names seen as racist [1], enough problematic gender stereotypes to warrant half a dozen of academic papers of various quality, and last but not least antisemitism that continues even into modern works such as the shofar in Hogwarts Legacy [2].
I won't deny it, I enjoyed both the books and the movies, but it's ... not something I'd just hand over to my kids one day without having a serious talk with them beforehand. Back when I was young nobody cared too much (although I do member that at least in Germany, the goblins-jews analogy was discussed a bit), but nowadays...
I'm not gonna lie: it has always struck me as extremely racist to claim that goblins are caricatures of Jews. No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".
> No normal, reasonable person reads Harry Potter and thinks "Jew" instead of "wacky fantasy creatures".
It was a pretty obvious thing for us Germans when the movie came out. Caricatures of Jews that were used in the time leading up to 1933 are taught and analyzed at schools here. Crooked noses, deal with money, hoard money... it's not that far away. There's a pretty good blog post with actual imagery, if you want to read further [1] - although I admit that JKR just used existing folklore as a foundation, just as with other elements of worldbuilding.
That shofar however, now that's intentional. HL came out many, many years after I read about the issue the first time. And 4chan, inevitably, immediately identified the goblins as jews.
Wow, that site was... something. I would have never made that connection in a million years. As a non-German, I might lack some critical context here, but the author seems to be desperately searching for antisemitism, and finding a tiny kernel of it. Of course, 4chan will be 4chan anyway.
The authors are a group of Jews, of course they're even more sensitive towards antisemitic imagery than Germans are - they had to live with that imagery and often died because of it... pogroms against Jews are a staple of European history dating back centuries!
(That's also the reason why I support Israel being a safe state for Jews first and foremost. The rest of the world has shown over centuries it is not a safe place for Jews.)
I don't need to know who is building VLC, curl, ffmpeg or any of the other essentials in my life. I just appreciate their work and pitch in some money if possible.