do you ever get tired of your own schtick

and if you don't, does it suggest a lack of self-awareness?

yes and yes

i do want to say that i fundamentally believe everyone on earth is annoying and we shouldn't judge ourselves too harshly for constantly leaning into our schticks

i would like to point out that my schtick is awesome

while many here would answer no, for me it's definitely a sometimes.

100%

At times.

what ivy said

im trying to get kinder to everyone, including (perhaps especially) myself

There is no schtick to what I do, or don't do. Its just me.

gotta say even the joke responses have been astonishingly in character, good schtick everyone

Yes, but when I think about the effort required to become a totally different person, I need about sixteen hours of sleep.

thats right xxp damn you ivy and unperson lol

Some of you learned the wrong lessons from Bowie.

i.e. if you're going to star in a kids-themed movie, don't wear a Tina Turner wig.

When a poster tells you who they are believe them.

I am a werewolf.

Mine? No. Other people’s? Yes.

😎

interesting question. i think i like when i can see someone's early on, and act accordingly. who doesn't love their friends schticks ultimately? i feel like i keep it a little slippery in that regard. that is probably my schtick.

https://di2ponv0v5otw.cloudfront.net/posts/2022/05/26/628fbd173e732b91740850ed/m_628fbd389e15593116288750.jpg

<3

resolutions are a kind of schtick and they rarely stick.
no caffeine after noon, that's my schtick for 2025!
2PM rolls around...
uh oh, now i am literally tired of my own schtick!

what's your schtick that didn't stick?

kettlebells

hm what is my schtick. i bet someone here could tell me and it would kind of hurt my feelings. oh one thing is i am by nature very excitable and enthusiastic about the things and people i love. i will say something is the best [x] ever about a billion different things and it'll always be true (to me, but also, like, i'm right). i get very annoyed when people approach these same things with cynicism or detachment. hate it when people act like they're better than anything, because they aren't. these are all things i love about myself though, i don't really get tired of them, though i can see other people getting tired of them which makes me a little exhausted and exasperated with myself by transference! so in conclusion please appreciate my schtick, for the sake of my therapist

I get tired of how tired other people get of my schtick.

It's also totally understandable. In other words:

im trying to get kinder to everyone, including (perhaps especially) myself

― tuah dé danann (darraghmac), Wednesday, February 19, 2025 11:26 AM (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh one thing is i am by nature very excitable and enthusiastic about the things and people i love. i will say something is the best [x] ever about a billion different things and it'll always be true (to me, but also, like, i'm right). i get very annoyed when people approach these same things with cynicism or detachment.

i feel like most of us start out that way when we're very young kids getting swept off our feet by music/movies/whatever for the first time. everything is awesome, and it's hurtful when someone says it isn't, from a position of cynicism or superiroty. but then we very quickly start to accumulate all kinds of biases.

something i appreciate and sort of admire about you, more than entusiasm, is how resistant you seem to be to those kinds of biases- or more likely, you seem able to overcome your biases, see past them and find the beauty in things that a lot of us have built up resistance against.

im trying to get kinder to everyone, including (perhaps especially) myself

i think i give out too many compliments and i'm going to be really mean to everyone from now on.

I used to have a conscious shtick in my first few years of posting, don't know what it is anymore except to shake doomposters by the shoulders.

current schtick is "Spock baffled by the human race" and I do get tired of it sometimes, but it's not as cringe as Rock Hardy's schtick was

I agree with what everyone has said above. I get really tired of their schtick as well.

haha! i'm a lil' stinker! :}

I don't have one, and yes constantly, and yes what dmac said too.

i have multiple shticks depending what context i'm in

i'm tired of all of them

faschticks

i was coming at this question from two different directions - i see a number of ilxors who have definite schticks and i can't help but think "don't you ever get tired of being that person?" meanwhile i don't feel like i have much of an ilx schtick any more but i do frequently get tired of my irl schtick - the same interests and anxieties and dumb jokes i've had for 35+ years. that feeling of being so tired of being in your own head and wishing you could be someone completely different just for a break.

i find it helps to abandon my social circle every 2-3 years and join a new one, otheriwse i end up being the old guy from Vicar of Dibley who keeps saying, did i ever tell you about the time the pub rab out of crisps

Absolutely, i hate myself and i wish i was actually funny instead of annoying and attention seeking

^ilx-wise. my irl schtick is more “where did brimstead go”

everyone is annoying and attention-seeking!!!!!

especially people who are actually funny

i would like to point out that my schtick is awesome

when you are a broken person in a broken country, shtick is a coping mechanism imo.

Do you say “put a bit of shtick about” in the UK?

they say put some HP sauce on them lubbly jubbly shticks!

lol ty for remembering it was my birthday recently!

my irl schtick is more “where did brimstead go”

irl lol, same

My own schtick? Never. Endlessly entertaining.
Realizing mid-schtick that I have borrowed it from someone else and am currently doing an impression? A bit embarrassing but the only way out is through.

that feeling of being so tired of being in your own head and wishing you could be someone completely different just for a break.

Totally feel this myself, but I think this feeling is more about wishing you could change the particular recipe for /composition of your character - whereas schtick is more about the well-rehearsed roles you play?

My shtick is on ilx -- or anywhere else -- is a pretty true reflection of how my mind runs. I do get tired of listening in on my mind's chattering sometimes, but wrenching it out of its normal channels is next to impossible so I normally try to entice it down a different alleyway or just let it exhaust itself. When it gets like that I try not to listen too hard.

Yes, I get tired of my own schtick.

But it's way too late for me to develop a different one. My toolbox is just not that deep. Drive-by quipping, stupid puns, childlike amusement, eclectic culture detritus.

The only other mode I have is a zenlike monastic silence.

When I am quiet, people ask me what's wrong.

Yes, but probably not as much as others are tired of me.

no

no

I have habits, not schticks. None of them are particularly interesting? 360 days of the year, I wear the same pair of jeans. I have two pairs of them in rotation. I never wash them, except by hand if something spills on them. I even wear them all summer. I have jogging pants for the gym and dress pants for fancy occasions. But otherwise I only wear these jeans. I buy the exact same pair again when they wear out. It's been like this for 13 years. Is that a schtick? I like that there are some aspects of my daily life that are just figured-out and I don't need to think about.

This seems like a case of talking past each other and not realizing it, and I think that it might be best to just put it to rest? You are both great posters, it’s cool, let’s be cool.

I also agree with nabisco’s post fwiw— I think that the idea of art as “genuine human expression” is actually vile and simplistic absent taking into account the projections and instabilities that every artist performs and is subject to. I mean, this is all about performance, right?

One thing that I often think about is the performance of education— how “intelligence” and “intellectualism” are performed, and how they can be performed in ways that are inclusive and inquisitive or in ways that are exclusive and mocking. I think what always prevented me from fully joining the academy is that even despite my own admitted snobbery (in some regards), I cannot stand the way many academics perform their own education, particularly if they’re “radical” academics. Gag me with that exclusionary bullshit!!

ive wanted to talk about the art points since but havent kinda felt able 🥲

didnt read the first post as being about commercial or critical success or fame or whatever but also think that its very possible for art to fail on a number of levels that are purely for the artist to decide which is how i read the point being made, tbh

just to be ear: No ill will for me either. I’m just like “huh, is that what I was doing? is ~that~ what you were saying?”

Performing education was a big part of my schtick for many years and one I grew extremely tired of and am glad to have matured out of.

🤝

I like many debut volumes of poetry, sometimes preferring them to the later "original" work, precisely because of the way naivete, derivativeness, and the writer's struggle to figure out what they want to say results in these wracked poems. I think of Adrienne Rich's fist couple of books, which I can read endlessly.

I don't know what a given artist's 'naturally' good at. Bowie couldn't "sing" well in any conventional sense, especially in the early days, and could barely play guitar; but, boy, I would have wanted Mick Ronson to play those jagged Diamond Dogs lines.

i’m also suspicious at the notion of being inherently good at one thing and just not being able to do another thing. i don’t think that’s a real thing

“Inherently” is overstatement but there’s a strong kernel of truth to this, says the singer who moved into classical choral music because even baritone rock stuff was too high for him

you can also subtly brag about how deep your voice is by being an artistic renaissance man.

Or you could brag with your deep voice about being an artistic renaissance man

true

If I sounded like Paul Robeson, every single one of my posts would be a sound file of myself singing Old Man River

i really believe in like... trusting your instincts, and i think a lot of my artistic failures in my early 20s are owed to me thinking my instincts were dumb and bad and would be better off transplanted with someone else's. i look back at a lot of my writing then and i just see other writers i was trying to imitate, poorly, and i was not making a great deal of sense or communicating anything real in doing it. it's only now in my late 30s that i'm realizing my instincts are what make me me, and what make my art unique and worthwhile, but i also think i had to be at war with them for a while to come to that conclusion. i also had to transition... i had to become SO much myself that i couldn't help but find it fascinating and beautiful, the things i can do, the things i don't even know i can do yet!!!

anyway this doesn't strike me as compatible with a discussion of schtick, because schtick can include learned behaviors, and instincts seem to lie somewhere beyond that, beyond even the active production of our thoughts. and sometimes our instincts can lead us toward failure, toward artistic ambitions we can't fulfill to our personal satisfaction, but i think *that* in and of itself is really interesting, and that failure reflects our true selves like some kind of x-ray mirror, and that anyone who abandons their desire to do one thing for another thing that they're pretty reliably good at is in some way abandoning their instincts for their schtick, i guess, and i think that's always sort of a shame

idk if this makes any sense with my previous posts but it just kinda came out like this

Anyway I mention this because it makes perfect sense to me in creative terms, and I bet I could give a really good pep talk to someone who, I dunno, is wild about avant-garde literature and disappointed to have turned out really good at writing fantasy novels instead

Yeah I don't really get this, because of what people have been saying, I mean what does really good at writing fantasy novels mean and who gets to decide what "really good" is here. writing is so subjective.

also does this ever happen? "i'd love to write like Thomas Pynchon but I write like George RR Martin, oh well."

basically this

i don’t understand what you mean by “generate successfully” and “aren’t actually suited to”. generated successfully for…others? in what sense...in monetary terms? in artistic value (and who determines that etc). and the other expression of that, “stuff they admire but aren’t actually suited to” - but who says they’re not suited to it? you? or them? and suited in what way? etc

i like to think of a novel as being a piece of writing with something wrong with it. and also if you create something how someone reacts to your art is totally out of your hands

“really believe in like... trusting your instincts, and i think a lot of my artistic failures in my early 20s are owed to me thinking my instincts were dumb and bad and would be better off transplanted with someone else's.”

Yes I totally relate to this!

I assumed the original premise for artists here was "I feel I am very good at this one thing but I enjoy this other thing I don't feel good at much more". Nothing to do with outside influences or audience reception at all.

idk just keep doing the other thing you don't feel good at, you'll probably get good at it

i am seriously trying to learn to draw for the first time, in my late 30s! i suck at it! but it makes me feel good and i get better every time i attempt it

^^^^^^

i am NOT doomed to be a shitty visual artist, and even if i were that doesn't mean i'll stop enjoying it

that's the key to life, trying new things "sucking" at something and getting better at it as you work through the suck. it's good for your brain

So many musicians paint. Let them paint!

I am doomed to mix excellent martinis.

This convo reminds me a bit of old timey ilx poster Dave q, who once said how he wished ppl were as enthusiastic about his music as his writing about it.

There's a story about a student who asks the rabbi, "why do you always have an appropriate parable for every topic?"

The rabbi answers, "Ah, my son, for that I have a parable.

"A traveler comes to a village and notices that on every barn there is a bullseye with an arrow in the center. The traveler is amazed by this, and asks a villager who is such an expert archer.

"'Oh, that's Simple Stephen,' says the villager. 'He paints the bullseye after he shoots.'

"The meaning of this parable, my son, is that I only introduce topics for which I have a parable."

^ I take this story to mean both "do what you're good at," but also to note that people who seem really good at something are often stacking the deck by only attempting to do what they're good at.

As a musician I very much keep to the material I know I can play well, which suits me as a hobbyist / enthusiastic amateur.

Picasso (or maybe it was Bob Marley) said that if you can do five things, do three. That way you have a sense of power in reserve.

but

it was the student who introduced that topic

READ: rabbi DESTROYED by darraghmac ON ILX

the student introduced the topic, but it was the rabbi who told his son the student, that he had a parable. if he didn't have a parable for his son's question, the rabbi would have instead just stared silently until his child went away. later, his son would come back with something else and the rabbi would be like "yes, you have learned to ask the correct question, kid"

rabbi sounds like he would be popular on reddit

idk just keep doing the other thing you don't feel good at, you'll probably get good at it

Get better at it? Sure. Get good at it? Not necessarily.

I can practice and study until the cows come home but it’s very unlikely that that will reliably give me the G above middle C full voice; that’s going to have an impact on the type of stuff I can credibly do. It’s just not how my voice works. Maybe I’m being self-limiting but I’d argue most disciplines involve both aptitude and practice, and it shouldn’t be overly controversial to note that aptitude can point you in a direction that’s not necessarily the one you would have picked for yourself.

I don’t think this necessarily ties into the enjoyment you derive from practice or learning, or the improvements you make when you stick with something, or even the importance of what the ceiling is for your ability at your chosen activity. I’m not intentionally making any value judgments here, more noting that e.g. not everyone can be an Olympic-level athlete or a compelling artist/writer or keen businessperson. I don’t think it calls into question the entire idea of pursuing your passions to point this out, or to note that there are people leveraging above-average skills in fields/areas they aren’t particularly passionate about, or are adjacent to something they’d rather be doing but aren’t as good at.

i think everyone is good at something creative. they can find it. a lot of the activities we understand as like officially creative are just the tip of the iceberg. you can be creative at decorating your house, for instance. i want to say that being good at something just means that you achieve a "flow state." that's my metric for when something is good by the way, if i can tell the person who did it found that flow state, that quickening. and then something about it that came out speaks to me. that's more where personal experience comes in.

anyway i agree with ivy that the important thing is you enjoy it. sooooo much that. that is the only fucking thing that matters! i really believe it. i've been a lifter for years. i consider it a creative practice. my whole thing is kind of idiosyncratic. i do it almost every day. it's creative for me. i get so much enjoyment out of it.

but

it was the student who introduced that topic

"The times when you have seen only one set
of parables, my teacher, is when I asked you."

Picasso (or maybe it was Bob Marley) said that if you can do five things, do three. That way you have a sense of power in reserve.

But at the same time Picasso was an inveterate schtick-shifter. I went to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona a while back and left not quite knowing what to make of the constant abrupt adoptions of completely new styles, which he'd then seem to immediately perfect before moving on again. The more sustained schtick, e.g. the little creatures and other biomorphic forms, were more compelling. As was, up the hill, the Miró museum, showcasing a guy who decidedly embraced his schtick.

It's hard getting to another phase in a hurry without a schtick-shifter

May be corny, but drift of the discussion reminds me of this quote from Vonnegut:

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

I went to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona a while back and left not quite knowing what to make of the constant abrupt adoptions of completely new styles, which he'd then seem to immediately perfect before moving on again.

Oh, here is something I actually do know about! His most intense and experimental output (ca 1906-12) was extremely prolific and driven by artistic rivalries and collaborations that accelerated his experimentation and envelope pushing. The widespread break in artistic activity during WWI and turn toward figurative art afterward also makes for a v jarring contrast in styles. Then, there was Parisian surrealism’s adoption of Picasso as a kind of elder statesman, but by then he kinda settled into doing his thing bc he didn’t have much more to prove so could just make grotesque homages to spanish masters or portraits of whatever questionably young woman he was fucking. Also: being famous enough for people to care about early, formative styles that would normally go unnoticed.

xp vonnegut otm. i'd go further and say that living itself is literally practicing an art whether people realize it or not. like, you don't have to 'pick a hobby' or whatever. you can do art as part of the everyday. all the stuff you have to do can be artful. you will quickly run into people or ideas that say that no, you can't do life in a way that feels artistically fulfilling, there are prerequisites. they are wrong.

I mostly agree with Vonnegut's sentiment, but it underplays the role of fantasy in our lives and how much our creative activity is prompted by and in service of things of which we're only dimly aware. Let alone the allure of validation. Late capitalism and social media intensifies to the point of absurdity. DeLillo says somewhere in *Mao II* that 'there's the life and there's the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or film' and yeah, that.

Which I suppose puts the creative act back front and centre as a mode of rebellion *against* the lure of exposure. Dancing in front of the mirror is praxis.

xp to gyac. Oh man, I'd *love* to come and meet y'all. One day. One day!

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

― Kurt Vonnegut

i think about vonnegut a lot. the whole mother night thing, "we are who we pretend to be". (see above.) i don't think that we are who we pretend to be. my youngest sib, when i said that "fake it who you make it" didn't work for me when it came to being a guy, said "that's not the real saying. the real saying is 'you can't think your way into a new way of acting, but you can act your way into a new way of thinking.'"

we are what we do. i mean i grew up catholic. i sometimes hear "sola fide" protestants say that catholicism says that faith isn't enough, that you need to do good works... that's not what i learned. what i learned is that a person can say they believe something, but if they don't act according to those beliefs, well, how much does can that belief really mean to them?

the unfortunate thing about me is that i found the thing i'm good at early on. i'm a fucking incredible usenet poster. really great at it. i wasn't so good at it in the '90s, but it's been 30 years, and i've gotten really good at posting to usenet.

so ok, i post to ILX. it does make life more bearable for me. it's how i make meaning in my life. so much writing is solitary work. one toils away in isolation and then one shows one's work to others and... there's no real personal connection in it, for me. there's too much abstraction. i can write something that changes someone's life and it's about them, not about me. words are dead. i'm alive, at least as of right now.

i have... it feels like a compulsion to write, to create, in this tiny little niche format, one that's really only going to make a difference to people i know. it's exhausting, though. it's so, so tiring. i'll write one of my extremely long, thoughtful posts, and if they're too long for some people to read, i'm ok with that. these are things i have to say, and i say them the only way i really know how. the way this world is, it's change or die. i've changed a lot, but the world just keeps changing faster than i can, it seems.

the arts are not a way to make a living. how the fuck am i supposed to make a living, really?

oh i said "see above" and then i clipped the first part of the post

I once posted elsewhere “my worst nightmare is having an iron rod slammed through my brain and not undergoing a complete personality change as a result”

― fact checking suz (wins), Tuesday, November 4, 2025 2:51 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

It’s not really true but it’s a p good joke imo

― fact checking suz (wins)

a perfect example of why i take everything someone says as if they mean it

if this was a discord server i'd challenge you on it, be like "if it's not true why would you say it?"

i do think of myself as being fundamentally a narrative creature, in some sense i am the stories i tell about myself. it's taken me a long time to change my story from "i suck" to "i'm a pretty awesome person who has problems but is doing her best"

i got this pin at pride last year that says "suck dick & punch nazis"
except the layout is such that it's possible to misread it as "suck & dick punch nazis"
it's funny to say "that's me, i suck and dick punch nazis", but to do that would require me to say that i suck.

i'm gen x, i grew up on gen x irony, i grew up being sarcastic and putting myself down, and i've worked really hard to stop doing that

---

rabbi sounds like he would be popular on reddit

― giving you schtick (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, November 6, 2025 8:47 AM (three hours ago)

idk, once i took a rabbit on a red-eye and they kicked me off

"if it's not true why would you say it?"

it’s a p good joke imo

here’s something

This article discusses the ancient reception of Cicero's poetry and explains why ancient critiques of it were primarily made under the aegis of genre essentialism: the Greek concept that each author was naturally suited to one genre. It argues that these critiques were a direct result of Cicero's canonization as Rome's primary prose author, and specifically of his transformation into an allegory for Republican eloquence silenced by tyranny. Because this canonization relied so heavily on the Philippics, in which Cicero discusses mockery of his poetry (2.19–20), it is concluded that, ironically, Cicero himself sowed the seeds for this tradition.

my parents made me take Latin in school, but I sucked at Latin and couldn’t get the grammar under my belt so the only way i could pass was by memorizing texts. one year we did Cicero’s First Oration Against Catiline and i memorized the whole thing. i remember the into said something like “Cicero believed his best work was his poetry. Unfortunately, no one agreed with him” and then quoted Catullus (the great proto-diss track artist) saying it was bloody awful poetry. anyway after that i adopted, inadvertently, the Ciceronean sentence structure. you don’t choose your influences, you know? my sentences got really prog. i read NME a lot too around that time, which didn’t help.

so, i really hate the way i write. i find writing very difficult & time consuming, even if it’s just like an email or a messageboard post. it’s like brick laying kinda, a lot of work. and i think it comes across as really self-important. it’s just so much easier to communicate face-to-face, in real time, where i don’t have the opportunity for deliberation. i’m always challenging myself to write faster and more spontaneously and in a more down to earth kinda way, and i mostly always fail. when i manage it feels good, but it’s rare.

'd go further and say that living itself is literally practicing an art whether people realize it or not. like, you don't have to 'pick a hobby' or whatever. you can do art as part of the everyday. all the stuff you have to do can be artful.

now, here’s where i can shine! one year, i spent like $500 on balloons.

what's your candle budget look like

I totally understand and share a lot of the questions above about what it means to be "suited" to something and who decides whether you're doing it "successfully" and all that, but I think a lot of the stuff I had in mind operates on such a basic level that those questions fall away? Like as an obvious example: I have known multiple writers who adore and admire funny things — just thrill and marvel at the idea of writing funny stuff — but also know very well that they personally are not funny writers. That's just not what comes out of them, not the way ideas arrive for them, not where their thinking leads them. Some can't picture how you'd even begin to write something funny; some could kind of try, but it would feel like an awkward battle and they wouldn't be remotely amused by what came out. And this is fine, because there are other modes they're good with, modes they understand how to work in, modes their brains can engage with in a productive and harmonious way. Plus "being funny" is one of those skills where it's pretty normal to just be like oh, I don't have that one.

So yeah, I definitely didn't mean that in terms of what other people enjoy or what the market rewards — I meant it down on that fundamental level, where "success" means, like, "can I even figure out how to create a thing in this way," or map's great invocation of a flow state. (I imagine that example writer spending years of miserable agonizing over various unfinished formalist novels that they can never get to do anything they want; meanwhile, they sit down for a fantasy story and exciting ideas flow smoothly out and everything works. That person should keep at the literary work if they really want to, but there's probably some feedback there about what their garden grows well.)

Anyway, it was just a metaphor for how one might approach personality stuff, which of course works very differently. And then I guess posting is somewhere between creative work and personality — I personally would love to be the sort of person who could have written like two pithy, breezy, perfectly distilled lines that conveyed this whole post, but, you know. I think it's healthy to aspire to move in certain directions as much as you can — people can change a TON, especially seen from their own perspectives — but also to accept that you're not going to be, like, native to certain qualities, and to see the value in your nice native qualities even if there are others you find more appealing.

Considering I used to work for L@dy Rh3@, and given the range of candles we carved and decorated for spellwork (she has several different designs just for gay sex!)… I’ve somehow been using the same 2 pull out candles for a decade. I feel so subpar. I do have 2 more for when they run out. & I also had 2 man-shaped red candles which are supposed to be for gay sex, but I can’t find them.

xp!

Not that I wish to relitigate this any further but deems I apologise if I've misread and thus misrepresented your intent with ed.b. It honesly came over as badgering in my reading, but if you didn't mean it that way, you didnt mean it that way.

nobody needs to apologise and lines drawn under it, all good

ok, but you don't have to scream it

there’s a typographical emphasis for that

all good

nabisco thank you for your response upthread!