Are they a thief of focus or simply very efficient entertainment?
Are they a thief of focus or simply very efficient entertainment?
I lean toward "efficient entertainment", but I do sometimes wonder what that chunk of my free time would look like otherwise.
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And then there's the voynich manuscript, an old hoax/fantasy book documenting plants and animals that don't exist, in a made-up language.
That some people have dedicated their lives to "noble" pursuits and others to "wasting time" is entirely a function of who is telling you the story and how much money they stand to make off that other person's work. You get one life, do what you want with it as best you can.
Generations of monks did nothing but pray, work, and copy books for their entire lives. Is that a waste because they weren't writing novels instead? Because every one of them wasn't Mendel, obcessed with growing peas?
Play some video games, work on stuff if you want, or don't. Most people in history worked very hard and have been completely forgotten, all their works erased. With how easy it is to share your work online, you could even be famous for being good at video games (speed running, lore analysis, gimmick runs, etc) which may not change the world but objectively has more impact on more living people than writing small business websites or small farming rice in South Asia.
It is not clear that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax/fantasy book. The plant illustrations, whilst ambiguous, do look like plausible real plants (though some have features of multiple species), and while nobody has decoded the text, the letter and word frequencies are consistent with it being natural language rather than gibberish.
Perhaps you’re thinking of the Codex Seraphinianus?
Hey I just wanted to say, thank you for sending me down the rabbit hole of both of these texts. Fascinating!
Regarding the Voynich Manuscript, and to be fair to the person you're responding to, with no current decipherment, there is a good possibility it's a hoax.
Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is either a synthetic forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman), or else a forgery, as the preeminent theory. However, he concludes that, if the manuscript is a genuine creation, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author.
Also the Codex Seraphinianus is much newer and self-admittedly describes an imaginary world in an imaginary language.
Anyway, thanks again for the Wikipedia adventure. :D