What system of ideas which you first encountered indirectly through artists you admired was the most disappointing when you got to actually know about it? For me it's Gnosticism.
Me, aged 21: Wow, Philip K Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Octavio Paz and Sonic Youth are all into the Gnostics, they must have been pretty cool
Actually-existing* Gnosticism:
Links!
- Hypnerotomacha Poliphili and the Architecture of Dreams
- Decolonising the International Phonetic Alphabet
- Fifty years of the smiley face
- How to rescue a server with only Bash builtins
- Bonus link! Bash 5.2 is out and has rewritten the command substitution parsing code, which means that a lot of things will probably break in subtle ways, eventually. Also, Bash is being maintained by one guy
- Rest in power, Pharaoh Sanders
* Yes, I know that the Gnostics were repressed by the early Church and that pretty much all of the sources we have about them are by their mortal enemies, and I don't care, I just spent five minutes tracking down that gibberish in the cartoon in my library and it still wasn't worth it.