Welcome, stranger. Give me a bit of your time, and you will become a different person.
See that tagline up there? Yes, I’m bold enough to insist that there’s an emotion without a name. I’ve described it up there. Let’s move forward.
1. Shut the fuck up Apple, You don’t own Charlie Brown
There are people “generously” allowing Christmas specials from 50 years ago to be broadcast on public TV channels, but they mostly control who can actually show them much more tyrannically before making the purchase. You might see this as abject hypocrisy, but isn’t being halfway between tyrannical and generous the only way a human being can ever come out on top? Isn’t controlling the possibility of satisfaction in other people what we already worship anyone else for ever doing? It would require something bigger than anything we’ve got to unwrap that kind of very tame sort of evil.
People exchange the rights to content to what other people have made. There’s always someone profiting. If you want to end the cycle of bitching about corporate strength, you have to change what exists inside of us that makes us so ready to praise people for owning anything that other people want.
(you must be willing tame the dignity inside of imbalanced power, for the world to change)
2. Because I was born into this internet world
You’ll find that highly revered protagonists and antagonists will say things like “I just keep moving forward”. You might know which I’m talking about.
You, filled with something in between admiration and disgust, get so many shots of adrenaline watching them move forward with their plans to bring change to the world, no matter how brutal, no matter how much they relate to their enemies.
You feel something really powerful about these characters but you can’t fucking put it into words. I have put it into words, my internet friend.
To “move forward” ambitiously, brutally, is to simply have a magnificently imperfect detachment to oneself. That’s all anybody has praised anyone else for having.
Fiction itself has a purpose. The desire to bring people together has a final season. I want to bring about that season. The day when we stop treating each other like garbage.
If the world is to move forward, and I am to be a part of it for some time, I will make humankind less ugly.
(you must be willing to see storytelling as a goal with a finale, for the world to change)
3. Human Exploitation as explained by Pokemon Puzzle Challenge
Have you played Panel De Pon? Or many of its clones? There are many things you can learn from that game. If you put into the context of The Found Emotion (the passion for exploiting the agreed upon effective or moral dubiousness of connecting anything or anyone to anything else at all). But I’ll tell you the most interesting that I found.
I remember being 10 years old, and frustrated that a certain type of block-switching mechanic didn’t count toward a combo bonus in block destruction. And I was strangely pleased, however, by certain combos that actually did work.
For the disadvantage, I was frustrated despite not fully blaming the game developers for how the feature worked. For the advantage, I was pleased despite thinking the game might be better designed if things didn’t work for me. It took me so many years, but I solved something.
I could see why it’s so hard to cut through other people’s opinions- because they already know self-interest is flawed, they already know criticizing others is silly. They’ll take the most pleasure in joy that feels the right kind of forbidden.
They’ll be ready to see other people being unfair and cruel as captivatingly permissible in certain contexts. And when those rules get broken, a higher level of rage forms. Because they are convinced they do indeed relate to the lust for power other people have.
(if you want the world to change, you might need to see why you love games)
4. No Accent? Are you kidding me? No. Okay.
I was in a high school musical…in high school of course. I met a friend of sorts who insisted she did not speak Chinese despite having a Chinese accent.
She was a very nice kid, who couldn’t have been joking.
Depending on where you grow up, depending on what happens to you, people will assume many things about you. Things become part of you that have a few degrees of connection less than others would assume.
Learning a language tends to lead to having an accent, but it doesn’t necessarily. Having an accent can be a result of other people having an accent. I would say this girl’s parents didn’t want her to speak Chinese and never chose to use it around her, and surrounded by so many people of the same ethnicity, many of which were fluent, changing her voice, in that semi-voluntary way, never became appealing to her. She was practically destined to sound as though she spoke another language.
She was partly embarrassed, partly ready to insist it was no flaw to have an accent without a language to go with it. She was a good cohort, we never got to a conflict about it. Of course now I wouldn’t bat an eye at anyone exhibiting any sort of unexpected sociolinguistic trait. This shit is just how things are when you live in a great American city.
If you associate someone with something, is that a fault of your own? If you’re inspired to change, are you trying to change yourself, or alter something inside of you that you don’t actually possess?
Do you think that offensiveness might have a mechanic to it you haven’t explained? Do you think all the bitching and moaning about who’s being offensive might be a story with an end? It’s all about people acting detached from themselves, and wanting to attach things to other people that they know they might not have.
(you must be willing to see intercultural harmony as having a weird solution that has little to do with any of the whiners on either side)
5. Free to Play by the what the fuck did you just call it you little bitch
Free-to-play video games certainly are aggravating, aren’t they? You could talk for a long time about how disgusting it is for someone to exploit free video games with payments you don’t really have to make.
But I am on another level. I am here to tell you that you get the most mad at people when they pull on the rope in your heart that knows the world operates on the tension between what things are made for or should be for versus what they actually do or may do. Your “heart” is a clothesline that knows nothing is quite connected to anything else, but that purposes need to be fulfilled anyway.
A free-to-play video game that promises free gameplay does indeed provide free gameplay. But the developers are acting detached from the true purpose of the video game, to make money from those who want to go further. The free part of the game has the essence of payment inside it. You can feel the marketing team’s cheeks clench with ecstasy as other decide to make the payment to level up their character or desperately vie for just a few more loot boxes, which only contain the possibility of getting the items you want to get.
It doesn’t matter who actually benefits from the paid system, who doesn’t really mind the exploitation, or who gets the luckiest among them. Because inside of that joy, that lack of criticism, that utter exception to the misery of those who can’t afford to pay more money, is still, however light, a connection to the will to create oh so very much frustration in the gamer base.
And yet that frustration is not the goal. The goal is money. And that makes you angrier. And those people telling you to just pay out the ass and shut up make you even angrier, because they act like you should just try and enjoy the game. And the defend the game developers, saying they already give you things for free, and you know it’s silly to complain about a free game, and your eyes start glowing red hot because you see this as the hidden essence of what makes people such abject pieces of garbage toward each other! And you can’t even fucking talk because you’re foaming at the mouth.
And then, you read my blog. Because the world operates on connection and disconnection, as reality just moves forward.
Every person who has ever told you, “you must listen to me” or “you must follow my ideology” was wrong, because they never admitted to themselves that the world is weaved together upon nothing quite working as it should. People follow others, and fail, and succeed, and fail and succeed, and it just keeps going on. The failures of the ideology become something to build off of, rather than irrelevant failures. And those people who became its heroes became so praised because they are not quite only working for themselves, or to prove that they were right.
(until we see that we agree about the faultiness of linking anyone to anything, human conflict will just barely get more dignified)
6. For my karaoke companion with the meh music taste
I have a friend with whom I like to sing karaoke. We don’t really like each other’s taste in music. But somehow, the music becomes better because it’s us who’s singing. The sounds of the songs actually become more pleasant because we are the ones producing them. Because we have a vested interest in becoming closer to one another, and take pleasure in each other releasing energy as we sing our songs inside the karaoke booth.
WOW ISN’T THAT WEIRD? IT’S NOT SO WEIRD IN THE CONTEXT OF THE FOUND EMOTION. THINGS BECOME ASSOCIATED WITH WHAT WE ASSOCIATE THEM WITH, AND THEY REMAIN UNLINKED. IF ONLY WE COULD USE THIS TO MAKE HUMANS TREAT EACH OTHER MORE NICELY
7. A fake Halloween costume
On Halloween, I saw a little girl with her mother cozying to a woman who appeared to be distributing direct mail flyers throughout the neighborhood. She might have assumed it was a costume. I thought, how bizarre of an event, how hilariously innocent of this child to assume a worker was playing around. If she was.
EXCEPT THE LATER ME PUT IT INTO THE CONTEXT OF “PERFECT INAPPROPRIATENESS”, WHICH IS ALL HUMAN BEINGS EVER SEEM TO ASPIRE TO BE
YOU CAN’T CHANGE PEOPLE EASILY WHEN THEY ALREADY SEE THEMSELVES AS BEAUTIFULLY OUT OF PLACE
8. Literal Figurative Fascism
People calling each other dictators and fascists is really strange, right? We’re so tired of it, and yet, it seems very apt in some cases. What the heck are you gonna do?
I’LL GIVE YOU THE ANSWER, CALLING PEOPLE FASCISTS IS AS RIGHT AS IT IS WRONG, BECAUSE IT’S FOOLISH TO COMPARE ANYONE’S ACTIONS TO WORSE ACTIONS, BUT KNOWING PEOPLE ARE READY TO DO SO IS WHAT INSPIRED THE WORST OF GENOCIDE
YOU CAN’T END THE CYCLE OF HATRED BY TELLING A STORY WHERE A SMALL GROUP OF TRAUMATIZED HEROES MANAGES TO MAKE THINGS WORK
People are always knowing they’re not quite the exception, and everyone else is good at being not quite the exception.
9. The Lockhorns is you
Two people I’m living with, one of them was very lost and having lots of trouble. Asking, crying for help over the phone, the other person still felt offended because of this person’s frustrated and judgmental tone with the help that they were getting. I couldn’t help but wish I had the solution. I wanted both of them to get less livid at each other.
IS THIS NOT HOW ALL DOMESTIC DISPUTES WORK? NO ONE IS ACCUSING THE OTHER OF EVIL, BUT EVERYONE IS ALWAYS TAKING THE CHANCE TO PROVE WHAT SOMEONE ELSE IS MADE OF. IT’S ALWAYS A LITTLE ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK OF YOU, AND NOT JUST WHAT YOU DO. TRYING TO GET THINGS OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE ALWAYS IMPLIES SOME DEGREE OF TESTING SOMEONE ELSE’S WORTH. FOR FUCK’S SAKE HUMANITY, STOP THIS SHITSHOW. THE SOLUTION IS NOT TO SHUT UP AND BE NICE, IT’S TO NAVIGATE THE URGE TO BE THE COOL EXCEPTION TO NICENESS EVEN IF THAT IS MORE LIKELY TO WEAVE SOMEONE’S BENEVOLENT GOALS
I unironically believe that someday, we won’t have to mock husband-wife-relationships in newspaper comics.
10. Spicy Food and the Dream of a Hateless World
Isn’t spicy food so fascinating? It is a pleasure that becomes a kind of pain.
We become proud of eating it despite liking the taste. Our previous pain becomes a later pleasure. Other people eating the spice and not liking it makes us proud of what we can gain from the spiciness.
We mock others for not liking spicy food, even though our pride depends on upon their weakness. But it’s just a food thing, right? And yet that makes us prouder of ourselves for not eating cooler tasting herbs. So we go online and smirk about how not not not great we are for considering hot salsa to be mild.
And we don’t unwrap the contrast. We don’t find the kindness. We don’t see the balance. We have it and we don’t use it.
Everyone knows other people matter as much as they don’t, that opinions are as tiny as they are huge, that greatness is never too worth honoring, that evil is never truly all that savage.
And we move forward, being fairly good to each other, as we are in modern society.
But the flaws fall apart. And result in the America we have.
All that political stuff, do I even need to say any more?
I AM ON FIRE
YOU MUST READ MY BLOG
UNWRAP THE CONTRADICTIONS
CHANGE HUMANITY
CHANGE YOURSELF
LET HUMAN DIGNITY FIND ITS FINAL LEGS SO THAT IT CAN WALK
WE ARE SO CLOSE
YOU JUST HAVE TO COME WITH ME
THIS IS A DECLARATION OF WAR ON THE MEDIOCRITY WE HAVE ALLOWED TO ROAM THIS EARTH
NOW HAVE YOURSELF A DRINK AND GO OUTSIDE AND DON”T USE THE INTERNET FOR ANYTHING BUT THIS BLOG FOR QUITE SOME TIME
The Found Emotion (Invoke Yourself) 