Smartarsery

I tend to use several voicings. That’s probably not a word. Nevertheless when I get ultra pragmatic, I tend to be a bit formal which is sort of shit. Well, I do love it, but it can lose people – understandably. You can’t be formal all the time.

Being formal isn’t very funny. Even when you try to be funny in a formal voice, I often suspect that the reader pauses and considers whether or not an actual joke is being made or in its place, some kind of dark, subtle irony or just straight out negative commentary. I guess you can game it that way, but it would have to be part of eventually sliding into a more transparent comedy. Obscuring it early could be great.

I seem to fall into more formal language whenever I start typing out pieces for a site or for OD. It’s an odd phenomenon. Emails are something else. I seem to be able to mix a decent amount of formal tone and chaotic colloquialism, or rather naturally leap into it. It’s likely that I do this because I know the people and they’re almost always familiar with my behaviour in real life. Getting too formal can start to sound distant and I like to be able to put my feet on the ground now and again.

I’m currently in love with romanticising the concepts of chaos and entropy. Entropy is great from a holistic perspective in order to leverage wild aspiration and positivity. I definitely don’t mean the kind of platitude ridden blind positivity of affirmation culture that we seemed to build in the 90’s – self help culture? Thinking positive? Just by thinking positive (without intelligent governance) things will change? That’s a hilarious lie. Still, the cultural precepts seem to have endured. Interestingly but probably predictably, there was a cultural reflexive action against the Think Positive movement that has fueled our cultural cynicism for the last twenty odd years. A lot of this cynicism is healthy, but it’s important not to throw the baby out with the hand-grenade. Optimism is good and healthy, but it must be intelligent. Cynicism is also good and healthy but it too must be intelligent and you’d want to hope it wasn’t just about nihilism or at least not just about nihilism.

That’s a funny thing for a nihilist to say, but I guess I’m always semi-joking when I say I’m a nihilist because I’m not and I’m guessing no-one really is. Everything is not actually shit and completely fucked and there’s a lot of cool stuff to be experienced and shared. It’s likely we go through seasons in life where everything is actually fucking terrible and be become nihilistic entropists (to coin an absurd term). I get like that. It feels great to be in that headspace in which you can make sense of a whole bunch of stuff and you know implicitly what’s wrong with them all and culturally it seems as though there’s no hope. ‘Fuck the world’ is a great mode of thinking, everyone should try it.

Perhaps because of my bipolar or my smartarsery or whatever else, it always passes and I know it’ll pass. I get into states of heightened optimism where I start planning on how I will think and do good things in my life, how I will try to proliferate good things in my interactions with people. That’s the mode in which I’m more likely to spend time with individuals that stretch for hours and we get lost in endless cultural criticism and the exercising and cultivating of good thinking.

Blah blah blah it’s pretty boring to say that my discussion of balance in communicative tone is analogous to the discussion of balance between optimism and cynicism. I mean it is. It’s just not very interesting. Well, to you, I imagine.

It’s important to me to record this stuff because I do actually go back and reread my own diary, it’s one of the benefits of being a narcissist. I love going back and seeing where I was at, when I decided to write about something and what was happening in my life at the time. What has happened in my life of late?

– About a year ago, I started emailing people long personal letters, many of which returned correspondence.
– Six months ago I started board gaming in earnest with Rok.
– In April I broke up with my girlfriend.
– From April onwards, I started having dinner with my work crew once a month. Good, long discussions have precipitated from this. I’m spending a decent amount of time with one on and off which always includes excellent discourse.
– In June I started buying board games, which as mentioned previously, is a decision to teach board games.
– Also in June I started hanging out with Swift (or was it May?) and talking about everything that exists in the universe, or rather video games culture, philosophies of interaction and design and cultural criticism of all art cultures.
– In July, Rok and I started Cardboard Embassy, writing publicly (more so than OD) for the first time for me since we concluded Game Taco in 2012.
– Also in July I started emailing one of Swift’s good friends about audio and music. Looking forward to having a coffee and meal and etcetera with them both. Cultural criticism will flow like so much blood on the battlefield.

Work issssssssss I won’t talk about work. It’s meaningless, that’s enough on the topic.

I need to write. I need to write something that makes me money. Selling words is weeeeird. I don’t know if I should sell words. Along with a fair few people, I’ve been testing this sense of survival on which we’ve built so much of modern culture. Yep, I know, been tested and contested before and in great detail. The key though, is to do more than just write a manifesto and a book. I don’t want to start a cultural movement either, well, at least not a highly visible one, because highly visible cultural movements don’t stick and end up dying usually at due to the very thing they revolt against. It’s not a direct thing, it’s an economy of necessity. Often society runs on rules because like it or not, those rules sort of work. Or they work well enough. You get all wild and start affecting change except you change a few things in a big way and not enough of everything in any way at all. Adrenaline only gets you so far and time will wear it down. Eventually the necessity to survive in a larger environment that hasn’t changed at all will be a tide that slowly erodes the shore and shoring up of revolution.

PHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAR LISTEN TO ‘IM.

I am full of some bullshit ay.
Meandering is good. I realise I’m going to tag this as SOC because fuckit, I barely had an objective when I started other than to be less formal.

I have discontentment, several elements of life with which I’m dissatisfied. They don’t exactly bug me all the time but sometimes they bug me enough. This seems healthy. I don’t think I’m ready for contentment yet. Agita gives me way too much energy and promotes agile iterative thought which naturally is a drug to me, I’m compelled to keep its momentum going to the degree that I may willfully expose myself to things I know can easily be subject to harsh criticism in order to get my angries on.

I also have at the moment a wealth of enthusiasm for the cultural aspect of both individual discussion and group board gaming. Both activities are incredibly rich and dynamic, providing a wealth of thought and opportunity to iterate. I keep wanting to interact with individuals more, via long (long) form emails and/or by spending time with them talking and usually sharing a meal or coffee etc. I also am pushing group gaming as much as I can, because almost everyone loves it once they’ve done it. Board/card gaming provides cunning and clever activities while also providing a great sense of community, something that many other recreational activities lack.

While I seem to carry the board gaming thing in particular as a cultural movement, (indeed, even using the term Cardboard Revolution Front), I’d rather it actually become a general component of life for a broad contingent of society. The way television has only not fucking evil.

OK that’s enough for this line of thought, have to move on to something else for a bit.