#more discord ramblings. wow there's a trend here it seems

[booperbeanv3]

Asougi Family Watermelon technique

[pelikinesis]

looong meandering post about ‘gamers,’ political engagement, Pidgeotto, etc.

looks like i might start playing league again. friend of a friend shenanigans means i spent a LOT of time in a voice chat with a bunch of people i’d somewhat hesitantly describe as “college kids with Twitch accounts” and oh wow, collectively they couldn’t go more than ten seconds without referencing someone’s genitalia or using the word ‘gay’ as an insult. I mean, i’ve encountered people like that before and actually someone like that lives with a couple of my friends, minus the genitalia thing actually so that’s an improvement.

so these people were even more...uh, honestly i’m tempted to just call them ‘gamers’ but that seems a little unfair, in much the same way that referring to the USA as ‘America’ is unfair to people from Central America, South America, and America’s Hat, Canada. 

like i’m not on twitch often enough to definitively state that this is a twitch cultural thing, it could just be young-ish guys obsessed with genitalia, their own and/or others, and the whole ‘we like playing videogames and/or watching other people play videogames’ is just a a coincidental connecting point. 

what i’m not certain about is whether or not that’s their main mode of being. the sheer volume of obnoxiousness is either just part of their personalities (an exhausting prospect) or maybe, i wonder if it’s because there were one or two girls in the chat, one of whom at least has been described to me as being attractive. the desire to impress(???) girls is often an exacerbating factor in promoting obnoxious and otherwise inexplicable behavior. I had a friend who cliff-jumped and belly-flopped from pretty damn high up into a natural pool of water, came out the water seizing and developing chest contusions. I’m not saying it’s because there were a lot of girls in the crowd of hikers cheering him on, but i think it would be a bit ungrounded to say that had no impact on his decision making (or sternum). We took him to the ER to check for internal bleeding by the way and he was fine.

i don’t say a whole lot in chat but they think i’m funny (they were trying to assign people in the discord chat to Naruto characters. When it got to my turn, I, who have never watched Naruto, said I wanted to be Pidgeotto) and were impressed by some of my plays (in ARAM as Fiora, Riposte a Caitlyn ult while hitting her with a snowball, using the teleport to travel across half the map and get the kill--and yes, it occurred to me afterwards that I could have just used the snowball travel invulnerability to avoid the Caitlyn ult damage, but I’m rusty and I guess it was more stylish the way I did it) so my interactions with them so far have not been antagonistic. 

whenever i’m in a situation where i’m interacting with a group of people who are very different from me, i find myself absorbing the experience in an (untrained) ethnographic approach, in the sense that I’m more interested in listening and trying to figure out what drives group dynamics than anything else. Like for instance i’m trying to figure out whether the main girl of the group is genuinely cool with the plethora of dick jokes (more than one of the guys also made a joke about how she had both a penis and a vagina, or didn’t have any genitalia, which my amateur psychoanalytic tendency makes me wonder if that’s a necessary conceit they have to construct so they don’t have to think about her as a ‘girl’ because their concept of a ‘girl’ is too narrow to fit her into, or some other such thing as that wasn’t the only strange interaction they had with her)...or if she is actually uncomfortable about that sort of thing and is just tolerating all of it, or if she truly doesn’t care, as she doesn’t really respond to those uh, jokes?

I also am kind of enjoying being the contrast. This is true in other instances as well. At a small open mic in Fullerton where most of the poets there more or less had the same style, I enjoyed performing poems that were very different from that style even though I had some that would have fit. In that instance as well, I wanted to see if that might prompt people to break out of their comfort zones and try something else. And in this discord chat, my humor was comparatively subtle (this isn’t easy to explain unless you’ve played league, but I make a custom status message that just reads ‘Onlime’ which is one letter off from the standard ‘Online’ and I’ve found that noticing this minor deviation leading to a realization that I made it a point to create a custom status that looks like the standard status but just slightly wrong is something people react to with amusement and/or exasperation when they belatedly realize it’s an M not an N) and I didn’t brag when I made plays in-game and let other people point it out if they noticed, whereas most of the guys were constantly talking about blowjobs or saying “oh my god did you just see that play i did?” I’m somewhat interested to see if this affects what I perceive to be an obnoxious homogeneity of obnoxious behavior in that group. It’s something I’ve been curious about for awhile now, most recently with watching supergreatfriend (he’s drastically influenced and expanded my command of sarcasm and shifted it from being caustic and withering, to being upbeat in a cheerful refusal to acknowledge copious absurdity) and contrasting him with other Let’s Players and Youtube gamers. The standard of [internet] behavior seems to be obnoxious and outlandish performativity, like a hyperinflation of personality, and/or a more or less nihilistic strain of irony. For the former I’d say Pewdiepie is of course the extreme end in every awful way, but I would also say Markiplier is, from what I understand, a relatively benign actor who embodies the archetype, and then there’s Trick2G, who is interesting because though the majority of his content now is just him being obnoxious (in a way I do sometimes find entertaining though tbh) he also did start off early on providing informative content and still does some of that as well, which I think shifts him a bit to the side. In terms of the nihilistic strain of irony, I’m mostly thinking of people like Imaqtpie, or Dekar, though perhaps I just don’t ‘get’ what their whole shtick is. But the way I see it, they just says shit and it’s never clear whether they mean it or not. Like a perverse, banal version of the zen sense one gets from reading certain haiku. Did I really just make that comparison? Also, kind of like Andy Kaufman, without any of the craft. But I feel this is something a lot of young-ish people seem to relate to, where a void of meaning and certainty can only be filled by laughter which is in itself like 80% hollow, and I would be tempted to connect that sense to the information overload in an era of global tensions deriving from more or less existential threats to humankind, and of course tensions a little less extinctiony but no less horrific.

i hear people, friends, family, acquaintances, young and old alike, referencing the latest bullshit the Trump administration is trying to pull, and i hear notes of fear, or despair, but almost always bundled into resignation or misguided stoicism. I don’t hear any fight in their words. they’re concerned and aware enough to reference ICE, to reference sexism, to reference the KKK, to reference Charlottesville and Trump’s tweets, but they don’t have any fight in their words. i don’t see any fight in their faces.

i wonder what it’d be like to create a device that could measure the amount of learned helplessness in the world. i wonder what kind of data we could get with that, if it correlates with certain trends, like fascism, like plutocracies, like inequality, like bigotry. This has become quite a tangent.

Which does make me want to reflect on where I am now, because there was a time I had around that same level of resignation to the unfairness of the world. Where I am now, and how I’ve gotten here. It’s probably the case that some of it is a certain predisposition. Then there’s education. I personally think that if the social sciences were competently taught in secondary school, that would drastically alter our political landscape. also if history classes and such weren’t so full of bullshit. It’s not until people look under the hood and have all the different parts explained and how they all work together, that people can really get a grasp on how the fact that there’s room for improvement and get a few handholds and footholds on how to make the changes necessary for those improvements. i’m sure there are other things that have to be done as well.

I’ve been rambling in a stream of consciousness ever since the first few paragraphs. I wonder if this is how the human brain is supposed to work. sometimes I wonder if i’m normal, if i should want to be normal, if i’m actually the most normal human on earth or in all of human history which would mean that one of the most common characteristics of a normal human being is a feeling of insecurity about their own normality. and i’m tempted to think that latter part might actually be true, regardless of the questionable way I arrived at that conclusion.