kiteinspace

My new theory on why adults think your ability to learn language magically disappears when you grow up is because they developed prejudices that hindered their ability to project. To learn a language you really have to pretend to be the person that's speaking.

(fuck. not me using "adults" in a sentence as a category that I'm clearly placing myself outside of. that's so embarassing. I have to edit it to say something like "when I was younger I never believed adults when they said you couldn't learn a language" etc etc...)

Wwhen I watch Chinese people speak, am I placing myself in the same category of or as different from them? I'm definitely, have been for years, putting myself in the same category as a "White heterosexual man" in this society to prove that I'm exactly the same as him. But when I watch Chinese newscasters or reporters or streamers, am I positioning myself subconsciously as "something that's definitely different from you"? I think I am. I think I have an aversion from seeing myself as the same as them because of racism. This makes it more difficult to learn the language! Essentially you have to be really good at empathy to figure out why someone who's fluent is using the language in a number of specific ways, and if there are barriers to empathy, there ya go.

(Maybe my social development is this way because I didn't have as much access to my peers as a small child on account of immediately attaching to the adults around me, who told me that my peers were wrong about everything.)

Part of our evolution as social creatures is that ingroups and outgroups can have a significant impact on our learning of skills, and that while social discrimination plays a big part of that, it's not solved by just "saying you're not doing it" and putting in a lot of restrictions on what entertainment can show to the public. In fact, ingroups and outgroups are just baked into the geopolitical history and impacts everything we do regardless of what *etiquette* we implement to try and counteract it.

What is money? It's an agreement between people that something is worth the same as something else. (rei: a representation of contribution, a pwomise that you will make yoruself useful in the bastract.) It's a statement of trust that a task will be done in the future. It's chains that bind you to promises. It's the power to make people do something.

(this is why I was never good with money, because rather than being concrete like people try and present it, it's a representation of a social concept, which have always been difficult for me to understand)

[rei: when I think about that I think of the pentacles suit in tarot, & like how that's a hyper concentrated version of the "earth element" in tarot, & that quadrant represents material resources & the work those resources require]

[rei: yeah exactly. bc of that I think that people who have a lot of money/assets don't actually *have* all of that like you wouldn't be able to be rich without being involved with a shitload of ppl]

Right like I have no idea how Elon Musk lives but essentially he can wave his hand and make ppl do things for him him right? but he wants to live like a regular guy he doesn't have the attention span for like... solving complex society problems. He wants to focus on tech gadgets so all of that power is going toward making ppl divert attention away from social issues and on how to make cool things. that's why there's no funding for essential things.

Because you're using your power to say stop paying attention thingsl ike taking care of your elderly father, or how to find happiness in life, use it to make cheap food so lots and lots of people can crunch numbers on a computer to make sure something something etc.

I've been living according to my childhood values which include living a humble life and paying little attention to money. But it's a little number (like a follower count) in the corner of your screen and they keep changing the game re: how you can spend those points because reality is constantly changing.

[rei: same here dude T__T I saw this thing recently that was like "if you're disgusted by money you'll never amass it" & I was like :( ]

[rei: like I would love to be wealthy & not have to worry about my material needs]

If I wanted to live a simple life, I could ignore it. But I don't, I wanna be a rockstar! I wanna shake things up in this dump of a world. So I need to use those little points.

There's no way to stay still right now in this world, at least as an urbanite I guess. You can't hold a small piece of land peacefully and grow it. There is a war and resources are constantly being taken from you. When you're under siege, you can't just be a simple humble farmer. You pick up your pitchfork. But they're not coming with pitchforks - A farmer can have a shotgun, too. Their weapons aren't fire or guns, they're an armored squad that will politely put you in a cage, unless you give them your property so they can bulldoze it, destroy everything you have, and con somebody into buying the land for inordinate amounts of money. And the public will do nothing because they agree that it was fair for them to have done so. The weapons were mana to psychically paralyze the people using leylines of magic - money, and logic.

So the people who have the best morals should be in charge but sometimes they're not the ones that do the best job when they're in charge.

This is because having good morals and being able to MANAGE people are two different skills.

There are people who wouldn't be able to articulate their larger morals but they can lead a team because they know instinctually how to herd people to accomplish a task.

There are people who are very intellectually sound, have extremely good theories about the world, but they crash and burn in a leadership role because managing people will bring out the most intense emotions in you. a wide range of intense emotions. And when that happens, when you are exhausted and you are the worst version of you, being able to be the worst version of you is a skill that the people with very good morals do not have.

See the thing with morals and social theory is it's a focus on a good theoretical system, aka it's a goal that you want to get to. And seeing what a goal looks like is a very intellectual task. Now actually getting to that goal, aka facing obstacles between you and your goal in the forms of how to manage the people around you and your relationship to those people, that's going to be the domain of your animalistic side. Because your animal side is the one that likes being in a pack. It likes to be interacted with in a certain way. It can make others in your pack feel at ease.

The people who are very intellectually able to analyze the ramifications of the decisions made about other people around them have developed their rational mind so much, because it's so difficult in this complicated era to understand the things that people do to each other, that sometimes they neglect their relationships with others. How to amicably exist among people, how to address conflicts, how to love themselves and others in a practical, everyday sense - sometimes they're not as good at it.

I will, of course, become good at all of it.

Was watching Broxah stream today. He got really tilted.

He got tilted because he had been coaching somebody on how to not tilt and play well despite setbacks - the next game his protege was on the opposite team, and his own team was playing very poorly, playing emotionally, and Broxah watched them make mistake after mistake, unable to do anything about it and questioning again and again, "Why are they doing this? Why don't they want to win? What can I do? I don't want to play this game anymore."

I think that being a kind person means that you consider effecting good consequences for those around you something that you can control, something that you will to happen, and when someone is behaving badly you wonder why they are choosing to behave that way. You are frustrated at the lack of control that you can have on the situation. You fall into a despair of not understanding why someone chooses to effect negative consequences on their environment. Because YOU can imagine yourself in that scenario and how you would behave to counteract your negative tendencies, you can't see why someone else is responding to a scenario in the way they are responding to it, rather you are hyperfixated on your judgement that the behavior they're exhibiting is the WRONG one - because you hold yourself to a standard where you don't perform it.

Being kind is to act in a way where a group of people have generally agreed upon a standard of acting, which is to say, to consciously change the way you act and be disciplined about it. The problem with discipline is that it can render you inflexible.

A kind person is an angry person in a situation they can't control, whereas an indifferent person who behaves sporadically at most times may be the one who has the energy to be kind when the patience of others fail them, or the empathy to be able to be kind, because they are perceiving the world around them without judgement.

It's very hard for me to accept that someone I live with or choose to spend my time around is not choosing the courses of action that would enable them to be effective, kind, healthy in their life. I think it's definitely true that I've tried to manicure the trajectory of my thoughts and actions to be optimal since a very young age. In Broxah's frustrations I see myself.

"I don't want to play this game anymore. What can I do? This is such a fun game, and if it's not this game it will be the next one. I can't do anything about the fact that people just don't try to win this game. And they get no consequences for it. Here they are, queuing up for the next game, where they will do the exact same thing. What is even the point? What's the point of playing this game?"

I know how he should react. (there's the judgement, again.) (Can you have growth and improvement without judgement? Is it better, or worse?) It's just a game. People have always played like this, so just accept that your teammates will make poor decisions and focus on your own play. (Maybe it's harder for a jungler who always has to look to others to make plays, whereas laners are usually a straightforward duel) 

When Sneaky fought Adam and Eve for the first time in Nier Automata, a scripted biased battle, he came back again and again, like 20 times, while chat told him to just quit and grind some more. He was getting one-hit and hardly doing any damage. But he found enjoyment in learning the enemy's instakill attack patterns. Every time he got just a little further in the scripted fight. The chat was spamming the dialogue that played at the beginning of each fight as a joke about how repetitive it was getting, how it was getting on their nerves. It didn't get on Sneaky's. When he played the fight to its timed conclusion, he gloated at chat. "Who needs to grind more now?" 

When Sneaky had bad teammates, he might be frustrated at them and make snarky comments at them when they made bad plays, but I think he found ways to be distracted doing his own thing. Maybe that's what Sneaky means when he says he's like a dog and doesn't remember bad emotions. If there's a program playing in your head all the time, which you can focus on instead of external things that demand your focus, maybe it's easier to bear the frustrations of the world. Sneaky's fight against Adam wasn't fair. The game was elevating the difficulty curve arbitrarily for that one instant. It's the game's perogative to do so, thought, right? It's not my game, it's the programmers' game. It's Yoko Taro's game. Don't I just have to trust Yoko Taro that this is gonna be fun? So the game League of Legends, when you're playing with teammates who can't regulate their emotions, that's not fair. I will lose a game because of no fault of my own. So, why attach importance to losing at all? Don't I have fun controlling my characters, playing out impossible scenarios, exercising my skill when I can?

To answer Broxah's questions: 
The people he's playing with might not be trying to win. They are walking their own, frustrated path. They do spend their whole day like this, playing out positive openings and raging and quitting negative ones. They don't get consequences because this is a way that works for playing this game. 

The thing is that everyone is playing the same game. Everyone enters the rift with five strangers, many of whom will be throwing the game. My own performance can make it so that we're more likely to win, but I can't guarantee it. So then, winning is nice as a treat, but is not an equal indicator of my effort or my skill. It can come as a result of it, but it doesn't determine it.