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Not that I wasn’t also having fun. Ripping the Defenders’ arguments to shreds and then reading all the comments agreeing passionately with me and electronically patting me on my cybershoulders was thrilling. It’s so much harder to actually define yourself and work to imagine the best possible future than it is to tear down others’ ideas.
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I know that that doesn't make even a little bit of sense. That was the point, that beautiful incongruence.
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If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn’t have liked what I found, so I didn’t.
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Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average.
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Well, if I weren't so insecure, I would have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to spend every day of my life getting really good at seeming confident.
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He was one of thousands of people who scraped by filtering reality through their ideology and then yelling really loudly at the internet.
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Sometimes it seems to me that the purpose of life is to convert energy into beauty. And I know that's not rationally true. But sometimes it's okay for things not to be rationally true.
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Fear is an even better fuel than anger.
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The whole time I was in front of the camera, I was thinking of the artist. A fellow creator who had poured her soul into something truly remarkable that might simply be ignored by the whole world. I was trying to get in her head. I was trying to figure out why she had created this thing and, in the same breath, calling out the world for its callous ignorance of beauty and form... I wanted people to wae up and spend a few moments looking at the exceptional amazement of human creation.
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This dumb little moment was the first time I heard a stranger hating me in public. I knew then, for real, that thousands of people were having the exact conversation all over the world every moment of every day. Those people were real and their thoughts were formed by overblown or just straight made up stories about me that I could never adequately defend myself against. People all over the world whom I had never met and would never meet hated me. HATED. And what they thought about me was completely out of my control.
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I was really, deeply, honestly, and truly infatuated with having people pay attention to me.
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Anyway, we’re left with three possibilities. I have forgotten something very basic about a topic I know a great deal about, and so has everyone else I’ve talked to about this, including people who are smarter and know more than me. Someone has constructed a new material that behaves unlike anything that currently exists, or should be able to exist, and then put it on the sidewalk for everyone to see. Carl is alien. And I don’t mean alien like “weird.
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So how do you do it? Not make a baby, balance an equation. I did biology last year.
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It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.
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My path forward was the opposite of theirs and theirs was the opposite of mine. It distilled itself down until all that was left was the argument. And maybe, lurking just beneath that, the hatred.
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The comments on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter instantly switched from a small, friendly, supportive community to a selection of the loudest, most over-the-top opinions one could imagine. I was a traitor to my species. I was ultra-fuckable. I was a space alien. I was an ultra-fuckable space alien. And so on.
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At some point that night, I glimpsed my most probable future. That one day, the most interesting and important thing about me would be a thing that I did a long time ago.
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I intentionally put myself in situations where people who I care about and who I respect rely on me to do things, which is very motivating.
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If you're wondering what the difference is, well fine art is like art that exists for its own sake. The Thing that fine art does is itself. Design is art that does something else. It's more like visual engineering.
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That's an actual quote from an interview I did cable news. Direct quote. Great plan, April. I really knew what I was talking about.
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We are irrational beings, easy to manipulate if you're willing to do whatever it takes. That's exactly how terrorists convince themselves that murder is worthwhile. And the wound it left, it was larger than those lives lost; it was a wound we would all have to live with forever. The purity of my feeling for Carl was gone and I would never get it back.
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In any case, Maya's efficiency of speech was extremely helpful in the maintenance of a relationship that I was subconsciously keeping on the knife-edge between casual and serious. She was capable of talking with her eyes and her body, but she mostly chose to use her mouth. I didn't mind this.
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People will hate you for no reason, or for bad reasons, or even for good reasons. People are torn apart by fame, and this is far beyond what most of them deal with. You're talking about yourself like you're a tool, but you're a person too. And an evolving one. This will affect your life forever.
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We are all differently broken, semi-functional, rusted out love machines...