For as long as I can remember, I’ve believed that the key to becoming a better person lies in one’s ability to see the world and themselves from many different perspectives. This way, they can avoid ignorance, unnecessary offense, and generally be kinder to others.
Sometimes, we don’t follow our own rules. I had to remind myself this morning that no matter your philosophies or beliefs, self-reflection and re-adjustment are always necessary, or you’ll find yourself slipping into another person who you might not entirely like. On Twitter this morning, I came close to creating a game, which, should it have taken off (which I’m sure it wouldn’t have), could have potentially offended many authors.
The premise of the game was to tweet the hashtag, conjure up the name of a pretentious-sounding novel, and then search for it in Google. If it was a real novel, you gained a point. If it was also a movie, you gained two. I rather quickly deleted these tweets after realising that creating a game that is literally about judging a book based on its cover is one of the dumbest and most ignorant things I could do.
The concept of being pretentious is, from my understanding, the act of claiming to have a high standard of morals and acting like you support charities and movements, but only so that you can gain some sort of moral upper-hand over your friends and be revered and admired by the people around you; so that they can call themselves a better person than you.
Basing an author’s ideals on the name of their book, therefore, is a rather dense thing to do. It could be a lovely book; it could be good, and simply not my cup of tea. It could even be autobiographical and highly self-critical. And that is why continual self-reflection is important, else I would not have realised this.
Sorry this blog post has been rather self-centric today. Coming up I hope to be making some blog posts about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and writing comedically, and the rise of storytelling in videogames such as those found in Telltale Games’ creations. Also, maybe a thing or two about cats, and why they shall become transcendent beings.
Perpetually Perturbed 