Today’s deck is Tarot Del Fuego.
It’s a very surreal deck, I really dig the marker aesthetic.
Today’s reading advises that the key to getting out of a rut is not letting an obsession with balance hold you back. It sounds a bit like the idea of taking a week off if it means you get 50% done afterwards, rather than remaining tired a whole week and only achieving 21%.
So today was so uneventful that the biggest thing was seeing a Friend sunbathing in my balcony.
They left on their own without a fuss, the Cat Assignment System is not out for me… yet.
(Yes, I know my balcony is messy, leave me alone)
There’s not really much else to talk about today, really. I sorted stuff in my apartment, finally remembered to buy dishwasher soap, started the humidifier because my skin was starting to get itchy… I was in such a homebody mood that I ended up ordering uber eats for the first time in forever for dinner. I did also have this very specific craving for A Lot Of Carrots, I guess.
Instead, let me tell you about today’s title.
Chatting with E, the term “Hyperreal Relatableness” came to me.
“Hyperreal” is a word that sounds fancy the same way one of those screwdriver kits with a bunch of weird heads looks fancy. It’s just a very specific variant of something mundane.
There’s real and there’s fake. And then there’s the things that coat themselves in reality but it’s such a polished version of reality that you get distracted in your reflection instead of seeing the actual polished item.
A version of reality so polished it ends up feeling fake in a different way, a Hyperreality.
A good example would be Makoto Shinkai’s depiction of romance in his movies. They’re not fairytale romances, but they work within such a specifically polished version of reality that they end up feeling unobtainable.
Another good example is if you’ve ever meet anyone that puts up a caustic front as a defense mechanism. Surely someone so Real, someone so Sincere wouldn’t be hiding anything… right?
So as you see, “hyperreal” is more ultra specific than it is fancy.
“Hyperreal Relatableness” is then, the name a gave to that school of PR (often in social media, very often with game developers, I won’t be naming names) where the subject tries to act like he’s like me frfr but in a way where they still caricaturize themselves to a point where, despite supposedly appealing to relatableness, you never get the actual impression that the author is conveying how they actually are or how they actually feel.
And dunno, I’m just giddy that I finally found a proper name for that ultra annoying trend.