# facts &
Let me share a story that admits a blind spot I've had. 

## story 1: save the sea turtles
But for some background first, let me share with you a story of someone else's blind spot.
[prep beverage]
back in the before times, when I was less old, the zeitgeist at the time was involved worrying about plastic pollution. specifically, a big offender is plastic straws. Like most forever chemicals, they don't decompose, they just litter the oceans. given their shape and density, they get blown around by air a lot, so they tend to accidentally escape containment efforts. It's not an ideal situation. I guess there was a viral video showing how it's horrific for sea turtles.
This is the background information for local businesses informing us of how admirable they are because they switched from plastic straws to paper. Following that, memes about paper straws dissolving before people can finish their drinks - apparently some people order a beverage and stare at it for multiple hours? I had a friend at the time who informed me how much smarter he was than these people by realizing you can just not use a straw.
sure. But the point of a straw is to work around ice cubes. 
Him and his girlfriend were... amused? that I wanted to buy metal drinking straws.
[put metal straw in beverage]
In response to their derision I said, "yeah, Save the Sea Turtles." my then-friend was incredulous that i would spend money for a cause like this. I specified, it's not that I feel bad. It's that I recognize the moral obligation.
[sip]
He attempted to correct me viz a viz my thought process; he said that a sense of morality is exactly that feeling of guilt, which he then assured me I was feeling.
at the time i was mildly horrified that he couldn't fathom the difference. Since then, the true horror is that I'm pretty sure most people can't disentangle these concepts in their minds. So once you become desensitized to the feeling of guilt, there's nothing left to guide you.
[chug, finish]

## story 2: *obviously* it would be logic

Every pretentious video essayist will eventually talk about spec ops: the line and/or disco elysium at some point.
[tombstone, Here Lies: Spec Ops: The Line. nearby sign: we kindly request that @PirateSoftware stop disrespecting the grave]
[skill check fail, rhetoric, trivial]
Now let me share with you a story of my own blind spot.
[rhetoric] what the fuck was that?
When I first saw the list of skills, I was immediately drawn to one. I figured clearly it's the best. If the game is good, surely with this one skill will be the one that matters the most, and with enough of it, you can compensate for the rest, or render them entirely obsolete.
Other than the physical ones, of course. 
[some kind of lampshading about making jokes about foreshadowing]

Fortunately, I've been able to ask others. A therapist once told me she thought that of Empathy. I figured it was possible she was performing what is expected of her rather than being genuine. then an artist told me she was immediately attracted to Inland Empire. 3 data points isn't definitive, but we can work with it. I hold the thesis: a person correlates with a "signature skill" in disco elysium. Much like that one expired card game has player archetypes of spike, johnny, timmy, and vorthos, there are appreciable differences that a real person tends to gravitate toward, reflecting their own personality and perspective on life. If we think of life as a game where you're the character, most players seem to have chosen a signature skill. Mine is Logic, of course. Surely you saw this coming, it couldn't possibly be anything else.
...but then, maybe you didn't. It's obvious to me what was happening in my skull, but I reside there, so of course it would be - my thoughts are how I model thoughts in general.

## story 3: the worst person alive

[//TODO: that story about how vicky argues like jordan peterson]

There's a meme from tumblr. 
[//TODO: find it]
some children's hospital redecorated. For some reason they painted the floors red. It looks like a trail of blood. a few tumblrinas argued back and forth. some talked about the color theory of the color red. The rest told them to open their god damn eyes, it looks like a trail of blood.
now Color Theory is a tumblr meme.


## exemplars

[//TODO: you have the books, go look up the verses]
these are my 2 favorite books. Douglas Hoffstadter presents a theory, that thoughts in general are a process of forming and refining categories. A child has a concept of self, then distinguishes a separate concept for others, then eventually might recognize "my mommy" vs "other mommys", then define an adult woman independently of any offspring... he puts it way better, obviously.
but the point is, you form a category around its exemplar, then distill its traits and refine the category to something more useful that better reflects the world in front of you.
this is why I would love to push the term "wolfendoom" for that genre. 

Anyway. Disco Elysium. If you're not familiar.. well, turn this video off, go play it. But a quick rundown of some of the relevant information..
This is truly a game where you build a character, in a realistic way. You wake up with amnesia - it takes a long time to learn your name (Harry), and your "skills" are talking to you as though they are someone else's voice in your head. They even talk to each other sometimes.
They all have a personality, and dictate yours. Or rather, the real you chooses to nurture the ones its attracted to initially. Kind of like "inside you there are 2 wolves". but, 24.
[LRR in the ... phyrexia? stream highlights, where (that) adam says something like] "i'm bursting at the seams, here!"

### exemplar of Half Light

let's look at half light. the game describes what it is; your fight-or-flight response. it describes the sort of person who really like it; high strung people, shoot now ask questions later, etc. what's fascinating about disco elysium is that it has a cynical view of the concept of a skill. in D&D, or almost every other game that has a way to increase skills and/or attributes, if you can raise a skill from n to n+1, that is better. In Disco Elysium, there's such a thing as being "too good" at a skill. So continuing to look at Half Light, if you don't have enough of it, you don't really have a survival instinct. but if you have too much of it, you're living your entire life right at the boiling point, which is not ideal, either.
Disco Elysium also has lots of items that give small boosts to these skills, with a description about the item, usually also justifying why it affects your skills. Here's some Itchy Pants. Suffering the itchiness all the time puts you on edge, which is a detriment to your Composure, but a benefit to your Half Light.
Let's take a moment to appreciate that all the skills have, and I cannot understate this, *works of art*, to represent them.
Now, let's go meet Cuno.
[on tv] "cuno doesn't fuckin' care!"
This is cuno, an edgy child self-medicating for the trauma of his father's abuse with some kind of stimulant.
[on tv, woolie vs clip, reggie] Give the child his speed, woolie!
[on tv, clip of narrator describing him] He's almost exquisitely ugly. Like a gremlin.
Cuno is the apex of Half Light. It's no wonder that Harry thinks of Half Light in terms of being exemplified by Cuno.
And that's why the portrait for half light looks so much like the portrait for Cuno. Or maybe I should say that the other way around.

## Enter: SkyMistless

but that's been thoroughly covered already. I'm sure every disco fan has noticed this, and told you about it. Enter youtuber SkyMistless. She matches up *all* of the skills to their in-game exemplar. How sick is that?
[fill beverage]
[some pomp and circumstance about sitting down to watch]
So who is the exemplar for logic?
[sky mistless, show her showing off a good one, but not the insulindian phasmid (for spoilers reasons)]
[sit by tv with beverage]
[sky mistless showing logic's exemplar is measurehead. Ideally, just quote her saying the word ] Measurehead.
fuck.
[sip]
[measurehead] YOUR BODY BETRAYS YOUR DEGENERACY.
how could this happen? how is the exemplar of logic the mega-racist?

## the point

Surely neither sky nor ZA/UM thinks racial bias is logical. logic is the opposite of bias, obviously!
and yet... it's undeniable, isn't it? 
There's another sign. one of the items to boost your logic is a conical hat. +1 logic - why do you think these, and indeed, most hats - were invented? keeps the sun out of your eyes. Plus this one is made from straws, sounds way better the environment than polyester or whatever. But there's more data left. Some missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle - the setting of the game is not earth, but the same insensitive elements are at play there. Harry is a white guy. This is decidedly not a hat for a white guy. Maybe Encyclopedia could have told us about specific events. Maybe empathy would have let us intuit this.
[//TODO: what'd sky say?]
All the skill exemplars represent being in too deep. Cuno's half light is easily outmaneuvered by the adult in the room. Garte, as volition, gets no part in any of the interesting stuff. I'm pretty sure there's no way for you to pay him what you owe, so he's been manipulated into doing what you want for your benefit, instead of his own.
the game says that too much logic will cause you to lose yourself in an ivory tower, wrapped up in some chain of reasoning that completely ignores what's in front of you. 

The logical thing to do is fit more information into your theory of the world. Even if it comes from unexpected place.
Maybe with a sufficiently galaxy brained intellect, sufficient logic could solve everything, including morality. Realistically, you'll need some "facts &", as well. 
whatever it takes. Just remember to open your eyes every so often, or you might turn into a color theorist.

