#partial positive

[reality-reveiws]

Seal

seal the animal... seal "to block"/seal "the thing that blocks", seal like seal of approval...

they dont have same etymology, to block comes from latin signum, which means "sign" (coming from the letter sealing with wac thing) and animal comes from a proto germanic word selkhaz which means. seal

hm, i like seal the animal. cute! ah, the first thing i think of when i imagine seal is it looking at me with big doe eyes, but the second thing is it getting torn apart by a polar bear...? which might say something about me. i dont know that any seal facts... which is sad. i asked my partner for seal facts and he talked about seel, a first gen pokemon:

which. boring, tbh, not the coolest pokemon. devastating for an ice type

to plug/block... reminded of this yt channel: https://youtube.com/@thescienceclassroom that puts marshmallows in vacuum chambers with various levels of protection, so far only a super tight mason jar has been successful and he uses it as a control group, which i think is pretty cool. i know mason jars are super air tight because they apply force onto the seal? or something? steve mould has a short on it related to the assassin's water bottle i cant seem to find

seal of approval... an implicit authority here, and i do like bureaucracy, as an asthetic. but i dont like people telling me what to do...

overall positive ish i think lots of cool directions with this word

[reality-reveiws]

drama

theater. not comedy. to be dramatic. gossip.

as a self diagnosed theater kid, the word "drama" immediately brings me much joy to simply hear. i love acting, theater, and so many of my friends are from theater

but if you look at my theater "portfolio" it'll be pretty clear that im mostly specced towards comedy. i dont know how much of its a mental block, but not being able to do drama is frustrating, i want to fix that, get better at dramatic acting and get more experience... but its been a low priority amoungst other things

interestingly, the "to be dramatic" interpretation makes a dramatic person more... comedic. dramatic means larger than life, and most exaggerations come out more comedic than not. it's just an interesting "contradiction"

drama as in gossip is... never liked it. but its interesting as a concept. the general artifice of. [story] [oh my god thats evil/amazing] interactions and what they mean are fascinating.

hm, it looks like i mostly have negative thoughts, but that one positive association is really strong. seeing the word "drama" made me go "a me word!!!" so itll have to be partial positive I think

[reality-reveiws]

Real

real numbers, reality/truth, and. apparently an old spanish currency

real numbers are so ugly, but they're pretty in an ugly way, yk? i can see how we got to the definitions just from "let's try to fill all the holes"

real as in reality/truth is also interesting, especially with. modern contexts of AI. Id be nice to be able to tell when things are real again, although maybe i never could do that. it also reminds me of the much older phenomena of people confusing models of reality as reality itself. thats an annoying preconception to deal with...

according to wikipedia, the brazilian real was introduced in 1994 to replace the cruzeiro real, which was inflated to uselessness. at first it was 1 to 1 with the usd, but now a dollar is around 5 times that. currency is called "real" because it meant "royal" which is interesting.

i have mixed feelings on reality, but it lead to me learning a new thing so that gives it a few points

[reality-reveiws]

Participation

Brings to mind "participation credit", "participation trophies", and the time i was in a high school improv team. some of the members refused to participate in the rehearsals, and dragged everything down for all of us.

two negative, and one positive associations. being forced to, rewarded for, and someone not participating. for the first and last, it means "an enthusiastic engagement" and for the middle it means "any engagement at all".

enthusiasm is valuable, which is why a class might want to enforce it, or why i felt annoyed when my team members had a lack of it. of course, enforcing something like enthusiasm doesn't work.. like that one office meme. theres a broader thesis about the american school system (or others) trying to foster things like "participation" with tools best used to teach rote memorization activities.

"participation trophies" are bad, because they're the opposite of the usual definition for participation. we're rewarding low engagement. that feels wrong.

participation, and the ideas we built around it, are all about wanting people to care. that's hard, and i dont know if ive seen a better solution than selecting for people who care.

makes me feel melancholy