I've noticed that a lot of my deeper interests are meta in a specific, recurring way that i find difficult to talk about.
Even after getting the hang of English, i kept scrutinizing the rules, and i soon made what turned out to be spelling reforms and constructed writing systems. I've been interested in linguistics and conlanging ever since. Now there are at least 5 more languages i want to learn, and several more i'd like to create.
But what also fascinates me is how a lot of people are totally averse to language construction. They think it's a waste of time (but don't apply that standard to other hobbies). Or they don't even give a reason, they're just mysteriously annoyed to hear about it at all. Or, in the extreme case, look at what historical figures made of Esperanto. They found it suspicious, threatening, that anyone would care to try to improve on the natural order. Beyond conlanging, the same "Changing the standard language is evil!" sentiment remains palpable with things like inclusive language, but i digress.
My interest in communication methods extends beyond language, into signage, and user interfaces, and notation systems, and a whole bunch of stuff.
I'm pretty sure this is an autism thing? After all, i find lots of other autistic people through this cluster of interests. But i don't want to generalize; i'm legitimately curious about how common it is.
Maybe you could blame my interest in Toki Pona, specifically, on having been in spaces that would chronically twist my words, leading me to try to solve for the best, clearest way to speak. But the general interest in language was practically there from birth, long before i was ever mistreated in that way. (It's the same as my nonhumanity. You could try to pin it on being dehumanized for being autistic, but like, i'm pretty sure i'm just, like this, regardless.)
Like, okay, until a decade ago, i was enamored with Windows. Just, Microsoft Windows, in and of itself. Like, the Barney Error meme that Patricia Taxxon discussed in "On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People"? That's the exact kind of thing i would've done as a kid. I spent hours recreating the Windows startup sequence in PowerPoint, over and over again, and later made a full Windows 8 parody out of hyperlinked AutoShapes. And composed my own sound effects for it.
Today, i still put a lot of free time into brainstorming ways to improve—what would you even call it—the core paradigms of the computer interface, i guess. And i still mock those ideas up in PowerPoint, but i know how to make it actually look good now. It's fun to me. I need to know if other people are doing this. I know it must sound super specific out of context, but looking at everything else i'm talking about in this post, i can't be the only one.
When iOS 7 redesigned the iPhone interface to use flat colors and gradients, so many people vocally hated it. I specifically remember the critics taking this one video, "Was iOS 7 created in Microsoft Word?", as a condemnation to rally behind. But for me, the redesign, and this video, only validated my UI-recreating hobby and inspired me to extend it to mobile interfaces. "Fancy effects aren't necessary", it told me; "the clarity of the content is what matters and also recreating user interfaces in Microsoft Office applications is cool." And i do like it when my communication is clear.
Somewhat earlier, when i got interested in videogames, i used up a lot of paper by drawing controllers and cutting them out. I was enamored with all the controls that had been thought up, all the different kinds of buttons and sticks and experimental input methods, but also the layouts. The form factors. I was captivated by the clamshell of Nintendo's recent few handhelds, and how you could point the Wii Remote at the screen or turn it sideways to change modes. When i first heard about the Fidget Cube, i was disappointed that it didn't function as a little, dice-shaped game controller. And similarly, i've posted before about keyboard layouts, and wanting to make my own.
All of this controller stuff then took me down the pipeline of constructing my own videogame ideas, in intricate detail. I didn't just want to enjoy games; i wanted to go up to the meta-level and see what makes them tick.
And it just keeps going. The niche of Threatening Music Notation is, like, the exact kind of thing i would spend hours doodling as a kind of joke. Apparently, it's not enough for me to learn a notation system—i want to push against its boundaries, see what it takes to break it, what value can be derived from that. So i did the same with math notation. And the IPA. And once i started programming, i got drawn to esoteric languages like Befunge, which flip core assumptions of programming languages on their head.
Hell, now i know i'm nonbinary, and gender presentation is a communication system that warrants its own field of signaling theory.
The point i'm trying to reach might strain with the stereotype of tunnel-visioned autistics. Because, from where i'm standing, the non-metahobbyists, the outgroup of this hyperfixation cluster, are the ones missing the forest for the trees. They're so focused on their native languages, their entrenched social norms, their familiar power structures, all their arbitrary ways of interfacing with the world, that they mistake it for objective reality—not just the way things are, but the only way they ought to be. Even when others are begging them to believe things are broken, that the order in place is causing quantifiable harm. Too many people seem not to want to think about the tools they're using, the systems they're participating in, whether it's a society or an operating system.
Whereas i feel intrinsically driven to look at the bigger picture, toy with it, see if there aren't better concepts out in this infinite-dimensional conceptual space. What others take for granted, i can't help but view as a local minimum that we, in a cultural gradient descent, just happened to settle into—and often a dangerously high local minimum at that. Given an infinite forest of possibilities, there's no way we've optimized the structure of the world we built. We're just attached to the trees in our sub-quectoscopic little valley.
How can these interests of mine be "restrictive" if they're too broad for the rest of the world to value, much less engage with? (And how am i supposed to get across to people what my interests even are!?)
I guess to dispel any notion that i'm an Esperantist, i see Esperanto as just another local minimum. People assume Zamenhof knew what he was doing, they go along with the idea that he made the perfect language. It seems that a lot of reforms have been treated the same way, within the community, as Esperanto itself is, without. So i feel like Esperanto is a sunk cost fallacy. I feel the same way about English. And gender. And defining π in terms of diameter when the rest of math uses the radius——
How much of that is a waste of time to try fighting?
One of my favorite quotes is, of all places, from jan Misali's "seximal responses". I think it sums up my ethos very neatly.
it’s fun to examine how we could theoretically change the things we take for granted, even if we know it could never actually happen.
And even then… like, we are succeeding in making language more inclusive, aren't we? And alternative operating systems are gaining market share. And the Wii, with its silly remote-shaped controller and motion controls, managed to strike a massive chord. And τ has spread a lot in just over a decade. None of that is theoretical.
Maybe we metahobbyists and overthinkers have more power than we believe.
