Seven reasons why life is pretty cool, Day 1

In case you guys didn't know, Professor Plum wrote an article a few days ago about how life could use a bit more positivity in it. Honestly, I'm inclined to agree with that - and when i say "inclined to agree," I mean "Holy crap I'm really thankful somebody is making a post like this."

I honestly can't say that it's something that "everyone should be doing," because that would make me even more of a highest-order hypocrite. Lord only knows i throw massive temper tantrums, get bitingly acidic over the smallest things and hold unreasonable grudges. But the fact of the matter is that those things don't make life pleasant for more people - and dudes being cool to other dudes very much does. And on the whole, I'd prefer a life that was pleasant for most people over a life that wasn't, philosophical discussions of the best possible life aside.

So here's what I'm gonna do: I'm gonna go on a few oversized rants about how certain distaff parts of life are actually pretty awesome - like, worth getting the fuzzies over awesome - and I'm gonna make an effort to post one a day for, oh, let's say a week. Don't feel the need to follow along every day or comment, but - hopefully i can explain myself why those bits of life are cool well enough that you can be like "yeah, from a casually intellectual perspective i can dig that." Maybe you won't like some of the things i do; in fact, i suspect at least one entry in the seven might be more than a little risible. But hopefully they can remind you guys of things that you personally liked, for similar reasons and/or on similar topics, and get a smile out of you in one way or another.

I think that's a long enough preamble for now; I can't think of anything else to say up there, anyway. Let's get started!

#1: The Color Blue

_{That's a lot of different boxes, isn't it?}

I'll be honest: I think colors are pretty awesome. I mean, talking about part of a fundamental aspect in the structure of our universe in a "subjectively nice" or "subjectively lame" way kind of frames said aspects in a simple enough light [sorry about the pun] that it's almost kind of insulting or disrespectful, or at the very least ignorant about how little one's personal lens actually matters in the enormity of existence itself. It's also probably the case that a deeper level of appreciation of colors comes from learning in detail about energy, light, the visible spectrum and our classifications of specific bands of a spectrum - and I was the guy that took a class quasi-affectionately labelled "physics for poets" in college, and managed to get a C on it. I'm not a smart person, particularly in regards to the hard sciences, and I can't say that my appreciation for a label of a band of part of a spectrum of an aspect of a universal underpinning is even close to as meaningful as it should be, or even needs to be, for this kind of message to get across.

But you know what? I kind of don't care about that. Even from this incredibly limited perspective, it's sort of fascinating that this isolation of our visual senses - the concept of something like a color, and how we relate to it - can have so many different variations, so many different implications, so much taken from it and added to it. The fact that this little iota of an aspect of yadda yadda yadda gets so much attention and use from us in everything from advertisements to ideological branding to compound analysis is kind of stunning when you think about it, and the fact that something this ingrained into our thinking, something explained to most children when they're still really small and that we still sit up and pay attention to it when it proves eye-catching in some way - that's honestly pretty impressive. Routine exposure tends to lead to taking things for granted from time to time, and given the way brains process memories and information that's perfectly understandable. But that there are things that we're routinely blasted with every day and that we *still* remember as vivid foreground details from time to time? That something could be so important to us that it hits us in the conscious while flooding up the subconscious? That's really freaking cool!

_{Much cool, many low thermal energies yes, wow amaze}

So why blue in particular? Why not, say, green, or purple, or red, or something else? Honestly, that bit's even more subjective, and i'm not going to say that I think it's better than greens or purples or reds or anything like that - on the whole, i love them, and saying that i think one is better than others is the height of silliness. But i'm a silly guy, so I'll say that, among other things, I really appreciate that:

-The sky is blue.

_{Pretty darn blue, really.}

Ever fallen into it? I haven't. But as a kid, I used to dream that I would - i'd lie on the grass or on the trampoline my folks had or whatever and imagined just plummeting right into the blue. I know that inverting gravity and/or falling are things we're supposed to be scared of - and i learned to be scared of them fairly quickly - but there was something about that vibrant, all-encompassing void that was practically intoxicating. I imagine that it tasted like berries and vanilla. Wanted to drink it, occasionally. Knew that it would feel fantastic if i could swim around in the stuff. And I loved how it would change as the day passed - blended in with other colors as the day passed, before slowly darkening down to inky nighttime. And the fact that each and every one of those shades seemed "pretty" in their own different ways seemed nothing short of powerful wizard's magic to me.

-Blue Hyacinths exist.

My favorite flower as a kid, straight-up. They possibly still are. Didn't get to see many of them before i actually got to spend more than a half-hour each day on the internet and/or got to frequent places that had them, so there's something about them that feels inexplicably "rare" to me. Even now, I try to find excuses to have that particular shade show up in some of my character designs or have it referenced in some of my written works, though normally i end up changing it at the very end when i realize how self-indulgent it is.

-Magic: the Gathering is a thing.

_Countered!

My opinions on my old man are mixed these days, but I'm not going to deny that I'm thankful that he taught me Magic: the Gathering when i was a tyke - this would be about a month after the Visions expansion was launched, mind, so I was only five years old. But I really, really wanted to learn how to play, partly because he seemed to have a lot of fun playing it with his friends and partly because the cards were really pretty, and he allowed me to look at some of his cards in his collector's binders.

One of the things he taught me - once i was actually able to play the game well enough to start building my own decks out of the excessive number of commons and lands that he had lying around - was that blue was always the best color. Always. Why? Because you could do all sorts of fun things with it - get more cards, "Counter!" your opponent's cards, get creatures that flew over his creatures, fiddled with the board state, and so on and so forth. Also to his credit, he taught me a lot of different ways that you could make seemingly innocuous cards do all sorts of tricks and funny things when you combined them with each other, which was a whole different sort of magic entirely: I saw a stage magician pull tricks on a TV show close to two decades after he first started teaching me those tricks, and I was legitimately surprised to find out how similar it felt to learning all those cool little card combos. Mechanical sleight of hand, as it were.

I've played the game a bunch more since he first taught it to me, going through various on and off phrases - currently, I'm on an "off" phase due to it being really freaking expensive for someone in my income bracket. And even though my opinions have differed from his in some matters, I've always associated blue with that level of misdirection and trickery, and how powerful it could be once you learned all its little tricks. Even if it's only a shade of its former self these days [not sorry about that pun at all], I still love it for what it represents and what it does.

Also, look at that card border. It's goddamned gorgeous. Other colors get cracked rocks or bubbling muck, and blue gets that freaking gorgeous paint-y look to it. It's totally lame that they changed it later.

And so on. I could go on and on and on about this, and chances are i could do the same about other colors - and chances also are that most other people could also do the same. (Color-)blindness not withstanding, the fact that color is a global medium with discussable associations is yet another thing working in its favor and yet another thing to appreciate, even if it's taken for granted, and even if taking it for granted is a perfectly fine thing to do. But the point stands: conceptually breathtaking, empirically lovely, and ripe with all sorts of expressive potential. Colors are great. Blue is particularly awesome, but all of them are awesome. Life in general is more awesome than not, overall.

And hey, if nothing else, we've gotten a couple of high-tier cartoon pastel horses out of it.

-Petrichord