On being weird (or, bitsmaxxing)

why did you impersonate a statue today?

you are a silly man

— Nice Gray

I didn't think you were a furry, but if it turned out you were, I'd be completely unsurprised.

— Honk Near Eel

Thank you for your felicitations, Nobel laureate trapped in a schizophrenic's body [dkl9]

— Ill Grime Ode

You are a very strange person [dkl9]

And that's coming from a very strange person myself

— Rake Spoke

Starting some years ago, the media I took in came to be mostly from the strange side, variously intellectual and pseudo-intellectual. I kept consuming it, and took it seriously, sith I enjoyed thinking and reading, and felt only weakly an instinctive pressure to conform. The various niche ideologues spoke of things one should do, and my logic-heavy thinking filled in the rest.

• Write in plaintext.
• Look to Latin for its influence on later languages.
• Learn to measure sans tools.
• Music causes earworms, probably, so avoid it.
• Smartphones and social media are addictive, so avoid them.
• Abandon months, for they are arbitrary.
• Ignore junk media.
• Memorise with spaced repetition.
• Make your notes more portable with a "tiny" notepad.
• Use shorthand when writing on paper.

All these things make good logical sense, and I like logic, so I did them. There are surely a dozen more like these which I omit, only sith they feel to me too normal to write up.

As it happens, few others do many of these things. Apparently, doing things that make sense makes me weird.

"Weird" is a complex, cumulative judgment, extended from the experience of being bewildered. I find such bewilderment, seen in others, as funny. Soon enough, I ran out of "radically"-sensible actions, so I started violating convention some more to mess with people.

• I went barefoot in crowded American public.
• I repurposed a conlang as a marginally-more-efficient shorthand.
• I do all my programming in shell script.
• I formalised the cognitive advantage of the silly web browser in the odd phone I still use.
• My lifestyle is now written up as a quarter-jocular religion.
• All fist-bumps, I replace with forearm-bumps.

If a systematic odd behaviour, seen as a joke, is called a "bit", and consistently pursuing a value is described by the gerund suffix "-maxxing", then I should be able to casually describe this process outlined above as "bitsmaxxing", as Telex Graze brilliantly suggested.

Each of these actions has its own distinctive effects, usually positive, which is why I prefer them as more sensible. The broad strategy has more double-edged secondary effects. Being weird contributes to people rejecting or avoiding me. My real friends are thus sparser, and filtered to have a high concentration of people open-minded or weird in their own ways.