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woman in brown and red long dress

LARP-ing for those who don’t know, stands for “live action role play.”  A LARP. It is like play acting, pretending, or in a video game, like a first person shooter game, taking on the persona of the character. It basically means having a grand adventure and playing a virtual character.,

It’s not necessarily a bad thing! In our culture we’ve come to use larping in a more negative context, as in indication that something is not real. When virtual reality has merged with subjective reality and objective reality is now slain on the ground and bleeding out, you need some way of discerning truth from fiction.

Queen, in Bohemian Rhapsody captured the nature of the problem well, “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality…”  I really dislike that song, by the way.  The music is fun, but I mean it is depressing as all get go and very sad.

So Twitter in it’s wisdom,  I mean in it’s extremely biased love affair with censorship and the stifling of free speech, has been running about shutting down and removing QAnon accounts.  Thousands of them.  I’m not worried about it, but what I do find fascinating is the outrage, the accusations that suggest this is justified since QAnon is just a grand LARP-ing adventure. Totally fake, just people play acting. A bunch of Christian, Trump supporting, play actors, to add insult to their injury.

In all the time I have been following Q and Q supporters, I have never seen anything the least bit hostile or threatening. There are literally hundreds of thousands of them, so obviously I have not observed them all. Spats and sharp words are also common on social media and Twitter, but honestly the accusation from Twitter that tries to declare QAnon is potentially threatening and potentially violent is just as bizarre as claiming they must be shut down because they are nothing more than a conspiratorial larp.

Well shucks, 90% of the internet is a, “conspiratorial larp.”  Twitter must mean, QAnon is larping in a politically incorrect direction we disapprove of. Like, stop saying you’ll win in the end or I’ll just take my dollies, go home, and tell mom.

I found this whole thing curious on account of the fact that there are people rioting on our streets right now wearing masks and carrying shields made out of garbage can lids and pool noodles! What the heck? That behavior however, is apparently okay, quite real, and not a larping adventure at all. Well, Sheesh.

Still waiting for Twitter to do something about all the actual threats, intimidation, and pedophilia going on among their ranks, but I digress.

A bit amusing, but when all this stuff started going down in my state and mask mandates were passed, and everything went crazy, I decided I’d just stay home. Like, I don’t want to play. This is not my fantasy. I can’t work, enter a store, or buy groceries without being masked up and compliant. That’s fine, I’ll just stay home, I have plenty of other things to amuse myself with. And I did just that for weeks until somebody who knows me quite well said, Look, this is total performance art, a complete larp, it has no basis in reality. Now will you just mask up, put on the gloves, and look suitably concerned and wistfully anxious?

She had me at “performance art.” I was finished off at “wistfully anxious.” Long ago I was in a play and my job was to simply stand there looking suitably concerned and wistfully anxious. This is amusing and challenging if you have no lines, kind of like playing charades with no words. Go ahead, I dare ya, try acting out “suitably concerned.”

All of these words just to tell you that what is going on out in the world right now is a real power struggle, an epic battle over who gets to control and define your reality for you. We get to tell you what is real and what is not. We get to control the horizontal and the vertical. We get to pick what game we are playing. We get to tell you what to wear. We get to tell you who you can play with. We get to tell you who you can talk to. We get to say who uses what platforms, and what they can discuss with one another.woman holding an american flag

Uhm, no. Unacceptable. Each one of those Q accounts has several thousand followers, even tens of thousands. That is a pretty big silent majority from all walks of life, numbers that should offer some evidence to suggest this is not a fringe group of radical conspiracy theorists, but some rather ordinary patriots communicating, encouraging one another, and building community together.