I've been working on myself

Dear reader, I feel the need to get a bit real with you right now. There has been a lot going on lately and I don't know if you've noticed and just haven't told me I've become a dick, or that you just didn't notice either. You see, just a few years ago, let's call it around two decades or so, I swore to myself to try and entertain people with my writing. I had the feeling life was too short to deal with all the negativity of the news and getting bogged down by it. I felt the need to break through that noise and just highlight the fun stuff. Except, the world has caught up with me and now I've become a bit of a negative Nancy myself.

Today I realized this dreary fact about myself. Again. I found myself chatting with one of my colleagues about the not so new Porsche Taycan that can now do fake shifts. My colleague, who usually kicks this kind of stuff right in the nutsack, shoots it in the back and buries it face down in a shallow grave finishing it off with a nice little wee, found it a fun option. He was cheerfully explaining it was great and that he would pick it anytime of the week.

I, the one who swore to look at the bright side of life and applaud all the fun stuff in the world, proceeded to kick him in the balls, shoot him in the back, bury him in a shallow grave, but not finishing it off with a wee. There are lows I don't even go to. In other words, I told him the option was the stupidest thing out there. It's like purposely fooling yourself with stuff that isn't needed in the first place. I then told him shifting is not only a tedious and stupid thing to do, which is only 'fun' when it's being done correctly while driving hard, when it actually has a use.

You have to give it to me, I do have a point there. I mean, I don't get shifting at all. I like driving, I don't like the shifting. I don't like to use my third leg on the third pedal to use my hand to fondle a stick in the middle of the car. To me it isn't fun and takes me out of my driving experience. I don't mind the flappy paddle gearbox, however.

But that is not the point. I went straight for the jugular without even considering the whole thing is an effort to make EV-driving more fun. To get the driver more involved in the process. And that I do applaud. Very much! If there is one thing true, and I've tried it many times, is that driving an EV hard does lack a bit in feeling. It's not just the missing engine noises, there is more missing. Shifting might be a part of it, maybe not for me, but trying to get as much of the sensations back that make driving great, helps.

The whole realization of feeling the need to hate the fake shifting for no real reason, has got me in a new, no, old gear. In media these days, there has to be a negative connotation to everything. I works. It gets readers. I gets reactions. More than any positive, fun or good writing will ever reach. But the issue is that all this comes from looking at something very inhuman: numbers. Dumb numerical data. We forget that these numbers flatten the human experience usually to what evokes anger and rage. We just like to get fed up about everything, it seems.

I've fallen for the trap too. I've been blinded by looking at the numbers. Setting aside all feelings, sensations and people behind it all. The very things I swore not to do when I started out. So, dear reader, I hereby will swear to try (let's not be to hard on myself here) to bring back the fun times, good things, great feelings and human sensations that make cars (and some stuff around it) great through my writing. Just the way I swore to when I started out on my mission.

This time it was just me.

In other news:

And therefore I'm going to curate this section way harder than I did. If there is nothing here, there is nothing I feel good enough about to share with you. If there is something here, I hope it makes you feel a bit better instead of worse about the beautiful world of cars we live in. That doesn't mean that I won't be pointing out the weirdly stupid stuff that is going on around us. I consider that very funny too.