Necessity of Fluff

What? Fluff is a necessity? Blasphemy!

It seems that it may not be so. It is necessary stage in the development of a psion. Few accomplished psions skip the fluffy stage. I went through it, and every other psion I have asked has gone through their fluffy stage.

Why does everyone go through it? Many times, a psion will make their first psiball, then have something very advanced happen. For example, they are sitting in their room, trying to create another psiball and a piece of paper flies across their room. They ignore the fact that they had the fan on and nothing was pinning it down. They convince themselves that they are geisting and post it all over various forums. Many of these forums won’t think to ask if there were any other causes, assuming that it’s common sense to catch these things, so they reinforce the new psions belief that they were geisting. The psion then begins to convince himself that he has a whole slew of other skills. This type is generally ended by the psion being scanned by someone and them telling them that they don’t have these abilities, or someone bursting their bubble.

The second type of fluffer is a person who knows 100% that they can’t do any of these abilities. They are a type of internet troll, and it is generally because of self-esteem problems. Basically they go, and read as many articles and forum posts as they can, and project this feeling of intelligence around them. They gain status in the psionic community, and even write articles! These are the most troublesome type of fluffy, because they have the whole community wrapped around their little finger.

Then you have the last type of fluffy. They are a hybrid of the first two, basically they start of as the second type but morph into the first. They start by making up their psionic reputation, but these people are actually trying on the side. They make a psiball and go through the steps of the first type of fluff. They convince themselves that this is actually happening, and create articles and methods that they think work. They may work for other people, and this person can relate. This type of fluffer does a lot of front-loading (when you suggest things to force AOL in another psion). It becomes an art.

The first version of fluff is the one that many victims can easily recover from. The last is harder, but still possible. It’s the second one that causes so many problems. If you decide to admit that you have been lying, people will find it hard to forgive you. Most likely you will be totally shunned from the psionic community. This forces people to keep fluffing.

Dealing with fluff is hard as well. Every case is different. Generally the first type of fluffer will be persuaded through proof. The third and second forms of fluff are unfortunately very hard to shake. The only way I have seen someone shaked from this path is by public humiliation. Someone usually finds out in some way, and posts it all over the place. Basically they make the psion’s empire crash down around their ears. This will either shake them, or banish them out of the psionics community.

I know. This got way off of the original topic, but hey, it’s a blog. That’s what happens I guess. This is fun. I’ll definitely keep up with this.