Original link: https://onojyun.com/2022/07/31/6447/
△ 212｜Wild Gears
After searching for a long time, I really couldn’t find the Chinese name of “Wild Gears”. I owned such a “toy” when I was a child, and now I know that it is actually a tool: a gear disc with holes and numerical values on it, placed in a ring with the same gear as the inner edge, as a pen tip After inserting into these holes, let the gears and gears operate in a specific direction and speed, and eventually the pattern under this brush will become more and more complex from chaotic lines, until it becomes a complex, regular and coherent composed of interlaced curves. graphics.
I still don’t know what the purpose of this gear is. Maybe it is the presentation of a certain function, or a calculation rule for the mechanical operation of the gear, or the trajectory formed by the relative perspective of two stars when they revolve around the star, or The trajectory of electronic operation. In a word, these complicated and winding lines do not seem to be of much “help” to my current life. It is also because I am not in the industry that needs to use these curves, so what is it used for, I don’t need it. To find out.
When I had it when I was a child, it was like taking apart the “regular blind box”, choosing the size of a gear, and then randomly selecting a hole to start its trajectory. It started from a point and moved in an unpredictable direction. At first, you can’t make any guesses about what it will look like, because of which node it will overlap. Sometimes, a figure quickly completes the intersection of the end point and the starting point, and then becomes a constant pattern; sometimes it takes more than ten minutes to make the end point coincide with the starting point. During the drawing process, the curve was infinitely close to the starting point, but then separated immediately, forming a ghost-like existence on the graph. It’s like a plot in a novel. Two people meet in the way everyone expects, but they are staggered by accident, time and time again, entangled in the reader’s heart, but they don’t expect them in the next roundabout. They meet in the curve of each other-because they meet, it means that their story paragraph ends.
I have taken this thing to school to “show off”, because of its unclear meaning and its randomness, it also made many students curious and envious of it for a while. Everyone can only understand this thing simply as a “drawing” tool, as for where it can be used, no one can say.
Some time ago, I talked about children’s involution of “stationery boxes” . “Wild Gears” is also a product that can participate in involution competitions, but because of its “exclusiveness”, I have become the envy of many classmates. But at the same time, the existence of “Wild Gears” is also an existence that destroys the original “rules of the game”. Unlike a stationery box, this is something that everyone can own and form an inner volume. “Wild Gears” not only has an unclear meaning, but also has endless possibilities. It is impossible for it to have any “corresponding object” for a while. The existence of “, that is to say, it forms an independent situation that cannot be contested and introverted, is itself a certain rule and cannot be “lost”.
Some students who had already won the competition through the “stationery box” naturally did not allow this situation to happen. Because the stationery box itself and “Wild Gears” cannot win under the same competition rules, they also thought about finding all kinds of deformable rulers that can draw wavy lines and dotted lines. But because they can’t contain too many complicated rules, they all “lose”.
At this point, you can first guess how “Wild Gears” lost in the end.
In addition to the “Stationary Box Rolling Competition”, there are many similar competitions, such as scissors. Because many of the parents of the classmates in the same period are medical workers, there will be a competition between them who can get the sharpest surgical scissors from home; There are also competitions for watercolor pens. People don’t care whether 24 or 48 colors, or even 128-color watercolor pens can be used. They also don’t need to use watercolor pens as a judging criterion. It is not uncommon to see who has more colors in the competition; there are also competition schoolbags that can insert a bottle of water on the side, but at that time it was indeed worthwhile to read the “details”.
In the above competitions, because of my average family background, I am not qualified to compete. It is rare to have a “poor competition” that is more inward than an eraser, but in the end I couldn’t help my own slut, and cut the fragrant eraser with a knife. Fragmented. “Wild Gears” is one of the few games I “won”, but it can’t be called a game because nothing can compare to it.
In the end, “Wild Gears” still “lost” because someone gave the teacher a small report saying that I played “Wild Gears” with my classmates in class. And just like that, it lost terribly in the rules of the game where no competitor, and certainly no one, won. The teacher asked me “what is this”, which I admitted was found on my dad’s workbench.
“what’s it for?”
“I do not know either.”
“So does it help with learning? It’s not a straightedge, it doesn’t measure angles, and it draws a crooked circle.”
“No.”
“After that, you can’t bring it to school anymore, it will affect your own and other students’ learning.”
“Oh.”
Afterwards, I never played Wild Gears again, because I also felt that it didn’t seem to have any effect on “unintelligible”.
So until now, I don’t know what the scientific name of “Wild Gears” is, and whether it has any way to “win” others in a certain kind of competition. But now I understand that the key to “Wild Gears” is not “Gears” – the word gear, but “Wild”, which does have a game rule that is as if it was reported and then defined by the teacher as “It’s not helpful for learning”, and finally the whole class was ordered not to bring anything unrelated to learning to school. I can still remember it now. When the teacher announced “I lost the game”, several students They looked at each other and smiled secretly.
The game rule of “Wild Gears” is not what it can draw, but the word “Wild” – the law of the jungle. They defeated others with the rules they manipulated, and they rejected everything that might subvert their existence by holding a group.
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