Gaining and Maintaining a Quality Following

While being locked up or locked down can be a nuisance, there are some consolations.

At least the present is not the past or the future.

The present can be experienced as a perfect moment, at least if you make it look pretty enough in the immediate future.

How the present moment feels to you is not important if you want to gain a following of adoring fans.

What is important is how people perceive you feel, through the way you look in beautifully curated images of apparently immense momentousness.

If you also sound quite plausible, so much the better.

What does being real mean to you?

For many people, especially quite vulnerable ones, apparently credible presentations of other people's pleasantly real experiences are more real to them than their own, seemingly less pleasant reality.

How do you tell the difference between apparent credibility and real credibility?

Even authorities associated with the assessment of expertise are sometimes duped into believing expertise exists on a particular matter when no relevant expertise really exists at all.

Are you currently well?

Are you currently regarded as an expert on wells and/or wellness? 

Are you currently regarded as an expert of taps and/or tap dancing?

Gaining a following requires the ability to make an impressive impression on quite a few people, particularly people also in possession of the ability to make an impressive impression.

Do you have much experience in the art of impressions of one sort or another?

Do you have much skill as an impersonator?

Do you have a talent for acting?

Are you capable of personifying Eudaimonia in a social media and/or mass media context over several weeks or months?

Are you acquainted with the social psychology of impression formation? 

Do you know much about digital marketing and the impressions associated with interactive advertising?

Have you had many encounters associated with fraud?

If this is your first visit to Trickery Today, welcome.

Do you regard yourself as serendipitously fortunate to have arrived in this virtual vicinity?

Are you here to experience ethereal wellness tourism?

Do you have any particular interest in the art and science of enlightened well-being? 

Perhaps you wish to throw a few thousand or million dollars of a digital currency into a digital wishing well.

While it is possible to create impressions of one sort or another in a variety of contexts, some are ethically and/or aesthetically acceptable whilst others should be avoided at all costs.

Bad impersonations, whether legal or otherwise, should always be avoided.

Do you look like someone famous?

Do you sound like someone famous?

Has anyone ever impersonated you?

Perhaps you are under the impression that gaining a following will make you happy.  Nothing is further than the truth.  Gaining a following will cause you to gain immense responsibilities.  It may also cause you to gain enemies.  It may even cause you to mistake followers for friends.

What is your acquaintance with enlightened etiquette?

What have you discovered about enlightened hygiene?

If you are currently in lockdown or locked up, what have you been writing, if anything?

How have you been assessing your ethics?

How have you been assessing your humour?

How have you been assessing your politics?

How have you been assessing your acquaintance with art movements?

How have you been assessing your acquaintance with intellectual movements?

How have you been assessing your acquaintance with social movements?

How have you been assessing your initiative, your influence, your leadership and your goals?

How do you usually interpret images of one sort or another?

How have you been assessing your acquaintance with mass media?

Perhaps you have been gaining a following through the mass media, or through social media, or through both, or through neither.

Perhaps you have developed a reputation through a scientific or artistic discipline. 

Who are your admirers and why do they admire you?

Perhaps you are perceived as physically attractive by particular persons, with or without your knowledge.  

Perhaps you are being followed and/or stalked and/or predated upon by someone you fear, or may soon fear.

How do you usually assess good fortune and bad luck?

How do you know when followers misinterpret the principal message of a leader?

How do you know when an influential person, or someone claiming to be an influential person, deliberately misleads people?

And how do you attempt to prevent people from being mislead or otherwise harmed?

You may or may not know the meaning of good health.

You may or may not know the meaning of bad health.

How have you been comparing good and bad governments?

How have you been assessing the constitution solution? 

It is probably much easier to gain a following as part of a new sporting team or pop group or as a fashionable Instagram uploader or dancing Youtuber than it is to start a much needed improvement to a political landscape.

With whom do you share images and information, and possibly misinformation, and why?

What have you been learning from history about sharing lifestyle information?

What have you been learning from history about sharing political information?

If this is your first experience of Trickery Today, welcome.

Who, if anyone, will you encourage to follow you here?

Perhaps you have an online entourage.

You may already possess expertise in distinguishing between marketing tricks and reality. 

Perhaps you have students and/or colleagues rather than followers.

Perhaps you are experiencing Trickery Today as a student of the International Training Centre for the Harmonious Interplay of Beauty, Understanding and Magnificence.

What is your current acquaintance with Boethius?

You may already be one of his literary and/or philosophical followers though you will probably not wish to follow him literally, given the usual political situation in various parts of the world.

What is currently your preferred approach to critiquing the habits, actions and inaction of politicians, senior bureaucrats and other people in possession of considerable power and/or influence?

What do you believe you know about enlightened leaders in their roles as elegantly egalitarian patrons?

And what have you discovered about purported workplace wellness?

Gently encouraging people to maintain good health is certainly commendable, yet there is much hypocrisy in the practice of influence.

Ignoring the complexity of long-term illnesses is unfortunately common.

While you may enjoy the therapeutic benefits of comparing works of art, particularly to take your attention away from distressing experiences, how do you know when an experience is therapeutic?

A therapy is meant to support healing.

Yet many claimed therapies are no more effective than attending a mineral spa or sipping a glass of mineral water, or even drinking tap water.  Indeed, attending a mineral spa may actually bring one into contact with various unpleasant diseases.

How do you tell the difference between a holiday and a therapy?

What do you know about holy wells?

When, if ever, have you experienced a spa, whether as a spa resort or day spa?

How regularly do you eat appropriately?

How carefully do you avoid consuming confidence tricks?

Much claimed wellness practices do nothing to improve the health of the unwell.  The 'successful' practitioners are usually relatively young, relatively healthy, relatively convincing and relatively gullible. 

What is your acquaintance with medical indications and medical contraindication?

What is your acquaintance with political problems and a possible philosophical consolation?

While high profile followers, including commercial and/or charitable ones, may provide you with apparent credibility, you may only be popular as a possible source of profits, or as a source of another sort of hope.

Perhaps you would prefer comparing impressionism and post-impressionism.

Perhaps you would prefer spending time in a studio boat.

Perhaps you would prefer learning more about us.

Perhaps you would prefer to listen to one piece of impressionistic music or another.

How do you usually assess artistry?

How do you usually assess a philosophy?

How do you usually ascertain authenticity, including artistic authenticity?

How reasonably do you face up to reality, and communicate that reasonableness?

How do you compare the muse of the imagination with the dangers of denial, deception and despair?

Are you competent at growing culinary ingredients in close proximity to a kitchen?

Access to a cottage garden of the imagination is not the same as being a competent gardener, a competent cook, a competent hygienist or a competent nutritionist.

How would you describe your direct understanding of nature?

How would you describe your indirect understanding of nature?

How do you reflect upon your awareness of history?

How do you reflect upon your awareness of truth, reality and knowledge? 

How do you reflect upon your awareness of industries?

What do you know about impressionable people?

How, if at all, do you protect impressionable people, and all other people, from exploitation, and from all other forms of harm?

How do you prefer to invest in industries and communities, directly and indirectly?

What do you know about deception as a cottage industry and as big business?

What do you know about honesty in relation to any type of business activity and/or political activity?

You may regard art as an intermediary between business and politics, or you may have a different view of art entirely.

You may regard science as an intermediary between the known and the unknown, or you may have a different view of science entirely.

What is your acquaintance with social media marketing?

What do you know about the authentic and inauthentic aspects of friending and following?

How do you reflect on the relatively temporary and relatively permanent aspects of life?

How do you compare your first impressions with your later experiences?

All first impressions are perceived images, based on prior assumptions about experiences.

Perhaps you are familiar with at least a few of the public domain images presented here.

How do you compare one image with another and another, and for what reasons?

How, if at all, do you use social networking services, and why?

What, if any, have been your experiences of online communities?

What have been your experiences of communities and social networks in the physical world?

How do you assess subscribers and other customers in terms of patronage?

How carefully do you distinguish between genuine patrons, genuine friends, genuine colleagues and everyone else?

How do you assess the value of goods, services, activities and relationships?

How do you assess the value of a work of art?

How do you assess the value of a person's time and skill?

How do you interpret the qualities of an image?

People desire a following for a variety of reasons.

The word has several meanings.

If you desire a following, why do you have that desire?

If you already have a following, is it the one you initially desired?

If you are currently following a particular vocation, profession or line of business, is it one in accordance with your avocation and affection?

Perhaps you have not yet explored your values from an adequate range of perspectives.

Perhaps you have not yet explored your reasoning from an adequate range of perspectives.

How impressionable, vulnerable and/or gullible are you at present, and how do you know?

What do you believe to be the opposite of being impressionable, vulnerable, gullible or otherwise likely to judge information and experiences inaccurately?

What is your impression of Trickery Today, and how did you form that impression?

If you are already an admirer of this publication, please pay here.

Are you seeking to become part of a revenue-related realistic retinue?

Do you wish to join an enlightened entourage of attentive attendants?

Have you adequately informed yourself about the legal aspects of consideration?

Are you suitably prepared for the sensitive study of various experiences?

Do you often experience excitement when making epistemological, ethical, aesthetic and/or metaphysical discoveries?

Perhaps you often experience excitement when making money and/or gaining new customers/followers/admirers/audiences/fans/disciples.

How does your excitement express itself and how, if at all, do you attempt to moderate it?

And how do you relax and find peace, if at all?

You may be familiar with the names Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne.

How do you interpret their work, and the work of the people they have influenced?

How do you interpret the work of other influential people?

How do you know when people have extraordinary influence?

What do you know about how influence is acquired?

What do you know about how privilege is acquired?

What do you know about how social problems develop?

How carefully do you assess the word associate, whether as a noun, a verb or an adjective?

What do you believe Ambrogio Lorenzetti had in common with Boethius, the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, and why? 

How do you compare the 6th century with the 14th century and the 21st century?

When, if ever, have you used social media primarily for educational purposes?

Perhaps you are reading Trickery Today primarily for educational purposes.

You currently have access to this publication primarily as a consequence of gaining temporary, ethereal access to Frugality Cottage and its garden.

Perhaps you regard the cottage as a museum.  Yet it is not like the Musée Marmottan Monet or the Musée de l'Orangerie.

Perhaps you view your experiences of the cottage as some form of consolation.

How do you usually attempt to console and comfort yourself when reflecting upon misfortune, the inevitability of death, and various other distressing and disturbing subjects?

How reasonably do you attempt to maintain a distance from potential dangers?

Most people do not make the time to question their own assumptions.  They do not take an adequately cautious approach to assessing possible problems.  They may act mainly to make money, or seek thrills, or to conform to the perceived expectations of a cultural group or seemingly attractive person.

How do you compare the rhetoric associated with old media and new media?

How do you compare the formality of the Tuileries Garden with the informality of a cottage garden?

How do you compare perceptions of urban areas?

What have been your experiences of virtual communities? 

What have you discovered about virtual and non-virtual communities through the exploring the history of followers?

What is your acquaintance with the Fondation Claude Monet and a particularly famous pond and bridge?

What do you know about the history of community leaders, particularly as mediators between the past and the future?

The online world is infested with social bots and ghost followers.

It is also inhabited by many confused people.  They do not know the difference between real credibility and fake popularity.

How do you tell the difference between genuine and fake followers?

Do you have a private collection of quality artworks, quality books, quality manuscripts, quality antiques, or even a collection of quality students, friends, clients and/or patrons?

Do you have a reputation as an early adopter?

Perhaps you are an associate of an exceptional cultural leader.

Whilst fads and fashions are fleeting, and pseudosciences are deceiving, history itself is worth following.

You may know something about the history of camp followers and groupies and cult followings.

You may know something about the history of amateur enthusiasts, connoisseurs, aficionados, dilettantes and experts.

What do you know about the liberal arts and quality critiques? 

What do you know about the fine arts and imaginative insights?

What do you know about the relationship between excessive enthusiasm and art forgeries, and possibly even archaeological forgeries?

What do you know about false attribution, literary forgeries, journalistic scandals, fake news and scientific misconduct?

What do you know about the politics of pseudepigrapha?

What do you know about the politics of digital rhetoric?

Interpretations of experiences are always embedded in the historical moments from which they arise.

Are you acquainted with Julien Tanguy?

Are you acquainted with Victor Chocquet?

Are you acquainted with Twaklin?

Are you acquainted with the Last of the Romans?

Are you acquainted with Fortuna?

Are you acquainted with struggling artists and modest accommodation?

Are you acquainted with extravagant art lovers and their financial difficulties?

Are you acquainted with Ernest Hoschedé and his wife Alice?

Are you acquainted with virtue?

Are you acquainted with virtue signalling? 

Are you acquainted with the avant-garde?

Are you currently at the top of the Wheel of Fortune or elsewhere on it?

Perhaps only Lady Philosophy knows.

Are you following her?