play. This explains why this ludic aesthetic has a noticeably unfun or stressed-out layer to it. Contemporary zaniness is not just an aesthetic about play but about work, and also about precarity, which is why the threat of injury is always hovering about it. An assortment of Atari 2600 games, left to right from top left: Combat (1977), Frostbite (1983), Defender (1982), Kaboom! (1981), Frogger (1982), and Pole Position (1983). What is the underlying connection between affects and aesthetic experience? I think Gerard Genette is right to say that all of our aesthetic predicates are "objectifications" of feeling. To make an aesthetic judgment, with all its necessary claims for universality, is to project one's feelings onto the object in such a totalizing fashion that the "actually subjective" basis of the judgment of aesthetic quality ends up being somewhat incidental to how we experience or understand that quality. Does this mean there is a one-to-one correspondence between the minor affects and marginal aesthetic categories? No. The former are sort of like raw materials for the latter, which are both descriptive and evaluative. In fact, and this is part of what intrigues me about them, aesthetic judgments like the ones in my study revolve around multiple and even conflicting feelings: tenderness and aggression, in the case of the cute; fun and unfun, in the case of the zany; interest and boredom, in the case of the interesting. I should stress that these aesthetic categories are trivial , but not for all that