:|

At the Movies With Fodder

2012-01-08T05:09:00.000+11:00

I think it was Yaksha who asked why movies are a typical date activity considering you both sit in a dark room together in a place that doesn't encourage talking (by movies, I obviously mean going to the cinema as opposed to putting on a DVD at someone's home). Let's consider why people go on dates. If you ignore the people who go on dates just because they want to get free stuff from their dates and the people who enjoy trolling others, I'd say most people go on dates because they are hoping to find someone they would consider being in a relationship with. The nature of that relationship may vary individually - some might be hoping to find "The One", while others are looking for a quick fling. Regardless of the type of relationship you are after, you tend to want to accomplish a few goals (but your priorities will vary depending on the type of relationship):

- get to know them/find out whether you can stand to be with this person for more than an hour.
- make them want to see you again
- establish a connection/history with them

This isn't just for the first few dates, this will probably continue until you consider yourselves "officially together" as you will both be re-assessing whether that is the path you want to head down with each other.

I actually think going to the movies can help with all three things.

Getting to know them
As Yaksha (even though it might not have been her, I'm just going to write as though it was and if someone else wants to take credit, they are welcome to let me know and I'll edit the post) pointed out, the fact that movies don't encourage talking makes it a little hard to get to know someone, but there are still things that you can learn from seeing a movie with someone. Do they talk during movies? This is a huge deal-breaker for some. While I am guilty of this myself (I'm one of those annoying people who has to point out stupid movie trivia that nobody other than me cares about), I don't think I'll ever understand why some people feel the need to ask questions about every single thing that is happening. Sure, if you went to the toilet and missed some important plot points, that's fine, but if something doesn't make sense right away, why not wait a few minutes because it might be explained in the next scene or two?!

The other great thing about movies is that the semi-enforced silence serves as a good comfort gauge.

Relationship Hierarchy

I'm not sure if there's already a theory that describes this, but I think that this is how most of the people that we know fit into our lives (family members can also fit into these different categories, but you'd probably never tell them if you put them in the bottom two).

Acquaintances you don't like (most of the people that you'll meet in your lifetime): These are the people you would cross the street to avoid. If you do need to talk to them, it's usually fluff/small talk.

Acquaintances: These are the people you greet if you happen to see them on the street. They know the basics of your life (in particular, the stuff related to how you two know each other). When you bump into each other, you usually make plans to see each other again but somehow you both always "forget".

Friends: These are the people who you'd probably be hanging out with on the street. They know the basics of your life, and some stuff beyond that. They probably know the names of your siblings, or at least know that you have siblings.

Close friends: These are the people who you probably see or talk to at least once a week (or in the case of socially deprived people like me, you think about seeing or talking to them). These people know intimate details about your life, and you theirs.

"Soulmates": I used the term soulmates here not to mean "The One", but the people who are on the same wavelength as you. The people who "get you".

As you go up the hierarchy, the conversations you have with those people tend to have more substance. You might describe your job to an acquaintance you don't like, but reveal to a close friend that your job actually sucks and you are looking for employment elsewhere. As you go down the hierarchy, the number of words to convey an idea increase. For instance, you say that you went to Brianna's house on the weekend. To an acquaintance you don't like, you need to explain that Brianna is your ex-wife, and that you went to pick up the kids because you have them for a week. A close friend will know that you're probably pissed off because Brianna made you wait over an hour again, and that you want to vent to a sympathetic ear - all from a few words.

Anyway, back to the original topic! The semi-enforced silence of the cinema means that communication between you two will be more non-verbal than verbal. Are they putting their arm around you or leaning on your shoulder? Do they hog all of the popcorn? Are they trying to feel you up on the first date? (After reading ABCotD, I'm really not surprised there are people out there who will do that.) Most importantly, if they are doing something you don't like, and won't stop when you ask them to, unless you are involved in some S&M thing, warning bells should be ringing loud and clear.

The opposite is also something to consider - are they shrugging off your attempts to be more intimate? If you're at an Arnie movie, it might just be because they are too absorbed in the movie, but it might also be an indication that you're moving too fast or that you want something out of the relationship that the other person doesn't. It might be something you want to address later down the track (by that, I mean after a week or so if you are still getting the same impression. NOT IN THE MOVIE THEATRE!).

Making them want to see you again
One of the good things about a movie is that if the movie is good, it can increase the other person's perception of the overall enjoyment of the date. If the movie is bad, then you can shrug it off as yet another piece of crap from the toilet bowl that is Hollywood (please don't use those words, I love you, Hollywood! Make more of these please) and you can work it into an excuse for another date, as you can apologise for how bad it was, and let them pick the movie for next time.

Establish a connection/history with them
Couples who have been together for a long time will have a long history of events together from which to draw from. e.g. "I feel like a creamy pasta, like the one we had at your sister's wedding." Not only can this increase affection from the other person ("You remembered something from my sister's wedding, therefore my sister is important to you, therefore I am important to you) but it leads to a sort of secret language between the two of you. While different people may be able to decipher certain things, only the two of you will understand everything. This links back to what I described above, where you have more substance with less words the higher you get in the hierarchy. Obviously this is something that develops over a long period of time, but I think things like movies and common interests can lead to a psuedo-code.

Back when I was still chatting with people at 3AM, I'd get messages saying, "Are you awake?" and I'd reply with, "I'm awake, I'm awake." In my head, I heard the Druid of the Claw from Warcraft 3, but I think the reference was lost on a lot of people - if not everybody. T_T I'm sure everyone has had at least one experience of quoting a movie/TV show/book and their audience completely missed the reference. It always makes me feel sad. Then you get the opposite when you say "nuke the fridge" in passing, and end up having a long discussion with someone with someone and "click". The two of you share something, and that shared thing tends to make you like each other more (unless you disagree on that topic, in which the relationship can go both ways).

Then you can drop things like "origami unicorn" and the other person will know what you are talking about (I really hope MrMan5.5 gets the reference I am making, otherwise it completely negates my point. T_T). It's the beginning of your secret language, but the development is being sped up because movies tend to have a lot of quotable lines or distinguishable plot points that can be referenced later. The added bonus is that if things don't work out, the language is transferable (hence why it's a psuedo secret language, because it's not really all that secret) - e.g. You go and see all the Harry Potter movies with Girl 1, but things don't work out, then you meet Girl 2 who also happens to like Harry Potter. This can mean the two of you immediately "click".

The last point I wanted to make was that seeing a movie can give you something to talk about together afterwards, if you are lacking conversation topics. I always thought it was weird that it was "dinner and a movie" rather than "a movie and then dinner". Though that might just be because you'd be starving by the time you had dinner if you waited, or ruin your appetite with popcorn.

Game Review - Star Wars: The Old Republic

2012-01-05T01:25:00.000+11:00

Since this is the current thing that is taking up most of my time, and a lot of people are asking me about it, I thought I'd add a review to the masses of reviews that are popping up. I'm not going to complain about things that are obviously bugs, but there are some things that may be working as intended which I think are bad for the game, so I'm going to discuss some of those.

Overall, it plays a lot like KOTOR (I never got to KOTOR2, so I can't say anything about that), in the sense that it's very story driven. Most quests are picked up through conversations, and your character can drive the progress of the conversation (though unlike KOTOR, some conversations seem streamlined, so even if you pick an option that seems to allow you to smash the quest giver's face in, the NPC will semi-ignore you and direct the conversation back towards making you kill rabbits for them. (That being said, there are some conversations that let you smash the NPCs face in.) I'm finding that as you progress through the game, the later planets feel a little incomplete, and the story isn't very engaging, so it feels very grindy like WoW.

There is a very MMO feel to SWTOR, so I wouldn't recommend it to someone just because they enjoy KOTOR or are interested in Star Wars lore. I mean, you could definitely roll on a PvE server and just pretty much play it single player all the way through to see the story, but there will be periods where you will feel the grind. I think because they're trying to streamline players to 50, there are a lot of repetitive quests (e.g. "We want to attack the Republic, we need you to do some initial recon/guerrilla attacks and we'll clean up afterwards."). Other than the class quest and a few quest chains on each planet, there isn't very much story/lore that I've found engaging.

The main class I've decided to play is Mercenary, one of the advanced classes of the Bounty Hunter. I'll try to make this review as spoiler free as possible, because I really enjoyed most of the Bounty Hunter class quest line. I've been doing a bit of MrMan5.5's quest line along with him, and the Sorcerer class quest line gets really lame towards the end.

Good Things
Holocall
One of the great things about the quest system is that for some quests, you don't need to be at the quest giver to start/end the quest. One player in your group can start the conversation with the NPC, and everyone else can holocall in to join the conversation. This means you don't need to wait for the entire party to meet up and pick up all the quests, then head out. The only limitation they gave to holocalls is that you can't choose certain conversation options - generally the ones that require you to make a physical action such as slapping someone.

Bonus Quests
One of the things that annoyed me the most about questing in WoW was when you see an outpost or something, but there are killer rabbits all along the road to the outpost, so you practically have to perform mass murder to get to the town only to be told that a farmer has been having trouble with his crops because of killer rabbits, and could you be oh-so-kind as to kill 25 of them so that he can keep growing pumpkins to feed the starving children in Stormwind. Then you will be told to harvest the pumpkins which requires going back again, and killing more rabbits. In SWTOR, a lot of the quests are more along the lines of collect X of these items from the group, or destroy X things. If you happen to kill creatures in the area that are part of a bonus quest, then the quest pops up right away as you are doing it, and any subsequent parts of the quest also pop up after you are done, so that you don't need to walk all the way back to the quest giver and walk back to the quest area. And since they're bonus quests, you know that they won't end up being part of a quest chain.

Dismount On Damage
Although this is a bit annoying while questing, I think that overall, it's a good thing. If you take too much damage while mounted, then you end up being dismounted. I was really frustrated in WoW as a lot of the time, I would try to kill an Alliance player, only to have them ride away on me. I think the fact that every class has the ability to dismount someone is a good thing. It also means players can't (as easily) ride through a huge group of mobs, aggro everything, then cause those aggroed mobs to attack you as they ride away to freedom.

Phases
I think a lot of MMOs sorely need something like this, especially during launch, or crowded times. A lot of the quests with big bosses make you go into a "phase" where your group can enter and do the quest uninterrupted. Like mini-instances. This removes the long waits for bosses to spawn and the need for fast reflexes to tag the spawn before anybody else can. There are also class-specific phases where your class storyline quests take place, and they're restricted to one person of that specific class (i.e. the person whose storyline is being progressed).

Bounty Hunter Phase

Crew Skills
I thought I'd hate this part, but the crew skills have grown on me. You get companions throughout the game, who are NPCs that accompany you, and that you can send on tasks like crafting items or searching for crafting reagents or recipes. This doesn't mean that you can't still mine resources in the world, which I think is a good thing. The great thing about it is that you can send your crew off to craft and do other things in the meantime. They can also craft while you are offline. This removes the need for those circuits around Sholazar Basin to mine ores and level engineering. You send your crew off while you are questing, and 3-30 minutes later, they return with some goods. The only downside is that it costs money to send them away, but I am rarely finding myself short of cash - even with the slicing nerf*.

Reverse Engineering
This skill allows you to break down the things to use their raw materials (like disenchanting, but every crafting skill has the ability to break down something. For instance, my Bounty Hunter is a biochemist and can breakdown medpacks). I love this, as it means it's a lot easier to level crafting skills, and as you outgrow the things you've crafted, you can reverse engineer them and sell the raw materials on the Galactic Trade Network. Plus it makes it feel less wasteful to create 30 medpacks just to level your skill.

Med Probe and Out of Combat Regen
Two things that reduce downtime. The med probe lets you come back to life where you died (you also get an 8 second stealth to stop yourself getting owned again after you resurrect). I absolutely love this, as I can see it removing the need for the healer to run back to their body and res everyone up while everyone else takes a 5 minute break. Add to that the fact that every class can resurrect others. You also have the option to resurrect at the nearest med center, which Yaksha sees as a fast way to hand in your quests. Out of combat regen is a channeled spell (with no cooldown) that every class gets which heals you and regens your mana (or removes heat in the case of Bounty Hunters). As you might have guessed, it can only be used out of combat, so it's not that great in PvP. This removes the need to eat/drink between fights (though in some of the flashpoints (instances) I've done, people seem to still expect the healer to heal them up between fights rather than channeling their OOC regen).

Map

A cool feature is that when you bring up your map, if you are moving, the map will go slightly transparent and you have an idea of which direction you should be going to get to your destination. You can also toggle icons for various NPCs so you know where to go to train new skills or get to a mailbox if there is one in the area.

Quick Travel

I haven't unlocked many on this planet yet, but there are plenty of Quick Travel points scattered around the place, and they're the equivalent of setting your "home" in WoW so you can hearth there. Except you never need to set your home, you can travel to any QT point you've unlocked on the planet you're on. The cooldown is 30 minutes, which is pretty short consider how time flies while playing. I'm really glad I never have to set my hearth to some stupid area for raids (Kargath, anyone?).

Flashpoints in the Fleet
All flashpoints (dungeons/instances) can all be accessed from the Imperial Fleet (or whatever the Republic's equivalent is), and most planets will have a shuttle to take you to the Fleet. This means you don't have to make your way to the ass end of the world just to get to an instance (and also cuts out waiting for people to make their way to the ass end of the world). It also means there's a central place you can go to in order to look for a group for flashpoints as there are plenty of people hanging around the Fleet, so you can just advertise in general chat there.

Jawa

One of the Bounty Hunter's companion is a Jawa who is so cute! I am 100% sure Olek rerolled from Sniper to Powertech (the other BH advanced class) just for Blizz.

Bad Things
Elevators
Why, why, why would any MMO have elevators after the failure that was the elevator bosses in Undercity (I'm sure more people died to falling from an elevator than died to Ragnaros back in the day). Sure, I think it made UC one of the hardest cities to attack in WoW, but it was also frustrating as hell for anybody who actually wanted to go there (at least for impatient people like me).

It's a looooooooooooong way down

Waiting for elevators is a pain in the ass. There are some elevators in the game where you press a button and tell it which floor you want to go to (like in Pokèmon), I don't understand why all the elevators in the game aren't like that. And it's not even like you can just jump down, die and someone can revive you at the bottom - apparently you can't revive people on elevators (maybe because the game considers you to be "moving").

PvP Brackets
Apparently PvP brackets are decided by Valor level (you get Valor points from PvP and go up levels depending on how many points you have) rather than player level. While this does make sense at the higher levels, as you want to be grouped with people of similar experience, this can mean that you have a level 12 player in the same warzone as a level 50 player. Everybody gets a buff so that they all have roughly the same amount of health, but level 50 players will have way more spells than level 10 players and just end up dominating the warzone. I find that it's becoming slightly more even as we get closer to level 50 (I assume because they are more level 50 players who can play against each other), but I still cringe whenever I see someone under level 30 in my warzone.

Black and White Light/Dark Side Options
Like KOTOR, you have the option of going to the Light Side or the Dark Side. To keep things balanced, the difference between them at end game is only cosmetic (for instance, at Light Side 3, I got a little Sand Crawler pet). However, the options for each side are pretty clichéd, and a lot of the time don't really take into consideration the wider implications of your actions. I remember letting someone live which was a LS option, but I wonder if letting them live was really the better choice, as they may say they won't do bad stuff anymore, but people will say anything if it means saving their own life. I think Olek described it the best by saying the light side is really naive.

Conversation Ganking
Something that someone mentioned in general chat was that there are players who wait for someone to end a conversation and then proceed to kill them once they lose their conversation immunity. It's probably just a minor annoyance, but you would think that they could make people briefly invisible or something as they come out of a conversation. I haven't had any problems while questing with MrMan5.5 though. I've found we can usually take on most people, as there is no healer debuff like in warzones, so you do get a bit of that invincible healer feeling (especially when Bounty Hunters get to wear heavy armor - yay!).

Galactic Trade Network
I thought they would have learned from Blizzard's mistakes with the Auction House, but I guess not.

I think it's a little unintuitive at first. You need to know what category your item is, then subcategory. Then you can click search which will bring up all of the things in that subcategory (which can be filtered by rarity, usability, level or cost - but I've never used these fields). Only then can you type in the name of the item you're looking for to filter the search even further. You can't even shift+click the item from your inventory to populate that field, it seems you have to type it yourself, and there are some weirdly named things in this game. Selling things is also a bit of a pain, as when you are selling multiple items of the same type, you need to enter the same details each time, it doesn't remember them. Auctioneer was basically an essential if you wanted to sell things on the AH in WoW. I think even if Bioware doesn't want to allow automated market undercut calculations by mods, it should at least look at some of the other cool stuff Auctioneer introduced, like being able to see a list of similar auctions when you put an item in the sell tab.

Fishing
There is no fishing, and no sign that they will be adding fishing to the game. WHAT THE HELL, BIOWARE?!

Thing I'm Undecided About
Starship Travel

Travelling between zones (or planets, in the case of SWTOR) is easier than in WoW, as you can just fly their in your ship. You just click the section of the galaxy, then select your destination. The good thing is that it takes just as long to go from one side of the galaxy to the other as it does to go to the planet next door. The bad part is that it takes just as long to go from one side of the galaxy as it does to go to the planet next door. I guess it's a bit of a trade-off, like linear search vs a hash table with moderate cost for look up. I'm not sure if it's my computer or our connection, but loading a planet seems to take forever, so I usually avoid travelling unless I have to.

----------------------------------

*Slicing was a crew skill where you could basically send your crew member out to farm money for you. It got nerfed so that now they are more likely to return with less money than it cost to send them out whereas before it was a bit ridiculous. I could send one out for about 1000 credits, and they'd return with about 4000-6000 credits.

They

2011-12-20T21:28:00.001+11:00

I have had the fascinating pleasure of seeing what it's like being a FWB from a male point of view via a friend of mine who seems to enjoy discussing his.... exploits. I shall call him Lot, short for Lothario. I always heard the term "modern-day Lothario", but I never knew where it came from, only that it was used to refer to guys who pick up a lot. Wikipedia to the rescue! Lothario: Lothario is a male first name which came to connote an unscrupulous seducer of women. Sounds about right!

He showed me a message in which one of his girls said something along the lines of, "I don't want to do this anymore, this will be the last time you ever hear from me." He claims that he did nothing wrong, and I think he's a good enough at reading people to know whether he has pissed them off or not, so I trust him on that point. While everyone else who saw that message was saying how he was in big trouble, I had a different reaction to that message - because I had done something similar myself.

This, titled Why You're Not Married, reminded me of it:

3. You're a Slut.
Hooking up with some guy in a hot tub on a rooftop is fine for the ladies of Jersey Shore -- but they're not trying to get married. You are. Which means, unfortunately, that if you're having sex outside committed relationships, you will have to stop. Why? Because past a certain age, casual sex is like recreational heroin -- it doesn't stay recreational for long.

That's due in part to this thing called oxytocin -- a bonding hormone that is released when a woman a) nurses her baby and b) has an orgasm -- that will totally mess up your casual-sex game. It's why you can be f**k-buddying with some dude who isn't even all that great and the next thing you know, you're totally strung out on him. And you have no idea how it happened. Oxytocin, that's how it happened. And since nature can't discriminate between marriage material and Charlie Sheen, you're going to have to start being way more selective than you are right now.

While I don't entirely agree with that, I have to say, there is some truth to it. There were a few times when I said to Charmeleon that I wanted to stop being FWB. I found that I wasn't really looking for someone else - at least, not seriously, because I guess one of my needs was being taken care of already. But like Mr Sheen, I kept going back for another hit. Obviously, I managed to stop eventually (and then got engaged, maybe that article is telling the truth... (I really doubt it)), but it was so easy going back.

Sometimes, I think that maybe there was a bit of Hollywood romcom in my reasoning. Like Hugh Grant in Two Weeks Notice, I think a part of me was hoping that since I wasn't around anymore, he would realise he missed me and want me back. Like Sandra Bullock, the female FWB filled certain niches that the guy never knew he wanted, and so once she was gone, he would be stuck trying to decide between two different types of envelopes and be completely lost.

Lot completely blew that out of the water. He doesn't seem to care all that much, and he is completely confident that she will return to him. I think he's even planning his next big conquest. I don't know, it just seems weird. I find it hard to believe that he doesn't care about any of these girls at all, as he seems to talk about them quite often, and not just to brag. He seems to enjoy spending time with them, and thinks about them when they're not around - that's a sign that he cares about them, right? Maybe I'm just biased because of how I saw the situation when it was reversed.

Either way, I'm also fairly confident she'll go back to him.

Flamboyant Bagel

2011-12-13T22:29:00.000+11:00

When I was a kid, I was given the impression that the thing to aspire to be was rich and famous. Never only rich or only famous, the two of them were always tied together. Being the shy kid that I was, I never wanted to be famous, so I figured that meant I would never be rich either. I still don't want to be famous, and though I know a lot of rich people are famous, and a lot of famous people are rich, I don't think the two are necessarily tied together. (So maybe I have a chance to be rich someday.)

At my work's Christmas function, I was chatting to one of the waiters as we were setting up. He asked me if I worked anywhere else, and I assumed he assumed I was also one of the waiters and he was asking if I had another job on today (as he, and all the other waiters and chefs we hired, did). So I told him that I was on the social committee and helped organise the function. He said that he thought I looked familiar, and as I processed those words, a chill went down my spine.

I also recognised him - he was someone I saw when I worked at the casino. I would like to think I am a fairly inconspicuous person, not the kind of person you would look twice at if I passed you on the street. Except for a Halloween event I went to where I was at least six years older than everyone else and the guy running the trick or treating wouldn't give me anymore lollies because he remembered me, I think I'm not a very memorable person. So when someone does recognise me, it's never a good thing.

At this point, I was starting to panic. I made some vague statements while I was frantically trying to remember what kind of gambler he was. I knew right away that he wasn't a poker player, as I tend to remember most of the poker players, and they tend to be old Greek men or young Asians/Aussies, of which he was neither. So that left the roulette players. There are a few that I will probably never forget, and they're the ones that hate me a lot (there's an Asian lady who said she wished I were dead), but he definitely wasn't one of them. I had no memory of him being either a big winner or a big loser, so that left only one other option. He must have been one of those lonely souls.

There are a few of them who hang around the casino. They never gamble, they only watch other players, give players advice, and talk to the dealers and supervisors. To be honest, I think it's a pretty clever way to get money at the casino. You hang around and give players advice. If they lose, they lose and it's their fault for listening to you. But sometimes they win, and if they win big, they tend to give a tip for the advice. So it's a no-risk way of making money.

The sad part of it is, I think some of them are just lonely - if you think about it, they might get a $20 tip from someone, but they might only give good advice to a tipper maybe once or twice a night, so if they hang around from 8pm until midnight, that's $20-40 in 4 hours, they'd make much more working at McDonald's. So the real reason they hang around is because it's the cheapest place to find people who will listen to what you say and pretend it's interesting (I sometimes think of retail and hospitality workers as poorly paid psychiatrists). They're usually OK to talk to, if you don't mind hearing the same stories over and over again, but sometimes I want to shake them and ask why they don't take up a hobby or try to make friends online or something.

Back to the waiter, I was a bit wary of chatting with him now. I didn't want to give him the impression that we were going to be friends. That might sound really snobby, like I don't want to be friends with him because he's a waiter, but that's not the reason at all. Cue flashback:

When I was working at the supermarket, there was this guy who would come in every now and again, and he would always buy certain items (no dirty thoughts here, it was stuff like curry powder). One day, I mentioned that I noticed he always bought those items, and he said he was making a Sri Lankan curry that his mum taught him how to make. I said that it was pretty cool that he knew how to cook, and made general complimentary remarks (as you do when you are a customer service oriented person like me! *cough*). The next time he came in, he ended up coming through my checkout again, and I asked if he was making the curry. He seemed surprised that I remembered, and told me that he was. Then he asked what time I finished, and I said 8PM (it was around 5 at the time).

Some of you might be hearing a few alarm bells here, but asking what time someone finishes at a supermarket is a fairly standard question. After you tell them, they either make a sympathetic face and say that it'll go by faster than you think (it never does), or they make a cheerful face and say, "Oh! It's nearly over!" (Worse are the people who just have to go through even though you've put up your sign saying you're closing, and then when you tell them that you were supposed to finish 5 minutes ago they say happily, "I'm really glad you stayed open for me!")

The alarm bells were correct, as he was waiting for me outside the supermarket when I finished. I was smart enough not to let him walk me home so we hung around outside the supermarket for a bit. Then he said he wanted to buy me something from Kmart and even though I kept refusing, he kept insisting. Then he said that he "liked" me and I suddenly felt really bad. I hadn't meant to give him the impression that I was flirting with him or anything. I am really bad with faces, and even worse with names, but for some reason, I seem to be able to remember insignificant facts about people. This seems to give people the impression that I care about them, which is usually true, but not always. So I think that's what caused the misunderstanding.

I imagine being famous would lead to that being magnified and then.... hello, stalkers!

Blast From the Past: MB

2011-12-05T21:20:00.001+11:00

This really should have been something I did a long time ago, as the events that unfolded are something that, in hindsight, I see should have been handled much better than they were.

I think the first thing I remember about MB is pancakes. I found an old email thread where we were talking to each other about pancakes, but then aliens and my sisters somehow got involved. I don't think that really counts as flirting, and probably a good thing, as I was still with AG at the time. And for some reason he wanted to know the elasticity of my forehead - I don't think I ever found out why! I think that's a good indication of what he was like - quirky and unpredictable. I have previously mentioned the fine art of composing flirtatious SMS messages, well, it was doubly difficult to compose a reply that was sufficienty witty, but also had an off-beat kilter to it.

Seeing as he and Lena lived so close to me (and a park), they somehow managed to convince me to go running with them. (MB says: Believe it or not the running was your idea as you got it into your head that you didn't want to limited enough not to be able to do anything such as be a firefighter) If you think Lena is evil, wait until she's pushing you to keep running for one more minute. (MB says: Rob also came with us running (perhaps not at first) and we were not the only two dancing/running around each other at the time, only they had a much happier ending. I like to self-indulgently think we played a helpful hand in their early courtship.) The running was torture for me, but it was nice to have people to chat to in a non-online manner. I don't know what it was, but something about the atmosphere made this the closest to D&Ms I ever had with people I knew in real life. I told them a bit about AG, and when we were in one of our broken up periods, I thought maybe I could convince MB that I was a super awesome person and that he would want to be with me. And I was sure my parents would have been much happier if I had been with the 3 years older MB than the 13 years older AG. (The fact that it was even a factor for me is a bit sad, but that's just how it was.)

Unfortunately for me, MB had a girlfriend. I was kinda crushed, but I kinda felt it was to be expected. I can't remember the reason, but during one of our running sessions, he mentioned that he and his girlfriend had broken up. Unfortunately again, I was back with AG. I can't really say why I went back to him, considering I was pretty sure I was interested in MB. I guess it was pretty selfish. I decided since the person I really wanted was MB, I was going to break it off with AG, for good. The planets aligned, MB and I were both single, and eventually went and got pancakes.

There was Spy Vs. Spy, WarioWare, table tennis, but there was no movie, instead, the episode Once More With Feeling from Buffy is what always reminds me of him (we watched it at his college, along with a bunch of other people). He had planned a trip to Sydney not long after we got together though.

It's all fun and games until someone misses a period. Which I did. Seeing as it was the first time it had ever happened, there was only one conclusion that came to mind - I was pregnant. MB and I never got to that stage (as I wouldn't have sex with him until he beat my record in Freecell), so that meant it had to be AG's. I don't remember a whole lot about this period of time, but I remember feeling like I was sinking into a big, black hole. Starting uni, I felt like it was the beginning of my amazing career in whatever I wanted - anything was a possibility. It took one small thing to take that feeling away. Suddenly I was thinking about how my parents would disown me, I would have to live off Centrelink and move back into one of those housing commission flats. I'd have to go full time at the supermarket in order to make ends meet. I'd be one of those tracksuit wearing, single mothers who has three kids with all different fathers and is just barely staying sane.

Telling AG was not an option for me. Even though I thought my parents would disown me, the thought of disappointing them by admitting I had been sneaking behind their backs to see AG was too much. I thought about telling MB, but it didn't seem like the right thing. Firstly, it wasn't his fault, it was mine. Secondly, that is a lot to dump on someone when you've only just started going out together.

I had no idea what to do, and different scenarios kept playing out in my head - none of which was a good solution. I became more and more depressed, and felt so alone (it probably didn't help that I was pushing pretty much everyone away). The one thing I knew I had to do was end things with MB. He seemed to be the kind of honourable guy who wouldn't necessarily take care of the baby, but would stay with me to help me through it (perhaps out of pity). I didn't want to make him have to make that kind of decision, as it was completely unfair to him.

The stupidest part was, I hadn't even taken a test at this stage, because it would only confirm what I suspected to be true. A part of me was hoping that maybe I just had the dates wrong and everything would be OK. But days and days went by and still no sign of blood. I ended up telling the entire story to Meshu and he said that he would take a pregnancy test with me (in spirit, as he lives in another state). This is one of the reasons I am so thankful for Meshu, I think this was a turning point for me (though I don't know if he ever did a test as well).

I worked up the courage to go to the supermarket (not the one I worked at) and buy two pregnancy tests. Standing in line at the checkout with two pregnancy tests is one of the most shameful things I have done (why didn't they have those self-checkout things back then?!). It is really hard to pee on a stick. Plus, you need to catch the middle part of the pee, so it can't be the start or the end, but how are you meant to know when it's the middle and not the end of the start, or the start of the end?

The test came up negative, which was partially a huge relief to me, but mostly I was still convinced that I had done it wrong, as my period still had not come. I did another test later, and it also came up negative. I figured two tests should have been enough, so it must have meant I wasn't pregnant.

What happened next is something I am not proud of. While I was incredibly relieved that I wasn't pregnant, I was suddenly filled with so much hate. Massive amounts of hate for AG for making me go through what I did. Hatred towards myself for letting it happen, and for not doing anything about it sooner. Hatred at the world, for being so stressful and unhelpful. This is something I struggle with a lot, even now, but when I am angry/upset, rather than confronting the source, I tend to funnel that anger into whatever happens to be at hand. So when MB came back from Sydney, I was upset at him for not being there for me, and that just lead to him becoming the center of all that anger and hatred. I couldn't think of him without getting upset.

A part of me knew that it wasn't his fault, so guilt started getting mixed in. Why was I treating someone so badly when he had shown me only kindness? I avoided him like the plague while I tried to get everything sorted out, but the more I avoided him, the guiltier I felt. Which just made me feel even worse whenever I thought about him - which was most of the time. I tried to distract myself by doing as many other things as I could, but eventually, he confronted me and I told him I didn't want to be with him anymore. I even returned the tiger figuring he brought me from Sydney as a mental gesture of me ending things. I told him a partial truth, that it was because I thought I was pregnant and seeing him made me feel guilty, but I was too ashamed to admit anything else.

I acted very poorly, and I am quite fortunate that he is still willing to talk to me. I should have apologised years ago, but I could never bring myself to do it, and then it became one of those things where too much time has passed and you feel silly for bringing it up again.

What I learned about myself: I can't funnel anger properly, or confront people. Instead I tend to run away and hope the problem will disappear when I get back. I am really lucky to have the friends who will support me, even though I push them away. I prefer to handle problems on my own, and tend to avoid asking for help even though I really need it.

I think I have come a long way in the last one, but the other three definitely need work.

(MB says: It was good to read this as I sometimes felt that I was a small blip on your experiences, while on the other hand our short lived venture meant a lot to me, especially back then. Could I change where things ended up I don't think I would have, as without that closure to our relationship I don't think I would have moved on to the girl I dated in Singapore which is the first time I ever felt like I was in love even if it ended when I came back.

I am currently now living with my girlfriend in the happiest relationship I've ever been in. Which I hope is just the auspicious beginning to my happy ending.)

Smurfs, Christmas and Interest

2011-12-04T19:21:00.001+11:00

I've been reading through Nome's blog (Nome was the former lead designer for HoN) and came across this particular post talking about some of the troubles new players have when they first play HoN or DotA. I agree on all of those points, but I think one of the biggest barriers to new players is the attitude of other players. This has been made much worse by the fact that HoN is now free-to-play, so the number of 'smurf accounts' has gone up dramatically.

Smurf accounts are accounts that high rated players create to play against low rated players (though there are players who make new accounts simply because the queues are too long at higher level games - naturally it's a positive skewed distribution, as there aren't many pro players). Since this is their "fake account" they don't care about stats so much, but it also means they will be matched against players far weaker in skill than they are. And because most of their first games will be in the non-verified category, it is likely that they will be matched against people who have genuinely just started, at least for their first few games. Because they are much better players, they can typically win games on their own. This leads to a few problems, two in particular:

-players who shouldn't win, do win. I played in a game where me and my team were fairly average, but the other team featured four players who seemed to have no idea what was going on and one player who was incredibly skilled. He was enough for them to win the game, which meant that the clueless players all received a higher ranking than they should have. While this would get balanced out in their next game, where they should lose, I have played with someone who was 1600 and still had no clue (the starting rating is 1500, where you typically win or lose 5 rating points per game).

-everyone is a smurf - or so some people think. We played a game with Mark the other day, and during the game, someone on the other team implied they thought Mark was a smurf (he made a new account when HoN went free-to-play, and his current rating is 1000). Even when I play on my own "smurf" account, a lot of the time the games end with people complaining about smurfs.

(I would just like to say here that I don't really consider my smurf account a smurf account in the sense that I don't (always) play in order to beat people of a lower skill level to me. I use it to play heroes that I wouldn't normally play so that I can learn them without people complaining, "OMG, how did you get to 1700, you are so bad?!" I also think for a while, I was getting a bit of support burnout and just wanted to play other heroes.)

The problem with all the smurf accounts also means that new players never really get to learn the game because they are so severely punished for any mistake that they make which discourages trial and error. Add to that the fact that experienced players are constantly abusing them for every little thing they are or aren't doing. The only way for them to learn is to read up on a lot of theorycrafting, but they will probably never do that because their experience in playing the game is horrible. Plus, it's incredibly boring.

Olek suggested this a while ago, which was to have a "noob period" where you play your first 5 games against other new players. I think it should follow the Starcraft 2 model, where you have a practice league. Of course, this doesn't stop smurfs from making accounts and entering the practice league. But it does help divide the genuinely 1500 rated players from the new players, and you are less likely to encounter the pro players who don't want to wait in queue for a game.

Christmas baking is half-done!

This year, I went with a chocolate cupcake, fudge brooooooooownie (in honour of the Mumble channel), a choc-chip cookie and a Mars bar slice. I would have made shortbread or gingerbread, but we don't have a working oven, and the thought of baking 6 cookies at a time wasn't all that appealing. When Julian suggested rocky road, I thought it would be awesome, as it didn't require cooking, but nobody I polled said they liked rocky road, so I went with the Mars bar slice instead. That was the baking for my co-workers, not sure if I can actually be bothered making stuff for friends as it took almost the entire weekend. But I kinda want to because I'm still sad I couldn't give Vinnie a fudge brooooooooooooownie on his birthday.

Lastly, I've been thinking about what makes a blog interesting. Lately, I'm starting to think maybe I fall into that reality TV category, where people watch because it makes them feel good that their lives aren't so bad. Not that I think my life is bad, but some of my posts involve me thinking about on the train wreck events in my life, and I think it makes people feel better about themselves. Maybe the other part of it is the fact that people are usually surprised to find I write the things that I do. So maybe they enjoy reading about the "private me". If you aren't shy about it, I'd appreciate it if you told me in the comments or via email why you read my blog. =)

Blast From the Past: AG

2011-11-30T23:34:00.001+11:00

I'd like to go to bed soon, so going to do a brain dump on this one.

Story behind this isn't nearly as cute as the one behind YN, IMO. It was Anzac Day, and I was busy finishing a psych lab report when he dropped the bomb on me. Unlike the previous time, I felt happy, but I think the need to finish my essay overruled any inclination to jump up and down with glee.

However, his job meant that it wouldn't be very good if his employers found out we were together - as he was a tutor of sorts. It meant that a lot of the time we spent together was in private, and I don't think we really went on any "dates". The one movie we did see was Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And by see, I mean it in we-didn't-really-see-it sense.

I was very indecisive about whether we were actually together, or whether we should even be together. Considering the huge age gap between us (13 years), I knew my mum wouldn't be very happy if she ever found out. Then there was the complication of his job. But the biggest factor for me was the fact that he seemed like he had never really gotten over his ex-girlfriend and childhood friend. The fact that they were living together for a while made things a bit awkward.

There were a lot of "break ups", usually at my initiation. But we would usually get back together afterwards. I didn't realise it at the time, but I think the age gap did have an effect on us. I was really starting to get into WoW at this point, and he was somewhat of a technophobe. He used his computer to play chess online, and that was pretty much it. He liked having new gadgets, but only because he wanted to show off, not because he cared about any of the new features.

The worse characteristic he had was his competitiveness. He tried to get into gaming, I think for my sake. I brought over my PS2 and he had rented bunch of games - one of them being Space Invaders. It had a competitive mode where one player would have their laser cannon at the top, and the other would have theirs at the bottom. There were shields on both sides, and the invaders were in the middle. The goal was to shoot each other without getting killed by the invaders. I beat him at that, and then I beat him at DDR, too. He was getting quite worked up that he was losing, so I thought it might be a good idea to take a break, but he refused. His housemate tried to get him to stop as well, but that just made him even angrier. I played one more song, and managed to keep my score just barely under his so it wouldn't look as though I had let him win. He started saying how he knew he could beat me and I asked him to drive me home.

One of the other factors where age played a part was the fact that he was a bit bitter. I was in my second year of uni, and it felt like my whole life was in front of me, there were so many things I could do. He was at the point where he had pretty much settled into the only job he would be able to do, and he was pretty negative about a lot of things. Some nights, he would talk about things and I would feel like there was this huge weight being dropped on me, and I wanted to help him lift it up. But other nights, I was just too tired.

We broke up for good around the time I met MB, and it felt so good to be able to hang around someone my own age, who understood things that AG never would. AG probably had his reasons for saying some of the things he did, and I'm sure based on his experiences, it was good advice, but I think it was important for me to learn those things on my own.

He went overseas to work for a while, and by the time he returned, MB and RB had passed by. He tried to rekindle things again. Time had made me forget all the bad things about being with him, and remember all the good things, and I was really tempted. Then I was reminded of what someone told me during Scav Hunt. He said that all I have to do is think about how wrinkly his penis is. So it was a wrinkly penis, and RH who helped stop me from going back.

What I learned about myself: Despite the fact that we never went on "dates", I enjoyed the frequency with which we spent with each other (around once a week). It left me a lot of time for WoW, and uni, but not so infrequently that I felt like he didn't care. I sometimes wonder if he was the only reason I played chess - I can't even remember the last time I played, and even though I still went to the chess club after we broke up, it was mostly to catch up with the other people, rather than play chess. Being with him showed me the ugly side of competitiveness, and I think that was one of the reasons why I refused to take part in anything competitive for a long time. I never want to become like that, but I can see it happening.

(A mutual friend told me that he is currently dating someone in China, and frequently flies back and forth from Australia to be with her. Facebook let me down.)

Blast From the Past: YN

2011-11-30T01:04:00.001+11:00

So in a weird, imaginary conversation with my "muse", I was reminded of the people in my past that I have been romantically tied with. Now that I'm engaged, I thought about revisiting those relationships.

YN was my second major high school crush. Now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure what we had in common. He did mention playing Starcraft in passing, and he played Warcraft 3. It probably didn't hurt that between Year 7 and Year 11, he grew really buff, and I thought he looked really good! (Though he did come over and play a game of Starcraft, and in the few bits that I saw him play, I'm pretty sure my dad would have owned him.)

I think it was a bit of a juvenile romance. I don't think I ever gave him any traditional signals that I liked him, my method involved stealing his calculator and programming it with things to help with differentiation (it's so romantic, I know). At the end of Year 11, I organised a Kris Kringle. I can't remember if I cheated or not, but I ended up getting him. I had no idea what to get him, nothing seemed good enough. In the end, I settled for getting him a box of cards with "100 things to do before you die". I wrote him a letter where I basically told him how I felt, but that in the interest of wanting to work hard in Year 12 (LOL), it would be better if he pretended it didn't happen. Then I mailed it to him because I was too afraid to give it to him in person (I had this amazing idea in Year 10 where I started the "Idiot's Convention" and it was an easy way for me to get people's contact details).

Year 12 was not that big a deal, I was mostly interested in chess and badminton at the time, and I think that took my mind off YN and whether he actually received his present. Towards the end of the year, Tu asked me to accompany her to see the university she wanted to go to out in Whoop Whoop, and we missed our train back, so I was running late for my first ever chess tournament. Mum told me someone sent me a letter, and I grabbed it on the way to the chess club. I was half-running (being the super unfit person I will probably always be) when I smelled something distinctive. It smelled like YN. The letter had no return address, so I opened it, and sure enough, it was from him.

His letter mirrored mine, and he revealed that he also had feelings for me, but because I had asked him not to say anything so we could focus on our studies, he kept quiet for the whole year. It came as a total surprise to me. I honestly don't think I had any redeeming qualities in high school. I was a mean, arrogant know-it-all. The kid who just has to point out that the teacher missed an apostrophe. I wasn't one of the pretty girls, and I think the fact that I was spending a lot of time thinking about Perfect Dark was the beginning of my descent into gamerhood.

I was so happy. I made it to the game on time, and managed to beat someone who is a far better player than I will ever be. It was like all the pieces fell into place. Harsh as it is, I think that chess game was the best thing to come out of the "relationship".

We did a few things together: saw "The Last Samurai", he tried to teach me to play soccer, he called me on New Year's Eve and we talked for a while. I think with both of us starting at different universities, and making lots of new friends, we didn't really have time for each other. Not to mention the fact that he moved to somewhere really far away and neither of us could drive or even had a car.

Still, it seemed like we wanted to keep it going, seeing as neither of us ended it (or maybe at this point he didn't even care enough, but I'll never know). So when I won tickets to Sony's screening of Resident Evil, I invited him to come with me. I waited outside the cinema right up until they were about to start the movie, but he never showed. When I finally managed to get in contact with him again, he told me that he had forgotten about it. That's when I decided it was over. I don't remember exactly how I phrased it, but he replied, "Are you giving up on me?" That one question has stuck with me ever since. I don't understand why he asked it.

I never even got the chance to ask him, as our net connection chose that moment to die (yes, I did this over MSN). I could have called him, but I was too angry (nothing good ever seems to happen when I'm angry).

What I learned about myself: I consider a boyfriend someone who I interact with more than once every two months.

(I looked him up on Facebook. It seems he is now married and the photos seem to indicate that he has one kid. So at least I didn't completely mess him up.)

Sqwerty

2011-11-25T00:53:00.001+11:00

Just in regards to my last post, I didn't mean to give the impression that MrMan5.5 never does the laundry. In fact, he is the one who does all the laundry, because I don't know how to use the washing machine, and I'm afraid of all the clothes coming out raggedy or with blurred colours if I tried to wash them. So that's also why I couldn't just wash the clothes myself when I thought the laundry needed doing.

I don't know if I'm alone in thinking this, but when I first realised that guys watch porn on their computers, I always think that their keyboards must be covered in... penis. I can't remember which comic it was, but one character was shaking hands with another character. The second character then revealed that she had just given someone a hand job. Since she was using the same hand to shake the first character's hand, she explained that via transference, it was like the first character was touching that someone's penis.

So I figure, most guys will do some typing while masturbating to porn, or at least touch their keyboard. And if you add to that the number of people who don't wash their hands after they go to the toilet - which for guys doing a number one, means touching their penis - there is a lot of transference penis on a keyboard! I was also a bit worried about accidentally "spillage" on the keyboard, but I was told it is really unlikely.

This might be bordering on obsessive compulsive behaviour, but it has gone past keyboards into the bedroom. I'm not really a touchy person, but sometimes I think that if I touched MrMan5.5's penis, then didn't wash my hands, and then met up with someone who is a hugger, I just put MrMan5.5's penis on their back! (I bet nobody will hug me when they see me from now on - so actually, this is a bit of a win for me.) I've started getting a bit compulsive about washing my hands after sex, or if I fall asleep afterwards, washing my hands in the morning.

I wonder if anyone else thinks about things like this. I asked Julian if he would use Vinnie's keyboard, and he thought that was a weird question, and couldn't think of a reason why he wouldn't. It isn't really a big deal anyway, I can't even remember the last time I used someone else's keyboard.

-------------------------------

On a side note, yay or nay to images in blog posts? I think they're good for breaking up walls of text, so it makes the post easier to read. The downside is, sometimes I can't be assed finding a picture to go with the post, or can't think of a good one, or can't find a good one that's free to use.

I prefer the use of block quotes, because I don't have to worry about copyright or whatever, but there isn't always something that fits with the post itself.

I always seem to have images centered with text above and below. It irritates me when people put text around an image, or to the left or right, probably because it makes me think it's an ad embedded in the text and they're trying to trick me into looking at it.

Eyjafjoellfodder

2011-11-22T03:42:00.001+11:00

I've finally caught up to the latest posts in A Bad Case of the Dates, and a lot of the dates on the site seem to involve a date that is going perfectly fine, and then the other person (for reasons unknown to the submitter) has a complete personality transformation - usually where they become incredibly angry over what should be a minor thing. There is usually at least one commenter who says, "Bullet dodged" in reply to those dates, which I normally agree with, only I realised I do the same thing to MrMan5.5. I don't think I'm a bad girlfriend, well, occasionally I am, but overall, I think I'm doing OK.

First of all, what is a bad girlfriend? It's something I've asked before, and I never really worked out an answer. Based on movie and TV show characters, who are the girlfriends everyone loves to hate? They typically have characteristics like:

is controlling
nags a lot
complains about everything
talks about things their partner isn't interested in
ignores their partner's wants and needs

While everyone has their own preferences, these are some of the things I think make a bad girlfriend. However, I'm guilty of all of these things: I set rules for opening Christmas presents, I nag about doing the laundry, I complain about work and bad games of HoN, I talk about things like Stargate that MrMan5.5 hasn't seen and doesn't care to see, and I regularly play HoN for hours at a time and completely forget that MrMan5.5 said he wants to join the next game and queue without him.

I don't want to be a bad girlfriend, and I don't think MrMan5.5 currently thinks I am a bad girlfriend, which hopefully will remain the case for the rest of our relationship. So occasionally, I will catch myself about to nag MrMan5.5 about the laundry and stop myself. Then I give myself a congratulatory pat on the back for not being a bad girlfriend. Everything is good!

But a couple of days pass, and the laundry does not get done because he is too busy playing Skyrim. We need to cook something for dinner, but there is nothing in the fridge. MrMan5.5 is tired, so I say that I will go (I am such a good girlfriend, after all). I go to get changed, but the only clean pants I have left are my uncomfortable work pants - so it's either that, or my bright pink, Hello Kitty pajama pants. I decide if I put on a long coat it will cover most of my pants, nobody will look at them anyway.

Of course, on the way to the supermarket, every passing driver is staring at me, and every pedestrian is laughing at me behind my back - so it is a very embarrassing walk to the supermarket, a very embarrassing walk through the supermarket, a very embarrassing wait at the checkout, and a very embarrassing walk home. Why hasn't he done the laundry? All he needs to do is chuck some clothes in the washing machine and turn it on. IT'S NOT HARD!

This whole process probably takes about 15 minutes, and I have had the entire time to build up a nice case against him. That time he left the clothes in the washing machine without hanging them up, the fact that I've cooked breakfast the past two weekends, the fact that he misclicked his spell in HoN and let me die. Every single bad thing I can remember comes up, doubly so for all the bad things he did that I suppressed because I didn't want to be a bad girlfriend and nag him.

The list is pretty damn long, which means I'm in the right - he is a bad boyfriend and I am justified in this case of nagging. Not only that, but I am angry. I don't get angry very often, so it must be things are pretty bad if I am angry. I get home and I say to him, "It would be nice if you could wash some clothes once and a while!" then put the perishable groceries away and climb into bed. I don't want to talk to him right now.

(I don't actually see this part, because I'm in bed at the moment, but I imagine it going something like this: MrMan5.5 gets up in a panic. He can tell I'm angry, so he has a quick scan of what he has done recently to provoke me. His quick scan isn't very good, because he doesn't come up with any reasons - not doing laundry doesn't normally make me angry. He knows he has to do something to make it better though, so he starts cooking pancakes for me. I get a big plate of pancakes with maple syrup and ice cream)

OK, I lied, that never happens. What happens is that MrMan5.5 comes in and says that he didn't do the laundry because it has been cold and the stuff on the clotheshorse isn't dry yet, so if he does more laundry he will have nowhere to hang it. He can't hang it outside because it is raining.

~~That's actually a perfectly reasonable~~. My angry brain doesn't care! Despite the fact that my entire reason for being angry is now gone, it's too late. It's like a volcano about to explode - even if the town if innocent people disappears, the volcano still wants to explode. I still have to punish him so I turn to the ultimate weapon - the silent treatment. The only weapon I can actually use at the moment, because I can't really say anything in reply without admitting that he's right. Because he's not right. I am.

Eventually, I cool off (usually after a nap), and I return to my logical self. It's because I never said anything about the laundry when it first started bothering me, or all the other things I suppressed, all MrMan5.5 saw was a big storm of crazy. He probably writes it off as PMS or just a quirk I have where I occasionally get illogically angry over a tiny thing. He will never find out what is truly bothering me, and I will continue getting angry over it, which makes it a positive feedback cycle.

So that's my theory on why people (well, me, really, but it could apply to others) get angry seemingly out of nowhere. I realise that it is unhealthy behaviour, so I am trying to work on it.

Nigel's Words

2011-11-09T23:24:00.000+11:00

Ah, I realised that some people might not have read about the inverted penis thing (don't google it...). One of my cousin's friends called me an inverted penis because I'm a girl, but I like to do "guy things", like gaming - i.e. "girl on the outside, guy on the inside". Though nothing to do with the term (though it fits the meaning in a way), MrMan5.5 tells me that when they do sex change operations on guys, they take the penis, and turn it inside out to make it into a vagina. Why they couldn't use the word "tomboy" or something similar, I'll never understand.

So, as you might have guessed, I gave up on NaNo again this year. Well, not gave up so much as decided to take the pressure off. I know it's not really the point, but I thought maybe I could write the story in my own time. I've just been so pressured at work to finish the project I'm on before I go on leave (being the only Java developer on the team kinda sucks), that by the time I get home, I just want to relax. It's an excuse, I know.

This blog post stemmed from my last one, and I think it might cause some trouble at home, but I'm writing it anyway!

A while ago, a friend and I were standing outside the train station, and we were discussing average penis size. He casually slid in the fact that he was in the top something% based on penis size (don't know if he brought up the topic just to brag) - maybe it was 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean, but basically he was saying he was big. He told me how big, but I forgot, because inches don't mean anything to me, and so there was no context for me to remember.

Then another friend of mine was telling me that her partner, who I also know, is also quite big. Now, when I see either of them, I wonder just how big. (This line-between-friends thing seems to be a bit of a theme lately.)

I don't even understand why though. Maybe it's cultural brainwashing, or something, but so many people say that size doesn't really matter, so it doesn't make sense. What makes even less sense is that I've been there, and done that, and it wasn't better (although, I have to put my usual small sample size disclaimer here).

AG was also pretty high on the scale - though I didn't know it at the time, given my only other source of comparison came from porn, which is pretty biased in terms of size. So sex hurt at the start pretty much every single time, and I thought that was normal. I mean, if you think about it, it would explain why girls in porn movies are always making so much noise. It was a weird mixture of pleasure and pain, and I think there was a bit of a case of the mind only remembering the good parts, which was why I kept going back. Then, during one of the times we "broke up", I mentioned to him that my parents would like it if I were with an Asian guy (LOL), and he said to me that I should make the most of him while I could, because Asian guys would never be able to compete...

I would like to say that it was a moment of enlightenment for me, and that I realised at that point that sex didn't have to feel like someone was trying to put a telephone pole into your ass (I say ass here so both genders can understand!), but I didn't, and continued to think that that was just how it was. It wasn't until many years later that Charmeleon helped me realise that it doesn't have to be that way.

I think it's way better when it doesn't hurt at the start, so I really don't understand the fascination. Maybe it's just curiosity, like trying to find out whether there are non-porn star guys who have porn star penises. Or maybe to prove that porn stars don't get penis enlargement surgery.

Apparently the French did a study to find out the average penis size of French men in order to try to make everyone feel better, but if the average is the middle, then you'll still upset a lot of people!

I have been told that at my hen's night, I have to do something wild, but I really have no interest in having a stripper over - whether it is for penis research or other means. I still really like the idea Rob and Lena had, where they had a combined hen's/buck's night, and their guests could move back and forth between the two - one of which was a LAN, if I recall correctly. Or maybe we can marathon bad girly movies and have a sleepover! Don't care about the "last night of freedom" thing.

Never the Bridesmaid

2011-11-07T00:27:00.002+11:00

One of the things that comes with being engaged (yes, GP, this isn't some elaborate prank on you) is having to plan a wedding, which also involves choosing the bridal party (and groomal party?). We have to have 3 each, because MrMan5.5 has 3 really close friends, so I need 3 to be symmetrical. Being someone who loves patterns as much as I do, I had originally planned to have a good friend from primary school (Tash), a good friend from high school (Sharon) and a good friend from uni (QC), so they would represent me from different parts of my life. I kinda felt bad asking Tash to be a bridesmaid though, as she has been with her boyfriend for longer than MrMan5.5 and I have been together, and they seem to have hit a bit of an uncertain patch at the moment. I thought it might feel a bit too much like rubbing it in her face if I asked.

So to learn from the experiences of other brides that I know, I thought I'd just go with easygoing bridesmaids instead - people who won't cause drama, but people who have also played an important part in my life. Again, Sharon was the first one to jump to mind, but the next person to jump to mind was slightly unusual. Unusual because he is male. But I think he has played a very important part in my life, and I attribute a lot of my university life to him. From a chaos theory point of view, he was the butterfly that flapped his wings, and the hurricane was the events in my life that stemmed from that point. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't met, I think I probably would have spent all of my uni time at the chess club and then.... Pandy....

On a side note, I also invited him to my hen's night (when I have it), and he declined saying he couldn't because only girls are meant to go to the hen's night. So I invited him to the hen's night as the stripper instead. Perhaps I crossed a line in our friendship, as I now realise that was a strange request. He didn't seem to take it too badly, but he still declined.

Anyway, it made me think about how few female friends I have that I feel like I can associate with. I lost a large chunk of my life to WoW, and other than Charlotte, there are no females that I know in real life (I don't count Vamp, because we don't even talk) who can ever understand what that's like. I guess it was never really a problem for me, because I had plenty of people I could talk to about WoW. It wasn't just WoW, there were so many people to talk to in the game that it was pretty easy to find someone who was happy to have a chat about any topic I wanted to discuss.

Begin: my life as an inverted penis. Someone told me that it's a compliment that guys find me easy to talk to, but I disagree. OK, maybe it's a compliment, but I don't think it's a good thing. Back in the days of MrMan1 was when it first occured to me. We were at a LAN together and he farted. Not end of the world stuff, and I still liked him after that, but one of his friends was so surprised that he would fart in front of a girl. He said, "Nah, it's OK, it's just Anna." It took me a year to realise that I had been friend zoned.

During that time, I could never work out why so many guys were perfectly fine with opening up to me, but there was never anything more. "One of the guys" was pretty much the story of my life. One of RB's friends told me over MSN that I didn't have to worry about him trying to steal me, because he considered me one of the guys. I hadn't even met the guy and he was already friend zoning me (not that I was interested, but that's besides the point)!

It's something that I probably never will be able to prove without invading people's privacy, but I think there is the type of talk between guys that happens when it's just guys. Then there's the type of talk when it's an inverted penis and some guys (which is more polite than the only guys, but not that much more). Then there's the type of talk when there are guys and non-inverted penis girls. Oh, then there's the talk when there are girls and girls, I think it's the same regardless of inverted penis status.

I think that clan chat when Char was around was of the third type, and it was nice. Even though it had nothing to do with me, it felt like I was a girl! Although, it was probably because they didn't realise Char is an inverted penis as well, so they were probably being polite until her true nature came out. Either way, it was nice having another girl in the game. Everyone was so much better behaved. OK, maybe calling Char an inverted penis is not quite right, maybe she's more of a hybrid female/inverted penis. I think she has found a good balance between inverted penishood and being a female.

If I were a real girl, and not an inverted penis, I wouldn't have this problem of not being able to find a bridesmaid. I wonder if Auto took me seriously when I asked him....

The Invention of Lying

2011-11-01T01:13:00.002+11:00

This will probably be my last post for a month, as I have decided I won't be doing NaBloPoMo again this year (since I managed to complete it last year (in a way), the challenge isn't as big as NaNoWriMo). However, if you would like to read something in the meantime, I suggest the blog of regular commenter Chaotic Good: Wordsmith. He has set himself a challenge to write something every day, and I think they're all fictional (at least the ones he has written so far have been), but he doesn't stick to the same genre, so there's a bit of everything. My favourites so far are:

The Magic Wagon Part 1 2 3 4
Trouble in Toytown
Blueberry Pie

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I read somewhere that people who are good liars also tend to be more intelligent. It makes sense, because in order to tell a good lie, you need to come up with a plausible alternative, but you also need to keep track of what you said, who you said it to, and keep that separate from the truth (it might help to convince yourself that the lie is the truth, but that's not always very easy). I remember my mentor telling me about his 4-year-old daughter (who sounds incredibly intelligent). He caught her telling a lie, and she kept insisting that it was true. Eventually, he explained to her how he knew that she was lying, and she stopped trying to argue. The next time she tried to tell the same lie, she corrected the mistakes she made last time.

I can usually come up with a plausible alternative, but it is the keeping track of lies that I find difficult, which is one of the reasons I tend not to lie. I'm even trying to cut down on my white lies.

Last night, someone asked to join our HoN clan. From previous experiences with him (and the fact that a few of the current clan members refuse to play with him), I didn't want to let him join. However, I was really reluctant to turn him down because he is friends with someone MrMan5.5 respects a lot, and I didn't want to cause trouble. I told Julian, and he told me to tell the person that if he joined, Julian was going to leave. Not that it's a big deal if Julian leaves the clan, because we can still play together, but I would prefer it if we were in the same clan.

I didn't want to use that as an excuse not to invite him to the clan, but Julian said that he was happy to be the bad guy, so I did. I don't know if Julian would have followed through with it though. What makes it worse is that Julian then told me about something he saw on TV, where someone threatened someone else in order to make them tell a lie. Hearing it in the third person, it sounded to me like the threat was obviously a bluff, so it seemed like Julian was bluffing as well.

I just played a few games of HoN and completely forgot where I was going with this, so I'm going to leave it here.

Fish Meets Martyr

2011-10-28T22:15:00.002+11:00

I'm trying to stick to a regular schedule of blogging on Tuesdays, but Char made a comment on my last post which I wanted to reply to, but I think it's going to make a really long reply. Plus, half of my reply was the topic of my next post anyway, so I might as well write it now. My blogging will probably die down as I attempt NaNo again this year (still undecided as to whether I'll try both NaNo and NaBloPoMo again. Will be difficult this year now that I'm working full time).

"...it takes a lot of will power to fight the heart that just wants what the heart wants. "-Char

I agree with her on that point, and I think there are friendships that can never be platonic, no matter how hard you try. I think I've written about this before, but I want to get it out now for therapeutic reasons.

It all started with the Korean Panda trainers. For some reason, they were causing the US WoW servers to be down, and so I was at a complete loss for something to do. This was during my more obsessive WoW days, where my evenings were usually clear for WoW, and it was what I did every day, other than the planned WoW maintenance Tuesdays. I can't remember exactly how he found me, but RH was also in the same boat, so we started talking. Even though we'd only just "met", conversation was pretty easy. The servers came back up, and we both went back to our respective grinds.

But we started chatting more and more frequently, and because his guild was a lot more progressed than mine, I learnt a lot about the raid dungeons that I had never seen before. I think one of the best indications that someone is interested in you is the fact that the two of you stay up late talking, even though it means that you'll both be so screwed up the next morning. It was worse for him, as he had a pilot lesson the next morning, and my chess lesson felt like one of the longest I'd ever been to, as I spent the entire time worried that he was going to crash and die. Thankfully, he didn't. One of the highlights of my day was being able to talk to him.

It was pretty obvious that we were into each other, but a part of me was telling myself it was a bad idea (for reasons of my own). Eventually, that part won out, and I ended up asking him not to contact me anymore. We didn't speak again for years.

Then, due to a bug, we ended up talking, and we'd talk again every now and again. I found out he was engaged, and was pretty sad for a while. Eventually, I ended up spilling the beans about why I severed all contact with him, and he called me an idiot and said stuff that just made me like him even more. So I think given the circumstances, I don't think we'd ever be able to be platonic friends.

However, all of this reminded me of what I thought was called the Martyr Syndrome (hence the title), but when I googlged it, that wasn't what I meant. So I'm going to call it Premature-Partner-Death Situation. Imagine you have just started dating someone. You are in the honeymoon phase, where everything is perfect. You barely ever fight, and when you do, you end up resolving it pretty quickly. You spend almost every moment together, and it's fun and enjoyable. You still stay up late each night talking to each other on the phone. Then suddenly, your partner is hit by a car on the way to work and dies.

You never found out that they secretly hide rubbish under the cushions in the couch because they were too lazy to get up and throw it away. You never found out that they have a weird habit of throwing away a block of butter after using a small amount of it. Or other assorted things that would piss you off. So in your memory, they were the perfect person.

Of course, that means whenever you meet someone new, they can never measure up to this perfect person that you've created in your memory. And because that person is dead, there is nothing to contest that memory. Obviously, it doesn't have to be something as drastic as dying. They could move away somewhere, or the relationship could end in a way that doesn't cause you to feel badly towards them. The point is that memory of a perfect person that cannot (or is unlikely to be) contested.

That doesn't mean that you are doomed forever. I think it is important to remember that the person you hold in such high esteem probably isn't as amazing as you remember. If you try hard enough, you could probably find a few thing that annoyed you, or would have if you hadn't been blinded by love. Though my mind knows that, my heart still stops to wonder every now and again what would have happened between me and RH. I don't think it's a bad thing, and I care about MrMan5.5 enough that it doesn't get in the way. I just know if we were to try to be good friends, it would be dangerous.

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

2011-10-25T22:51:00.001+11:00

Once again, the topic of platonic relationships between a male and a female has resurfaced, and I'm glad to say that it doesn't involve me, so I can say whatever I want! Char wrote a blog post about it in the past, but it has since been deleted, and I can't remember what it said, so I'm going to start anew.

I find it so strange that even as adults, there seems to be this strange assumption that whenever one male and one female are doing something together, they are a couple. Gone are the kindergarten and primary school days where the girls played in one area, and the boys played in another. Now that the Internet allows pretty much anyone to talk to anyone else, it makes sense that males and females are getting to know each other better, and become closer friends.

But just because you are friends doesn't mean that you are romantically attracted to each other. As an example, I made many male friends through the chess club, but MrMan5 was the only one I was attracted to, so that's a hit rate of about 10% - pretty poor! So you should at least only assume people are a couple 10% of the time based on that...

Though I think what Char was questioning was whether a male and a female can be close friends, and just be friends. Off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of males who I am just friends with, and at least four who I feel like I am close friends with.

I think the first thing you should look at is circumstance. Are one or both of them in a happy(-ish) relationship? I've found that being in a relationship makes you less likely to be on the look-out for a partner (though I'm sure that doesn't speak for everyone, as I found out there are now things like discrete dating sites). Not wanting to be a home-wrecker is also a pretty good deterrent (most of the time....).

Another important factor is the nature of the relationship. Are they just members of the same sports team, or is it at the level of being each other's confidante? I think the latter is falling into dangerous territory. This may differ for other people, but to me, being able to confide in each other is the ultimate level of intimacy. All of the people I have been attracted to are people that I have felt like I could talk to. And of the people I enjoy discussing things with now, I think it was due to circumstance that nothing ever happened. There's a really funny story that I would like to tell here, but I'm afraid it might cause a problem with someone I consider a good friend, so you can just imagine I told it and laugh.

This is probably going to sound a bit self-helpy, but I think that people are breaking down the traditional gender barriers, and trying to get to know the other side a bit more. The downside to this is that I think the dating game is getting a bit more blurred. Asking someone out to coffee doesn't necessarily carry the same, "THIS IS A DATE!" banner on it anymore. So for people who are a bit more shy, it requires being a bit more specific when asking someone out, lest you end up agonising over whether your "date" was actually a date, followed by the awkwardness of trying to find out whether the other person thought it was a date or not. Someone at work asked me to join him for coffee, then he asked me to join him for drinks. I was getting suspicious and about to pull out the whole, "I have a boyfriend thing" when Person explained to me that this guy spends a lot of time promoting a club, so he is always trying to convince people to go there with him. Person thinks he might have a share in it or something. Could have been really embarrassing.

I think it's entirely possible for a male and a female to be in a platonic relationship, and I encourage it. It is so hard to find people that you get along well with, and I think it's stupid to not consider someone because of their gender. But I guess if one person is already in a relationship, it depends on the level of trust between them and their partner. It might not be worth it if you have to deal with the increased paranoia from your partner ("Why were you 10 minutes late?!" "We got stuck in traffic." "Suuuuuuuure you did." *no sex for you*).

Diversification

2011-10-19T00:20:00.000+11:00

gwon made a comment on my post Fifteen Minute Cast Time where he said:

Something else to think about: you actually have an advantage because they are restricting themselves to not having girls on their team, while your team can actually have players based on skill and not gender.

I don't think they specifically chose not to have a girl, it probably never came up. I know Alex had a girl in his DotA clan for a while, but some of the stuff I heard gave me the impression that she was more interested in socalising than playing, and I think eventually she dropped out. So it probably gives a bad impression for any future females who want to join, as people tend to try and work out what went wrong and blame it on whatever difference they can perceive.

I spent an hour in a workshop at work where people were trying to discuss the problem of the lack of females in technology. I actually found it a bit boring, because it mostly involved women talking about how they can't work as much as they would like because they have kids. While there may be a gender agenda when it comes to corporate life, I don't think it applies so much to gaming. I definitely don't recruit people based on gender (though my requirements are a bit more strict, I only like to invite people who I know in real life, but I don't hold anyone else to that same requirement, so they are free to invite whoever they want).

There was a girl that Julian and Char wanted to invite to the clan, but they left the decision up to me. Through random chance, we ended up playing in a game against her, our group of friends against her group of friends, and we won. I made the excuse that I didn't want to invite her because she wasn't very good, but I think I just didn't want a stranger in our clan. But maybe I should have invited her, so that we could train her up. I've invited people who aren't great into the clan (*cough, cough*), so it's not really fair to leave her out for that reason.

Anyway, back to gwon's comment. One of the arguments they always bring up when talking about the whole gender diversity thing is that when you bring together a bunch of people from diverse backgrounds it makes it easier to solve new problems, because you can draw from a wide range of knowledge. I think for things like gaming and sports, the opposite is true. When you are out there playing, you want to act like a well-oiled machine, you don't want someone rocking the boat. When our clan fields a team of five, we (mostly) listen to each other, and we've played together enough now to have a rough idea of each other's play style. We are not identical robots, but we are also not so different that we end up clashing in each game and not being able to function.

I think that in cases like these, diversity can be a problem, because you just end up butting heads too often to be able to function properly. But with computers being the great equaliser, I think people should be ranked based on their skill and experience.

As I discussed last time, there are so many variations in a game that it's difficult to create accurate models. So now when I say something like "1700 level Tundra", I'm not taking into account match-ups against specific teams, what I mean is that on average, in a 1700 level game, you will not play badly as Tundra (I know that is also subjective, but the gist of it is you don't die too often, you perform the role you want to perform (keyword "want": dps, initiator, support)).

Given a limited amount of time, you will acquire a certain amount of experience (represented by the area under the graph). How much experience you gain depends on your level of skill, and the level of skill that you play at. E.g. someone who has played a lot of RTS games in the past and starts to play HoN may pick up game concepts a lot faster than someone who doesn't have that background, so they will gain a lot of experience at the start playing against noobs, but after they start to play against more experienced players, their learning will slow down because there are so many little nuances to learn at this point that are game-specific and their RTS background doesn't really help.

So you have jack-of-all trades players, who have played a wide variety of heroes, and while they may have a few favourites, they tend to be fairly average at most heroes. They are very good with team cohesion, as they are able to take up whatever role is missing from the current line-up.

Then there are the specialist players, who tend to play the same few heroes over and over again, and are quite good at those heroes, but pretty poor at all the others. What the dotted line is supposed to indicate is that when you hit a certain level of skill, your overall game experience can make up for your lack of experience with that specific hero. E.g. you are an 1900 level player, and so your map awareness is high, your instincts are refined, and your knowledge of game mechanics is good. Even though you may not have played Myrmidon before, you don't die very often, you are aware enough to be in team fights, and you do your job. Basically, you are helping by not being a hindrance.

Of course, you are never stuck as one type or the other, it's a bit like WoW, you can chuck all of your talent points into a specific area (PvP spec vs PvE spec, for example), or you can try to go some sort of hybrid, where you may not be as good in that area as someone who has devoted all their time to that area, but you can still do what needs to be done. Unlike talent specs, it just takes a lot of time to change over.

Since my headphones have been almost broken, I haven't been able to play HoN with everyone else over Mumble, and it feels like I've lost a limb. I don't tend to talk very much, but being able to listen to what people want to do, or just what they are thinking really helps me work out what to do next. I was reminded of D2: The Mighty Ducks (spoiler incoming, if you haven't seen the movie), after their first game against Iceland:

Julie: Coach Stansson and his team knew everything about us.
Luis: Yeah, and you've just been driving around in convertibles talking with all those sponsor fools.
Fulton: And eating ice cream with the Iceland lady.

I guess I really don't know the people that I play with very well. I should really spend more time getting to know everyone's preferred styles, as I think it would make me a better support player. And I guess in the future, when I am deciding whether or not to recruit people, I should base that decision on how well they will fit in with the people who are currently there.

Katarno, the Police Mage

2011-10-14T00:28:00.002+11:00

Unrelated to today's topic, Yish linked this blog Blackboards in Porn (SFW) which I found pretty funny (but I found it a bit disturbing that two girls in those photos have the same skirt that Charmeleon suggested I buy. Is that red, plaid skirt the stock standard for porn schoolgirls?).

I was looking through screenshots for my photobook and came across the comic I drew for Katarno's police graduation ceremony (sorry for the quality, it was taken with my phone, and each panel was one photo as Kat would be viewing it on his iPhone. Also, all the jokes in the comic are WoW(WotLK) jokes).

I find it funny that bad guys in my comics always have eyepatches, because my lack of drawing skill makes that pretty much the only distinguishing characteristic in people (that and ponytails, which I usually reserve for when I draw myself). I also found it strange that in some of the pictures, Kat doesn't have a face, I don't really know the reason for that.

In the drawing for Kat creating the portal, that was my attempt to draw the undead male casting animation. Kat did it once during a Tuesday dinner, and he looked so ridiculous it stuck in my mind. I also know evocation doesn't create ammo (especially not ammo for others), but I figured that was the real-life equivalent of reloading. Before you argue that it should have been "Improved Counterspell", Kat is arcane, so it probably is. But even if it wasn't, I imagine his wife talking that much is a channeled spell called Mesmerize (somewhat similar to the succubus' Seduction), it has a 4 hour channel time, and no mana cost. If you are under the effect, and you break the channel, you die instantly (anyone else breaking it is OK, but she will immediately attempt to cast it on whoever tries to break it, unless she is crowd controlled).

The policeman that looks like he's getting ready to be anal raped is supposed to be someone crouching behind a box (seriously, are there stick figure drawing classes I can take?!). If you are wondering why Kat looks so happy even though he lost his puppy, it's because he's a really cheerful guy.

Cognitive Model of HoN

2011-10-12T00:05:00.001+11:00

Months and months ago, Julian and I were stuck in yet another baddies game of HoN and he wanted the team to do one thing, but half the team disagreed. He asked in frustration why they wouldn't listen. Putting aside the typical explanation of them being stupid/noob, I thought I'd try using cognitive models of learning to explain the answer.

I don't think all HoN players are stupid, and there have been times where someone has asked me to do something and I thought it was the dumbest idea ever, but now I've learned how good it really is. I've probably played close to 800 games of HoN/DotA where I did not use wards of sight, and yelled at anyone who even thought about suggesting I buy some. Now it's usually one of the very first items I buy, and counter-warding is one of my favourite parts of the game.

Rewind to another tangent, I remember a time when AG was explaining to me how chess algorithms work. I don't know if this is still true, as I've never looked into writing chess AI, but at the time, it seemed like the most logical way to program a chess computer. The computer will look at the legal moves available (using heuristics to trim down the list (e.g. not playing h3 on the first move, as this is typically considered wasteful (although AG also told me there are these weird chess movements that come and go where all of a sudden, people seem to like to play moves like that))). Then it will use depth-first search to try to find the best possible move out of all the legal moves, "switching sides" and calculating the same for the opponent. I think I read somewhere that it usually did about 7 moves ahead. It determines the "best" move by adding up the values of the pieces it has, adding a few points for certain things like square control, active pieces, etc, and comparing that to the calculated value for the opponent at that point in time. Then it works out the best trade-off. If there are two equally good choices, it chooses at random.

It "learns" but playing lots of games, and when it wins, it "strengthens" the path for that series of moves, and when it loses, it "weakens" the path for that series of moves. The next time it comes to a crossroads, it will end up choose the stronger path.

Considering a computer has insane processing power, it can handle quite a lot of calculations. Plus, computers don't necessarily "forget" to take things into account. Humans, on the other hand, are quite fallible. I wanted to explain all of this because I wanted to contrast that to how I think humans develop "HoN-sense" (for some reason, I read that as rhyming with "nonsense").

When something good happens, you tend to want to replicate things so that it might happen again, and when something bad happens, you tend to avoid similar situations in case it does happen again. This is how things like superstitions develop. What I've typically found with HoN players (and which I am also guilty of) is that when they win, it's because they did well, and when they lose, it's because their team did poorly. So if you combine the two, you get players who remember the awesome things they did that caused the win, and banlist the baddies who made them lose.

Imagine that your HoN experience was quite limited, and of the few times you did the above strategy, you ended up winning. You play a few more games, and your cognitive map starts to look like this:

You've played and won with Pyromancer the most, so that is the strongest path at the moment. But you've experimented with a few other heroes and strategies, some going well, others not so well. I should point out that unlike a computer, we are unlikely to have calculated every possible path. So in this case, the lines represent past experiences. Whether the lines lead to win or lose indicates the outcome. The "strength" of the line in this case doesn't indicate the best path, but number of times that path has led to that outcome.

A bit more time, and you might start to see a pattern ("Every time I play Nymphora, go top, and buy boots and wards, I lose"). The only problem with HoN as opposed to a game like chess, is that there are so many other factors involved that it is quite difficult to consider every single one of them. Team balance, good lanes, runes, hero match-up, team skill, and neutral creep spawns are probably only a few. But because we tend not to overanalyse the situation (especially because this is supposed to be fun), you end up thinking Nymphora + top lane + boots/wards = LOSS. This is despite the fact that the map might look a bit more like this:

Every person goes through a different developmental journey, and everyone will come up with different cognitive maps with different lines. So when two people with opposing ideas come together, it's difficult to convince one person to try something they "know" to be a losing strategy. As far as they are concerned, it has never worked in the past, and is unlikely to work now. Even if it is a weak line leading to a losing path, they may feel adverse to that strategy as they believe there are other winning strategies available.

Which is why I think it's great to play with open-minded people who have never played before. They have no existing map, and so they end up learning your map, and you work really well together. ^_^

I think I'm skill-capped at the moment, and I don't think I will get better until I spend more time playing with better players, as I have the cognitive map of a 1500 player. It's something that I find difficult to do, but when I play with stronger opponents, I should spend more time trying to take on their maps, instead of feeling sad that I got completely crushed.

Stim Pack

2011-10-07T01:54:00.000+11:00

Obviously, there is physical arousal (either of the sexual nature, "He/She is so hot I want to have sex now", or the adrenaline nature, "That tiger is going to eat me, I'd better run as fast as I can"), but what about intellectual arousal? Something that makes you want to think things, argue, debate, hypothesize.

The mentor I have at work that I mentioned earlier, I was thinking about the nature of our relationship, and though I consider him a mentor, he doesn't seem to give me all that much advice. I don't really know what mentors are meant to do, yet I somehow went from zero to three mentors in the space of about a year. I always thought they were meant to be sagely, and give advice (somewhat like those elderly people in old-school RPGs who you have to talk to in order to work out the next part of the quest). Though he does give me some advice, I feel that he is more of a person I can bounce ideas off, and discuss things with.

Every time we have a chat, I always walk away agitated, but in a good way. I suddenly want to do all those projects that have been put aside. I want to argue with everybody about everything and anything. So many hypothetical situations and money making schemes always start chugging away at the back of my mind. Is this what intellectual arousal is? Is this what it is like to have a muse?

Unfortunately, as I only ever see him at work, the effect usually wears off pretty quickly, as I have work to do (hooray!) and I'm not being paid to debate hypotheticals with people. I find that by the time I get home, all that energy has been sapped away, and the feeling is gone again.

When I tried to go to sleep tonight, I found myself lying in bed for a while. My train of thought eventually led me to think about my mentor, and I found that I was having an imaginary conversation with him in my head. I also found that I had an itch to do something, and I didn't really want to sleep anymore (which is why I'm awake now, even though I have to get up to go to work tomorrow). In the same way that you can picture an attractive person naked in your mind and it causes sexual arousal, I wonder if having these imaginary conversations is enough to provoke intellectual arousal.

It seems like a pretty dangerous thing though. I tried playing a game of HoN just then, even though I'm feeling so tired, and it felt a bit like watching the game with a strobe light. I'm farming peacefully, oh, now we're in a team fight, oh, I'm at the fountain now, oh, we're pushing a tower. Julian, Char and Twins carried the team though, so we won. :D

I thought about inviting him to something after work so that I could keep the buzz, but it feels weird. He invited me to something once, but it was a developer thing, so it was a bit work-related. Other than Tong's meet ups, I don't really have any developer things I could invite him to. Maybe I should frame a picture of him and put it on my desk. Though how would I explain that to MrMan5.5...?

Virtual Memory

2011-10-05T14:42:00.002+11:00

There was a deal on Scoopon for a discounted photobook, where you send in a digital photobook, and they print and bind it into a hardcover book. I decided I wanted to get one for myself, but I don't really take the kind of photos that you would want to put in a coffee table photo book, so I figured it'd be a waste of money. Then I had the idea of putting in HoN screenshots, from memorable games. MrMan5.5 told me it was a waste of money, but I disagree.

Are memories from game events any less "valid" than memories of events from real life? I have quite a lot of fond memories from gaming. There was a UBRS run I went on with some guildmates, and one of the warlocks, Philip, wanted to play a joke on the party. He got us to summon him on the bridge, then he jumped off the bridge, hoping to shock everyone, then accept the summon and reappear on the bridge. Only he lagged a bit, and so he hit the ground and died before accepting the summon.

There was the naked boarhunting session with Meshu and Stringbeans, where the three of us (two mages and a priest) ran around Durotar killing level 8 boars with unarmed melee attacks, which took a loooooooong time as it was back before the removed the unarmed weapon skill.

There was the time Isoraji and I jumped down from the World Tree and I ran out of feathers on the way down, so I coudn't levitate myself anymore and died. It was a painful and expensive trip - I realised I should have just hearthstoned right away, but Iso convinced me to make it to the bottom, I thought the only way out was to keep corpse running and jumping further down the tree until I hit the ground. (Iso was a hunter, so I don't know how he expected to survive the fall, not to mention the fact that he used to play Alliance, so he must have known it was quite a long drop).

OK, so a lot of these are WoW memories rather than HoN memories, but there have been some pretty good moments in HoN as well. And most of the other multiplayer games I've played.

I just wonder if I go so far as to make a photobook someone is going to accuse me of being unable to tell fantasy from reality. I don't understand why people can recount the details of a tense sports game and it's fine, but if you start talking about a game in the same way, you have an addiction/need to get a life.

I've been addicted to a game, and there have been times where I think I've been pretty close to becoming addicted to other games, but I think I'm still able to tell fantasy from reality. So for that reason, I am making my own gaming memories coffee table photo book.

Fifteen Minute Cast Time

2011-09-28T00:47:00.001+10:00

Julian, Char and I were discussing how we could make money by creating a HoN stream commentated by a girl (Char). The idea seemed pretty straightforward, we play, stream the games while playing, and chat as we normally do on Mumble. The allure would be the fact that there is a female playing HoN, and people would watch just to see what's going on. Their views would generate income from ads, which we could split between the five of us (Char getting the biggest share, of course, as she is the one doing most of the work (I think the fact that the five of us have to play is work for us, although, Julian said Char could just stream on her own with randoms and get all the profit, which makes sense to me)). Besides, we play every night anyway, so why not profit from it?

So why Char and not me - after all, I'm also a female that plays HoN? I thought Char could do the cute, Asian girl over webcam thing, and get even more money, so that was my biggest reason. But a part of it was to do with the fact that I've focused a lot on recognition based on merit, not gender (i.e. I'd like to be good, not good "for a girl"). The idea of selling my channel based on the fact that I'm female isn't appealing to me at all. Though that didn't stop me from suggesting someone else should do it.

The last part that frightened me was the thought that we lose often. In fact, I have a 50% win rate, so we'd be expected to lose about half of our games. Losing between friends isn't a big deal. We think about what went wrong, blame the random person on our team, and queue up again. Losing when 500 people are watching seems really embarrassing. Not just that though, I'm afraid that every time we lose, it just feeds into the stereotype that girls are bad at games.

Which is so ridiculous. I avoid having my skill judged with a female bias in mind, but at the same time, I'm afraid that when I am judged, I'll end up contributing to that bias.

I remember at the HoN tournament we played in about a month ago, we were seeded against the Qlimax Crew. As soon as they saw us, they were so confident they were going to win, and as they were walking back to their seats, they were laughing that we had a girl on our team. They completely crushed us. Their strategy was really aggressive and it seemed like they didn't even consider us a threat. It was almost like they were playing a practice game and we weren't even there.

I watched a replay of one of their other matches in the tournament, and they were a lot more cautious. I kinda feel like I let the team down. Maybe if I hadn't been there, they wouldn't have been so arrogant, as the team was an unknown, and they might have played cautiously in the first match, which wouldn't have caused the strategy we had practiced to unravel so quickly.

Besides, I wouldn't want any bad reputation to come to LCF, as I still think of it as Simon's clan, even though I've been clan leader since the beta.

Yellow Belly

2011-09-20T23:54:00.001+10:00

I was discussing yellow fever with someone (the fondness for Asians, not the disease), and jokingly mentioned a mutual friend of ours who I thought had it (his Chinese is better than mine, so that is definitely evidence that he has yellow fever in my books). He then said, "I probably shouldn't tell you this, but has it, and he has it bad." It confused me, as I thought it was pretty clear that he had a thing for Asian girls, as from what I know, he has only had Asian girlfriends, and he usually spends his time hanging around Asian females (though whether that is a side-effect of studying commerce, it's hard to say).

The fact that this is the first time I have heard my friend mention that our friend had yellow fever made me think about the lack of discussion between him and his other male friends (who I also happen to know) about romantically inclined things. It's not manly to discuss feelings, blah, blah, blah, but we were discussing it, so it's not like he didn't want to talk about it ever, just not with his other male friends.

Is it because they're not interested in hearing about that kind of thing? I don't think that's true, as I've talked with a lot of guys about various topics of the romantic nature, and they seem fairly happy to discuss things (considering that I am now in a happy relationship, living vicariously through them is my only source of relationship drama).

So it's probably because they don't want to be seen as "girly" by their friends, so they don't talk about dating in general. I am really curious about how they go about telling their friends that they are now dating someone.

"Hey guys."

"Hey."

"Started playing Gears of War 3."

"Oh, how is it?"

"Pretty good so far, started off a lot harder than I expected."

"I have a girlfriend now, don't have money to buy GoW3."

"Sucks to be you."

I remember at Julian and Lucy's wedding, Julian's best man talked about how when he first starting dating Lucy, he asked for tips from his friend. I can't remember the rest of the speech, but I remember thinking that it was really bizarre. The first thing I thought of was a picture of Julian and Twins standing over a map, like in one of those war planning sessions. There was a model for Lucy on one side of the map, and Julian's "army" was spread out over the other side. Twins explained that he had to flank Lucy with dinner, and then while she was distracted, have the chocolate cavalry charge in.

How do people normally go about asking their friends for advice?

Cognitive Fetish

2011-09-14T00:41:00.000+10:00

This post is a reply to a reply to my post Naked. Which is really exciting, as the reason for my blog being public is because I want to have discussions with people about the things that I think about, and the one great thing about a reply in blog form is that it means the person has sat down and thought about it, so their response is well-constructed.

I hope this post is generic enough that the person can't be identified. The post got me thinking about fetishes (of the sexual kind), and whether it was bad to have an abnormal fetish. I always preferred to break it down into harmful and non-harmful, rather than normal and abnormal. I believe if someone gets off on watching clocks tick from 11:59PM to midnight, and they're not doing anything harmful to anyone, then so be it. Who cares if it's "weird" or whatever? Though "harmful" may not be the right word, as some people enjoy BSDM, among other things, and so they might want to be harmed in that way. So maybe something along the lines of doing something to someone which they don't want done to them.

Anyway, the post also had me thinking about the way in which fetishes develop. I've been meaning to write up a cognitive model of HoN learning for a while now, but I've been too lazy. The idea behind this is somewhat similar.

When you first start exploring sexual material, chances are you did not know what you were looking for, and you were too embarrassed to do a deep search, so you would stop at the first thing that remotely turned you on, and that you had relatively easy access to. These days, for most people, that would be something found on the internet - which was DBZ fanfiction in my case. What you tend to go searching for may also have links to what you have been told by others is "hot" - for instance, the stereotypes surrounding maids, schoolgirls, nurses, etc. You sample this for a while, and it works for you.

Later, you might decide to expand your horizons, maybe try out a Russian dominatrix instead of the maid you always go back to. The mood has changed, and you have to adjust your style. Rather than watching the demure maid who does whatever she is told, and will do anything to please her master, suddenly you're watching a woman who knows what she wants, and if she isn't pleasured NOW, then there will be punishment. Things are so new, and the things that you might have looked out for before (brief glimpses up the maids skirt, or the ridiculously clumsy maid falling on an erect penis (sounds painful to me)) aren't there, and you have to learn what new things are there to excite you.

Maybe it takes too long. You think to yourself, "I should have finished by now, what's going on?" Maybe Russian dominatrices aren't for you, and so you go back to the familiar, the things that you know work. Over time, your mind has things that it is guaranteed to get off on, things it is sometimes in the mood for, and things that don't really work, or might work after a lot of effort.

I think it is when you don't try out new things, that you end up with a very small number of things in each category, and you just become so accustomed to your favourites that it is hard for you to adjust to seeing something new. Then there starts to be some crossover, where you start to notice in the outside world those things that you previously only looked for while masturbating. It's natural to find people attractive and be aroused, but I think when it's at the point where you are starting to fixate on certain things, and aren't able to control it, that it gets to the point of being a fetish.

It makes me wonder whether maids, schoolgirls and nurses are really that interesting to the male libido, or whether it's just a reinforced stereotype.

For a while, I was a bit afraid that I had an abnormal fetish, and that it was bordering on harmful. We used to have a shared computer at home, so looking up porn was pretty much impossible. However, I discovered a bunch of books that my aunt had given us, and some of those books featured Mills and Boon type romance novels. I can't remember how old I was at the time, but I read them thinking they'd be like the Babysitters Club style romances, not having any idea what I was reading until it was too late.

For those who have yet to open one of those books, a lot of them feature a sex scene where the guy is so overcome with desire for a woman that he has to have her, and somehow her clothes seem to just fall off, and she is so wet that he can just slide in and thrust deep (it's always a deep thrust, I think in that world, there is no other kind) inside her. Of course, they both orgasm at the exact same time, which shows how in love they are.

Being the naive girl that I was at the time, I started to believe that that is how it happened, and so a lot of my fantasies involved doing something mundane in a room with a guy, when suddenly he would be so overcome and he would take me right then and there (never having had sex before, the details were kinda fuzzy). Those were the kind of stories I would seek out (you can look pretty inconspicuous reading text on the computer, and chances are, nobody would be reading with you over your shoulder, so it was something I could do with a shared computer - I also learned how to clear browsing history around the same time).

For a long time, I seemed to have a bit of a fetish for being practically raped, but then it actually happened (me having sex, not me being raped), and it kinda dispelled the idea. I would sometimes find a story, and a voice in the back of my head would tell me that things don't really happen like that, which would occasionally ruin the mood. That's when I started trying out new things, and found other things that worked for me.

One last thing that I thought about. The poster said that it is hot when a girl talks about sexual things, but creepy when a guy does it. Personally, I disagree. I used to read a blog written by a guy about things he did with his wife and various other women (can't say if it was real or fake though), and I didn't find it creepy at all. Actually, it was pretty hot, until it got a bit boring, as it was mostly the same stuff over and over again.

**********************************

I did WiiFit again today. I think my body started to get used to it, as I found I was thinking about doing yoga quite a lot during my week without WiiFit. Plus, I am now at 67kg, so I think that's another sign that I should continue. Although, I want to take up ice skating, and I'm going to sign up the term starting in October.

Couch Potato Returns

2011-09-06T23:27:00.001+10:00

Our Wii died, and with it, all of the WiiFit save data. We bought a new one, but I couldn't even find the motivation to make it through the first exercise today. When previously, I could force myself to do WiiFit even if I was feeling exhausted, which says to me that it was probably all about the high scores anyway.

Not sure what I will do instead. Read the start of the book GP gave me, but the idea of having to do something like that to lose weight puts me off completely.

Schrödinger's Friend Zone

2011-08-30T21:56:00.003+10:00

Recently, a friend of mine decided he was going to stop talking to a mutual friend of ours. It came as a bit of a shock to me, as I always thought there was something between the two. They would always comment on each others' Facebook statuses, and they kept inviting each other to things involving friendship groups that didn't overlap. E.g. I'd have dinner with a group of my friends including Friend A, and all of a sudden, he would start inviting Friend B, even though she didn't know anyone else there other than the two of us. I even asked Friend A how he felt about Friend B, but he was very vague, and unwilling to say commit to having or not having feelings for Friend B.

(The following sequence of events is only the story from the point of view of Friend A, so keep that bias in mind.)

Not too long ago, Friend A asks Friend B whether she wants to hang out together one night. Friend B says she is busy and says she only does group catch-ups. Friend A is confused, but suggests having dinner one night with a few other friends as well. Friend B says she caught him out, and that he only said that afterwards (implying that he only wanted to have dinner with her, like a date).

He said that wasn't the reason he changed it to a dinner with friends, and she replies saying that she isn't actually interested in him, and he replies with the same. Now it seems they are not speaking with each other.

Schrödinger's Friend Zone is probably not an accurate description of this effect, but I was thinking, what happens when you are mutually friend zoned? How can this happen? Well, I think one way is when two people are each other's Plan Bs. Similar to the pact between Julia Roberts' character and Dermot Mulroney's character in My Best Friend's Wedding - if neither of us is married by 30, we marry each other. Two people who enjoy each other's company enough to be able to spend a lot of time together, but not enough that they are still looking for "The One" elsewhere.

The biggest problem here, is the balance of power. As long as both people are happy to stay like this, then it serves as an ego boost for both of them - the thought that there is someone out there who loves them (at least, as far as they can tell) is a comfort, and reduces the pressure of finding a partner. However, as time goes by, each person start to wonder more and more whether they will actually find someone.

If one person reaches the point of falling back on Plan B before the other, then the power shifts towards the person who is still hopeful of finding a partner elsewhere. If that person is willing to fall on Plan B as well, then all is good, but if not, then it's something that is likely to break a good friendship (as in the case above).

The entire thing hinges on whether or not the feelings are reciprocated remains an unknown. Once that box has been opened, both people are clear where they stand, and so the possibility of the other person being a Plan B is removed (unless that person still holds on to the hope that the other one will change their mind, which is normal for a period of time, but I think it's healthy to move on after they have shown that there is no possibility of it happening - basically turning it into a one-way friend zone).

I think a lot of people have Schrödinger's Friend Zones without even realising it, and it's always an unfortunate moment when they disintegrate. Or, if you are big-headed like I am, you get into near-Schrödinger's Friend Zone disintegration moments, where someone asks you to coffee or cocktails, and you mistakenly believe they are trying to ask you out, but it turns out that they are just promoting a bar. ~_~

(Disclaimer: It's not that I think Friends A and B are like this, this is just what it made me think of.)

**************************

Current weight: 65.5kg

Eyes Wide Shut

2011-08-23T21:59:00.002+10:00

O.5 warning here! Should also add a TMI warning, as well.

She closed her eyes as he entered her, pushing deep inside her causing a soft moan to leave her throat... So begins the generic sex scene from so many stories. I always wondered, what's with the closed eyes?

When I was with AG, I decided I was going to open my eyes during sex to see whether it was any different. It took me a while, because I kept forgetting to do it, but one night, I was lying on his ex-girlfriend's sister's bed (yes, I am a horrible person for doing this in someone else's bed), and he was pounding away, and I opened my eyes. At that moment, I forgot all about my experiment as all I could see was AG's face so close to mine. He had his eyes closed, and it felt like such an invasion of privacy to see him like that, all red-faced, looming above me. It was such a turn-off that I never did it again.

I don't think that's the reason though, as I'm pretty sure my eyes were closed the first time we had sex. My first theory was that it makes it feel better. They say that people who are blind find that they can make up for it with their other senses, as though they have been enhanced by the one sense that is lost, maybe by closing your eyes during sex, it enhances the feeling of it. I guess it makes some sense, if you think of it from a divided attention point of view. We only have a limited amount of attention, and when you have five senses that are battling to be noticed, with sight being the most predominant of them all, removing visual sensory input should lead to the other four senses having an increased presence.

My second theory was that it's due to influence from media. Things like erotic literature, or sex scenes from movies or TV shows, even pornos have their fair share of women arching their backs as they reach orgasm, mouths open wide and eyes tightly shut. Can't speak for the guys in pornos though, as I mostly focus on the ACA trifecta - abs, cock, ass - not really paying attention to their facial expression. Maybe someone can offer some of their experience in this area. Anyway, I figure for a lot of people, they see porn (even soft-core) long before they actually have sex, so they will be conditioned to think that this is how you are supposed to act during sex.

Further on the conditioning theory, I read somewhere that some guys have a lot of trouble reaching orgasm through sexual intercourse. The supposed cause being the fact that nothing can simulate the same feeling they get from their hand during masturbation, and they have conditioned themselves for so long to get off in this way that they really struggle with any other method. Makes sense to me, I mean, your hand is made for gripping things, and a vagina is made to be able to push out a baby's head, so one of them is probably going to have a tighter hold than the other. So it made me wonder, what other kind of behaviours do we get conditioned into due to masturbation?

I don't know if it's just me, so here's a try-it-yourself section if you want! I can't seem to finish if I masturbate with my eyes open. I will watch porn on the computer, then when it's done, shut it down, get ready for bed, and then rub one out under the sheets with my eyes closed ready for sleep. I tried this one with my eyes open as well, and I found a lot of the time I'd be thinking of something hot and really getting into it, then wonder if I can touch the light bulb with my head if I stand on my tiptoes on the bed. Or looking at the cookbooks on my shelf wondering what kind of dessert I should try to make next.

So maybe this has conditioned me into finding it difficult to orgasm with my eyes open. Anyway, this is all based on a sample-size of one, and so, like most of my thoughts on this blog, probably don't have the weight of a proper scientific experiment. Feel free to add your own thoughts and/or experiments in the comments!

**************************

Current weight: 66kg

GP says that I should weigh myself in the morning before eating to get a more consistent weight, but who has enough time in the morning to do 30 minutes of exercise (more, as you have to take into account loading screen times (though they're much shorter in WiiFit Plus))?! I would rather get that little bit extra sleep.

Under My Umbrella

2011-08-16T22:39:00.003+10:00

When it rains, it pours. I've already blogged about seeing Daniel again, and now both RB and MrMan5 have reappeared. I was pretty surprised, as I never really got to resolve anything with MrMan5. After my expedition to work up the courage to ask him out, I only managed to do it through a Facebook message, and he never replied.

(Which, by the way, is something that is pretty heartless. For the first couple of days, I told myself that maybe he hadn't read it, as he was too busy, or just hadn't had the chance to get online. But as the days went by, that excuses was harder and harder to hold onto, and so in the end, I had to move out of that denial phase and accept that he just didn't want me. Then there was all the self-analysis that came afterwards, but there was a little part of me that held onto the hope that maybe he would wake up one day and decide to take a chance. Would have been so much nicer if he had just let me know at the start and I could have gotten over it sooner.)

I was just thinking about the different ways that I reacted to coming into contact with all of them again. Well, RB doesn't count in a way, Graham said he wanted to meet up with us, but I still chat to him online every now and again, so it's not out of the blue, and doesn't carry any weird feelings. I wish things with all of my past male interests could have ended up the same way things are with RB now.

With Daniel, I wanted to be an ice queen. Courteous, but a stone wall. He used flirt... it's not very effective. This is probably all in my head, but it felt a bit powerful. The last time we met, he was definitely the one with the power (and I probably had too much to drink), but this time, I felt so in control. He would try a line, and I'd lead him to think that maybe it was working, then BAM! Blue balls. OK, now I know it was all definitely in my head, as I doubt he was even thinking that much about it, but hey, if it's something that makes me feel good about myself, then it's a good thing, right?

With MrMan5, I find that there's this part of me that's a little puppy, wanting his attention. Wanting him to see that I've actually done OK for myself - I have a (maybe) good job, I'm in a happy relationship, and I've actually moved out of home. I'm not the complete mess of a person I was all those years ago. Although, I have to attribute a lot of that to MrMan5.5, so maybe if something had happened between me and MrMan5, I wouldn't be the person that I am today.

Before I go to bed though, I want to admit something that I'm not all that proud of. I stopped stalking MrMan5's Facebook page for a long time now, but every time a mutual friend tells me something bad has happened to him, I feel good about it. I know it's wrong, because he's such a nice person, but I honestly can't stop myself. Maybe now is my chance to redeem myself.

***********************

I only missed two WiiFit sessions this week, which is probably a good thing, as I'm starting to feel sore from all the muscle and yoga exercises.

So last week, I was at 66kg, and this week, I am at 66.5kg. It's a reverse of what I wanted, but I guess that is mostly due to all the eating out I have done over the past week. I'm finding that I like WiiFit Plus a lot more than WiiFit, as it allows you to queue up a bunch of exercises which saves a lot of menu time (which is one of the things I really didn't like about WiiFit, and most games with excessive menu transitions).

Shumi

2011-08-10T20:30:00.003+10:00

I thought I would start blogging more now that I've started a new chapter in my life, full time work, but most of the time, I'm either too tired to write anything, or I'm afraid what I want to write might contain some sensitive information, and I don't want to get into trouble. So most of what I write is probably going to be on the lunchtime philosophy of the Arnie twins.

I find them so refreshing after meeting so many of the grads who seem to think they are on the path to being world leaders or something. Someone in my new team summed it up nicely, "The graduate program tells us that we're full of fresh ideas, and that everyone wants to listen to what we have to say, but in reality, we're sitting in a line behind last year's grads, who are sitting behind the 2009 grads, etc." So when I get yet another email from one of the grads trying to make their mark, I always have to resist the urge to add them to an auto reply list, which sends an email saying that there is a technical error, and I was unable to receive their email. Then it forwards that email to my junk folder.

A few weeks ago, George said to me that he finds it strange that there are so many girls out there whose only hobby is their boyfriend. They might go shopping, or learn to cook, but the main center of their activities is either attaining, or keeping a boyfriend. If they do have a boyfriend, then they will also spend a large amount of time with them. While George did say he excluded me from that generalisation (because I am a tech girl, rather than a "normal" girl), I have to say, I feel like it applies to me as well. I mean, I even said myself that one of the main reasons I wanted to learn to cook was because someone told me that there are two ways to get a guy, be really good in bed, or be really good in the kitchen.

Though I think now that MrMan5.5 and I have settled in together, I don't feel like so much of my life revolves around him. While there are things that I do for him, a lot of my focus now has been on self-improvement for my own sake (like going to Ruxmon and Limited WIP). While we do spend a lot of time together, we have our own lives, and our own preferences.

But is it a good thing to have your partner as your hobby? Now that my sample size of married couples has grown to something larger than one, let's take a look:

COUPLE #1

They seem pretty independent of each other when it comes to pastimes - sometimes to the extent that I wonder if one of them spends more time with the denizens of the internet than with his wife. However, they seem pretty happy when I see them together. I don't imagine that they hold each other back when one of them wants to do something and the other doesn't. Nor do I get the impression that when one of them is busy, the other one is just sitting there watching them do whatever they are doing.

COUPLE #2

He seems to be the center of her life. Everything they do, they seem to do together. I don't even know if they have their own group of friends, it just seems to be one group (and not even partly her group, she seems to have melded into his group). On the few occasions that I have seen them together, it seems like he is trying to get away from her.

It reminds me of a couple MrMan5.5 and I saw on the plane to and from Japan. The wife was seated next to us, and she wouldn't stop talking for the entire flight. I had my book in front of me, and MrMan5.5 was playing his DS, but she didn't seem to take the hint, and the only way I could escape her was to fall asleep. She was saying to the flight attendant that the ticket people made a mistake, and her husband was seated somewhere else, and if possible, she'd like to be moved to where he is.

MrMan5.5 and I have a theory that he purposely asked to be seated away from her. When was saw them on the way back to Australia, we dodged them, even going so far as to run through China airport so we could make it around the corner through that foreign transfer thing without getting stuck in line with them.

To be honest, I prefer Couple #1's style. I find that I need to spend some time without having to deal with people, and although I still talk to people online, it doesn't feel the same as talking to someone face-to-face. I guess because I can just leave whenever I want. I don't feel like I need to drag MrMan5.5 everywhere with me, nor do I feel like I have to squeeze myself into his circle of friends somehow. Maybe it's also better like this, as it will take longer for you to get sick of each other if you don't spend every waking moment together.

***********************

So the other thing that has come from the Arnie twins is my new weight loss scheme - WiiFit. I noticed it sitting with them today, they're both big, buff, bodybuilding types, and I'm this fat Asian girl sitting with them at lunch. I could just hear the song in my head, "One of these things is not like the others..." While I could console myself with the fact that even though they're all buff, they're not gamers like me, so they must have way more time to spend at the gym. But it's not true, they're both really good at TF2, and they spend a lot of time building their own electronic stuff, and yet they still manage to make the time to go to the gym.

So my new thing is I'm going to use WiiFit to train. Why WiiFit even though it's a gimmick? Well, I have tried running, and I have no motivation, but I think I will be more motivated when high scores are involved. All WiiFit really needs is achievements and I'd be hooked. The other part is, I have this idea in the back of my head that I'll become an urban legend, like that guy who managed to lose a heap of weight playing DDR, I'll be that girl who lost weight playing WiiFit!

Hopefully, it'll also motivate me to blog more, as I'll be updating my results at the bottom of a post every week.

So today, my weight is 66kg.

In 2 months, I am aiming to be 60kg.

Wish me luck!

Silence in the Library

2011-08-06T01:12:00.004+10:00

I saw Daniel again today.

Quentin Tarantino rewind: Derek is a guy at work who has become somewhat of a mentor to me. I mentioned to him that even though I studied software engineering, I don't consider myself all that technical-minded, so he suggested I start going to some tech meet-ups after work to meet people who I can learn things from. The only one I knew of was 2600. I figured it has been three years, surely Daniel isn't still going, so I would be safe. (Actually, in the meantime, Tong has introduced me to Limited WIP, and they're a really interesting bunch of people, I would recommend it.)

So I emailed the local 2600 mailing list, and asked if they still meet. I got a reply from the guy monitoring the list saying that they do still meet, and that I should also try going to Ruxmon (the monthly Ruxcon meet). Various events stopped me from going for a while and the organiser kept emailing me to remind me to go to the next one, and I kept replying that I would try to. Eventually, I made it to a Ruxmon meet, and at their second meet, I realised Daniel was there. Well, I wasn't sure it was him, but I saw him checking Facebook on his phone, so I decided I would say hi to him on Facebook and ask if he was at Ruxmon. Got no reply, so I thought maybe I had the wrong person.

Then this:

I just thought, "Wow, it has been three years, surely not?" A quick search through my blog archive makes me realise I never actually made this post, even though it was sitting in my to-do list for a long time. Many thanks to QC for sending me the chat log:

[edited to remove stuff that isn't important - I swear it doesn't change the context, ask QC! And the "me" here isn't me, but QC.]

Jessica: so jodes did we tell u that dan got drunk at lca

jody : nope but im sure he did
but he cant anymore

Jessica: on google student party

jody : yeah
what did he do?

Jessica: mm should we tell her jed

jody : did he grab other peoples ass?

Jessica: no

jody : cos he usually does that
ask for a head job?
dance bad?

Jessica: well flame was there tristen was there for a tiny bit and i was there and jed
no ewwl
we didnt dance just drank

jody : then it was not so bad
ah

me: he didn't ask for a head job, he gave someone a head job
in the middle of the dance floor

jody : lol

Flame: hang on... who is offering head jobs?

me: in fact, he gave flame a head job
in the middle of the dance floor

tdfwilson: and me without my banana

me: poor tristan

jody : yeah, well as long as it wasnt anna

me: no, not anna
wait, how do you know anna

jody : she tried to move into Dans life
but i put a stop to it

me: oh, really?

jody : yeah, well i hope so or else Dan would be in deep shit
and he said he wont

me: You're the girlfriend, then?

jody : yes
so you have heard of me

me: Only by reputation.

That was from 2008. Anyway, it seems like she felt the need to remind me that she still exists in Daniel's life. You can tell by the huge time gap in my reply on Facebook that I did not know what to say to her at all. But that is not the end of it. So rather than replying to me on his wall, Daniel decided he was going to send me a private message instead:

My reply was actually me trying to dodge going to 2600 this month. I was pretty much 50/50 on going by Wednesday, and Friday morning, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to go. Until I received an email from the organiser faithfully reminding me to go, and apologising for not being around last month due to Ruxmon (actually, I was at Ruxmon, too, and I was the one who ran home afterwards rather than joining them for a drink, so I felt kinda bad for not even introducing myself - although, to be fair, I was with Gerald, and I didn't think it would be fun for him if I dragged him around trying to find this guy).

So against my better judgement, I went along to 2600 today. Of course, Daniel was there. He said that he didn't remember me, though he did remember QC. I did talk to him throughout the night, but I tried to get to know some of the other people there. (We were joking that Daniel's heritage made him want a woman with a beard, and I asked the guy next to me if he would ever date a woman with a beard. He turned to his left, pointed to his partner (who has a large beard) and said, "I'm gay". Oops....hooray first impression!)

There was a drunk woman at the bar, who Daniel went to flirt with while the rest of us moved further inside the bar. I thought it was funny, it was nice to see some things never change. The guys were calling Daniel by his online nick, and I know it's probably really mean to make fun of people's online nicks, but I wasn't sure what they said, but it sounded a lot like "Finkle and Einhorn" (thumbs up if you get the reference).

I guess I'm writing this because I kinda feel really relieved. I just think that if I had managed to get Daniel all those years ago, and he somehow became more than a pokemon to me, I would be in Jody's position right now, suspicious of every single female that contacts him (though I have to say, it's justified suspicion). The fact that I'm not, and that I have someone who trusts me, and who I trust, makes me feel pretty damn good. =)

The Baddie Files

2011-07-11T17:02:00.001+10:00

Have been playing a lot of HoN lately, trying to prepare for a tournament. I can see now why some people don't find it very fun. Usually I enjoy playing, even when we're losing, as I feel like I'm improving, but lately, it has just felt like we either completely destroy the other team, or we are crushed by the other team (though sometimes we are "winning" at the start). I've found that lately, I am getting more frustrated at the people I play with. I don't think it's because they're bad - on the most part, I am happy to play with people who are bad, except.... when I think they are a lost cause.

For instance, V was horrible when he first started. Reminded me of my first hundred or so games of DotA. Now I think he is better than Matti. I feel a bit bad for him, as he is copping a lot of abuse. Plus, I don't think it's entirely justified, especially considering the fact that when I had his level of experience, I was much, much worse - he has only had the game for a few months now.

My list of people I refuse to play with (not including randoms) has grown over the past couple of weeks (from zero to one). Despite everything I said above, I think my enjoyment has gone up after banning that person. I've been thinking maybe I should do it more often. There are others that I don't really enjoy playing with, and I'm not entirely sure why I even play with them in the first place. Maybe I just feel guilty telling them "no". So, I've come up with the idea of a "Baddies File". I'm going to list why I think these people are annoying to play with, and you will tell me whether you agree. If we come to an agreement, then ban hammer, otherwise, tell me why you disagree with me.

BADDIE #1:

The ultimate baddie. I could probably fit an entire blog post with his badness, but not all of it is HoN related. Actually, I don't care. I'm going to get all of this out of my system, because for some reason, I constantly forgive his badness and invite him to the group, only to be reminded in game why I don't like playing with him. Maybe if I write it all down, I will remember for next time.

So it all started back when SEE was still into DotA. The mode was apem, it was a 5v5 inhouse. The game started and I randomed my hero. I got sniper.

BADDIE 1>> lol, swap me sniper

ME>> no

BADDIE 1>> who do you want?

ME>> sniper

BADDIE 1>> if you don't swap me sniper i'm not playing

ME>> fine

ME>> don't play

I would much rather he left the game and gave us extra gold instead of sitting at the fountain, but he wouldn't even do that. I guess he wanted to teach me a lesson or something. We ended up winning anyway, so I didn't really care.

Fast forward to HoN. In all pick mode, he will always random, even though he is only "good" at maybe one or two heroes (and not even the HoN equivalent of Sniper) - where "good" is taken to mean "not absolutely terrible". Still, he randoms a hero every game. At first, I thought it was because he wanted to learn new heroes, but I asked him once and he said his reason was to get more starting gold. Fair enough, I sometimes random for the same reason. But I've found that almost every time he randoms, he will ask for a swap. If someone wants to take him up on it, he will always say, "Give me X", where X is one of two heroes.

OK, fine, that's pretty standard (although slightly unfair, as he gets both the hero he wants, and the extra starting gold). The problem arises when nobody wants his hero. Then he will start whining in chat, "By the way, guys, I should tell you, I'm pretty bad with Y." Which is occasionally accompanied by, "I've never played this hero before." If his pleading falls on deaf ears, he will play the game as the hero, and then feed. Inevitably, someone will call him a noob, in which case, he will say, "Well, I DID tell you at the start that I'm bad with this hero" like it's our fault he is feeding. So I've started translating his earlier disclaimer to mean: "If you don't swap me the hero I want, I will feed. And do nothing useful all game while I 'learn this hero'".

Although, to his benefit, he will use his extra gold to buy a courier, but I don't think the cost of his playing so badly outweights the benefit of having a courier. I'd much rather spend all of my starting gold on a courier and four wards AND donate it to the other team, than play with him when he randoms Moraxus.

A few months ago, I had the displeasure of playing Magicka with him (the one and only time I have played the game, and probably why I haven't gotten around to playing it since). Our party discovered some item near the start of the game, which he quickly picked up. He then said, "If I die and lose this item, I'm not playing." Of course, that made me want to kill him in the game. Except I died. And got ressed, and died again. In fact, I spent most of the game dead, and I couldn't work out why. I was shooting the monsters with ranged spells, and running away when they came near. But every now and again, there would be this flash, and then I'd be dead.

After I learned how to cast the magic shield, I found I wasn't dying as fast. Then I realised, it was BADDIE #1 casting this lightning attack, that was really strong, but had a bad side-effect of hitting EVERYTHING in a wide line, and he didn't seem all that fussed about aiming it very well. I asked him afterwards why he kept using that attack and he said it was because he plays multiplayer just like he plays singleplayer. I said that we would have died less if he hadn't used that spell so much, and he said, "But how is that a good thing for me?"

Although, I guess that is partly my fault. I mistook Magicka for a co-operative game, where in actual fact, it seems to be a PvP game disguised as a co-op game. When everyone died except me, and I refused to res them, the game became 100 times more fun. Mostly because it meant I didn't have to play with BADDIE #1.

I have to say, I find it extremely funny that he seems to think his threat of not playing with the rest of us is incentive to do what he says. Every time he says, "Blah blah blah, or I won't play", I think to myself, "GOOD! I don't even want to play with you anyway." So should I just save everyone the trouble, and stop playing with him?

In Latex and Bows

2011-05-25T23:17:00.004+10:00

So the HoN servers are under a DDoS attack, and as funny as it is reading the forum posts about it (so many kiddies yelling that S2 should have safeguarded against the attack, or that they should find the person who is doing it and kill them), I'm struggling to remember what it is that I do when I'm not at work, asleep or cooking.

A few days ago, Julian and I were discussing whether geek/gamer girls are more promiscuous than non-geek/gamer girls. I would have done another poll, but I think the sample size would have been far too small to actually find anything worthy of reporting.

I think the cause for the discussion was this blog that he suggested I read: GeekySexBlog. She has linked quite a few porn videos recently, and I realised I haven't actually watched any in.... a very long time - I can't even remember what I last did. Probably because I have been catching up on TV shows. But I think the important part is, it hadn't even occurred to me. I do remember thinking at one point, since I started working, that I have been a lot less interested in sex. I attributed it to either working so much, or just being ooooooooooooooooooooold now, and then didn't really think about it anymore.

Even when Marie linked porn in her blog, I wasn't all that interested in watching, I was more interested in reading what she wrote, but when she linked one with Sasha Grey, I figured I should watch it to see what all the fuss is about. Not to get into the TMI zone, but even though the video itself wasn't all that great, it was like all of a sudden I wanted sex so badly, something I hadn't felt in so long.

So in a really roundabout way, this made me think of Julian's theory about geek/gamer girls being more promiscuous. I wonder whether it is that they just feel more free to talk about sex because people around them tend to speak freely about sex themselves(either because they are playing games with people who don't realise they're female, or because the Internet just allows people to speak their mind better). But also, I wonder if maybe part of it is because it is somewhat the norm to discuss sex - even if it's in a derogative way, e.g. "Suck my balls" (does anyone even say that anymore?).

I guess it depends on how you would define yourself as promiscuous. I wouldn't consider myself promiscuous, as I have only had four sexual partners, and on the most part, it has been only one at a time (not in the threesome sense, but in the "exclusive" sense). But then again, the fact that I had a friend-with-benefits might cause some people to label me as promiscuous.

On an unrelated note, going to these dev meetups with Tong has finally paid off. I have a few things I'd like to work on, but don't know when I will have the time. I half want the HoN servers to stay down a bit longer, but then my APM will go doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooown. T_T

On another unrelated note, I told Teekay that there is this awesome guy at work, but I am unsure about him because his APM is too low, and Teekay said it's about quality, not quantity. What do you think....?

[EDIT]: What I meant to add was that maybe part of wanting to have sex is simply thinking about it or being exposed to it, so geek/gamer girls tend to be more promiscuous because people around them talk about it more.

iNsult

2011-04-11T21:27:00.002+10:00

It took me a while to join the ranks of the smartphone masses, but the first thing I noticed was that everyone assumed I had an iPhone. Which is a fair assumption back then, as smartphones were still slowly becoming more popular, and chances were, if someone had a smartphone, it was going to be an iPhone of some variation.

It's really starting to bug me now, not because I hate Apple products, but when I think of someone who owns an iPhone, I generally think of the people who line up outside the Apple store the midnight of release night, and are so excited coming home with their giant $1,000 boxes. Then they're perfectly happy to do the exact same thing the moment the next iWhatever X.X is released, even if the model they have now still suits their needs.

Maybe it's partially because I'm jealous that I can't afford to replace my stuff so often (it took me so long to decide on a new phone, and I even put off buying a monitor for so long that Alex ended up buying me one for my birthday). I don't know... it just seems so wasteful to me. I know so many people who got new contracts just so they could get an iPhone 4, and so they ended up giving their old phones to their younger siblings, some who were only 10 years old! I didn't even get a phone until my first year of uni. T_T

Although I guess that's part of being a gadget geek, right? You usually want the latest and the greatest. I can't really look down on people for lining up at midnight for the iPad seeing as I lined up at midnight for The Burning Crusade... but they'd probably look down on me for that. So to each their own.

I was stressing for the past week over a meeting I had with someone at work today. We had met up a few weeks ago, to discuss my problem at work - that being the fact that I was doing none, and he suggested a few things I could do to help the situation. Then I went home and played HoN, and promptly forgot all about it. Fast forward to last week where I saw a meeting invite from him saying he wanted to catch up and see how I was going, and then it occurred to me that I hadn't done anything in that time... except make a lot of origami turtles.

So I was pretty worried that he was going to be super angry at me for not doing anything, and I tried to organise a list of things to talk about, but then I started playing HoN and forgot all about it... until Sunday night. The meeting disappeared from my calendar, so I thought he cancelled it on Friday when I wasn't in the office, but I wasn't so lucky.

[Speaking of not being in the office, I was at an emotional intelligence seminar, and it was like all of my psych course thrown back in my face, but hey, I got out of the office!]

It turns out that he also did software engineering at Melb, so we spent time talking about Les and ISD and just random stuff - it was really fun. He's really nice, and he has helped me out a lot, answering most of my questions, and organising events for us to meet various people in the company. A part of me is being a bit cynical, and thinking that the only reason he's trying so hard to get me into dev is because he needs more devs, but the other part of me says why does it even matter if that's something I'm happy to do?

It feels a bit silly, I'm usually perfectly happy to buy wards and a courier in HoN, but as soon as someone asks for them, I feel like I have to avoid buying them just to spite them. I don't know if I'd say no to a dev position just to spite someone, especially considering that someone has been so kind to me, but I can't deny that fact that the thought is lurking there in the back of my head. I'm so vindictive sometimes. =(

Naming Rights

2011-03-17T00:16:00.003+11:00

Hopefully a quick post, as I am meant to be sleeping right now, but I felt like I had to get this off my chest. We all probably have a friend out there who happens to engage in various flings over the course of a few years, and unless you know the flings in question, it is usually hard to keep track of them all ("Was Henry that guy you met at the parachute shop who studied law?" "No, that was George. Henry was my housemate's sister's gardener." "Oh, right."). Plus, there are some occasions where you may be the friend who has flings, and you don't feel comfortable divulging the identity of the other party. Whatever the reason, it seems that a lot of people go the route of the Sex and the City-esque nicknames for partners. Is it a good idea for you, as the friend of the person with flings, to be the giver of nicknames, or should you just let the other person decide?

Obviously, the nickname will tend to be something memorable about the fling (That Guy With the Big Ears, The Chick With the Fake Boobs, That Doctor Who Treats Very Small Elephants), but you might think is memorable about someone may not necessarily be something the other person thinks is an appropriate nickname, despite how fitting it may be (That Guy With the Small Penis).

In my blogs, I've had my various MrMen, and I like that system, because it is easy for me to differentiate different guys (though it may be hard for others to tell them apart), but it is also something that is non-descriptive, so whenever I introduce a new guy to my friends, they don't stop and think, "Hmmm, he looks like he has a small penis, I wonder if he's TGWSP." At least I hope they don't...

The downside is, when you look back, it may be hard to remember what it was about that person that really stood out for you. I do remember having feelings for MrMan1, but I struggle quite hard to remember what it was exactly that drew me to him. Maybe part of it was that by giving him this nickname, I had separated him into the person that he is in real life, and the online persona that I describe in my blogs who is MrMan1.

Other blogs that I read will give someone a fake name in order to protect the privacy of their flings, and I thought about doing that, but it seems like it will get confusing, especially if you happen to already be friends with someone who has that name. Plus, if you ever decide to introduce him to your friends, there might be an awkward moment where one of them asks, "So what happened to Mark? That blog post you wrote yesterday said you were still with him. How long have you been with Westley?"

I ask because I have a friend who is seeing a girl, but I don't know her name. He has been reluctant to talk about his female friends in the past, and I respect that, but at the same time, I'd like to be able to give him the opportunity to talk about her if he so wished, without him having to reveal her identity. I want to call her Hairy Armpits Girl, but I imagine that he would object.

On a final note, I still think Ice-Cream Cone Penis Guy is an awesome name.

Begging Friends

2011-03-09T22:53:00.002+11:00

I met up with a friend today to pick up a rulebook from him, and as I approached him at the station, he was being accosted by someone asking him for money. He politely turned the guy down, and I waved him over. I said to him sarcastically, "Friend of yours?" and he replied, "Nah, just someone asking for money." I had an urgent need to buy season 3 of Chuck, so I asked if he didn't mind accompanying me to JB to pick it up. As it was raining and quite crowded, I lost him for a bit in the crowd, and when I found him again, he was being harassed by another beggar. I rushed over to try to save him from having to refuse again, but before I got there, he had pulled out a $5 note and handed it over. The beggar muttered something about bus fare being $8 (such a lie, it was after 6PM, so at most he would have needed a 2 hr ticket, which is $5.80 full fare for zones 1 and 2) and walked off.

Afterwards, I started to make him feel bad about it (I know, I made fun of him for not giving, then I made fun of him for giving - there is no pleasing me). It didn't make sense to me why he had the sudden change of heart, and I don't think we're close enough friends for me to have asked. It's possible that he found this beggar to be more attractive, or more funny, or something, but I think the contributing factor was that I was there.

Part of what governs the actions of most people is the idea of socially desirable actions. For instance, if you believe that people tend to like rich people, then you might dress better and eat at expensive restaurants in order to give the impression that you are more well-off than you actually are in order to impress others. I think that a lot of us are taught from a young age that kindness is important (whether directly through being told by people, or indirectly via things like fairy tales, children's TV shows and movies). Maybe a lot of us tend to be more generous when in the presence of others compared to when we are alone.

So it made me wonder, if the number of people who chose to donate, as well as the amount donated goes up in places that are crowded and encourage a window-shopping type of slow walking compared to places like Southern Cross station where there are a large number of people, but most of them aren't really paying attention to their surroundings. I don't know if it's just me, but whenever I pass a busker or beggar sitting there, I have this weird feeling that someone is watching me and waiting to see whether I donate or not. So I don't even know if whether I choose to donate has to do with whether I care about the cause, or whether I just feel guilty.

That's the thing I hate most about beggars though - the fact that they make you feel guilty. The often ask for less money than I will spend on my lunch and it is definitely a lot less money than I would spend doing something silly like playing the gashapon/UFO catchers in Tokyo. At the same time, I feel like it's a self-perpetuating thing. If you give money to them, then it proves to them that begging is a sustainable activity. I guess most of my reluctance comes from the time I went with some second floorers to eat gelati. A beggar approached MB asking him for bus money. MB gave her $5, and then right in front of us, she walked into Koko Black, and walked out a bit later with a drink in her hand.

I really feel sorry if someone was genuinely in need of a bus ticket and I have written them off as a beggar.

Body Corporate

2011-02-28T23:56:00.004+11:00

So I have been in the corporate game for over a month now, and the first thing I noticed was that there really is no such thing as a free lunch. During our grad induction, they fed us really well, but I noticed there was a bit of a catch to all the free food. At these lunches, there were always past grads, senior managers, and occasionally executives, and it's quite difficult to make an impression on them if your mouth is stuffed full of tasty, tasty, sandwiches. Of course, they make the impression that networking is really important, and if you don't make yourself known within the company, then you might as well put on a jumpsuit and pull out a mop and bucket, because as far as anyone is concerned, you're just another cog in the machine.

Seeing as I love food as much as I do, I opted to pile my plate with sandwiches and listen to a pair of twins make fun of me riding to dwarf weddings on unicorns in WoW (one of them noticed I was playing Secret of the Magic Crystals on Steam, and I think it melted his brain a little - they're both hardcore FPS gamers). The truth of the matter is, I have no interest in sucking up to people that I don't like. If I suck up to them, then someday I might end up working for them, and I will just get more and more angry at them to the point where I end up punching a hole in their desk out of frustration, and then I'll probably get fired. It doesn't make sense to put myself in that situation in the first place - would it be better to just be in some lowly position than be unemployed?

I don't think any of this is the fault of the company I work for - in fact, almost all of my team is really friendly towards me, and I'm starting to feel more a part of the group now that I've gone to a few of their social events. I think it's just more the fact that the role I'm in isn't really suited to me so I'm often left wondering why they hired me in the first place. The #se440 people say that it must be a bad place to work if Leigh is working there and I can't help but feel that maybe I am the less alcoholic version of Leigh (but not as good at Starcraft 2). In most cases, I wouldn't describe myself as organised or responsible, and it seems that that is also the general feeling of my friends. I am far better at making friends than I am at doing anything useful like programming or management.

In high school, in came up with a hypothetical that I often end up asking myself. Imagine that a new compound is discovered. Upon a preliminary analysis, scientists end up concluding that the element has the properties of the universal panacea. There is much rejoicing. However, before they are ready to announce their discovery to the world, another study finds two new things: there is only a limited supply of this element in the world, and once it is used, it is broken down into components that can never be reassembled. Given another 300 years of analysis, they may be able to replicate the component and mass produce it (how they know it is 300 years is irrelevant). The more of it they use up, the longer it will take before they can mass produce it, as they will have less to perform tests on.

So now imagine that for some reason, you are on the threshold of death. What is so important about you that these scientists should use up some of this compound in order to prolong your life?

I have never been able to answer that question to my satisfaction - the only answer I could come up with was that there is a small, small chance that I might discover or create something that would improve the world in some significant way, but to be honest, that is so unlikely that if I ever were in that situation, I wouldn't even bother contacting them. "Hi guys, I can make basic spreadsheets and fold Post-It notes into paper cranes - please delay the improvement of mankind and save me."

Why do we go to such lengths to save sick people? When I asked Stanley for some cake recipes that are allergy friendly, he said to me that it's the survival of the fittest. If we keep sick people around, aren't we just further polluting our gene pool? In the rest of the animal kingdom, the elderly and the sick are usually the first to fall prey to predators. Then again, we have managed to spread to many different areas of the world despite everything, so we must be doing something right.

Leaving the Social Network, Part 2

2011-02-11T20:32:00.003+11:00

Have you ever held a non-Facebook people only event (and if so, how do you know who isn't on Facebook without having one yourself)?

Olek:

No, why would I want to distinguish between friends who use facebook and friends who don't? I think the question can be re-phrased to ask "how do you know who to invite to an event if they're not on facebook?" to which I would say email contact lists (address book). I think events are what I would use facebook for if it wasn't facebook, if it was just the events component. Some people may only want to go to events if certain other people are going, and some people may only want to go if certain other people aren't going. This is the sort of thing handled really well by facebook (unless the event admin makes the guest list private). A good idea for a web2.0 app would be to make an event organiser which can interface with facebook but not require it, which would allow for RSVP, and let you invite contacts by twitter name or by email or facebook or openID (without it being shown), and having a common "wall" for the event where people can comment. There may already be an app like this, I haven't checked.

GP:

Off the top of my head, I only know one other person who doesn't have FB, the boyfriend of a friend, and while I get along fine with him, I don't think I'd ever need to hold a party with him alone. He organised a surprise birthday for our mutual contact, and invited everyone, including me, by phone.

I guess I find out during small talk at parties, or over other media. I still frequent forums on the net.

My thoughts: I don't really care about exclusivity either, and I wouldn't be deleting my Facebook for some "OMG, I'm so different, look at me, and how cool I am for not having a Facebook!" reason.

GP's question: Do people (strangers) ever respond negatively when they find out you don't have Facebook? What about your friends?

Olek:

yes, occasionally. My friends mostly know now and seem to accept it even if they don't necessarily agree (i think for them the convenience for events trumps other stuff).

Strangers: Nope, not negatively. Maybe with a vague sense of curiosity. But most of the time not even that. I don't think that many people actually think it's that big a deal, facebook isn't really srs bsns.

GP:

I've never been insulted or attacked by a stranger I'd just met for not having FB. People are usually more stunned and curious than hostile, and in my limited experience, they are happy to hand over phone numbers or email addresses if they want to remain in contact. My friends were (and still are) incredulous over my decision, and often bring it up in exasperation, but have never been particularly negative.

My thoughts: I think these days, it's just a natural assumption that everyone has Facebook. I gave some people my email address at work for the purpose of adding me on Starcraft 2, but instead, they added me on Facebook. I guess it's still fairly new that it doesn't elicit the same response as, for example, finding out someone doesn't own a TV. That always gets me, even though I don't even watch TV anymore!

How do you go about organising an event and inviting people?

Olek:

Email. I get invited to events also by gtalk and sometimes irc and sometimes twitter. But if I was organising an event I just use email.

GP:

Texting. Even plans made face to face are confirmed via text. I usually send a message to one or two close friends, confirming a time and date they're free. If they reply affirmatively, I then send a mass text to all the people I want to invite. I've never organised a massive event, although I was planning a surprise birthday last year (it never came to fruition, damn exams). I was going to use email, which is still better than FB, because I don't know if you can hide an invite (say, a surprise birthday) from an individual friend (say, the birthday person) on FB.

It is possible to invite me to an event over Facebook by inputting my email address somewhere during the event creation. I can then see basic details about the event, such as date and time. I can also be added into private messages, and while I cannot reply, I receive an email update every time someone else replies, meaning I can at least listen to group discussions.

My thoughts: I actually prefer email for organising events - at least email with threaded conversations. I like how easy it is to branch off into smaller conversations to discuss things that don't concern everyone else, but still keep it all in one place for easy reference. I organised almost all of MrMan5.5's surprise party via email, but I had to resort to Facebook for the people who never seem to check their email and SMSes to his mum.

Has your phone bill become more expensive since deleting your Facebook?

Olek:

Ha! No. I barely use my phone. I pre-pay which gives you a month to use the credit, and I'll often get to the end of the month and have used only $10. I sometimes go weeks without buying credit for my phone. Although, I just have a normal phone, not a smartphone/iphone so I don't need a plan so that I can get 3G or whatever. (I don't intend to get an iphone/smartphone, but that's a different story).

GP:

Yes.

Do you find that you are "behind the times", in that your friends seem to know what's going on in each other's lives, and you are always the last one to find out any news?

Olek:

Yes and no. There are certainly times when I find out news about friends after other friends because I'm not on facebook. However, generally I prefer to talk to people in real life about what they've been doing rather than read their facebook walls and status updates. If I haven't heard from someone in a while then there's more to hear about when you do. Besides there's nothing really wrong with hearing things late. If they haven't told you about some big event directly then it's clearly not that important that you know, or they're not such a close friend anyway.

GP:

Surprisingly, no, but I think I'm the exception to this rule. I don't think major news, at least amongst my friends, was/is spread publicly via FB too much, and I was never part of any sort of gossip private message circle when I did have FB. This is an interesting question for me, because I major in Journalism. I ask lots of questions, and people generally enjoy confiding in me, and as such I'm actually usually the first person to find out important news. A close friend recently broke up with his long time girlfriend, and while it was announced on FB soon after, another friend on holiday overseas texted me first to find out what the hell was going on before she started talking on FB, as she knew I'd have all the news first.

My thoughts: I'm not a big fan of gossip. If only I could reach some sort of agreement with everyone I know - if you don't gossip about me, I won't gossip about you. Unfortunately, gossip seems to be such an integral part of social interaction - though it is exciting sometimes! Although most of my gossip seems to come from QC, so I wouldn't really lose that from deleting Facebook.

What is your main method of communication with your friends?

Olek:

I don't really have one main one, I use several depending on which friends I'm communicating with: email, google talk, irc, twitter, sometimes sms.

GP:

SMS. I've never called people much, and oddly my friends don't seem to use email much. I know for a fact that some of my close friends don't actually know my email address.

My thoughts: Who knows people's email addresses these days? They're like phone numbers - store them in your address book, and never look at it again. I really dislike Facebook chat. It's slow, has stupid icons, and any noob on your friends list can message you - which I guess begs the question of why did I added them in the first place....

Do you find that you have more spare time to read things you are interested in, rather than being inundated with the boring minutiae of the lives of people you may barely know, or just more spare time in general?

Olek:

Erm, I use twitter alot (too much), so I still get my fair share of timewastiness. Twitter does tend to be more relevant and interesting than facebook though. When facebook changed so that it was more like twitter with the status updates, it didn't really replicate twitter. The feel is very different. Not many people talk about what they've been doing ("got coffeee, had a shower"), it's often tweeting about important stuff (or atleast what's in the media) and insights into things they might've seen (like during the QLD floods people posting videos/photos of the situation). It feels sometimes a little like a massive irc channel, but with celebrities and stuff posting links to funny things they're interested in too.

GP:

Unfortunately, I still spend the same amount of time on the computer. It's funny, now I don't spend time on Facebook, I spend more time reading news sites and catching up on current affairs. Essentially, I've traded the minutiae of about 100 people for the minutiae of almost 7 billion.

My thoughts: I don't think the reduce time-wasting purpose of getting rid of Facebook applies to me. Like Olek and GP, I'd probably just spend more time online doing something else.

Do you find that you want to spend more time with your friends just to

catch-up now that you're not on Facebook?

Olek:

No. I never thought of Facebook as a way to catchup with friends anyway, so not having it hasn't really changed anything. I don't find the communication it facilitates to be rich enough for me to want to use it like that. I prefer real life (or atleast voice).

GP:

Yes. I don't really distinguish a status update from an SMS, and now that I only have SMS, I've realised how impersonal, cold and emotionless a text is. I'm not a fan of moving our entire social lives over to the internet, as so much nuance, so much complexity, is lost in translation. I'm generally an anti-social person, but I've definitely found I want to spend more time with friends in real-life. Being able to share their stories, experiencing every emotion and memory together with them; it is so much more fulfilling than clicking a link to a YouTube video over Facebook. I worry that our ability to truly connect with another person will be lost in the future due to the banality of social media.

My thoughts: I'm not a big fan of catch-ups in the first place. While there are a few people I like to meet up with every now and again because I haven't seen them in so long, in general, I usually only like to meet up with people if I really enjoy spending time with them. I don't know... sometimes I find it a bit of a hassle when someone wants to meet up for coffee out of the blue to "catch up", when we really weren't all that close to begin with. It's a bit like the small talk you make with people you have just met. I find that the people I spend a lot of time with are the people I tend to click really well with, and being with them is fairly easy. As opposed to some friendships where I still value them as a friend, but they're not the kind of friend I could chat with for two or three hours and wonder where the time went.

Although, I guess it's important to catch-up with people, as otherwise you will lose friendships, and it also might mean you miss out on finding out something important about someone - something that completely changes how you think about them. I should really get out of my comfort zone a lot more often. =(

And that concludes the 2-part series on leaving Facebook! I have been given quite a lot of ~~food~~ fodder for thought, thank you Olek and GP. =)

Leaving the Social Network, Part 1

2011-02-11T19:15:00.005+11:00

(This blog post ended up being quite long, so I'm splitting it into parts.)

I find that the more I want to do with my life, the more worried I am about being "exposed" for thinking a certain way that some people may find undesirable. Which I feel is also a bit ridiculous, as I am someone who believes in freedom of speech, but at the same time, I know that there will be people out there who will form preconceptions about me if they were to find out about the things that I am interested in.

In fact, today we had a BBQ for all the tech people in my building, and of the 350 or so people who were there, David pointed out that there were very few females. Albert jokingly added, "That means you'll go far in this company, Anna." I know he was kidding, but I replied saying that if I ever did get promoted, all of my co-workers would wonder if it was because I slept with one of the higher-ups, and soon I'd be hated by everyone - I imagine that my various blog posts on the topic of sex probably wouldn't help defend my innocence. While the females in senior positions that I have met so far are well-liked, I know in my last job, there were a lot of rumours going around about various dealers sleeping with people in order to get their second game earlier.

Obviously, one of the ways in which I could reduce this threat would be to delete my blog, but again, the freedom of speech thing comes up again. Also, blogging is very therapeutic for me. I've never blogged with the intention of being picked up by some publishing company, or tried to be the gossip hub of my friendship circles where everyone would check here to find out all the juicy developments. I enjoy being able to lay out my thoughts, and if I'm writing for an audience, then it forces me to try to explain myself as best I can, and this can often lead to a realisation that my thinking is illogical (or someone will at least point it out in the comments).

My next thought was to delete my Facebook. Facebook is notorious for its privacy issues, and I think that without it, people are very unlikely to make the link between me and this blog. The guy who tried to take on Anonymous was an idiot, but I believe that there is some truth in his theory that you can work out information about someone on Facebook despite how private they make their settings, because not all of their friends will have use the same settings. I blogged a while back about the Blizzard RealID debacle where someone was able to find out so much information about someone given only their first and last names, and which city they lived in.

Ever since I joined the ranks of the smartphone owners, I've been more and more active on Facebook. A lot of what I do is read things that Luke links, which I could probably do from Twitter, but Twitter links don't have that preview feature that you can get from Facebook, so I don't like waiting for something to load unless I know I'm likely to want to read all of it. Other than that, I have more of a passive use, which is so that people are able to invite me to events.

When I create events, I will usually have a guest list in mind, so I will invite people from my mental guest list (although I always start typing Olek's name in, before remembering that he doesn't have a Facebook anymore, but that just ends up being a trigger to remind me to email him instead), then I will browse the rest of my list to see if I forgot anyone. So losing the ability to invite people over Facebook isn't really that much of an issue for me. If I didn't add them to my mental checklist in the first place, then they're probably not 100% suited for the event (in terms of interest in the activity, cohesion with the rest of the people invited, general availability).

I know that deleting a Facebook isn't the end of the world - Team Zuckerberg is ready and willing to hand me back my account if I decided it was all a mistake, but I thought I'd ask two of my friends who have done it how they dealt with it before trying it myself.

Why did you delete your Facebook account?

Olek:

Privacy concerns and lack of control you have over your own information. It was around the time the facebook privacy issues were in the media. Some geeky people (mostly Cory Doctorow) started deleting their accounts and once I read their reasons I did as well. I should probably mention I didn't use it that much anyway, well not as much as other people. I didn't play games on it, or have important contacts on it (like some people have business contacts that don't want to lose and therefore don't want to delete the account). I used it mostly for events and occasionally looking at photos.

A lot of people say things like "oh I only use it for events, I don't have personal info on there, and my account is on highest privacy settings so no one I don't know can see what I do anyway." The thing is though, it doesn't make that much difference. You still appear in photos other people put up of you and they can still tag you in them, they just can't get to your wall. Also, people leave accounts logged on in public(ish) places like university computer labs or net cafes and people can just come along and snoop around. Also there's nothing stopping a "friend" of yours from being on their facebook with a bunch of their friends (but not necessarily yours) in the room and going around trolling. Also nothing to stop them copy-pasting images and sharing them over imageshack or whatever. There's loads of ways to abuse the facebook privacy settings. You can still make a minimal facebook account with just a fake name which you use just for being invited to events...which is possibly okay, but it leads me into my second point...

I don't like that facebook has become the de facto tool for organising events. Something like that should be separate from other information. Having all your info in one "basket" means there's a single point of failure for having all your info leaked. Google has the same problem with their products. Whether anyone really cares about your info is another issue. There's a tradeoff between privacy and functionality with most of these Web2.0 apps. I don't find the functionality of facebook to be worth the amount of info it wants me to put up or the privacy concerns associated with it.

There's another side to this also which I only came across recently while watching this roundpanel discussion about Wikileaks and internet democracy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMzEdkiz5tY). Basically someone on the panel asks (paraphrasing) "what will people do when their primary form of communication is a closed platform owned by companies subject to the law?" Or something similar. This is basically the case with facebook and twitter. They're both companies which have been hit by US government subpoenas asking for usernames, ip addresses, contact details, BANK details, etc. We only really heard about it from twitter since they were the only ones to try and fight this subpoena (but you can bet anything that facebook and google also received one (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/01/07/twitter/subpoena.pdf)). Not only do I not like it that facebook is now the de facto event organiser, I also don't like how the de facto forms of COMMUNICATION are now privately owned by companies which can be subpoena'd (and worse). This all sounds a bit paranoid but it's also the principle of the thing.

GP:

I was using it too much. Checking it every 10 minutes, wasting time playing Mafia games (Farmville wasn't around when I had FB), it was a drain on my life. I spend way too much time on the computer anyway, and I figured the time I spent off FB could be used for a better purpose.

Also, while I'm often very interested about serious issues people face in life, I don't much care for the boring minutiae and myriad random details people post on FB and Twitter. I honestly don't care if you thought the train was late today. It's late most days. It isn't news! I know a wide variety of people, but I don't have many close friends, and I was beginning to find all the status updates draining. (you can now remove people from your feed, apparently).

Mostly, however, I think I deleted my Facebook account because I was feeling bored and a little down one day, and just did it for the hell of it. I promptly reactivated it very briefly in order to steal the very useful list of birthdays, allowing me to remain at an optimal social level. (I send a text on their birthday.) It has been completely deleted though now, no chance of getting it back.

My thoughts: I agree with Olek on the privacy issues. I've been doing compliance training at work, and one of the topics I did was on the Privacy Act (seeing as a lot of bank employees can potentially access pretty private data), which in a nutshell is: "We have to tell you what we're going to do with your data, we can't collect stuff we don't need (like sexual orientation) and we'll try our best to keep it secure, but we may have to release it if ordered to by a court." We can feel safe, as Civ III rules state that a democracy has minimal corruption, not every country is ruled by a democracy, and you may find that if you are in trouble overseas, your country might not save you due to political pressure.

I second GP's comment about a lot of status updates not being "news". There are so many passive-aggressive comments on my feed that I have to wonder if it's just me who seems to attract emo people. I once made the mistake of asking someone if they were OK, then was bombarded with cryptic replies along the lines of, "I can't believe that happened to you!" or "Next time we see each other, I'll sort it out!" and I never even found out what the issue was!

How do you feel when your friends have been invited to an event and you haven't? Have you ever decided to gatecrash anyway?

Olek:

Well usually I get people asking if I'm going to be there before it happens. When I say I don't know about it, they just invite me anyway. I never find out about secret events to which I'm not invited, unless I'm then invited.

GP:

Obviously I feel a little left out, but honestly it doesn't happen that often. I give credit to my friends, who are quite adept at telling me about parties before they happen. The main people who don't invite me to parties are usually partners of my friends, those who I've met, but don't know the friendship groups well enough to think too hard about inviting certain people. One girlfriend of a mate in particular has forgotten me several times, but she seems genuinely apologetic about it. I have considered gatecrashing her parties, as I'm sure I'd be welcome, but never have.

I often won't get invited by the person who is hosting/creating the event, but they usually ask "could someone message GP about this?" I always feel flattered when that happens.

The one thing I miss about events is the random invitations to parties from friends of friends, as they simply tick everyone off their friend list. A guy who I'd only met briefly once at a party invited me to his intimate 21st over FB once. I had a great time, despite not knowing anyone (our mutual friend arrived late), and made some friends I still talk to today (and who invite me to parties off FB...). The random party never happens any more.

My thoughts: I guess the thing that I'm most concerned about is, "Would anyone really want me there?" I don't consider myself outgoing enough to be a "party-girl", and I fear that if I wasn't on Facebook, would people actually make the effort to make sure I am invited? Obviously Olek and GP are too popular to ever have to worry about this. =P

Roll d20 For Friendship

2011-02-09T21:47:00.004+11:00

I went to a CYN lunch with some of the Mergo people, and it dawned on me that a lot of the Mergo people have been friends since high school, and still regularly talk to each other. Sometimes my high school friends invite me to do things with them, but whenever I want to do something, my high school friends are rarely the first people who come to mind. I guess I've always felt like my uni friends are the friends I chose, and my high school friends were the people I got along with the most out of the 60-odd people in my year level (I realised there were more people in MrMan5.5's Year 12 class than my entire school). I think the only person I really see from high school is Sharon, and Kelly on the odd occasion that I do something with her and ArO.

Anyway, back to the Mergo people. I call them that, because I can't think of a better way to refer to them. In my head, I normally call them Paul's high school friends, since I kinda met him first, but they're my friends as well, so it's not like how I can call Graham's South Lawn friends the South Lawn people, because I guess I don't really think of them as my own friends. I think right now I feel like I want something like the Mergo people. I've never really had a group of friends that I thought of as my "crew", I've had phases where I've wanted to hang out with certain people, usually related to what I spend most of my time doing at any given point in time (e.g. When I was playing WoW a lot, I spent most of my time either talking to WoW people online, or going to WoW dinners (or playing WoW)).

So the answer came to me at the CYN lunch in the form of GMJoe. Strangely, it turns out that he was the first Mergo person I met, with the second being Sphericus, and I believe Paul is third, though I may have met others, just not remembered it. I don't know why, but during the lunch, I had a strange feeling that I had met GMJoe before, and so I asked him about it, and it turns out that he was the one who introduced me to the game Paranoia. (Funnily, when he was telling me about Paranoia the second time, I mentioned that someone had given me a brief explanation a few years back, not realising that person was him.) I believe that at the time, I expressed interest in joining his game, but then didn't see him for many years, and so I'm guessing that's a no.

After the lunch, GMJoe lamented that he is always the GM and never a player and asked if I was interested in running a game. After much thought, I decided that maybe this is the solution. I wanted a close-knit group of friends, and this might be one way to create one, plus, I feel a bit weird having been the president of II but never having run a game. I don't know what type of game I want to run, when I'll even have the time (probably the most important factor), or even where I'll run it (maybe after I move out). I'm half-tempted to mention it to GMJoe and then never invite him, but I'm not petty like that. Maybe...

Time to Go Home

2011-01-23T11:07:00.003+11:00

Last blog post from Japan. I know I intended to blog every day, but I kinda ran out of things to say (though I'll probably think of more back in Australia. Then I installed HoN....).

Things I want to eat when I get back to Australia:

-fish and chips

-pasta

-pizza

-proper sausages

-Heinz big red tomato chips

-Grill'd

-burritos

-pies

-sausage rolls

-chips with salt (with the exception of McDonald's, which I hear tastes the same everywhere you go, every time we had chips (as in the fast food kind), they weren't salty at all. Probably because salt is bad for you)

-KFC

-chicken and sweet corn soup

-mum's won tons

-mum's tofu

-Indian curry

What I will miss most about Japan: soy milk melon pan.

Adventures in Japan, Part 4

2011-01-16T00:28:00.003+11:00

My favourite suburb of Toyko so far has to be Shibuya. It's the teen-haven of Tokyo, but for me, it's food heaven. There are so many ramen shops there, and fast food places. At Rangers' suggestion, we finally tracked down a Freshness Burger there, which is kind of like Lord of the Fries, but with burgers. Of course, I have to mention the clothes shopping. It seemed like every single store was having a sale, so I thought maybe I'd be able to pick up some work clothes cheaply. MrMan5.5 told me Shibuya 109 was famous for clothing, so I took a look inside.

It was completely packed with females, ranging from teens to middle-aged women. The clothes looked as though they were aimed more towards young females, so maybe the older women were just there shopping for their daughters. After looking through some of the floors, I decided the clothes weren't really my style and headed over to the other store MrMan5.5 pointed out - H&M. I was amazed that I could find what I thought to be suitable work clothes for 1000 yen a piece - that's about $12. I bought a whole bag full of stuff for what I paid for one shirt back in Australia. I really don't understand why clothes are so expensive in Australia compared to Japan. It's all the same material, right?

Anyway, I would really recommend heading to Shibuya, if not for the tasty ramen, or cheap clothing stores, at least to see Hachikō. Not to mention MrMan5.5's other reason for wanting to go - it was where the popular Nintendo DS game The World Ends With You is set. It's also amazing to see the main intersection in front of Shibuya station at night on a weekend. The Elizabeth/Flinders St. intersection is nothing compared to this, it's a huge mass of people crossing in all directions, and yet everyone seems to make it to where they want without issue. It amazes me how people can get around without problems in a country with such a high population density. I guess one of the contributing factors is Japan's great infrastructure. Nobody is running for a train because the next train will be 3-4 minutes after that one, so it's not really a big deal if you miss it. The stairs at the station have arrows indicating which side is for walking up and down, so it is a lot more efficient.

The biggest adventure MrMan5.5 and I had today though, was trying to wash our clothes. There wasn't a coin laundry in the area we are staying in currently (Ginza), so we were told to head to Tsukiji to find one.

[Short tangent. I mentioned this before, but my number one warning for people planning to go to Japan is that there are almost no rubbish bins anywhere. Not only that, but Japan is really into recycling things, so even if you do find a bin, it is probably a recycle bin and not suitable for whatever it is you're holding. Every time we find a bin while out and about, I feel the compulsion to empty out my pockets of all rubbish, because it's unlikely that we will encounter another bin until we are back in our hotel room. In fact, the bin in our hotel room seems to always be overflowing.]

Finding our way around Tsukiji was a bit difficult. There weren't many notable landmarks that we could find, and seeing as neither of us was very good with kanji, we weren't really able to read the signs around the place. After walking around for a bit, and even stopping to ask someone for help, we managed to find the place, only to find it was completely deserted. All the washing machines and stuff were there, just nobody tending the store or anything. I read somewhere that the crime rate is really low in Japan, so I guess people are quite trusting. Quite a few times, I've seen boxes of stuff stacked outside stores completely unattended, and thought how easy it would be to walk off with a box or two, but maybe it was Japan's aura of dutifulness (to the society) that wiped any criminal compulsions from my mind.

It made me realise that although we are getting by on hiragana and katakana alone (it is super important to learn katakana, it makes life so much easier as you can usually guess the meaning of everything else), there are a few kanji that would have made things easier had I remembered them sooner. It's probably a bit late for someone who hasn't learnt Japanese or Chinese to learn all of the 2000 or so kanji that most Japanese are expected to know, and I don't really fancy spending the rest of this trip studying, so I tried to find a list of important ones for travelers. This site has a few, but I thought I'd add some of my own.

小　SMALL - This might be a really obscure way of remembering it, but MrMan5.5 described this kanji as a 'J' with wings, which reminded me of Jenny's nickname in Gossip Girl "Little J".

大 BIG - I like to think of this as a person stretching themselves out to their fullest to try to make themselves appear bigger.

(The toilet we have in the hotel room seems to have the kanji for small and big in place of the "half-flush" and "full-flush" icons.)

電　ELECTRIC - To me, this just looks like one of those Chinese-style lanterns, which are now probably powered by electricity.

車　VEHICLE - This one is another obscure explanation, but to me, it looks like the kanji for middle (中) that I know from mah jongg, only with extra lines above and below, which makes me think of a car driving in the middle of two lanes. Co-incidentally, this kanji alone is the kanji for car, though I believe the meaning is intended to be vehicle, as combined with the kanji for electric, you get the kanji for train (ie. electric car/vehicle). I believe this is also the kanji used for elevators, but I can't remember the word off the top of my head right now.

英語 ENGLISH - I learned this so that I would be able to see if the DVDs/Blu-Rays I wanted to buy had English subtitles. Then MrMan5.5 reminded me that they would be region-locked anyway. I was so disappointed, because I had found the Densha Otoko special box set. T_T Anyway, I can't even remember this kanji myself, I just wrote it down in my notebook so I could compare it with other kanji on the box, but the second one I do remember, because part of it is the kanji for five (五) which is pronounced "go" which is the same pronunciation for the kanji 語 with the meaning language. It's a nifty kanji to know, because you can easily find languages, for instance, 日本語 is the kanji for Japan combined with the kanji for language, with the meaning Japanese (the language, not the nationality). The first part of the kanji is also the kanji for the verb "to say", 言, so more stuff about talking. The last part of it is the kanji for mouth, 口.

Some useful katakana words that I have picked up:

カレー curry

バーガー burger

メロンパン melon pan

ラメン ramen (also found in hiragana)

ギョウザ gyouza (dumplings)

パスタ pasta

チーザ cheese

ドア door

ホテル hotel

ビル building (not to be confused with ビール which is beer)

グレンラガン Gurren Lagann

MrMan5.5 just went to our local convenience store and tried to buy some weird flavoured pringles. He wanted the store clerk to read the flavour for him (because MrMan5.5 didn't know what it said), but he wasn't able to get his meaning across, so he wanted me to add a part asking how to read something.

Sumimasen. Kono (kanji/katakana/hiragana) wa dou yomimasu ka?

-Excuse me. This (kanji/katakana/hiragana), how do you read it?

Adventures in Japan, Part 3

2011-01-14T02:05:00.002+11:00

Not sure if I can keep up this blog-a-day thing while in Japan, as I'm quickly running out of things to say - and most of what I have said you can probably find on some tourist site about Japan anyway.

I forgot to mention yesterday, but MrMan5.5 managed to find a yakisoba roll at our local convenience store, so he bought one so he could see what they were talking about in Yakitate Japan.

We went to Hakone today, to try out one of the hot springs there. We decided to go to Hakone Kamon, which had good reviews, and was relatively easy to get to from the station (there's a free shuttle bus that leaves every hour, but there is also a bus you can catch for 100 yen that seems to be pretty frequent). The staff were really friendly, and the other patrons were also really nice as well. They were perfectly happy to take photos of us, and teach us how to tie the belt for the yukata.

I couldn't take the heat in the hot spring though, and so I didn't stay for very long. It was also kinda boring. They separate the hot springs based on gender (because you're naked while inside), so I didn't really have anyone to talk to, and I didn't want to bring my book in case it got wet. Any time I got into a hot spring, another woman would leave (was it me?), so even if I wanted to talk to someone, there wasn't anyone there to talk to. As we went during the week, the hot spring was virtually deserted.

When we first got here, I was pretty reluctant to speak any Japanese at all (despite spending 2 years studying it at uni). Whenever Japanese was required, I wanted MrMan5.5 to do the talking, because he looked like a foreigner, and so they would speak to him nice and slowly. If I did the talking, they would assume I was fluent, and so would answer with fast, complicated Japanese and we'd be clueless. This proved to be correct when we were in Akihabara and I asked if they had Gurren Lagann in Blu Ray and was answered with a long stream of Japanese. When he saw our clueless faces, he crossed his arms to make an 'X' and shook his head no.

I think most of my reluctant comes from experiencing people speaking Japanese in Australia. By people, I mean weeaboos, and by speaking Japanese, I mean screaming out a few phrases they've picked up from anime over and over again, completely ignoring the meaning and correct usage of the phrases. I think it's great that they're opening themselves to another culture, especially one so different from the one we have in Australia, but I cringe every time I see them. For one, they act quite arrogant all the time, like they're so much better than everyone else because they "know" another language. They sound all whiny and they seem to punctuate anything that is said with "Ee?!?!?!?!?!?!" that is really drawn out. It's something that Japanese people do as an expression of surprise, a bit like "Oh, really?", and seems to occur a lot in anime, but weeaboos seem to use it so much it sends shivers down my spine when I hear it.

Then you get the problem of their Japanese vocabulary being so limited that in order for them to talk, it is mostly in English, so what they end up doing is throwing in Japanese phrases when they can, and speaking English otherwise. Overall, it ends up sounding really stupid.

"I saw a neko statue today. It was soooooooooooo kawaii!!!!!!"

"Ee?! No way!"

"I want to go to Nihon soooooooooooooooooooooooooo much."

"Watashi, too!"

I know I'm acting all arrogant now, like I'm better than them because I actually studied Japanese, and have now actually been to Japan. It seems like my willingness to admit that: a) I'm not Japanese and b) I'm bad at speaking Japanese, is mostly my basis for being arrogant. In Australia, I will almost never speak Japanese, even if the situation might require it, because I feel like I'm butchering the language. When I call Graham, he always answers with "moshi moshi, Anna-san", and I always reply in English.

It seems silly not to use what little I know now that we're in Japan though. Even if my grammar is all wrong, and the pronunciation is off, it would probably help us and the people we're talking to get the gist of what we want across at least. So despite my reservations, I'm trying to say more and more in Japanese and trying to encourage MrMan5.5 to do the same. We learnt how to say "Are you a homeless person?" last night, and I want to get MrMan5.5 to say it to some random people and see how they react, and if they get angry, just pass it off as a foreigner's mistake. He only seems to want to ask me if I'm homeless. At any rate, I've decided that it's mean, and I'll probably burst out laughing if he does it anyway, so that would give it away.

To finish off, I thought I'd add some useful phrases for anyone else who is planning to visit Japan (please do not give this to weeaboos).

しゃしんをとってもいいですか。

Shashin o tottemo ii desu ka?

Is it OK to take photos?

しゃしんをとってもらえますか。

Shashin o totte moraemasu ka?

Can you take a photo of me?

みているだけです。

Mite iru dake desu.

I'm just looking.

それをみてもいいですか。

Sore o mite mo ii desu ka?

Can I look at it?

わたしたちにはたかすぎます。

Watashitachi ni wa taka sugimasu.

It's too expensive for us.

＿＿＿＿はどこでかうことができますか。

_______ wa doko de kau koto ga dekimasu ka?

Where can I buy _____?

＿＿＿＿＿がはいっていますか。

_______ ga haitte imasu ka?

Does it contain ________?

わたしは＿＿＿＿＿＿アレルギです。

Watashi wa ________ arerugi desu.

I'm allergic to __________.

ふたりがおねがいします。

Futari ga onegai shimasu.

Table for two, please.

えいごのメニューがありますか。

Eigo no menyuu ga arimasu ka?

Do you have an English menu?

Number of people who I have asked to take photos of us: 2

Number of convenience store breakfasts so far: 3

Number of people asked about their homeless status: 0

Number of giraffes tending the counter at 7-11: 1

Adventures in Japan, Part 2

2011-01-12T20:36:00.002+11:00

One of the first things that happened to us when we got off at Akihabara was getting accosted by maids. They're on every corner, and while most of them seem to be from the same franchise, it seems there are quite a few different maid cafes around Akihabara. So today we decided we were going to try one out for lunch (when in Rome...) and ended up picking the PoPoPuRe Maid Cafe, which was lucky, because they had an English speaking maid there. The food was decent (the corn soup was terrible, don't order it if you go there), and the maids were very friendly, but it wasn't really what I expected. It was kind of fun "casting" the tasty magic spell on our food with the maid (although MrMan5.5 said it wrong, and I blame him for my food not tasting as well as it could have). They also have a dubbing studio for you to dub your own short anime for 1500 yen, but we opted not to try it after seeing another group fail terribly at it. You could also get a photo with a maid for 500 yen.

The coolest part of the maid cafe was if you order a rice omelette, they draw a picture for you.

The melon float (spider) that MrMan5.5 ordered was also really cute.

The menu was in both English and Japanese, but the English names weren't all the descriptive of what the food was. Mine said it was a tomato sauce pasta, so I was expecting Napoli sauce or something like that, but it ended up being a Bolognese. Although to be fair, I think the katakana said something along the lines of "meat sauce", but just beware if you're a vegetarian and can't read any Japanese.

Japan is such a cute country. The people are cute, the food is cute, even the sewerage system is cute.

(Rar! I'm going to eat you... Om nom nom)

One important thing I learnt about Japan was that even though there are pedestrian crossings everywhere, they're not like the ones in Australia where cars have to give way to pedestrians. They're more like recommendations for where you should cross. Some have traffic lights, but people seem to ignore them sometimes, so it's important to look out before you cross.

Omiyage today: GP, Olek, Anjelica

Gashapon played so far: 6

Meals served by maids: 1

Number of people who celebrated their birthday at the Pokèmon Center today: 2 (and we got free stickers!)

Adventures in Japan, Part 1

2011-01-11T23:40:00.004+11:00

We arrived in Japan and spent most of the first few hours working out how to get to Tokyo station from Narita airport, and how we were going to get from there to our hotel. The map of the train system wasn't all that helpful, as there are so many train lines, and we only had a JR pass that let us on JR lines (there are lines owned by other companies in Japan). After fumbling around at a few information booths, we finally got told to catch the subway to Ginza station. It was 160 yen for a ticket, which is about $2, so not too bad, especially considering how fast and clean the trains are. One of the first things we realised once we started walking around was that Japan is so clean, but there are no rubbish bins. Well, there are a few, but compared to Melbourne where you see rubbish bins pretty much on every corner, Tokyo is pretty much a rubbish bin void - which makes me wonder how it is so clean.

MrMan5.5 had an encounter with Japan's crouching ground toilets, and now he's afraid of bum sprays whenever he goes to a toilet. I wasn't nearly so silly, and went to the Western-style toilet. Tokyo is actually really good as a tourist city, there are signs everywhere for important places, and a lot of them are in both English and Japanese. We are still a bit wary of ordering food, as a lot of menus are Japanese only, but so far, I've had curry, which I know the katakana for, so it's all good! MrMan5.5 has been a bit more brave, and has tried something other than curry. At his suggestion, we also had a convenience store breakfast, which he says is something a lot of Japanese people do.

People weren't kidding when they said there are vending machines everywhere. We have yet to find a vending machine for used high-school girls' panties, but we did order dinner from a vending machine today:

You put money into the machines, pick the meal you want to buy, and a ticket pops out. If you are done ordering your meal (I assume you can order multiple meals in one transaction), you pull the lever at the bottom, and your change drops out. MrMan5.5 ordered a katsudon and udon set, and I ordered curry soba.

Obviously, one of our first stops was going to be Akihabara (a.k.a. Electric Town), where MrMan5.5 nearly had an orgasm as we stepped off the train. We didn't see anyone in cosplay apart from people who wore it as part of their job, but it was so much more amazing than I imagined.

One of the first things we noticed was how tall all the buildings were in Tokyo. I imagine the design process for new buildings goes something like this:

Owner: I want to build a convenience store.

Architect: OK.

*6 months later*

Owner: I only wanted one floor.

Architect: Sorry, we only know how to build skyscrapers.

Owner: What do I do with the rest of this space?

Architect: Rent it out for lots of money.

Owner: OK.

We walked maybe 1km in terms of distance away from Akihabara station, but managed to lose hours there, because every store we walked into had at least 5 floors. It reminded me of the huge Pokèmart in Celadon City. There is a floor directory on each floor, and you can go up and down via stairs or an escalator. All the stores were really cramped though, you will spend a lot of time trying to edge past people. Which is not surprising, given Tokyo is about a quarter the size of Melbourne ( 2187 km^2 vs 8806 km^2, yet has over three times as many people living there (13 million vs 4 million) according to Wikipedia.

It is stupidly easy to spend money here. 100 yen coins look and feel like 10c coins, but are actually worth $1.20. Maybe I should convert all of my money to 1 yen coins, so I can actually feel what I'm spending (but then I'll be worse than the people with the 5c coin jars, since things typically cost around 2000-3000 yen).

My loot so far:

Omiyage so far: Gerald and QC.

Gashapon played so far: 1

Non-McDonald's/KFC meals eaten so far: 3

Failed attempts at trying to communicate in Japanese: Priceless (????)

Sucks To Be Female

2011-01-03T04:12:00.003+11:00

I'm becoming quite fond of James Devlin's blog, Coding The Wheel. I really like his writing style, and his posts are usually really helpful and easy to understand. I stumbled upon his post about the Matt Aimonetti/Ruby event, and when I read it, I was astonished that such a thing actually happened - not the part about a guy putting semi-pornographic images in a slideshow, but the part about people being completely outraged. Then again, I live in a country where we have the right to freedom of speech, and although we're sliding towards an era of super political correctness, we're mostly a free-speaking people.

Seeing as this seems to be one of my "crusades", I'm sure I've gone on ad infinitum about the whole females in a male-dominated environment. What this made me think of, was a comment Paul made a long time ago, about how people should learn to speak English. I'm sure I blogged about it before but I'm too tired to search for it, and just saying it like that is completely out of context, so please don't think badly of him! It's not as bad as it sounds. Still, I'm starting to agree with him to some degree - if you want to go somewhere different, don't expect people to bend over backwards to accommodate you. Despite the fact that English is taught at schools in Japan, when I go to Japan, I am going with the expectation that people will speak Japanese, which is why I'm equipped with my trusty "Eego o hanasemasu ka?"

Ah, I tried to stop myself, but it seems like I'm going to go on my crusade anyway. I became an engineer with the knowledge that this is a male-dominated field. I didn't even pick chemical engineering, which is apparently starting to approach a 1:1 ratio of genders, I picked software engineering, which is stereotypically full of geeky guys, and based on my 151 class, probably holds true to the stereotype. If this were marketing, and some company designed an ad to appeal to a market sector which turned out to be predominately males, if such an ad were to feature scantily clad women lying around on sports cars, nobody would bat an eyelid. If a speaker wants to make his presentation more appealing to an audience of mostly males, and he adds similar images, it sparks debate. Why? Supposedly because the females in the audience felt that it was insulting to them and degraded them.

OK, I understand that. I would prefer to be treated as an intelligent (arguable) being, rather than a piece of meat. So this reminded me of something MrMan5.5 said to me at Manifest last year. I said that I thought it was disgusting the way that some of the people were looking at some of the female cosplayers. He argued that they dressed that way because they wanted people to look at them. Taken completely to the extreme, it leads to the whole, it's OK to rape girls if they dress like sluts, but that's not what he meant. He meant that these people put time and money into their costumes, with the intention of having people take photos of them and admire them. A bit like art. I disagreed with him at the time, but I see the point he was trying to make now.

What if pornographic images cause males to objectify those women who chose to be photographed and not every single woman in the whole-wide world?!

When my online gaming started involving more than tower defense maps in Starcraft, and I encountered more people, I was exposed to a large number of ways to be told to suck someone's balls, or something of that variety. At first, I thought, "What?! Did he really just say that?" and was curious as to whether this was how males really speak when there are no females around - which, admittedly, was part of the appeal of hiding my identity. Now it doesn't even phase me at all, and when someone drops the C-bomb, and if someone calls them on it with the excuse that "there are ladies present", I usually end up thinking that person is being oversensitive. To me, that kind of stuff is part of the "gamer lingo". Sure, it might be offensive and/or exclude people, but it seems the majority of people who are part of that community are fine with the way that it is.

Side note - the kanji for "bride" consists of the "woman" and "home" characters, which is meant to signify a woman moving to her new home after getting married. The kanji for "wife" consists of the "woman" and "broom" characters. Both of these seem pretty damn sexist, if you think about it, but nobody is up in arms about that!

All of this political correctness makes me want to cry. Sometimes I find myself censoring myself because I'm afraid of who I am going to offend (which is why I'm worried about posting certain things on Facebook, and given some of the things I've heard about that have happened due to Facebook posts, I might be right in doing so). What are you meant to call "black people"? I once saw some (I'm guessing) American tourists talking about a man playing a didgeridoo in Sydney. "We should give some money to this poor African-American man, he obviously looks like he's starving." Contrary to what some people seem to think, not all dark-skinned people are African or American! They seemed like kind people, but just wow...

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is:

- if you're going where no (wo)man has gone before, keep in mind that you're entering a place with its own culture and traditions

-political correctness is becoming too much

-if you feel really uncomfortable being where you are, perhaps you should consider moving somewhere else

Leaving you with something to think about, Violet Blue asks an interesting question in her article, "2010: The Year of Whining about Women in Tech":

Everyone, every single one of you who have whined about women in tech this year are full of it until you can tell me one thing. And then, I will believe you are of a worthy cause. Like so many women in tech, I will no longer avoid attending your “women in tech” events. I will stop despising this cultural segregation for being female. I will stop hating your pro-women-in-tech posts that single us out, all cloaked in goodwill that always feels like it has a darker agenda.

Tell me why we should have more women in tech.

If you’re telling me we should, then tell me why we should. Why it is better. What benefits it brings to business, to profit, to innovation. To development. To leading companies and advising them.

And One Clown

2011-01-03T03:09:00.003+11:00

<th3no0b> Im going to be the next hitler
<th3no0b> Im going to kill all the jews and 1 clown
<rageagainsttheamish> why the clown
<th3no0b> See? no one cares about the jews
<rageagainsttheamish>lmao
-Quote #171987

Procrastinating for a bit and skimming Facebook. I realised I have a weird tendency to " Like" someone's comment even if I only liked one small part of it - though I guess that is the point of the "Like" function, to get you to interact with the site even if you're only reading briefly, so that hopefully you will stay longer and it can flash more ads at you. For instance, a friend of mine mentioned something that she her plans were for today(which was obviously so important to me that I can't even remember what it was), and at the end, she said that she was going to watch the third season of The I.T Crowd.

My cursor hovered over the "Like" button, but one of the other things I hate about liking someone's status is that because of my settings, every time someone comments on that status, I get an email with what they said, and most of the time, I can't even remember what the original comment was, so I end up having to log back into Facebook to check (again, probably another one of the reasons for the function). Instead, I clicked the "View all x comments" button, and read the comments. A lot of them were people commenting that they also liked The I.T Crowd.

I wonder if I could change my status to something with a completely outrageous statement, but have something at the end like "I just saw the new Harry Potter movie and it was awesome!!!!!!!!!!" (although arguably, some people may believe that is outrageous) whether people would comment on the outrageous thing or mention Harry Potter?

Joanna linked this article describing someone's experiment to try to find Facebook's algorithm for deciding which news items to show you. I always wondered why I would click on someone's Facebook profile to see what they've been up to lately, and see an entire wall full of status updates that never entered my news feed. Strangely enough, MrMan5.5 is never on my news feed, despite the fact that we are listed as being in a relationship together on Facebook. Something weird going on there! Maybe Facebook just assumes that I know everything going on in his life because we're together, and so I don't need to be updated with his status on my news feed. But if that were true, then you'd never get comments like this - though I do check MrMan5.5's profile every now and again to see if people have tagged him in photos from ages ago, so sometimes I comment on his status even though it doesn't appear in my news feed, but I am usually late to the party. =(

Anyway, back to the one clown. I'm trying to think of what kind of thing would be the most likely to cause people to focus on it. The one clown example works because the addition of "and one clown" causes confusion - how is the clown related to the Jews? Is there something about Jews that makes clowns important to them? Is the person saying Jews are clowns? Did Hitler hate Clowns? Whichever question is the first to pop into your head, it invariably leads to the question, "Why the clown?" which is what makes it work.

I thought the Harry Potter statement would work, because it's not entirely implausible to make it seem like a sarcastic comment, and I know a lot of people who like Harry Potter, though maybe I should wait until the next Twilight movie, because a lot of people seem very vocal about their opinions about Twilight, and will probably end up arguing about that and completely ignoring whatever else I said.

So the next part is, what can I say on Facebook that won't completely damage my "e-reputation", but will be shocking enough that I can make a "nobody cares about the Jews" comment? This is a huge can of worms, which I think deserves a post on its own, so I'll leave it at that. Suggestions, anyone?

What's For Dinner?

2010-12-17T04:09:00.002+11:00

I've put a bit more thought into the dinner problem, and I've come up with an idea. I thought I could create a website with a dinner sign-up list - inspired somewhat by the WoW dungeon queuing system. Only people who I've approved can sign up to dinners, but I will allow for some sort of vouching system, since I want to meet new people, too. Once you've signed up, you can make a party with other people who have signed up and "queue" for a dinner. Party size can be anywhere between 1 and 3 (because if you count me and MrMan5.5, that leaves 5, which is the magic number).

The first person/party in the queue will get a dinner invite. They will get an email saying when dinner will be, and get a chance to reply. This is when stuff like dietary requirements and things like that can be sorted out. If the party can't make it, I will either try to fill spots with smaller sized parties, or try with whoever is next on the list. You can't re-queue while you're currently in queue, and you don't leave the queue until the dinner is over. The purpose of this is to stop spam queuing. I'm not really expecting these dinners to be all that popular, but as QC pointed out, it is free food, and I don't want people who are only interested in a free meal. The point of this is to get feedback.

If nobody is interested, then that is also fine, MrMan5.5 and I will eat alone - which is probably what would have happened anyway. As gale mentioned, an important addition is the "If you do bad stuff, you are banned" rule. Bad stuff is up to my discretion, but something I wish the WoW dungeon system did have was a blacklist option. I say this rather than a feedback for others option, because I think the feedback system can be rigged if you just get your friends to thumbs up you, or thumbs down someone else. So you can create a blacklist of people you don't want to have dinner with (which only the system can see), and it will never group you with that person. That way nobody will have to find a nice way of telling me they don't like someone.

Hopefully the blacklist system will encourage people to play nice. If you are on a lot of blacklists, then it is unlikely that you will be invited to fill holes in other groups. Of course, you can circumvent that by simply always queuing in a group of three, but that may not be so easy depending on who you are friends with.

One problem I see with the blacklist idea is what if someone blacklists someone who wants to party with them? Since you can only queue once, and the system should never allow someone to be grouped with someone they've blacklisted, they would never get invited. The only reason I can see this happening, is if someone doesn't want to group with someone else, but is too polite to tell them to their face. I figure that is their problem and not mine. Is that fair?

There are a few things I'm unsure about how to solve, but I think it's easier to explain with an example:

We have some friends: Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Eve, Fran, Gordon, who may or may not be trying to send or intercept encrypted messages, but one thing they would like to do is have dinner at my house. Since I know them all, they are all approved to sign up. Alice is fastest off the mark, and she invites Bob and Carol to form a party. However, until Bob and Carol accept, they cannot join the queue. So in the meantime, David realises he hasn't seen Gordon in a while, so he forms a party with him. As Gordon is online at the same time, he is able to accept instantly, and so they are the first in the queue.

Eve doesn't know anybody else who has signed up, but she does know me, so even if she ends up with people she doesn't get along with, she can still catch up with me. So she queues alone. Fran is looking to meet new people, so she also queues alone. Bob and Carol finally get around to accepting their group invites, so they are queued with Alice.

Current queue: [Dave + Gordon, Eve, Fran, Alice + Bob + Carol]

I decide I want to try cooking chicken pot pie. I pick next Wednesday as the next available time and enter the details into the system. As Dave and Gordon are first in the queue, they are invited. I can accommodate for three people, so Eve is also invited. Eve is busy that day, so she declines the invitation, and Fran is invited in her place. Dave, Gordon and Fran accept. Dinner happens, they leave the queue.

So one part I'm undecided about, is what to do with Eve now. I think it's stupid to expect that everyone is keeping their schedule free for my dinners, so it seems only fair to let Eve stay at the head of the queue.

Current queue: [Eve, Alice + Bob + Carol]

Here's where I encounter my second problem. Eve is at the front of the list. The only other people on the list is a group of three people. I can either temporarily allow a party of four, or skip Eve again and only invite Alice, Bob and Carol. Let's just say I allow for a party of four, everyone is available, and we have dinner. Eve spends the entire time trying to get between Alice and Bob, which as you would expect, pisses both of them off. So dinner ends, and all are removed from the queue, but Alice and Bob blacklist Eve.

Bob is going away for work, so Alice queues alone. Eve and Carol had fun together, so they queue again. Gordon and Fran hit it off so well, that they decide they want to try it again and queue again. Dave doesn't really care who he has dinner with this time, so he also queues alone.

Current queue: [Alice, Eve + Carol, Gordon + Fran, Dave]

Alice is first, so she forms the party. Since Alice has blacklisted Eve, neither Eve nor Carol can join. So instead, Gordon and Fran get the next invitation. Gordon and Fran are invited. Fran is free, however, Gordon is not.

So the next decision I have to make is what to do with Fran and Gordon's group now? My first idea was to leave it up to Fran and Gordon. Are they OK with splitting the party up? In which case, Gordon leaves the group, and Fran is left in the queue on her own (I believe this is what the WoW dungeon system does).

Current queue: [Alice, Eve + Carol, Fran, Dave]

Dave fills the remaining gap, so Alice, Fran and Dave are invited.

So one thing it does seem to favour, is smaller groups, as you don't run the risk of the rest of your group being slow to reply. I think what I will allow, is for you to retract your invites if others are slow to accept so that you can try to form a new party if you want. However, once you are in the queue, if you decide you don't want that party, and you disband it, and queue again with a new group, you will be placed at the back of the queue (this is also what WoW does, and seems fair to me).

If there aren't enough people in the queue to fill a party, then I guess a smaller party is also fine. I think that covers all of the bases, is there anything else I didn't think of?

Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

2010-12-09T04:25:00.004+11:00

It has been a question that comes up every single time I go back to playing WoW. When someone dies in a dungeon, whose fault is it? So in typically MMOs, you have the holy trinity of tank, healer and DPS (which stands for Damage Per Second, which somehow means a damage dealer, but I guess DD was taken for things like double damage).

The tank's job is to take the damage, usually this involves knowing fights in order to position bosses to reduce party damage. The healer's job is to keep everybody alive. This usually involves casting healing spells, or buffs to reduce damage - though priests get a skill at level 85 which pulls someone towards them, which can help save someone from being stomped on, or something like that (I haven't hit 85 yet, so I don't really know how well it fits into my current toolkit). DPS are required to do lots of damage, and occasionally they will have a skill that lets them disable a monster, which they might also need to use.

During the week or so after the release of Cataclysm, the general consensus was that things were much harder than Wrath of the Faceroll. Things like crowd control are actually important, at least in heroics, and everyone has to pull their weight or the group will probably wipe. I've found that healing is actually a challenge now, and there have been a few times where I've felt like I've done everything I can, and it's still not enough. I took a bit of a break for a while, in order to farm up better gear, and things seem not so dire at the moment (although there was a hotfix that buffed priests not too long ago - I'm not sure what it did, but healing seems much, much easier now. It was kinda crazy, there was a poll on MMO champion about which healers people preferred. At the time I checked, 82% of people preferred paladins, and I forget the distribution between druid and shaman, but only a measly 3% of people preferred priest).

Previously in WoW, when a group wiped, unless it was really obvious someone else had done something absurdly stupid, the blame typically went towards the healer. If you send a letter, and find out later that it never arrived, it makes sense to assume something is wrong with the postal system. It would never occur to you that perhaps you addressed it incorrectly, or you might have completely forgotten to mail it in the first place, as these are usually unlikely events, and who blames themselves anyway?

As I mentioned, one of the big changes in Cata is that it's not just the healer's responsibility to keep everyone alive. As Olek puts it, the most important thing to learn in this expansion is it "stay out of the hurty shit". If you don't move out of the lava, you will die. If you don't keep adds crowd controlled, and the healer can't keep up with the damage, you will die. If you don't move away from the falling rocks, you will die (*cough, cough*).

Not too long ago, I came across this situation in a dungeon.

(If you don't understand what's going on: the warrior (brown - Nag) is telling the druid (orange - Dat) to focus on the mob marked with skull. The druid is saying he did, but the warrior said he was using an area of effect skill which was causing the druid to gain threat on other targets, and so they'd go and beat on the druid and he'd die. The druid said that what he was doing was fine, and if the warrior was any good, he would be able to hold aggro even with hurricane.)

Add to this, later I get a message from the warrior:

Thinking back towards the roles I described earlier, is the tank at fault for not being able to hold aggro over the druid's pitiful hurricane damage (I don't actually know how much damage he was doing) so that the mobs would attack him instead of the rest of the party? He purposely assigned an attack target so that he could build up enough aggro on that target not to have to worry that it would change targets. Holding a lot of aggro on multiple targets at once can be difficult, because while you are trying to build aggro on another, the DPS classes are unleashing everything they have on the marked target, so unless your threat can keep up, someone is going to get their face smashed in. At the same time, the tank can't completely ignore the other targets, as healing causes aggro on all mobs, so if the tank doesn't get at least some aggro on the others, eventually they're going to decide to beat down on the healer.

Is the druid at fault for.... doing too much damage? So as a DPS class, his job is essentially to deal damage, and lots of it. Also, they should crowd control where possible to ease the stress on the healer (druid wasn't able to do anything that pull). If he doesn't do enough damage, eventually the healer will run out of mana (it happens now, it's so great!), the tank will run out of health, and you'll all die (unless you're pro like Rob).

Am I at fault for letting the druid live? That doesn't seem to make sense, as it's my job to keep people alive, so letting them die seems counter-intuitive. I had a discussion with Julian ages ago about how to spot a good healer. DPS have damage meters, but using healing meters to judge skill doesn't quite work. I can make my way to the top of the healing meters spamming heals on random people all fight, but if half the raid is dead at the end, does that make me a good healer?

Knowing your class well is something that makes someone a good player in general, and I have read a lot about priests in Cata, and one of the things that crops up the most is holy priests are the best (unlike the other healing classes, priests have two healing specialisations - discipline and holy). I am a huge disc supporter. Other than a brief period in WotLK when I had disc for PvP and holy for PvE, I have always been disc for PvE (I was 31/30/0 in TBC, and that meant I was "hybrid", but I count that as disc as I had one point more in disc than holy!) and although the reason behind that might not be the greatest, it's something I want to stick with. According to the number crunchers, this is the less-than-ideal path.

This makes me worry that I might not be carrying my weight. Maybe I'm just feeling this way because after wiping on a boss many, many times, they managed to kill him after I was kicked from the group. MrMan5.5 says that it wasn't my fault, but if you look at the common element in all the failures that wasn't present in the success, arrow points to me (and all the random players who left as they didn't have the patience to keep trying, but it seems like they were just replaced with more of the same people).

The other pandemic that is spreading is the trigger happy vote-kickers. It seems that rather than give someone a chance to learn, they'd rather kick them from the party and hope to get someone new who is good. I understand that it is a waste of time explaining to someone how something works and possibly dying because they're still learning the encounter, but everyone was in that boat not too long ago, and someone was kind enough to explain it to them, so why don't they do the same to others?

I've read some stories about people who have waited in queue for over 40 minutes, only to get kicked the moment they join without any explanation (which is another problem, when you kick someone, you are required to give a reason, yet the person who gets kicked never finds out the reason - although the reason can be "asdf" and they'll still get kicked if the vote is passed). That is why I'm really reluctant to kick someone, especially a DPS class who has another long wait ahead of them.

I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing though. It's unfair to the rest of the party to die over and over just because I'm happy to be patient and teach someone new. As I said, I'd be happy to pay for people to repair their armour, but you can't trade gold across realms (I did offer to give the DK the loot I won so that he could sell it for gold, but he ignored me). But it's not just gold, it's also a waste of their time. That being said, the vote kick system would still allow the person to be kicked even if I voted no, assuming everyone else voted yes. It also punishes people for votekicking people too often, which is why the DK had to ask me to do it, as I'm guessing he has tried to kick too many people.

QUICK WoW DUNGEON QUEUE EXPLANATION
There are many different dungeons in WoW, and can be completed in parties of five people. Previously, you had to find the other party members yourself, but now you can just pick a dungeon (or a random) and tick the roles you can fulfill (tank/damage/healer) and wait in queue. The system matches people based on roles, puts you together in a party, and off you go! There is a shortage of tanks and healers compared to DPS, so they typically have short wait times, with the average DPS wait time sometimes getting to over an hour (compared to the instant - 1 min wait times for tanks and healers). =/

The good/bad thing about it is that it can match you with people from other servers, so you can be a complete asshole to everyone else and probably never see them again!

Beep, Beep

2010-12-03T21:30:00.003+11:00

Big event happened in my life! I was driving Graham home, this woman was crossing the road really slowly. I was ages away from her when I first saw and by the time I reached her, she was only halfway across the road. Since there was plenty of time to stop, I stopped next to her, and she didn't even notice, just continued at her snail pace across the road. Graham said I should beep her, and I did! It was the first time I had ever beeped someone on purpose since I got my license.The only two other times I have beeped my horn was when I accidentally sat on the steering wheel while trying to reach something in the back.

I think it says something about my personality. When people swerve into my lane, or do stupid things on the road, I would much rather just get out of their way than honk my horn and potentially get into a fight with them. Anyway, MrMan5.5 was saying it wasn't something worth celebrating, but I think it is.

Also, to Peki, I am not into beastiality!

(while in Arathi)

(this is what it was about)

The End

2010-11-30T23:31:00.002+11:00

Phew, last post for NaBloPoMo 2010! I'm starting it at 10:40PM, will I make it in time?!

In order to come around a full circle, I thought I'd link my failed attempt at NaNo 2010. I've learned a lot about what I like to read based on what I wrote. I'm not a big fan of paragraphs spent describing the surrounding area, nor even descriptions of the people themselves. Most of my focus is on the dialogue, rather than actions between people. As I mentioned before, my dialogue is quite stilted and unnatural, so that is the thing I would like to work on the most before trying NaNo again.

The main character was really bland. He wanted to become a mage, but that was pretty much his only character trait. He didn't seem to have any interesting relationships with anyone else, and was a bit of a loner. He did have friends, but I didn't really know what I was going to do with them, so they also ended up being quite two-dimensional.

So the basic plot would have been that a mage came to take Jarrod away for use as a conduit. She was a light/time mage, and quite famous for her work in the war. She explains that while shd did medical magic during the war, it wasn't because she condones the war, but because people were hurt. She tries to tell Jarrod that there are more important things that becoming a mage and fighting in the war.

It turns out that she is his mother (while she didn't give birth to him, she developed a technique to transfer his unborn body into his birth mother - who ended up marrying his father - as she didn't want him), which he figures is the reason he was never able to become a fire mage - or any mage at all. He learns a lot about the different schools of magic as the two of them travel together, but at night he constantly has dreams leading him to a specific place (he can't remember what happened when he went to see the spirits, but they are able to send him messages in his dreams). He finds that he is a very capable conduit for light, time and fire magics, but because of his extensive study at the academy, he is fairly adept at the other elements.

The two of them travel to the place in his dreams, and find out a man has worked out how to use untrained magic-sensitive children as magical conduits, boosting his power to incredible proportions. He wants to use his powers to wage a new war, while the soldiers are busy fighting their current war, but he hasn't managed to find enough children. He meets Jarrod and finds him interesting. Jarrod's personality is a bit of all of the elements, and the man realises that would make him an incredibly strong conduit, as he is able to manipulate all the elements, as opposed to most conduits who specialise in one or two.

Jarrod and his mother realise that using the children as conduits leads to them being unable to attain runes, which explains why there is a magic block in the area - the spirits are having trouble communicating with the children because they are not on the path of rune acquisition. Jarrod tries to warn the man, but he doesn't listen, and so Jarrod and his mother are forced to travel back to Istvar and try to convince the king that he needs to deal with the situation. The king says that they can't spare any troops from the front lines for some unfounded story, and dismisses both of them.

Jarrod comes up with the idea of using the academy students to fight. He says that they have magic inside them, they just can't shape it properly like a mage, but if you have enough of them, then they can act as conduits for the teachers of the academy who are magi, effectively amplifying their power. Jarrod's mother points out that this is exactly what the other guy is doing, and it may lead to these children never becoming magi either. Jarrod decides that he will ask the students of the academy to volunteer for the fight, arguing that at least he's giving them a choice in whether they want to eventually become magi or not, whereas the other guy is just forcing the children into being conduits.

While they are doing this, Pietro joins them and says that he heard what was going on through the air mail, and he wants to help. He ends up recruiting people who had studied with them at the academy to fight.

Most of the older academy students decide to help out, as they want to help save the children who are being used. Jarrod decides this is the best that he's going to get, and launches an attack. During the first moments of the attack, many of the students collapse, unconscious. Jarrod and the other magi are slowly being driven back. Then all the students who had collapsed awaken with runes - as the spirits saw their demonstrations of likeness during the fight, and saw fit to grant them their first rune. This turns the tide of the battle, and eventually, they win.

Jarrod decides he wants to see more of the world, and continues his travels with his mother in order to help people.

So that's my entire NaNo story in less than 800 words!

Game Idea

2010-11-30T21:36:00.002+11:00

I was thinking about writing an MMO where you can be any character in the MMO. The only NPCs would be the animals/monsters around the world that you could kill (or not kill, if that's how you choose to play), and while there would be an in game currency, how much things are worth is entirely up to the players. So the player can be the blacksmith that repairs weapons, or the hunter that collects pelts, or the banker, who stores items and holds onto currency (though they would have to gain a lot of trust first).

Players start out completely from scratch, and they can choose to join a village, or build their own up (by gathering the materials to build buildings, and then attracting other people to come to their village). Everything would be entirely player-enforced, if someone stole something from another player, it would have to be sorted out between the players (who may decide to involve people from their village to help them resolve it).

The most important part, is that players wouldn't have to be players, they could choose to be the boss NPCs in games. One of my biggest hates about MMOs with PvE (player vs environment) encounters is that after someone has figured out the encounter, it's easymode. Instructor Razuvious was a wall for a lot of guilds in Naxx, as he one-shot all the tanks, until someone realised you could mind control his students, and use the students to tank. After that, any guild with enough geared players to clear the trash up to Razuvious was smashing him.

If you had player controlled raid bosses, then it wouldn't just be a matter of "At 60 seconds, X casts Supernova, so everyone has to move to this side. Then 45 seconds later, X summons a skeleton that has to be killed right away." It becomes a bit more like PvP where the person you are fighting is unpredictable. They might be good, or they might be terrible, but it isn't just like dancing to the same music over and over again. They will cast stuff to target the weaker players, so it won't be as easy to be carried if you suck.

I want it to be somewhat like the Anubian guards in AQ40, where you don't know which skill they have until you are fighting them, and then everyone has to quickly prepare themselves based on which skill the guard has. So each "boss" can choose which skills they are going to level, and if there are enough skills, no encounter should be the same (although I get the feeling that people will start posting "optimal builds" and so eventually you will end up with cookie-cutter bosses).

Although, raid bosses aside, I think the game resembles too much of real life. There is too much of a grind to be able to do anything. You don't start out with any money, so where will you get money from? You sell stuff to people who have money. But where do they get money from? I'm not sure if it would go so far as to have someone who is the mint and they mine metals in order to turn them into money, and people trade their goods in exchange for the coins. What if a village has no miners and no mint - does that mean they can't have any money?

Also, what happens when people go to sleep for the night? This would only work if you had a huge number of people playing at the same time. It would suck if you traveled for half an hour getting to a new village, only to find out that all the merchants are asleep, and there is nothing for you to do there now.

I realise this game sounds a lot like Minecraft with an economy and raid bosses, but I want to add that I've never played Minecraft and I did come up with this idea before. The success of Minecraft means that my game could work in theory, as people seem to enjoy building stuff, but I don't know how I would handle griefers, which seems to be a big problem. Would people enjoy being able to raze another village? Well, if you're a griefer, obviously the answer is yes, but if you just wanted to play the game, I doubt a lot of people would be able to build up the motivation to rebuild a village if the first one got destroyed so easily.

I like the idea of being able to take on roles other than the role of the adventurer/hero, but I don't really want to play Eve Online, which a lot of people have recommended to me. I played a bit for Pandy when he went to China and had no Internet access, and the game didn't really appeal to me (well, the fact that Pandy didn't let me go anywhere in case I died might have had something to do with it, but the game itself and the mechanics don't really sound like my thing).

I've always want to play a game where the things you do actually have an impact on the world around you. I like how in Baldur's Gate II, there is a mission where you can save some people (depending on your class), and then you gain control of a headquarters and can make decisions for the people living there. I like how people react to you differently based on the things that you have done. There is no real punishment for being an asshole in MMOs. Sure, people can spam chat/forums that you're a ninja/moron, or put you up on wowjackass.com, but there are so many people playing that even if some people refuse to group with you, it's not that hard to find someone else to group with.

Probably needs a bit more thought before it is a playable game though.

More Friendship Algorithms

2010-11-30T20:56:00.003+11:00

(somehow I feel like I've written a post almost identical to this before, but time is running out and I can't really check.)

QC said that I don't spend enough time with her and that I am possibly avoiding her, but as I said to her, and as I have said before, my personal policy for deciding what to do is based on first come, first served. I think it is the most fair, and the least messy algorithm to decide how you are going to spend your time.

It used to piss me off quite a lot during vanilla WoW when one of my guildies would say, "Hey, Anna, do you mind healing X for me?" and when I put together a party and I made my way over to the instance (because nobody ever wants to help summon unless someone is already there), said guildy would then turn around and say, "Oh, actually, I might go and play some XBox." While he is well within his rights to change his mind, there are four people who have gone out of their way to help him out, and now we are left stranded. He was the tank, which is the hardest party member to replace, so it wasn't even like we could do the instance ourselves and make something of the trip out.

I think it's acceptable if you have something else that can't be put off later, like you need to pick up your parents who got too drunk when they went out, something comes up suddenly, but in most cases I will try to stick with my original plan even if a better offer comes up. I have agreed to do something with someone, and they are expecting me to be there.

Still, I think QC is right when she said that I do prioritise certain people over others. My hierarchy pretty much goes family > MrMan5.5 > other friends. I will drop pretty much anything for family stuff, because even though I don't feel all that close to my family, they are my family and I love them (but usually the only time I have to do stuff for my family involves driving Amanda around when Mum has work, or taking Mum to the hospital). I'll usually only drop something for MrMan5.5 if it's an emergency. He understands that I have other people that I want to spend time with.

FCFS isn't perfect though, as there is a way to abuse the system - simply spamming requests pretty much ensures that you get to do as much as you possibly can with the person. I don't think there's anyone out there who wants to spend that much time with me though, so I don't really worry about that.

I think if you approached events like a stack, then it would just lead to a mess. Alice asks you to play Starcraft 2 with her, but before you start, Bob asks you to go and see a movie with him so you do that. However, before you get there, Carol asks you to have dinner with her. Before you make it to dinner Dave invites you to go bowling, etc. You can't really go last in, first out, because people may feel rejected that you chose another offer over theirs. So you end up just leaving behind a wake of rejections and probably have a few people you have to apologise to later.

What does make sense is a priority queue, which may end up being better off for you, but I think is less fair than FCFS. I guess I already do use a priority queue, as emergencies tend to jump to the top of the queue, but what I mean is, having a queue of offers, but if an offer appeals more to you, then you can shift it to the front. So Alice asks you to join her for dinner, but Bob calls you and says he bought the James Bond DVD collection and is marathoning them, which you think is more fun than having dinner with Alice. So you cancel on Alice, and spend time with Bob instead. Your personal enjoyment goes up, but like with the stack algorithm, you might cause a lot of people to get angry. I think this system is also unfair, as it biases certain people.

There's a lottery system, where you can allocate "tickets" to each offer, giving more tickets to the offer that appeals to you more, and then pick a random number to determine which "wins". I'm not sure how this system is supposed to work for asynchronous offers though. I guess at best, it could wait until the last possible moment before picking a winner. I think is unfair, like the priority queue, as there is a bias towards certain things/people - since you are the one who allocates the "tickets". It does have the random factor though, so it can be slightly more fair, depending on your algorithm for allocating tickets.

There's shortest job first, which I guess could be the equivalent of agreeing to the shortest events so that you can pack more into your day. The throughput is high, but it sounds kinda weird, and it's quite difficult to pull off successfully, as you might have to cut events off short in order to make it to the next event. It makes me think of those people on ABCotD who line up multiple dates for one night, and end up pissing off their date who finds out about the other dates. Again, like with CPUs, this suffers from the "exploit" that you could just get spammed with lots of short events and so someone could effectively hog all of your time (although that depends on whether you rate the time based on how long the event takes, or rate the time based on time spent with a person - the latter would lead to someone being unable to schedule a series of short, sequential events.

Though if QC is complaining that I am not spending enough time with her, then I guess it means something has fallen through the cracks and I should put more effort into trying to fix that. Still, that doesn't change the fact that I'm busy Christmas Eve. =(

Daggy Love

2010-11-30T06:53:00.003+11:00

When I first heard the term "Love Triangle" I couldn't work out how on Earth it was possible. I was in primary school at the time, and I got as far as: Girl A likes Boy, but Boy likes Girl B. Then I couldn't get any further, because the only logical conclusion that would make it a triangle was if Girl B liked Girl A, and in primary school, girls like boys and boys like girls, but girls don't like other girls and boys don't like other boys.

Later in life, I learnt about sexuality, and that sometimes boys can like boys and girls can like girls, and then I managed to make the love triangle work, but only with bisexual people. Girl A likes Boy, but Boy likes Girl B, but Girl B likes Girl A. Now both Girl A and B have to be bisexual, because Boy wouldn't like Girl B if he had no chance of getting with her (ie. she was a lesbian), and Girl B wouldn't like Girl A if Girl A was straight, because she would have no chance of getting with her. My reasoning was, that if you realised that you had no chance with someone (ie. they were the wrong gender, or you're the wrong gender, or they are already in a relationship with someone else) you would work on getting over your emotions and try to move on.

So that's when I came up with the concept of a love directed acyclic graph (DAG). This doesn't pose any constraints on anybody's sexuality, because Girl A -> Boy -> Girl B is a DAG, and they could all be heterosexual or bisexual, but the point is, the graph still holds. QC mentioned having a 2nd floor web of love or something like that which sounds like a funny thing just to see what has happened in the past (and how incestuous 2nd floor relationships are), but maybe you could use it for the future as well.

If Facebook had a feature for love DAGs, then things would be easier. If you are listed as in a relationship, you drop off the DAG. You can secretly list who you have a crush on, and they will add those arrows to the DAG. If the person you have a crush on lists you in return, you both get a message and the magic can start (and you both drop off the DAG)! If the person you have a crush on doesn't return your feelings, then you can be happy with the feeling that you have an extra arrow leading off your vertex on the DAG. It's a win-win situation.

When (er... I mean "if" *cough, cough*) you break up, then you can rejoin the DAG, and try to find your next victim! In the event that you end up with a huge DAG, maybe I can do another poll and maybe get something published in a journal! Win-win-win situation. :)

Fodder and the City

2010-11-30T06:30:00.002+11:00

After I started watching Sex and the City, I always wondered if I wasn't somewhat like Carrie, in the sense that after I go out and do something with my friends, I will usually come home and blog about it in order to digest my day. I'm not quite so fancy as to have a weekly column in a newspaper, but whenever I do go out with friends, I usually have something new to think about when I get home.

The problem is, Carrie's friends never complain when she writes about them, even though they do read. And Carrie's circle is enclosed enough that she can write about her friends and pretty much nobody outside that circle of friends would have any idea who she is writing about. However, when I write, though I do try to keep people's identities a secret when I feel it's appropriate, there is only so much I can say about a situation before it becomes pretty obvious who I'm talking about if you happen to know the person.

For instance, I was going to write about P and N today. How I found out that P is going overseas, and when she gets back, N is going overseas, so I'm not entirely sure why, but they decided they were going to break up. Now not everyone who knows P and N would work out who they are, but pretty much anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes with either of them in the past week would probably know who I'm talking about. I wanted to do a big dissection on their relationship, but I wonder if somehow they stumble upon my blog, would they be pissed off that I am writing what I'm about to write?

So when I first heard that they were going to break up because they were going to be on holidays away from each other for a while, my first impression was they were doing it because they wanted to try out the exotic wares while away. There's that whole postcode rule thing as mentioned in Role Models (it's not cheating if you are doing it in a different post code), and while I don't believe in it, it's what some people seem to live by.

I think that's a pretty strange reason to break up. If you pretty much know that person is going to do the dirty while they're away, and you're OK with it, why bother breaking up? Just so they can say that they haven't cheated? But if they were planning to get back together again after they both returned, then does that mean they were only separated in name, but not in spirit? If that's the case, they might as well just stay together and be in an open relationship.

Now that I think about what she said, I got the impression from P that she wasn't entirely sure that they were going to get back together after the holidays were over. She never said that they were having problems, and from what I've seen of the two of them together, it doesn't seem like they are having problems, so the break-up seems so sudden to me.

I don't really want to ask either of them what's going on, because it's really none of my business, but I hope it works out well for both of them.

It's Showtime

2010-11-30T01:37:00.003+11:00

Today is the last day of NaBlo, and I have a whopping 6(!) blogs to catch up on.

I saw The Social Network today, and I think one of the nice things about it was how refreshingly different it was to most of the movies I've seen lately. I think I'm starting to develop more of a taste for shows/movies with good character development rather than good plot twists or great action sequences.

I read an article about the proposed Hollywood remake of the Millennium Trilogy, where the the author was wondering why Hollywood was bothering to remake movies that already exist (albeit with subtitles). From what I recall reading at the time, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo performed pretty well during its release, especially for a foreign movie, however, it didn't make the blockbuster amounts of money that Hollywood is expecting it to make if they add Daniel Craig to the cast list.

Watching the trailers for the movie today, made me wonder if Hollywood has run out of ideas. There's this movie where Angelina Jolie whisks away this random guy and they end up being chased by people who want to kill them. Sound like her movie The Tourist? Actually, that's the plot to her movie Wanted, released in 2008. Yeah, I couldn't see the difference, either.

Book adaptations, superhero movies, sequels to previously successful movies, modern adaptations of old stories (e.g. Shakespeare), zombie movies - that's pretty much what populates the "Now Showing" for the entire year. The movie industry keeps blaming pirates for losing so much money - which I do agree, does cost them money - but at the same time, all they are doing is repackaging stuff from a few years ago, giving it a fresh coat of paint, and charging us $15 to watch it. While advertising repackaged stuff from a couple of years ago, so that next year, we'll go and pay $16 to see that.

I guess now is a good time to get back into the classics. The acting might be sub-par, and the special effects non-existent, but good stories, and good writing will have to make up for that. I think it's a lot like games - older games don't have the awesome graphics or multiplayer capability to capture your attention, but they still managed to entertain, so there must be something there.

I think the movies and TV shows I remember the best are the ones with good writing, and good characters. Actually, I lie. I seem to have liked a lot of crappy TV shows with terrible characters and terrible dialogue. I'm trying to think about what I liked about them. I guess a part of it was that I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be a planeteer, or a power ranger, or one of the Mario brothers. Now I want a nice job, and a house, and a huge kitchen.

At first, I thought that maybe my priorities have changed. I don't want to save the world from alien invasions or nuclear waste anymore, I just want to be able to live comfortably. I am sick of movies with a happily ever after, because in real life, there rarely ever is a happily ever after. But then again, I really loved Toy Story 3. Despite being a kids' movie, I thought it was well executed, and without giving any spoilers away, I didn't feel like I was cheated out of a proper ending just because Pixar didn't want parents complaining that their kids went home crying their eyes out.

Maybe that's what has changed. I'm now an elitist movie-goer, who demands more than sparkly vampires and CGI-car chase scenes that are put in everything these days in order to cater to the masses.

Rarely Seems Very Patient

2010-11-28T02:46:00.002+11:00

I got an invitation to an event on Facebook for an event that is a while away. Not even 10 minutes after receiving the invitation, I get an SMS from the organiser saying, "Don't forget to RSVP, would love to see you there!" I wasn't sure if MrMan5.5 was free, so I didn't RSVP that night. In the morning, I woke up to another SMS reminding me to RSVP. Then three Facebook messages. At this point, I'm pretty sure it wasn't just the host thinking I was forgetful. I might be forgetful, but over the span of a day, do I really need 5 reminders? So the messages were probably directed at everyone. It just made me think that I'm really not suited to being a housewife if it involves sitting around doing nothing until there is a big event.

What I would like to know is whether there is still any need for an RSVP for some events. What do you learn when people RSVP?
-who plans to attend (and from that you can work out how many people plan to attend)
-who received your invitation
- who you should avoid inviting in the future because they're notoriously hard to contact, and never show up anyway.

When it's something like what QC did for her birthday, then I think it makes sense to need to know numbers, because there is only a limited number of places, and so if people say they aren't able to attend, then you can invite someone else who is. For things where a booking is required, or you need to purchase tickets beforehand, numbers are also important. But when it's a casual house party, is it really necessary?

You could argue that numbers will tell you how much food to buy, but everyone just seems to overbuy anyway, and with the wonders of modern refrigeration, it means you won't have to cook for the next few days or so! (Maybe it's just an Asian thing, but we always seem to have so much more food than is ever needed. I was eating food from my 21st for the week after - and that's taking into account that half of it was offloaded at my party. Mmmm, spring rolls.)

To be honest, I am finding it annoying that I am getting pestered so much. I don't really want to go for that reason. I forgot who it was who reminded me of the quote, but it's from Street Fighter (the JCVD movie), where Chun-Li has been captured by Bison, and he says to her, "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

2010-11-27T04:52:00.005+11:00

(break from stats for a bit)

Kelso: Dr Reed.
Elliot: Mr Murdoch was admitted with a COPD exacerbation, he responded well to antibiotics, bronchodialators, but he did develop a rash on his... ummm... private area.
Kelso: Sorry, on his what?
Elliot: His peepers.
Kelso: Excuse me?
Elliot: His schwing schwong.
Kelso: Dr Reed, it's bad enough that you run out on a patient in the middle of a pelvic exam, but you are a doctor and you need to be able to say simple, clinical words, like penis, or vagina, or anal.
Elliot: Anal is not a dirty word, sir.
Kelso: Tell that to my wife.
-Scrubs, My Dirty Secret

A friend of mine who suddenly has significantly more time to game with me had me wondering what the change was. He said that his usual gaming partner was busy doing something else, to which I made a few inquiries as to what said activity was, and he was pretty vague about it. I made the obligatory porn comment, and my friend replied, "He doesn't watch porn."

As an aside, I should add that it seems silly that there's an expectation that all males watch porn and all females don't. However, there are many, many females who are quite vocal about their porn watching habits and applauded for being so open, so why is it that when a guy states that he doesn't watch porn is he instantly called a liar?

Anyway, I was filled with disbelief, and asked how my friend knew his friend didn't watch porn. His reply was that his friend just didn't seem interested in sex. I asked him how he knew, and he replied that his friend just never talked about it, or mentioned it, or did anything to show that he was interested in it.

While I don't want to fall into the automatic assumption that he is watching porn because he's a guy, I don't find the reasons for him to be uninterested in sex to be enough to convince me. I think there are a lot of people who just don't want to talk about sex, maybe because it makes them feel embarrassed, or uncomfortable. Sometimes I wonder if I write about or say things that make people feel uncomfortable. I try to give people warning when I can, but I don't always get the chance. Am I being oversensitive? I know Graham would probably feed them a spoonful of cement and say, "Harden the fuck up" (ah, the fond memories of Jello ).

Personally, I have various levels of comfort when it comes to talking about sex. Like Elliot, I tend to stick with certain terms for various body parts, although I am more from the clinical school and go with penis and vagina. I was discussing writing erotic fiction for NaNo with Olek, and I mentioned how I just can't bring myself to put "cum gun" or "love stick" into a story, or even most of the stuff listed here (wtf, "Moisture and heat seeking venomous throbbing python of love"). "Cock" I could use, but it makes me feel weird.

In primary school, there was one guy who would always tell me not to say "dirty" words. When I asked to borrow his rubber, he would look at me like I was crazy, and say that he didn't have any condoms. So I started using the word "eraser". When I asked to borrow his sharpener, he teased me and said I just wanted to see how big his "pencil" was. I started carefully choosing my words in order to avoid coming across words that he had marked as being bad, and sometimes I wonder if my conversation with friends growing up has suffered because of it. To think all of that happened in primary school.

I think that some people who seem uninterested in sex may not be uninterested, just unable to get over the psychological taboo of talking about it. I was definitely in that group once, and I think finding someone I could talk to about it, and blogging helped me a lot.

More Stats

2010-11-27T00:17:00.005+11:00

Doing all of this in Excel makes me realise how much I miss SPSS. Thought about installing R, which I might end up doing next time I do stats related stuff and have the bandwidth.

WoW players and sexual activity

As many people have said, losing your virginity isn't the same as being sexually active. As Graham put it, you only have to lose it once to get kicked out of the V-Club, so as people get older, they are more and more likely to have lost it. If this were a longitudinal study, I would expect everyone to have lost it eventually. So with the same 38 people, here are the stats with sexual activity instead.

22 WoW players, 9 of which are currently sexually active.
16 non-WoW players, 6 of which are currently sexually active.

Chi-Squared test showed no significant difference (X^2 = 0.047, p > .05).

Hardcore vs single/multiplayer

Seeing as I didn't make that part of my survey compulsory, I did have one missing value, which I've decided to just delete. I've had a few comments about this question, the most prominent being that certain people prefer different types of games depending on the mood they are in. I'm not too sure how I would change that if I were to run the survey again, but keep that in mind when you read the results.

So we had 37 results.
24 defined themselves has hardcore gamers, 5 of which preferred single-player, and 19 of which preferred multi-player.
13 defined themselves as not hardcore gamers, 6 of which preferred single-player, and 7 of which preferred multi-player.

Chi-squared test showed no significant difference between the two (X^2=2.6, p > .05).

World of CasualCraft, the Follow-Up

2010-11-26T16:44:00.008+11:00

I've closed the poll now, and have started calculating some results. I had a total of 38 people respond to my survey. I didn't take any demographic data, which I probably should have, but it is too late now.

Quick note about my survey. Yes, I was only looking at whether being a WoW player affects whether you are a virgin, but I also asked a few other questions because it felt weird to just outright ask whether someone is a virgin or not. I think I am going to try to look at what some of that other data says, but I just have to work out how I'm going to do that first!

So the first part, is there a relationship between WoW and virginity?

Number of WoW players (this includes ex-WoW players, as well as current): 22
WoW + Virgin: 10
% virgins: 45%

Number of non-WoW players: 16
Non-WoW + Virgin: 7
% virgins: 44%

I guess I wasn't all that good at guessing after all. =(

I ran a Chi-squared test and found that the results show there isn't a significant difference (X^2 = 0.14, p > .05) between WoW players and non-WoW players and virginity.

Interestingly, if you look within the WoW players, dividing between current and ex-WoW players, you get a different result.

Current WoW players: 7
# Virgins: 1
% virgins: 14%

Ex-WoW players: 15
# Virgins: 9
% virgins 60%

Chi-squared test shows that this is a significant difference (X^2 = 4.04, p < .05)! Does that mean that playing WoW and then stopping means you're less likely to lose your virginity? I did get data on whether players are currently sexually active, so that will come in a further post!

[EDIT] Eric points out that this more likely means that people who have lost their virginity are less likely to quit WoW, rather than what I said - which makes much more sense!

I guess the biggest problem is the whole time factor, that I didn't include in my survey - ie. whether it was lost before or after playing WoW. But it still goes with my personality theory, maybe people who are WoW-quitters (!) have a certain type of personality. If I was to continue with my World of CasualCraft assertion, vanilla WoW, and perhaps BC were far more hardcore than WotLK is, and so hardcore players would have quit long ago.

The other things I want to look at:

-whether hardcore players tend to prefer single-player or multi-player games
-whether hardcore players tend to prefer certain genres
-whether WoW playing and current sexual activity are related
-whether it's not just WoW, but MMOs in general

In the Stars

2010-11-24T04:55:00.004+11:00

The WoW/sex poll must have really awakened the psych student in me, because here's another psych related post! Brookie and I were talking about personality tests in guild chat, and he linked me a description of INTP to read (I'm guessing the test he took was here). The two times that I've done a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I have been told that I'm an INTP. Graham did one and tried to answer as though he were me, and he got ISTP, which is only one letter off.

I read the PDF that Brookie linked, and I found that a lot of the terms described me pretty well:

-they see everything in terms of how it could be improved, or what it could be turned into
-they are the "absent-minded professors"
-they're very tolerant and flexible in most situations, unless one of their firmly held beliefs has been violated or challenged, in which case they may take a very rigid stance

are just a few from the first section.

Then Brookie told me what he got, and he said that he has the same personality type that I do. Not that it's a bad thing, but I've always felt like Brookie and I are pretty different people. We do share some common interests, like helping other people out, and achievement whoring, but the way that we talk, the way that we play, it seems like we approach life in a different way. Then again, he said himself that he doesn't think INTP describes him at all. However, he did a few tests, and they all told him the same thing, so something has to be wrong!

One of the things we talked about was "innate" personality vs. "situational" personality. The idea is that everyone has a personality that usually becomes fairly static after childhood, and this is someone's personality deep-down. The situational personality being the type of person you become in different situations - e.g. you might be lively and talkative when with friends, and sullen and quiet while with family.

In biology class, Mr Hanna once said that he refuses to believe in astrology because it's something some idiots created based on stars that have now moved to completely different locations, and only another idiot could possibly believe that such a thing dictates their life. Sometimes I wonder if personality types aren't a little bit like star signs as well. The only reason Brookie was doing the tests was because he had to do it for work. He said that depending on the results, he might be moved to another department better suited to his personality.

I understand that companies pay heaps to train people up, and at least they would rather find him a better placement than fire him outright, but why move people just because some test said they'd make a better X than Y? One of the important things I remember from I/O psych was that diverse groups can be quite strong, if they can get over their diversity, because they can draw from many different types of experiences, rather than just the same experiences over and over again. Maybe that problem of diversity is the reason some companies are so reliant on personality tests, but if someone has been working there for a few years, and has a proven track record of being able to play nice with others, it seems pointless.

Plus, there is no guarantee that the person taking the test isn't lying for the sake of social desirability anyway. More importantly, it might not be accurately measuring their situational personality. I wonder what will happen to me when I start work, especially as an Aries, INTP, moderate on openness, low conscientiousness, low extraversion, high on agreeable, and moderately neurotic?

Cover Fire

2010-11-24T04:53:00.000+11:00

(from Stuff No One Told Me)

As I mentioned before, I started playing SC2 again with Teekay (and occasionally Olek). Teekay usually plays Zerg, but tonight he decided to play Terran for a bit. Most of my Terran/Protoss games have been play with Julian (some with Charles, but all he ever wants to do is proxy rax/gateway, so it doesn't count as a proper game), and tonight it made me realise how much I'm used to playing with him. By mid game he usually has plenty of tanks with siege mode out, and is probably teching for battlecruiser, so when I remember, I try to go phoenix to back him up. In my last game with Teekay, we were able to engage in middle, and they were setting up tanks, so I was waiting for Teekay to bring his along, too, so we could set up and fight. And waiting. And waiting. And they never came.

Despite the fact that they both have the Kerrigan portrait, Teekay isn't Julian, and his play-style is almost completely different. I know I should have looked to see what stuff he was building, but I guess I was too used to relying on a Terran partner to build certain stuff.

"Amazing discovery Anna, but how does it relate to us?" you might ask. Well, I think it says a lot about relationships, too. When you're in a relationship, after a while, you'll find that you tend to rely on the other person for certain things. You tend to expect certain things from the other person without even having to ask anymore. Whenever I have a jar or a bottle of water, I usually end up giving it to MrMan5.5 to open, and almost all of the time, he's waiting for me to finish my failed attempts at opening it so that he can give it a try.

Just as I find it so much easier to play with people I'm accustomed to playing with, I wonder how much of people's relationships are based on the fact that they are just used to being with whoever they are with? I admit, one of the reasons I was reluctant to give up AG was because he was a known entity. If I tried someone else, they could be better, but they could also be worse. I didn't want to have to go through all of the getting-to-know-you stuff again.

That's probably one of the reasons I'm not all that interested in meeting new people. You never know what kind of things might offend them, and even though they might be a friend of a friend, they doesn't mean they like all of the same things that you do. I went DVD hunting with QC at Highpoint a couple of months ago, and she invited her friend Social Anxiety David. I call him that because that's how she described him to me. After she said that, I wondered if I had to be extra careful around him, because I didn't want him to have a full-blown anxiety attack in front of me (I know, I'm a terrible person, I'm probably scared of epileptics, and I know someone else who also has social anxiety, and I didn't even find out she had it until a few years after I met her. She didn't seem any different to me at all).

At one point during our DVD hunt, I wanted to see if JB had an Arnie movie collection, but I didn't want anyone to steal the Arnie DVDs that I had already found, but hadn't paid for. QC had disappeared somewhere, so I had no choice but to ask David to hold them for me. I spent quite a while debating with myself whether he'd be OK with me asking him, and in the end, I just did it, and he seemed to have no problem with it. In fact, he was a really funny guy, and didn't seem any different at all. Plus, he found Pumping Iron for me and he likes Arnie, too.

I just realised that Social Anxiety David abbreviates to SAD. Oops. Anyway, he didn't turn out to be a crazy serial killer, so maybe getting out of your comfort zone isn't so bad - you might find some new people to laugh with.

Gobble Gobble

2010-11-24T00:29:00.003+11:00

There's an achievement in WoW during the Pilgrim's Bounty (Thanksgiving) holiday that involves killing 40 turkeys within 30s of each other. It can be frustrating to try when the area is populated by other people trying to do the same achievement. You can be so close to a string of 40 kills when someone ninjas a turkey and there are no other turkeys within attack distance from where you are, so you have to start over again.

I figured the best time to farm the achievement would be later in the week, as the eager beavers will have finished with it, and you'd get in just before the people who suddenly realised the holiday would be over soon and wanted to quickly farm it before it ended. Then Brookie got it and told me Tirisfal was empty, so I ported over and tried my luck. HE LIED. There were so many other people farming at the same time I got the chain up to the 20s a few times before losing my turkey and starting over.

While I was grinding turkeys, I was thinking about how if you have a short chain (1-20 kills), are you're better off letting someone else finish their chain, and losing yours? If you do, that's one less person who is going to compete with you for turkeys. I had this idea that if two people came across a turkey, they could both say how long their chain was, and the person with the longest chain could have the kill. Or they could both play rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock and the winner would kill.

Though I imagine if you went by the longest chain gets the kill method, it would be really hard to get a long chain in the first place, because if you have to keep starting over, you're likely to come across people with longer chains than you, forcing you to start over. There isn't even time for the other two methods, as precious seconds will tick away while you sort out who should get the kill.

I wonder if all the people who threatened to quit WoW over this achievement, and other similar ones, actually did quit, would they put a serious dent in Blizzard/Activision's pocket?

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

2010-11-22T01:16:00.004+11:00

So much of my blog is about doom and gloom and the fact that I wish I were more X because it would make me life easier. Today I've decided to just stop and smell the roses. I've been a lot more calm since I quit my job at the casino - probably because I don't have the guilt of taking people's money, as well as having to deal with incredibly stupid/drunk people who can't seem to listen to reason. It has been a pretty relaxing break, I like how I can just do things whenever I want rather than trying to plan things around my shifts and having to shift sleeping patterns constantly (although I am finding that I have trouble reverting to "normal hours" now that I'm on break).

I baked a cake for my dad on Friday, and I honestly forgot how much fun it is to bake. I decorated it with pink icing (because we only had pink food dye) and tried piping cream, and overall, I think it turned out pretty nice. I also got to try out my shiny new silicone baking tin(? Is it still a tin if it's made of silicone?). Reading through the blog where I got the recipe from, I've decided I want to try more things, like chicken pot pie, chicken kiev, savoury crepes, beer batter fish, rogan josh, shepard's pie. Most of them will probably have to wait until I move out and have the dinner parties that I've been planning (as mum and dad already cook more than enough food for us to eat that I think anything I make will end up going to waste).

Although in more food news, my silicone rolling pin should be arriving in the mail (hopefully tomorrow), so I can get started on my gingerbread cookies and truffles for Christmas! Going to see how vegetarian-friendly I can make my Christmas presents, as I believe Gale and Olek don't eat eggs or gelatin. Also will get around to buying ramekins at some point during my present hunt for family members so that I can try making crème brûlée.

MrMan5.5 has finished his exams for what will hopefully be the last time ever! I'm really happy for him, as this semester has been pretty stressful for him and he has spent most of it cramped up at home studying. We will be leaving for Japan in less than two months' time, and I can't wait to play all the gashapon machines! ^________^ I don't plan to buy all that much though (other than a kimono as a souvenir), so if anyone is after anything in particular from Japan, let me know and I'll try to find it.

I took Amanda out shopping today, and it seems she would like more clothes, but I think every time she goes out shopping with mum and Anjelica, she ends up getting dragged around and doesn't really get a chance to find anything for herself. As it seems that all hope of grooming her into the next pro-DotA player have disappeared (I still haven't managed to convince her to install War3 on her laptop), I guess I should be a good sister and take her out. I did say that I would buy her something if she got a good grade on her piano exam, and the thing we went to buy today she ended up paying for with her own money, so I'm planning to take her to the DFO or something so she can buy some new clothes for the holidays. The holidays where she'll hopefully spend time with her friends rather than staying at home watching Gossip Girl and Avatar: the Last Airbender. The last thing this family needs is another me.

I'm quite surprised at the response rate to my poll (although still not as many people as I had for my guessing exercise). Now that I have more than 10 results, I feel comfortable opening the spreadsheet, because it's pretty much impossible for me now to guess who made which response. I don't really care about any individual answer, because someone's private life is their own business and not mine. I'm still going to wait a bit before I publish any actual results, because I don't want someone to say something to someone who hasn't filled it in yet and bias the results. There are quite a few things that I find interesting though, and a few questions that I now have that I hadn't thought of before, but I will explain all of this in a few days! The psych student in me is actually quite excited to do some analysis - even if it is statistics.

After some prodding from Teekay, I've started playing a bit more SC2 lately. I'm finding that I'm a lot more relaxed while playing now. I think when I was playing with Julian and Charles, the focus was so much on winning the game, and now with Teekay and Olek, I feel like it's more about playing the game. If I misclick and click a zealot instead of a stalker, then I just shrug it off, maybe berating myself for it later if we lost. I don't feel like such a dead-weight for the team. That being said, I am currently playing much worse than when I was playing with Julian regularly, so maybe I know my skill is worse and it doesn't bother me when what happens in a game matches my expectations of my skill. In addition, when I do manage to play well, it's a pleasant surprise.

I just realised that I'm not entirely sure how to handle all of my data, so I just sent an email to my stats lecturer asking him some questions. It made me realise that I should study up a bit more on stats before I start the analysis. Yes, I know that I said this post was supposed to be something with me saying, "I need to be more X", but what can I say, I'm a chronic self-improver!

Dinner Time

2010-11-21T06:39:00.002+11:00

QC reminded me of my plans to have people over for dinner once I move out. I still want to do it, but there is a problem of logistics that I never really thought about, and it was something that I'd deal with when it happened. I don't really know how I'd sort out who I'm going to have over when. I had this crazy idea that people would be lining up to want to come to my dinner parties.... but then I remembered that it's me cooking, and maybe people are going to be really cautious until I skill up.

I've mentioned before that I tend to segregate my friends. SEE people, 2nd floor people, WoW people, etc. Some people belong in more than one group, but everyone has one main group in my mind. What kind of groups would be interested though? I'm not planning to cater for a large group of people, maybe four at most, but two or three would be ideal. The problem with those numbers is that you end up having to decide who out of a large group would get invited.

I read an article saying that five is the ideal - so that you can break into smaller conversation groups of two and three. Three doesn't always work, as I explained previously (2 + 1). I'm guessing even though four is 2 + 2, and nobody is lonely, it doesn't quite lead to mingling. Does that mean that I should avoid inviting couples? Then which person from the couple should I invite?

Then you add in dietary requirements. I'm a mess enough as it is, but I think it would be wrong to constantly group Olek, Gale and RB just because they're all vegetarians/vegans. It's good that people have requirements though, it forces me to cook things that I wouldn't normally cook. I don't typically like Japanese food, but MrMan5.5 wanted to eat yakisoba, so I tried it out.

If I don't invite friends within a group, then you need friends that will play nice with other friends. I can imagine people meeting each other a few times, and then creating one of those blacklists. One of the things I hate most about organising group events is that some of your friends will have a secret grudge against one of your other friends. They won't say it out loud, but they'd prefer not to go to events the other person is going to. Rather than telling you this, they ask you who is going. Add to that, the fact that people will probably have a "required" list - ie. "I'll only go if X is going." Then you can't get a confirmation from anybody, because they're all waiting to see whether the others are going or not.

Or maybe everyone just hates me... T_T Either way, with so many comp-sci/soft eng types reading my blog, there must be some sort of algorithm for sorting out this mess!

Under the Bridge

2010-11-19T03:45:00.006+11:00

In regards to my "research" from a couple of posts ago, I am told that my guessing isn't satisfactory, so there is now a poll to answer if you want to contribute! It's completely voluntary. I'm planning to leave it open for a week.

At Paul's 25th, QC called one of Paul's friends annoying. As always, this is something that I've tried very hard to decipher with no success. What is it that makes a person annoying? I think I've worked it out - it all stems from my inability to troll people. Yes, my complete and utter failure to troll has scarred me for life.

[For those who missed it, as I can't remember if I have posted about it before, a few years ago, Mesh and Kalg said that I'd never be able to troll, so to prove them wrong, I started a thread on the Blackrock forum. It was successful until people started arguing, and I felt bad so I was all like, "Stop fighting, guys, let's be friends!" Kalg and Meshu facepalmed, tried to salvage it, and were far more successful at trolling than I was.]

I've been following this blog for a while now, and it seems there are a few things I need to work on.

Invading people's personal space seems to also be an important factor, but I don't like people invading my personal space, so I don't think I can bring myself to do that to others.

Taking people's things is something I used to do. YN told me that he didn't think I was annoying, so I took his calculator so that he couldn't do his work. I thought he knew that I had taken it, but it seemed he didn't. I was expecting him to come and get it off me after school, but he never did and I forgot all about it until he called me at home and asked if I had it. I heard later that he had stayed at school until 5PM trying to find it. I felt so bad at the time, I don't think I could do that one either.

I've tried talking really loud, but it just ends up being the volume of most people's normal speaking voice. I've also tried talking a lot, and I'm really amazed at the people who are able to do this, because I usually run out of things to say after a few minutes at most. When I write blog posts, it is usually done over a few hours, alternating with battlegrounds or TV shows. However, I think that is the one that I can work on - talking is meant to come naturally to females, right?

Breakfast at Tiffany's

2010-11-18T02:00:00.005+11:00

Lucy commented that MrMan5.5 is lucky to have me because he doesn't have to buy me things like jewellery. I think it's strange to like someone because of what you don't have to do for them. I think I'm over my clothes phase. I realised that I probably spend more time interacting with people online than anywhere else, and they really don't give a shit (I snuck a swear word in, Olek, did you see, did you see?) what I'm wearing and which label it came from. Probably with the exception of Lucy, the friends that I see in person don't care all that much either - at least not enough to have ever commented on it. So what is the point in spending so much money when I don't care, and the people who care about me don't care?

In the case of MrMan5.5 being lucky, I think it's a case of "you get what you pay for". I'm not the kind of girlfriend that you can show off to your friends. I guess I'll always be more Betty Crocker than Megan Fox - I don't go to balls, or clubs, or really any of those kind of events where you can get all dressed up and show off. I don't know if that's what MrMan5.5 wanted out of a girlfriend, but since he doesn't seem to do those things either (except go to balls, I believe he went to ISSS(S?) ball one year), it probably means it's not.

His expenditure definitely went up since we started going out. Even though we usually split the bill, I drag him out to eat more often than he would if he were single. He picks me up from work/home, so he spends more petrol. I spend more, but I really don't mind. A lot of my spending, I justify in terms of movie tickets. It costs about $15 to see a movie which is usually an hour and a half, so an hour and a half of moderate entertainment is worth $15 to me. Spending time with MrMan5.5 is very entertaining, and so the cost of a meal or train ticket to see him really doesn't bother me at all.

Would it mean that he cared for me more if he spent a lot of money on me? The only thing I'd really like him to give me (a flying bison), he couldn't even if he tried. If he did buy me jewellery, it'd probably collect dust in my room.

[Slight tangent. I've never liked rings, the only one I remember was a mood ring which I bought because I thought it was cool that it could change colour based on your mood, but it never seemed to change. I found out that it changed because of your body temperature, which I thought was boring, so I either chucked it out or lost it. I think rings get in the way. Julian says I'll get used to it, but what if I don't? A while ago, I came up with a solution - I'd wear the ring around my neck on a necklace, so people could still see it and realise that I'm married, but I wouldn't have to wear it on my finger. Then [SPOILER ALERT] I saw an episode of Sex and the City, where Carrie gets an engagement ring, and she ends up wearing it around her neck because she doesn't want the commitment it comes with. That's not why I'd do it, but I don't want people thinking that. =( End tangent.]

I think it's silly to measure a relationship's worth in how much money you spend on each other - if you get married, you'll probably end up with a joint bank account, so in the end it doesn't matter anyway. It's far more important to consider whether you make each other happy, and enjoy being together. If MrMan5.5 ever bought me a ring from Tiffany's, I'd probably sell it on eBay and use the proceeds to buy WoW game cards or Arnie DVDs. I'm clearly the best girlfriend ever. *cough, cough*

World of CasualCraft, Part 2

2010-11-18T00:31:00.003+11:00

So it seems I wasn't entirely clear about what I was looking for in my last post. Although I wanted to answer chaoticgood's statement about my WoW friends being more sexually active than your typical nerd, I wanted to go about it in a different way. What I wanted to show was that the kind of person who would play WoW is possibly more likely to be the kind of person who enjoys being in a social setting, and meeting new people. I know that isn't true about everyone (I know someone who played WoW and suffers from social anxiety), but I think compared to games such as Counter-Strike or Starcraft, World of Warcraft is more likely to attract a more social-minded audience.

Again, I need to add more disclaimers, correlation is by no means causation (so going out and buying WoW isn't going to get you laid!), my sample is biased, I am only looking at whether someone has lost their virginity rather than whether they are currently sexually active (which does make a difference).

So for anyone that missed it, since it kinda got eaten when I tried to post it, my "results" were:

Total WoW-friends: 63
Total assumed to have had sex: 45
% of total: 71.4%

Total non-WoW-friends: 75
Total assumed to have had sex: 34
% of total: 45.3%

I would do t-tests and stuff, but I'm kinda lazy, you can see the difference is quite large. I'd also like to emphasize that the sample was of gamers, so this doesn't indicate that non-gamers are less likely to have had sex than WoW players (which everyone seems to assume is untrue, I wonder if anyone has done a study on that...)! So going with these results, what are some of the reasons that could explain this?

As chaoticgood mentioned in a comment, WoW tends to be more of a social game, and this may attract more social-minded players. So rather than a game that prompts a "LOL, n00b, I pwned you" attitude, WoW and other MMOs tend to be a game where you build up a character and join a community to accomplish goals. While it's not impossible, it is quite difficult (and for most of your journey it will be lonely) to do a lot of the things in the game without having other people.

I read somewhere that WoW has a higher female:male ratio than most games, so perhaps it has a higher pick-up potential. I think one of the factors that caused a bias is that WoW is one of the games you can bring your partner to. MrMan5.5 and I have tried playing a few games together, but WoW seems to be the best game that we can actually play together. When we try to play TF2 together, we usually get separated, or one of us gets auto-balanced to the other team. When we played DotA/HoN together, it seemed like we spent more time in different lanes because of our different playstyles.

The reason for the title of this post though, is that WoW seems to be a really casual game now. It took me hours of practice before I managed to even make it to gold rank in Starcraft 2, and probably years of practice before I was half-decent at DotA/HoN. It seems that WoW doesn't have that great a skill curve. Sure, if you want to be gladiator, you need to be incredibly skilled, but to do normal stuff, it doesn't seem that way anymore. In vanilla WoW, healing seemed so much harder, because mana management was actually an issue. Now I heal without even looking at my mana bar. I joined Chris and Brookiee's ICC group one night, and they had managed to get to Lich King, the last boss. The warlock in the group was a complete moron, and yet he managed to get to the last boss of what is currently the hardest instance in the game.

It seems that in a game like WoW, where you can be carried by gear, and gear drops from trees, it attracts more of a casual playerbase. So people who prefer doing things on weekends that don't involve sitting in front of the computer may prefer playing a game that you can play for a few hours a week. I know that it seems weird for an MMO to be a casual game, but at the moment, you can play a little and still do reasonably well. Gone are the days of having to farm a lot each day in order to keep up.

Thoughts? Suggestions for more research? I would like to do a study on gamers and sexual activity, but I don't think anyone would answer me, because it's a bit of a dodgy question!

World of CasualCraft

2010-11-17T16:19:00.002+11:00

Also, on a more personal level, given your average friend is a computer nerd who has had rare, if any contact with anyone other than his left and right hands (this of course is a broad generalisation, and I don’t wish to offend (I put myself in this category). That said, it does seem that you have a number of sexually active WoW friends).
-chaoticgood, on my post Advice Anna

I was thinking, why does it seem like my WoW playing friends seem more sexually active than the rest of my gaming friends? Now that Facebook doesn't seem to have any of those friend wheel apps anymore, I can't make any pretty graphs, but just off the top of my head, I would say that a larger percentage of my WoW friends have been in a serious (and let's just assume that implies sexual) relationship than my friends who play games other than WoW. I would like to be able to do a survey on this, but I don't know how open people are going to be if I ask them if they're virgins or not. >_<

Actually, before I start this, maybe I'll see if I can make some graphs. Disclaimer first: this is a small sample size, and biased, as they are all my friends, which means they all might have some quality that makes them want to be friends with me or something, so keep that in mind! I hypothesize that a higher percentage of my WoW playing friends will have had sex than my non-WoW playing friends.

I'm going to go through my Facebook friends, and list all the people that I know play games and group them into WoW players (which is any WoW player, regardless if they play any other games, and regardless of whether they still play or not), and non-WoW players (possibly sub-grouping them into smaller categories if there are enough of them). Then I'm going to take a guess at whether they have had sex or not based on what I know of them. If I don't actually happen to know, then I'm just going to assume based on whether they have been in a relationship or not, and my general impression of them.

OK, I have to leave in a second, so no time to make graphs. Just a quick summary of the people on my list:

Total WoW-friends: 63
Total assumed to have had sex: 45
% of total: 71.4%

Total non-WoW-friends: 75
Total assumed to have had sex: 34
% of total: 45.3%

Have to leave now, don't really have time to write this out coherently in an argument, but this is the problem Mars found in my "study". Will discuss later!

Marstar says (4:41 PM):
so why do you want to survey who's not a virgin out of your WoW friends?
Fodder says (4:41 PM):
i just want to know
if my wow friends are more likely to not be virgins than my non wow friends
Marstar says (4:42 PM):
i think you'll find the numbers comparable
Fodder says (4:42 PM):
so you think playing wow doesn't make a difference?
Marstar says (4:42 PM):
shouldnt make any difference IMO
Fodder says (4:43 PM):
ah, i thought it would be less likely
but we'll see :)
Marstar says (4:44 PM):
there is no reason for it to be less likely ... losing your virginity is a once off event
and more than likely most of your friends (wow or not) would have lost it b4 they played wow
Fodder says (4:44 PM):
it's not about when they did
but more about the kind of person who would be drawn to that particular game
Marstar says (4:45 PM):
i.e. at the time they lost it ... WoW wasnt a factor
Fodder says (4:45 PM):
i think wow is somewhat of a less hardcore gamer game
than other games such as CS
so if you are a wow player
you are the kind of person who would play wow
it doesn't really matter when you started playing
the fact that you chose to play it defines the kind of person you are
to some degree
Marstar says (4:45 PM):
But you are seeing if WoW gamers are more or less virgins to non-wow gamers
Marstar says (4:47 PM):
youre survey won't show that though
Fodder says (4:47 PM):
why not?
Marstar says (4:47 PM):
cause most of the people who arnt virgins , but play WoW ... lost it b4 WoW
Marstar says (4:48 PM):
e.g. I lost mine a good 15 yrs ago
I then played wow
so who is to know ... if i would have remained a virgin if i played WoW b4 i lost it
Fodder says (4:49 PM):
well, there is the theory that someone's underlying personality will not change a great deal over the course of their life
Marstar says (4:49 PM):
what does personality have to do with Virginity? :P
sooner or later every1 loses it
Fodder says (4:49 PM):
a lot!
that is true
but with the exception of you :P
most of the people in my survey are my age
give or take a few years
Fodder says (4:50 PM):
actually, you're not the oldest
@_@
but either way
Marstar says (4:50 PM):
haha
Fodder says (4:50 PM):
to have lost it before getting married
requires a certain type of personality
and i think that playing wow might be an indicator of a certain type of personality
Marstar says (4:50 PM):
actually to keep it until marraige requires a certain personality these days :P
Fodder says (4:51 PM):
for instance, most CS players tend to have a different personality to most WoW players
it's just something i want to test :)
Marstar says (4:51 PM):
I don't see your survey as statistically significant though :P
Fodder says (4:51 PM):
of course it's not
hahaha
Fodder says (4:52 PM):
first of all, it is inherently biased
Marstar says (4:52 PM):
as in i dont see WoW and Virginity correlating at all
Marstar says (4:53 PM):
your survey ersult will just be : "i have more virgin friends who do./dont play WOW"
Marstar says (4:54 PM):
more than likely it'll be your personality that is being tested :P

Relationship Stats

2010-11-16T02:28:00.002+11:00

MrMan5.5 and I were discussing who would cook once we moved out. I thought we were doing to take turns, but MrMan5.5 said I should cook because he thinks I'm the better cook (I think I'm better at making desserts, but he is the better cook). So assuming I am the better cook, is it logical for me to do all of the cooking? Since he's currently studying for his microeconomics exam, he explained it in terms of commerce terms.

So the private marginal cost to me would be that I would have to cook. The social marginal cost would just be private cost, as the cost to me is that I would have to cook, and the cost to MrMan5.5 is nothing, so overall, the cost between us is my having to cook. The same would apply if MrMan5.5 would cook, as you would then have the cost to me being nothing, the cost to him being having to cook, and the overall cost is him having to cook.

Where it differs is in the social marginal benefit. He says that if he were to cook, we would both have the benefit of not being hungry (as we will have something to eat). The same would be true if I were to cook, but we would also have the benefit of being able to eat something tasty, so there is an increased benefit if I were to cook. Therefore, it makes more sense for me to cook, as the social marginal cost is the same either way, but if I were to cook, there would be an increased social marginal benefit.

That's all well and good, from an economical point of view. So what happens when one person in the relationship is much better qualified than the other in all other kinds of housekeeping things? Are they then expected to take over all of those tasks, as it is logical for them to do so? That kind of thinking is probably what results in people who have no idea how to take care of themselves when the move out.

Still, that's OK, because all you need to do is snag someone who is able to make up for all of your shortcomings, right? Just keep in mind, that the next time you want to start an argument, the very first reply you're going to get is, "I do all the cooking/cleaning/etc." and then they're going to storm off in a huff and that will be the end of the argument. I think in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If you end up taking on too many things, then the private cost to yourself will start to include stress, and so the social marginal cost will start to increase faster as there is an increasing amount of stress as you add more and more tasks. So it would be better to share the load.

My Life is Complete

2010-11-15T21:44:00.006+11:00

Phew. I was nearly 1000 points behind him, but I finally caught up!

Guy In Real Life

2010-11-15T01:02:00.006+11:00

I am told that the girlfriend of one of my ex-WoW-guildies (let's call him PW for now) wants to meet me. It was something completely out of the blue, PW and I have barely spoken since I quit. Not that I mind meeting new people, and it's always nice to meet the partners of my friends, but usually that happens as a consequence of something else, like when we get together as a group and they bring their partner along. Not something that's pre-arranged for the single purpose of introducing each other. Stranger yet, why would she want to meet me? We don't live near each other, and are extremely unlikely to bump into each other or hang out together - I don't even think we have anything in common.

Then I found out the reason. I had commented on one of PW's Facebook statuses, and she found out I was one of his female WoW friends, and all of a sudden she wanted to meet me. Well, to be fair, of all of PW's female WoW friends, I believe he has slept with probably half of them (or wanted to), so maybe she just wanted to check if I was a threat? She just wants to meet me to see if I look like my level 26 blood elf priest, that's OK, right?

Wait, what? That's not OK! First of all, my main is an undead priest (and I wear shoes - actually, I lie, my UD priest doesn't seem to wear shoes either)! Secondly, what did I even do? Why am I travelling to the other side of the city to ease someone else's insecurity? I'm half tempted to do a QC and "like" everything on his Facebook, as well as commenting with love hearts or something to everything that he says. But I'm too lazy.

I just know that if I meet up with her, I'm going to overanalyse everything I say and do and end up stressing myself out. T_T

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

2010-11-15T00:30:00.002+11:00

Was talking to Olek about being a drug dealer (so many of my blog posts seem to start with me having a conversation with someone about something). I said that I wouldn't be able to handle all the killing and bashing people up, but how can you be a drug dealer without that? Again, all of my knowledge of drug dealing comes from The Wire, so this may or may not have any truth to it at all, but seeing as I have nothing else to go on, that is what I will use.

Control within the chain of command is done by fear. There's a great quote in the show where one of the kids is trying to work out a maths problem for school, and he can't seem to do it, but his brother frames it in terms of keeping track of a drug stash, and he has no problem solving it. His brother asks why he can solve the drug problem, but not the school problem, and the kid says it's because if you get the stash count wrong, you get beat up. Leaders can't be seen as being lenient because it's a sign of weakness (although it seems they are allowed to be lenient towards family members).

I think fear is a very important element in keeping people in line. If someone arrives late to work, and they don't get punished, then they will have no qualms about arriving late next time. One day, they might not even show up at all! I thought maybe if you were nice enough to someone, they might show up due to a sense of obligation, but that only goes so far.

We used to have this policy of writing up damaged goods at the supermarket, so that they could keep track of lost inventory due to damage. But the staff eventually realised that they could use that to their advantage, and there were some cases of people feeling like a chocolate bar, so they'd take one and write it up as "damaged" and eat it. I think management knew, but they didn't really care. Eventually, there was one staff member who was stealing trucks of stuff from the store that was "damaged" (she was caught, in the end), and after that happened, management toughened up on the whole "damaged goods" policy. I think it was a case of too little, too late. The damage had already been done. My friend told me that we had lost thousands of dollars worth of stock.

Is it possible to be a nice drug dealer? Whenever I think of criminal leaders, the first person I think of is always Vito Corleone. He is very much a family man, but he also isn't stupid. He does business by garnering favours rather than simply bashing people up when he wants something. People do things for him because he did something for them. To give an example that doesn't spoil too much of the story, he helps a baker's daughter keep her husband from being deported out of the USA, and in exchange, the baker makes Corleone's daughter's wedding cake for free.

But the Corleone system isn't entirely without violence - there's the famous horse head example. Still, he does say that when he can sort something out without having to resort to violence, he prefers to do it that way, whereas the characters in The Wire are so trigger-happy they just want to hurt people whenever they possibly can. Does this mean I'm better suited for gambling and racketeering?

I think the biggest problem of trying to be a nice leader is getting people to follow you. In order to be nice, you have to make people happy. You can please some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. Eventually there will be dissent. Someone will stage a coup, and it'll all be over.

On the other hand, if you want to control people with fear, then you have to give them something important, because when someone has nothing to lose, then they're not afraid to go up against you. For instance, one of the characters loses someone he loves, and he's not afraid to go shooting people up and stealing drugs.

I can theorise all I want, but the sad truth is, there are people out there who are living this kind of life, and there are people whose families have to live in constant fear that their sons/daughters might get killed in a gang war. I don't like that thought at all, I guess that's why I've been thinking about volunteering for gambler's help. Just doing my bit to make the world a better place!

This entire exercise reminds me of something Julian said to me once - that quality of life is hugely dependant on spawning point. I guess if you spawn into the life of a drug dealer, it's really hard to get out, so why would anyone seriously consider going into that life?

Advice Anna

2010-11-14T18:31:00.005+11:00

So a lot of my blog involves either giving or requesting advice. When I give advice, it's obviously my opinion on what should be done, and it is based on my experience, so that's what I keep in mind when people give me advice. It's also what I keep in mind when people ask me for advice. I never know what to say when people confess to me that they want advice for how to pleasure their girlfriends. The first time it happened, I thought it was a one time thing, but it happened again not long ago, so I thought I might ask the masses for advice - especially since my experience of having sex with women is completely non-existent.

I think any advice that I give will apply to me, and not necessarily their girlfriend. I say what I can, but I feel like it's not entirely something I can say, as it also affects MrMan5.5. I don't mind talking about what I do, but now if I were to say something, then I'm also invading MrMan5.5's privacy, in a way, so I don't really want to talk so freely.

The same advice I gave both times was just to keep it constant - keep a steady rhythm. I didn't know what else to say. Although now that I've put a bit more thought into it, maybe the best advice is just to ask her! I'm sure she knows what's best for her, but I think the reason they don't want to is because it's OK for me to think they suck, but they don't want her to think that. The thing I don't want to point out is that if they have to resort to asking me for advice, then maybe she might have some idea that he's not the best. I think it's sweet that they want to do the best they can to make their girlfriends happy though. :)

If only they played Starcraft, I would link them this.

Anyway, someone give me some advice I can give others!

Triangle

2010-11-13T00:56:00.004+11:00

A triangle trying to squeeze through a circle
He tried to cut me so I'd fit

And doesn't that sound familiar? Doesn't that hit too close to home?
Doesn't that make you shiver; the way things could've gone?
And doesn't it feel peculiar when everyone wants a little more?
And so that I do remember to never go that far,
Could you leave me with a scar?
-Missy Higgins, Scar

I've decided to give up on NaNoWriMo again this year (sorry, Dante). I've reached a point at which I really don't care about my own story. I read it and I find it very boring, I don't care about any of my characters, and so when it comes to wanting my character to save the world, I honestly couldn't care less if he failed. Maybe it's a phase all writers hit, but I've felt a bit like that since the third day, and I gave a bit of thought to starting over form the start, but I think I'm lacking motivation. At first I was motivated by MrMan5.5 and Julian saying that I'd never be able to do it, but it doesn't really matter to me whether they're right or not. I don't know why this is different to Dante's brother.

Kelly and Lucy were talking about how you can introduce two of your friends to each other, and they end up being closer friends than you were with either of them. I don't think it's so strange though, as not all friends are created equally. Like I was saying in my last post, there are some people who make you feel better than others, so it would be natural to want to spend more time with them. Sometimes you just "click", but that doesn't mean your other friendships are bad.

Although then it leads to neither of them having time to spend with you because they prefer doing things with each other. I guess it's a lot like when people go into a relationship, they become dead to the rest of the world during the honeymoon period. It's probably one of the best parts of a relationship, so why wouldn't you want to spend as much time together during it as possible?

What can you do as the third friend when this happens? If you want to do something with either friend, they will invite the other along, and you will just end up the third wheel. Asking them to do something without the other is just weird, as they'll wonder why you're not inviting your other friend along. They might even go so far as to wonder whether you and the other friend hate each other or had a fight, and then they will obviously side with the friend they feel closer to, so you are left out again.

I think this situation is somewhat similar to the situation of being a new person trying to break into a clique. The old members are familiar with each other, and will have in-jokes, and traditions which will be unknown to you. The only way to feel like one of the crowd is to learn all the traditions they have, and join in. It is not only things people have in common that can tie them together as friends, but the past that people share. The common interests I share with most of my high school friends is a pretty small list, but we all have our high school years to reminisce about, and past classmates to gossip about.

Maybe that's how good friendships are formed, by building a foundation of things you can fall back on. I don't think friends always need to have something in common to be friends. For instance, I consider Dante a good friend, but we don't spend all that much time discussing sci-fi, or RPGs, or the other common interests we have. A lot of the time when we talk, it's more to check up on how the other is doing (and for me to see his latest drawings). We talk about life, uni, argue over who is going to take over the world, etc. Our friendship works because I'm interested in him as a person, and not just interested in having another person on my list of Facebook friends. If we don't talk for a couple of months, then that's cool, it just gives us more to catch up on the next time we see each other.

I think forced friendships are silly. It always makes me think of your typical teen drama where some uncool kid wants to join the "cool crowd" and tries to change themselves in order to fit in. They never end up happy. If a group doesn't accept you, maybe you should consider whether it's really the right thing for you.