Support Worker

MrMan5.5 fell sick yesterday, and it made me realise how much I really enjoy taking care of him (not that I want him to be sick, but I enjoy doing things to make him feel more comfortable). I guess it's one of the reasons why I play support heroes/classes in games so much better than carry heroes/damage dealers - I enjoy helping people out and although it sounds lame, making them be the best that they can be. I love cooking for MrMan5.5, and for some reason, I don't mind cleaning so much when I'm doing it at his house compared to when I'm doing it at home (except when I'm in a really lazy mood).

I think that if for some reason, a legislation passed saying women were no longer able to work, and had to stay at home and look after the kids (which would be made compulsory), I wouldn't mind so much (hooray for setting feminism back a few decades!). Of course, that's something that's probably easy for me to say now, and if it did happen, I'd probably be one of the first to whine about how unfair it is, etc.

On the way to work one day, I heard a discussion on the radio about housewives. One person called in saying that the expectation for women to be housewives is stupid, and that women should be allowed to go into the workforce. The radio presenter asked what she thought about women who wanted to be housewives, and she said they didn't exist. Women who thought they wanted to be housewives were really fooling themselves and/or pressured into it by society. She believed that if given a real chance to have a different lifestyle, no women would actually choose to be a housewife.

Sure, they might be pressured into it by society, but if they genuinely do want to do it, then why is it considered wrong? Imagine you were raised all of your life to have mash potatoes and roast beef for dinner every night, and when you move out of home and see what else is out there, you realise you actually do love mash and roast, and it's something you would choose of your own free will. Just because you were forced to believe that's what dinner was, doesn't mean that you should stop doing it because other options are out there. Isn't equality about giving people an equal opportunity to do what they want to do, regardless of things like gender, race, age, etc.?

Although perhaps this is just another phase for me. I do not currently have children, I haven't given up my chosen career path, and so I do not know the feeling of regret that some women might have. Sure, I've had to make decisions about where I want my life to go, and I always wonder "what if...?", but I don't think I have reached the stage where I look back on my life and wish that I had done law instead of engineering, or anything big like that.

For now, I think I'm just going to stick to cooking for MrMan5.5 - no life changing decisions need to be made there.

Cheater's Lament

Lucy said that she doesn't understand why people cheat. She said that there's no point in cheating, if you don't want to be with your partner and want to be with someone else, then just end your relationship. Otherwise, don't cheat. We also talked about whether you should tell your partner if you cheat. She says that it serves no purpose, it doesn't make it better for either of you, and if you're not going to cheat anymore, then just stop, you don't need to tell anyone.

I agree that telling your partner won't do anything other than make you feel better. I'm not sure what advantages there are to telling your partner. If they find out, they'll never trust you and your relationship will never be the same. Then again, I feel like your partner should be entitled to know that you are a cheater and decide whether they want to be with you based on that information.

I used to agree with Lucy about the not cheating thing. I didn't understand why someone who is in a happy relationship would cheat, so the cheating must indicate that something is missing from the relationship. Maybe not something big enough to end the relationship, but it would have to be something serious enough to make someone go so far as to cheat.

Then I met The Other Guy. I can't quite place what it was about him that made me feel that way - maybe part of it was that he was so much like me and it was my narcissistic tendency to want to love myself? Whatever it was, I felt like there were sparks between us, and I had that tingly feeling that you get when you know you have a crush on someone. I briefly entertained the idea of being with him, but dismissed it not long after, as I thought it wouldn't be worth it.

a) I didn't want to risk everything I have with MrMan5.5 for what could really be a bad experience.
b) A mutual friend tells me that he's not all that nice anyway.
c) I'm not that conceited to even think that he would even be interested in me in the first place, as we barely know each other.

I spent 2 hours lying in bed next to MrMan5.5 trying to work out what was missing in our relationship. Other than laughing at the silly faces he makes when he sleeps, the only thing I could come up with that we're missing was 20 nuggets, and I have QC and Sparks for that. Maybe it's because things are going well for us at the moment, but I feel happy when I'm with him, I miss him when he's gone, and I don't wish he would do x instead of y when we're together.

Still, I felt that we have an honest relationship, so despite everything Lucy said about not telling, I decided to tell MrMan5.5 about TOG. This is probably as close as I will get to cheating without actually cheating, and to be honest, Lucy was right. It didn't make anything better. In fact, I felt worse, because I hadn't even thought of TOG in ages until Lucy brought up the cheating thing. Obviously, MrMan5.5 got upset about the whole thing. He told me that if I wanted to see what it was like with TOG, then I should give it a try.

That wasn't really what I thought would happen. I'm not sure what I wanted to achieve by telling him. I didn't think it would make me feel better, and I knew he wouldn't be happy about it. Maybe I just wanted to see what would happen?

Where Are They Now: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers

Been waiting for a blog I read to do a "Where are they now?" on the Power Rangers, but then decided not to be lazy and do one on my own. I really only watched up to when they became ninja power rangers, so I'll try to do the original power rangers, the first red, black and yellow replacements, and the first pink replacement.

Red Ranger #1 - Austin St. John
Jason Lee Scott. Apparently he also played the second gold ranger. Interestingly, he was actually born with the name Jason. Pretty much his entire acting career consisted of the power ranger series, and according to wikipedia, he is now working as a paramedic. He also did a crime show called Footsteps, and wrote a book on martial arts.

Yellow Ranger #1 - Thuy Trang
Trini Kwan. She was in the movie Spy Hard and The Crow: City of Angels. Sadly, she passed away in 2001, in a car accident.

Black Ranger #1 - Walter Jones
Zack Taylor. Had various one-offs in TV series. Played Michael Hammon in Malibu Shores for 10 episodes. Played Harlan Band in Space Cases for 27 episodes. Did some voice work for various villains in the power rangers series after he left. He voiced characters in the Rockstar game Red Dead Redemption. Most recently, he has been working on the movies Man Without a Head and Speed Demons.

Pink Ranger #1 - Amy Jo Johnson
Kimberly Ann Hart. Had various TV one-offs. Even though she requested her character be written off in the power rangers series, she returned for the Turbo Power Rangers Movie. Spent a while in the TV show Felicity as Julie Emrick from 1998-2002. Was in The Division in 2004 for 22 episodes. She is currently in the Canadian TV series Flashpoint.

Blue Ranger - David Yost
Bill Craston. Produced various films and was in the movie Ladykillers, and just completed a movie: Degenerate.

Green/White Ranger - Jason David Frank
Tommy Oliver. He was the longest lasting ranger, staying in the series for 6 years. Didn't do much else in his acting career, and it seems he's more into his martial arts than acting. He will be making his fighting debut in the light-heavyweight division in August, 2010.

Bulk - Paul Schrier
Farkus Bulkmeier. He was a fan club president in an episode of Mega64. He did some directing, including 16 episodes of the Hello Kitty animated series. He is also a comic book artist.

Skull - Jason Narvy
Eugene Skullovitch. Was in action movie Wicked Game. He received a Bachelor of Liberal Arts. He is currently a PhD student, studying dramatic arts.

Ernie - Richard Genelle
Ernie. Left the power rangers due to weight and health problems. Sadly, passed away in 2008 due to a heart attack.

Red Ranger #2 - Steve Cardenas
Rocky DeSantos. He is a third-degree black belt and is currently operating a karate school in Southern California.

Yellow Ranger #2 - Karan Ashley
Aisha Campbell. Various TV one-offs, but co-wrote and produced Devon's Ghost: Legend of the Bloody Boy.

Black Ranger #2 - Johnny Yong Bosch
Adam Park. He does various voices for anime and game characters, including the English voice for Vash the Stampede in Trigun. His list is quite amazing, even I've heard of the anime that he has done voices for - Akira, Naruto Shippuden, Bleach, Samurai Champloo, Code Geass, Lucky Star, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Full Metal Alchemist, as well as the games he has done - Tales of Symphona: Dawn of the New World, Shin Megami Tensei, Dissidia, Devil May Cry 4, Eternal Sonata, .hack// series... check out the IMDB list, it's impressive! He is also part of a band called Eyeshine which is apparently named after something Steve Irwin said in an episode of Crocodile Hunter - that he could see crocodiles because of their eyeshine from his lantern.

Pink Ranger #2 - Catherine Sutherland
Katherine Hillard. She was in the movie The Cell, although in the movie she only appears as a dead body - her scenes were cut from the movie, but can be seen in the DVD release. She is now a personal fitness trainer.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Friendships are like plants. If you don't care for them, they wither and die.
-The Sims

After reading Graham's post (if you are reading this, Graham, and object to my link, then tell me and I'll take it out!) and I guess it's partly related to my whole wanting to network thing. The thing is, I think I have a lot of friends - well, at least I've never felt like I've wanted more friends. To be perfectly honest, I wanted to be one of those people who sits alone studying in the cafeteria when I went to uni. I probably would have done a lot better in my studies if I had, but my time at university has been and gone, so I'll never know. What actually happened though, was that Graham and Running Tom introduced me to the world of "second floor" and I was quite lucky in that I made a lot of awesome friends there.

Unfortunately, with WoW/DotA, 340 and 440, my time spent on second floor dwindled down to maybe once every few months (Suresh usually greets me with, "Anna! I haven't seen you since last time!" - a PurePwnage quote, but still a sign of how infrequently he sees me). I feel like I haven't really kept in contact with anyone other than reading LJ posts every now and again and following them on Twitter and it's something I regret quite often.

Anyway, the point of this post wasn't to be all boo-hoo, I don't see my friends anymore (which is my own fault, and something I'll have to rectify on my own), but it has two parts. The first part is in reference to the quote above, and the second part what I think my process for "making friends" is.

Lucy recently commented that I seem to have a lot of friends, the upside of which is that I'm pretty sure I have a trivia team ready, I just need to find a good venue to go to! The downside is that friendships really do require maintenance. Sure, there are the friends that you can catch up with once a year or so, but I think in order to have close friends, frequent contact is a requirement. When I first started getting decent chunks of time off, I usually tried to plan something with friends on those days off just because I hadn't seen them in so long, and it would be nice to be able to talk for more than a few seconds as I rushed off to work. I think I overdid it a bit though, as I began to feel exhausted from so much social interaction - both at work and outside of work. Maybe I felt that way because I'm mostly introverted, but I think that if someone were to have tons and tons of friends, surely they'd either have to keep most of those friendships at the "see each other infrequently" level, or just collapse from the pressure of having to keep up with it all.

The bad part about my friendship patterns is that I seem to have phases with people in which I'll want to spend as much time as I can with them, and then after a while, I end up seeing them every few months, if that. Although, I have a few friends who I try to do things with as frequently as I can depending on our schedules, so maybe those are my "close friends". Personally, I find that I prefer more online interaction with friends than having to do stuff offline with them. For one thing, it's much cheaper that way - as I've mentioned before, most of my pay goes towards DVDs and food! One thing I like about talking to someone online is, I can talk to them in my own time, and they can respond in their own time, and we can go on doing other things in the meantime.

I find that with the #se440 people, when most of us are in the channel, conversations are more involved. I guess when we meet up for dinner or something, you have the problem of really only being able to talk to someone in close proximity as it seems rude to carry out a conversation over someone in the middle. Plus, a lot of our conversations are usually interspersed with references to funny things we've seen/read online, and it's much easier to just link said item than try to give a vague description based on what you can remember of it.

For the second part, the reason why I'm writing about this is probably because I just sat through some customer service thing at work, so excuse me if it sounds all propaganda-ish. I don't even think I'm the best person to be writing this, to be honest, as I prefer to do the whole sitting in the corner having chats with one or two people at parties thing, but here goes!

For conversation openers, I usually go with asking how they know the host/what they're studying/where they work, as they're usually safe topics of conversation. Plus, they usually tell you something else about the person that you can ask about later. I guess the most important thing with making friends (and keeping customers happy) is the ability to listen actively. If you are incredibly charming and have lots of great anecdotes, then you can probably get away with talking non-stop the entire time and still win over a group of people, but I think people who are like that are in the minority. For the rest of us, we have to have the whole two-way exchange thing.

If you listen to what someone says, and they're willing to talk, you can usually carry on a conversation quite easily just by asking them about something they said. Something I do quite often, and that I've only been caught out on once, is that if I can't find anything that I want to ask about, I'll play dumb and ask about something even though I know the answer. It doesn't always work, as they might end up giving a dry explanation, but I find that during the explanation, I can usually think of other things to ask about.

(The one time I got caught out, someone was telling me about how he was levelling a WoW character, and he acted like he was really good at it, so I started asking him about it as though I never played and restrained myself when he told me he was alliance and they're so much better than horde. A bit later, someone else came up to me and said it was so surprising to see me out and not playing WoW.)

Another thing they mentioned at work is that people love it when you remember things about them, even if it's just their name (although then you get stuck in that situation I described in my post about respawn where if you meet them and you're not sure if they remember you or not, but you don't want to be the one who brings it up). Ever since I mentioned wanting to leech knowledge from #se440 people, MrMan5.5 has been calling me a sponge because I seem to absorb all kinds of weird information. I guess it is nice when people remember things about you - there are a few regulars at work that I'm getting to know their usual betting patterns and favourite numbers, and when I see them I mention how I have/haven't been spinning their numbers and they seem to like me - although not enough to want to play at my table.

(This is the other great thing about online conversations - message logs save you the trouble of having to remember something!)

The last thing I try to do when meeting new people, is avoid talking about negative things - the kind of things that typically make someone feel sorry for you. Unless they do it first, then you can mention a similar situation in order to try and empathise. I don't know, I just find people who whine to complete strangers to be a bit irritating after a while, and I try not to be someone like that. I think it's better to get to know someone first before you start telling them about how your rent is too high and your job sucks, etc.

So that's my super guide, I wonder if it'll be a best-seller?

Will the Real Anna Fodder Please Stand Up?

I was talking to MrMan5.5 not long ago about how I'm happy to write personal things here, but there are some details that I'll leave out - most notably, my full name. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest reason for me is that I don't want to chance meeting somebody who started reading my blog before they met me (I know it seems unlikely, but it has happened to someone I know, so it's not impossible - although she has more of an e-presence than I do). As does probably anyone who spends a large amount of time online, I feel like my online persona is different from my "real life" persona. Sure, I'm the same person in both cases, but there are things that I feel more comfortable talking about online than I do IRL, and vice versa, and so logically, a person's perception of me would differ depending on their main form of interaction with me.

When I found out Blizzard was going to link RealIDs (a Blizzard-wide user ID) with real first names and last names on Blizzard forums, I was suprised by their decision. They blame trolls for this decision, but I love how they add that it will "connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before" as though it's a positive thing. The only "connection" that I can see coming out of this is that it'll make it easier for guys to pick out which players are female in real life (yes, I naively signed up with my real name).

Another problem I can think of is that every time I meet someone new who I find out is a gamer, I will do an internal memory scan to see if I've played with that person before (I know it says forum link, but as someone pointed out in the comments, there are WoW addons that draw data from the armory, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote one to scan the forum for real names. There are even tons of sites like WoW Census that store heaps of information about WoW characters, so it wouldn't be too hard to add real name to the list).

"Oh, are you that John Mitchell that has an 85 rogue on Barthilas?"
"Have we played together before?"
"Yeah.... you were asking my priest for water. I didn't even know rogues had mana."
"Er... umm. Hi."

I don't even see why you'd need to know someone's real name to "make a connection". I have lots of WoW friends who I still call by their WoW names. Partly because it's easier, as quite a few of them are named John, but also because it's easier for me to keep track of them in my head. I know so many David/Daves, but only one Korsair, Mlargle or Meshugganah. Although the only downside to this is when I have to introduce them to my non-WoW friends, I always struggle to remember their real names. I could introduce them by their WoW-names, but people always look so confused as though they misheard what I said. I guess that's a reasonable assumption, but I thought it was an Aussie thing to give nicknames to people like Jozza or Macca (hi, Beans!), so what's wrong with Empathogen or Eviscerator?

What I love the most is what someone quoted out of Blizzard's code of conduct:

Quoted from the Battle.net forum code of conduct
DISTRIBUTION OF REAL-LIFE PERSONAL INFORMATION
This category includes:
Releasing any real-life information about other players or Blizzard Entertainment employees
If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:
Be permanently banned from the Battle.net forums

GG.

Most of the comments point out that it's really only the people who aren't in it to troll that are going to be affected by this, as anyone who intends to troll will have made a fake name anyway. Sigh. Why is everyone trying to turn into Facebook? Google Buzz failed hard, IMO. I'd log into my email to find a new "Buzz" only to spend ages scrolling down to find someone wrote a smiley face in reply to someone's Buzz from three weeks ago which I didn't even read because I already read it in Google Reader. Thank you, Google, how would I have lived without seeing that?

IMHO, keep the main focus of games on gaming. Or do what Steam does and have an IM-type system. How is learning someone's real name going to encourage friendship - are people going to look up people's addresses and write them letters?

The part of the arguing is between those who want to protect their privacy because of the principle of it (or because you're probably safer that way), and those who think that those who want to protect their privacy must have something to hide. It seems to me to be like that whole if you oppose the Internet filter, you must approve of child pornography argument. Just because you don't want your information revealed to all doesn't mean you have some deep dark secret to hide. I don't walk around with my mobile number tattooed on my face because I don't want random people calling me for no reason. I'm not hiding it, as such, I would just like to be selective in who gets it.

Maybe I'm just too tired to think of any good points at the moment, but really, all I can think of the idea is that it's dumb, dumb, dumb.

[EDIT] Oh, wow. Just as I finished writing all of that, I read a link from Agents Simon saying they decided to scrap the whole real name thing. Zzzzz.

Respawn Point

Last weekend, I went to Respawn LAN, and it was my first big LAN. I have to say, the thing that struck me most was that if you didn't play an FPS (or some other kind of shooting game like Alititude), then it was really hard to get a game going. Since the Internet connection was reserved for Steam only, HoN was out of the question, so I convinced some people to play DotA. It was a bit of a pain in the ass trying to get people playing DotA - had to make sure everyone has the same version and could get the game running OK. I guess most people didn't expect to be playing and so they hadn't updated War3. Although I can't really complain, since Auto had a game of Starcraft up and running for ages and couldn't even get one opponent. It was fun though, and I got to meet new people - though we never found out who megaTRON was, which was a bit disappointing because he was really good. It took me (as Doom) and Razor two hex sticks and my ult to stop him, but Mpanda was pretty farmed by the end, so we probably would have won anyway.

I bumped into Bill and Yorran (ArO's friends) again. I never know what to do in a situation where you're not sure if the other person remembers you and so you don't want to greet them in the event that they don't remember you and you have that awkward moment where they say, "Oh, right, Anna!" and feign recognition, even though you both know the other person doesn't remember you at all. I guess Bill not recognising me is OK since we haven't seen each other in about a year and a half, but I wasn't sure if Yorran remembered me since I think we met about 3 months ago. I wanted to congratulate him on his job offer, but didn't want to risk the awkward feigned recognition moment. I figured in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't have changed his life or anything if I had congratulated him, so I decided not to say anything.

Was that bad? What if he was a DotA player? Graham seems to think meeting new people is a good thing, and I feel like I should extend my friendship circle - plus, all the graduate programs seem to place a big focus on the ability to network. I met so many different people in the random DotA games I organised, but never got contact details from any of them. I guess I was a bit afraid that if I asked them for emails or HoN/DotA usernames they might think that I'm hitting on them (going to rage about this topic in a future post). Plus, I think shyness would have been a factor. We shouted out asking who megaTRON was, but nobody responded. =(

I ended up helping out with a few things at Respawn, because ArO wanted to enter the Flatout 2 comp, and because I enjoyed hanging out with him when he couldn't game because he had to do stuff for the LAN. It made me realise that I miss that kind of stuff. Now that uni is over and I'm not on any club committees anymore, I don't really have anything to organise or help out with, and I didn't realise how much I really enjoyed doing it until I couldn't anymore. That being said, I did complain about having to do it when I was doing it, but I think maybe I really do enjoy it more than I realised. I've been thinking about maybe taking up some volunteer work in the meantime, both to give me something to do, and to develop my skills a little more. Not really sure what I'd volunteer to do though. I don't want to wave cans and harass people on the street, or sell raffle tickets.

The atmosphere at Respawn was very sausage-fest-like. Every now and again, someone would yell out, "Penis!" and then it would get echoed around the room for a bit until it died out, or occasionally someone would yell out, "Vagina!" instead. Not many girls were there, I noticed a couple of female players, plus one admin and her mother. There was a female comp, but I wasn't paying attention to who entered since I was playing L4D at the time (ArO said about 6 or 7 entered, but he thinks about 20-30 females were at the LAN). Some guy was watching porn openly on his computer. I was a bit surprised. I don't think I'd be brave enough to do that as there are 449 other people who could see what you're doing - too embarrassing for me!

I had fun at Respawn, but I think I still prefer smaller home LANs, since you know that the people you invite are going to want to play games instead of watching stuff on their computer. Thinking of having a housewarming LAN when I move out, but will have to depend on space. =(