They

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.