Social Sim

I realised that my posts are pretty formulaic. They start with an anecdote of some sort (occasionally related to my life, but sometimes something I've read/heard). Then comes some discussion on a topic, usually related to the anecdote, but only just barely. Lastly, some question asking how I can improve myself based on what I've realised.

So, story time. When I played The Sims (the original), I played Michael Bechelor - mostly because I couldn't be bothered controlling multiple sims - and the AI in the original Sims was pretty poor, so if you left your sims unattended, their free will would usually lead to them doing stupid things. Pretty quickly, I maxed out all of his stats, he became really rich, and over a period of time, I managed to get him to the top level of each of the different career tracks. The only problem I had with him was his social meter. The fact that he lived alone meant that he was a sad social panda most of the time. And his long work hours meant that he barely had any time for socialising (especially when he was on the graveyard shift for various careers), but in order to climb the political ladder, I dosed him up on coffee and forced him to have social interactions until the wee hours of the morning.

When I got around to playing Bob and Betty Newbie, I noticed that keeping the social meter up wasn't nearly as hard. I think the biggest contributor was the fact that there were two people in the house. They could interact with each other to boost each other's social meter, and my sim didn't have to call in sick in order to invite people over at a reasonable hour (unsurprisingly, if you called a sim at 3AM, they get really angry at you).

Now that I've been living with MrMan5.5 for a while, I find that my desire to see my other friends has dropped pretty low. I think like in The Sims, my social "happiness" is fulfilled just by talking to MrMan5.5 and I guess I don't really feel the need to meet up with other people very often. Plus, my team at work is pretty cool, and I get some of that social energy out of talking to them, too.

Because of this, I feel like I've becoming more of a Socially Awkward Penguin than normal. I bumped into Olek at the supermarket recently, and I just couldn't think of what to do. Was I meant to walk around with him, shopping and chatting, even though I had already picked up all the things I wanted to buy? And even though DotA2 is pretty much on my mind all the time now that we've signed up for another tournament, talking about the game in the supermarket seemed really strange to me. It's weird, because I feel like I'm pretty close to Olek, but I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to say to him. So I did the SAP thing and disappeared with my shopping.

I feel like I'd be perfectly OK if I saw one of my friends once a month (i.e. every month I met up with one person other than MrMan5.5). I know that it's a really bad thing, because friendships are like plants. If you don't care for them, they wither and die (oh, speaking of withering and dying, I should really give Michael some feedback on his monsters). But I also feel like this is one of those other big transitions. Like when you first start high school, you catch up with your primary school friends regularly (if you didn't go to the same high school as most of your primary school friends, like I did), but then that drops off. Then you start uni, and eventually stop seeing your high school friends as often. Now that I've permanently joined a team, I feel like I have to spend time getting to know them, and between that, MrMan5.5, ice skating, Coursera, and the DotA2 comp, I feel pretty drained of energy. I wonder if seeing uni friends will also start to drop off.

Although, a lot of the other ex-grads seem to catch up with their uni friends quite often, so maybe it's just me? Even Person still goes to SEE events sometimes, along with the hundreds of other social events he gets invited to, and he's doing a Masters at the same time, so it's not like he has plenty of spare time.

Following from my last post, I managed to do four 30 minute exercise sessions this week, so the penalty fund is still at $20. Julian said that as long as the Salvos continue to help people, then it shouldn't matter that they don't support gay people. Joe came up with a good counterargument for giving the money to charity, as I would feel "good" about it, and could use that to justify not exercising! So maybe the Salvos is the best solution, as I don't think I'd feel good about giving to them, but they would probably still do some good with my money. Joe's other suggestions included hosting a board games night, or buying gifts for friends/family - just anything that puts the money out of my hands and won't lead to it coming back to me in the long run.