Bottled Up for a Week - Intro and Sending

I saw Bottled in the Google Play store, and it sounded interesting. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I tried the app Hello Talk, where you specify the language(s) you speak, and the language you are trying to learn, and it lists people who are the opposite, so you can help each other lean a new language. My French vocabulary was tiny, so most of the conversations died after I told them that I live in Australia and I want to learn to speak French. I did learn some cool things about Nice and Marseilles, and I met a really nice guy from Canada who shared cooking photos with me.

I wanted to give Bottled a shot, because it would remove the language barrier, and still let me learn things about people from other cultures. How the app works is that you write a message and put it in a virtual bottle to send to someone random. You can specify the preferred gender and age range for your recipient, and there's an item that lets you pick a country, but that's about all you can control with regards to who gets your bottles.

You can also customise your profile, firstly by defining what you want to get from the app. There are three types of hats you can wear, Sailor (Here to make friends, discover new cultures, learn and share), Treasure Hunter (Roaming the Oceans, searching for the rare gem, your special someone), and Pirate (Here for fun, not really knowing what you are looking for, but always with good intention). I chose Sailor, and I didn't realise that you could still get matched with Treasure Hunters and Pirates, despite being only a sailor. I also goofed and confused the pirate hat with the treasure hunter hat for the first couple of days.

Once you receive a bottle, you can decide to release it for someone else to find, or keep it, which opens a chat window with the sender and you can exchange messages. To help lure people in, you can edit your bio to add more information, as well as add a photo, however, unless the person has a telescope, the photos are tiny.

To prevent spam, you get a treasure chest every couple of hours, which has the chance to contain a bottle of rum. These bottles are emptied and used to send out your messages. Someone I met said that you can get about 20-30 bottles per day if you're on it all the time (you can only have a max of two chests at a time, so you need to keep opening the app to open your chests). The devs also started that you'll only receive a bottle if you've been on in the last 24 hours.

There's a reputation system in the game, and you get 1 point every time someone keeps one of your bottles. You can also gift people items which gives them more points. You start with 20 rep, and it's displayed on your profile. If your reputation gets too low, you can get banned from the app. I think the only way to lose rep is for people to report your messages. redbeanpork wanted me to report this message, but I thought that would be too mean.

Since I've had a few discussions about dating apps, and what kind of messages / profiles work best, I thought I'd document my adventure in Bottled. It's a lot of information, so I'll break it up over a few posts, and at the end, I'll post a record of all the messages I received (with names redacted), along with my comments about why I rejected / accepted them.

Keep in mind, this is my own personal preference! Don't take my comments as an indication of how everyone else is going to behave. My main intention was to meet new people and learn about different cultures, not to find someone to start a relationship / have sex with. But in my case, it's the same thing, as I can't imagine starting a relationship with someone I can't have a decent conversation with, and I can't imagine having a decent conversation with someone who I don't find interesting.

I tried to err on the side of chatting to people if I was unsure whether or not to talk to them, because a few of my friends have said that being on a dating app as a guy is really tough, since you almost never get matches, and you have to do all the work of initiating conversation. I will go over that a bit more in my next post.

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First, I'll start with my adventures in sending messages, since it's nice and short. In total, I sent 4 messages. The app actually gives you a tip saying not to send a message that just says, "Hi", since you're less likely to get a response.

The first message I sent was:

Hi, 

You've received my first bottle! Hopefully it's interesting enough for you to reply. 

I spent far too long thinking of a good username, and then I thought: I've never been an early enough user that I've been able to get a short name.

What's the story behind your username?

It was sent to Mexico. Given the time difference, I didn't expect them to open it any time soon, but I got another couple of empty bottles, and wrote a couple more messages:

If you were washed up on an island and you were dying, what would you write in your bottle?

Hi, 

I'm from Australia, and it's yet another hot night. I'm trying to think what would be an interesting fact to tell someone from somewhere else about Australia, and the best that I can come up with is this: 

We had a Prime Minister called Harold Holt who was lost at sea. In Melbourne, there's a swimming pool dedicated to him. 

What's your interesting fact?

Then I went to sleep.

In the morning, I got a notification saying that my potential Mexican friend had opened my bottle.... and tossed it back into the sea, along to Germany.

To say I was crushed was an understatement. I'd had the app for about 8 hours and I had already been rejected! My other two bottles remained unopened. I did read a few reviews from people saying that they only got a couple of bottles after a week of having the app, so I was pretty surprised when I saw three bottles sitting at my island. I hadn't yet decided to document all the messages at this point, so my first few messages went unrecorded, but I did take a screenshot of one of them:

My 45-year-old co-worker said she still gets stuff like this when she uses dating apps, so I'm unsurprised that I got one. But it was the first time someone outside of a game had asked me for nudes, so that's a milestone, I guess? I don't remember why I rejected the other two bottles.

Considering my failed attempt to captivate anyone's attention, I tried a different tact with my message:

Hi, 

I'm from Australia and I like movies, food and computer games. How about you? What do you like to do to pass the time?

This one ended up getting rejected 3 times, until finally, Receiver#1, a 20-year-old male from France, made my day by opening my bottle.

Hey I'm from France and I like computer games and food just like you do. Moreover I love making good meal for myself and making my own video games.

I was so happy! We messaged back and forth for a bit, and it turns out he also likes management / simulation games. We've both played Cities: Skylines and he recommended a couple of other games for me to try: Rimworld, and Airport CEO, which is kinda scary, because both games are on my Steam wishlist...

He made me incredibly jealous with the food he was eating, and really made me miss being in France. He's currently studying, and also happens to be a writer, though he was doing a class on French literature, and other than Le Petit Prince, I didn't have much to contribute to that discussion. The time difference made it a bit hard to have a flowing conversation, but to be honest, I preferred it that way, as it wasn't a demanding friendship. He'd reply while I was asleep, and I'd reply while he was asleep. It was nice and low-key.

Receiver#1 was the only person to open one of my bottles, but to be honest, after the first day, I didn't really have time to send out any other bottles.

Here's what my screen looked like when I woke up on day 2...

Note: You can't even open the chests when your screen is full of bottles, so I wasn't able to get any new empty bottles anyway...

To be continued!

Giving Thanks

Not really much of a tradition yet, as it hasn't been happening for many years, but I felt pretty grateful to get a bonus at work a few years ago, and I wanted to pay it forward by thanking some of the people who I felt helped me through the year. I ended up taking my parents and MrFodder's mum out to lunch at a lobster restaurant.

Seeing as I'm exploring the cultures of other countries this year, I thought about this year's bonus lunch being a Thanksgiving dinner instead, but unlike our counterparts in the United States, we don't get the day off today, and I didn't think anyone would want to eat a big dinner on a Thursday night knowing that they had to go to work the next day. Second best thing would be to have dinner with a couple of people that helped me get through this year. I figured, why not do it on Thanksgiving Day (the United States version, at least)? I invited redbeanpork and Pharmacist to join me and MrFodder at Meat and Wine Co. in Southbank.

The food was good, the company was good, but the best part was that our waiter was also called Anna. Pharmacist suggested that I constantly say her name when thanking her or talking to her in some other way, but I kept forgetting. He managed to pull it off, and I didn't even notice, despite the fact that he was saying my name, and the cocktail party effect is supposed to occur! I wanted to try again before we left, but unfortunately, Anna wasn't the one to take our payment. :(

I don't think I'm a criminal at heart, but I find the exercise of coming up with scams really fun. It was one of the things we talked about at dinner. I think the fun aspect of it is trying to stretch the boundaries of the law without going outside it. It's not a very ethical exercise though.

I know I complain a lot, and my last post in particular wasn't too happy, but I actually have a lot to be grateful for. I'm not dead, or in jail. There was a health scare in the family, but things are on the mend now. I'm happier at work than I have been for a long time. My boss is awesome.

I'm still trying to think of ways to thank some of the other people in my life who have made the year great. I thought about buying some flowers for one of my former co-workers, but there was a time someone left a note on her desk and she got really confused trying to work out who it was. Anonymous flowers are out of the question. If I left my name on the flowers, would it be weird? I tried to suss out her feelings on the subject by asking if it would be weird if I sent someone else  flowers, and she said yes. I don't want to keep giving people food, because then they'll feel obligated to eat it, and they might not want to eat sweets.

Though my last pre-Christmas food gift is going to be waffles for someone on my team, who has grown on me, and I've come to respect quite a lot over the past few months. I'm tossing up whether or not to bake gingerbread cookies, but I'm leaning towards not doing it, as I don't want to build up an expectation.

I'm really hankering to make another video though, even though I constantly say that I've folded away my tripod for good. I don't know whether my new team would be as willing to star in a movie as my old team was. They weren't even really up for it when I made the James Bond parody, but after they saw how it turned out, they were more willing to take part. My new team doesn't have that history, and I don't think I can make anything as good as that, especially since I love James Bond movies, and the person I was making the video for meant a lot to me. Making videos is incredibly time consuming, and I didn't like the pressure I was getting from others to make one. I felt like the videos I made when I felt the inspiration to make them (the James Bond parody, and the Taylor Swift parody) were far higher quality than the ones I was pressured to make (the AFL mockumentary, the Mean Girls parody, and the So You Think You Can Dance? parody).

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot left in my repertoire after that - it's just food and movies.

Sidenote: my phone went into a bootloop (RIP. Fortunately, A lent me his old Samsung Galaxy S6), so it's been a while since I've listened to the Frozen soundtrack. I found out someone on my team speaks Japanese, and I asked him whether he'd sing  とびら開けて with me, and he said only if he was really drunk. Then I found out someone on my team speaks a bit of French (Canadian French, but close enough), and now I'm working up the courage to ask if he wants to sing L'amour est un cadeau with me.

Back to the topic, I'm grateful for all the people who have pushed me to grow this year. Of course, it all starts with Intern Peter, who prompted me to start the 365 day photo challenge. Nev and Jal, who seem to find the creative ways I manage to break everything amusing, and have been incredibly patient with me learning a whole heap of new stuff, and changing the way that I work. In a new experience for me, I've interacted with a lot of different people this year - some who I probably never would have looked at twice in the past.

Urgh, so many things I want to do, so little time. And now I'm too full of food to do anything. Mmmm... ribs.

Dr Cox or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Unfriend with Aplomb

A former Valve employee posted a Half Life 3 fanfic recently, and it seems to have caused a lot of backlash against Valve's current franchise baby, Dota 2, the implication being that Valve's focus has shifted and Dota is to blame for why there isn't going to be a Half Life 3. The fact that Valve announced they'd be making a card game based on Dota 2 probably didn't help things. The response seems to be to post a heap of negative reviews for the game.

I don't know how much of an impact the negative reviews will have on the game, everyone I know who plays it only plays it because a friend of their recommended it to them. And the kind of people who are likely to sink cash into the game are people who already enjoy it. I guess it adds just another thing to stop new people from choosing the game.

Some of the reviews are funny.

"Think of how many fans of Half Life died during this time... They talked about how cool it would be to see the continuation of the game. But alas. They will never see it."

I thought this one was clever.

This one pretty much sums up how I feel about Dota.

Person claims to have spent 3 hours in a tutorial but has 2 hours on record. To have finished the tutorial and finished an entire game (approx 40 mins) in 2 hours is quite impressive.

"When Artifact releases you better prepare for unforseen consequences." What are you going to do, leave another negative review? Oh no.

Anyway, reviews aside, I noticed that one of my "friends" jumped on the bandwagon. I put it in quotation marks because we met once, at a party hosted by a mutual friend, added each other on Facebook and then Steam, and have succeeded in never playing a game together since. He messages me every now and again to get me to look at a screenshot from whatever game he happens to be playing at the time, but that's the extent of our friendship. I've been meaning to remove him for a while, and I haven't. I can't really explain why. Maybe I felt bad for him? Maybe I didn't want to put our mutual friend into an awkward situation?

It really bothered me to see that today because often I would have no interest in his comments or screenshots, but I always listened to him patiently, and made some sort of conversation about his screenshots. I'd let him explain skill build ideas to me, and even look up the mechanics of the game to understand what he was talking about. I haven't once said anything against his interests, so to see him to so against one of mine really pissed me off.

Well, today, after nearly 8 years of "friendship", I've finally removed him. It's probably been a year since we last messaged each other anyway. I still feel bad for doing it, but I also feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, as I felt guilty whenever I saw his name pop-up.

Not Sorry

I can't remember who spoke about this, but I've been trying this new thing where I don't say "Sorry" unless it's something I'm genuinely sorry about. There are other ways of expressing sorry without using the S-word, and I know it's an almost pedantic thing, but I'm finding that it is having an amazing impact on my life.

For instance, if someone were to invite me to do something and I wasn't available, I would previously say, "Sorry, I can't make it, I have ______". Which sounds innocent enough, except I would then feel compelled to make it up to them, as though my unavailability had inconvenienced them, and I needed to do something in return. But the truth is, I probably didn't inconvenience them. They probably just went and asked someone else, and thought nothing of me after my refusal.

It's amazing how liberating it is. I don't feel bad about turning things down, I don't feel anxious when trying to explain that I don't want to do something. I might not even have plans that day, I just don't feel like doing whatever it is I've been invited to, or I'll be tired from doing something else that weekend, or just want to chill at home and play games. As long as I'm not neglecting my friendships, I think that's OK.

And I feel like a giant weight has been lifted off my back.

Cookie Monster

Warning: this is an emo post - continue at your own peril.

Even though the Dota 2 challenge with D is over, I've been playing some bot matches with him, his friend OCD and Jal. The games are pretty relaxed, and it's mostly just messing around, which is fun.

I've come to really appreciate how relaxed OCD is (despite the impress you get from the nickname I've given him). Absolutely nothing so far has phased him. Even in the official match, he was incredibly relaxed the whole time, and was very sportsmanlike despite his loss. That's the kind of person I want to be friends with.

Before the match, I upped the stakes and said that if I lost, I would buy D dinner at this American BBQ restaurant that he seems to love. OCD asked if we can go together anyway, even though they lost, and the other players seem keen to go. We haven't gone yet, and I'm incredibly nervous about meeting OCD. I really want him to like me, so that we can eventually become friends.

I found out that he likes cookies, so of course that meant I would bring him cookies when we first meet. After my near-loss to Captain in the choc-chip cookie bake-off, I realised that even though these cookies are my perfect ideal for cookies, they aren't everyone's cup of tea, so I set to work trying to improve them. I really liked how Captain's cookies were a lot thicker. I know OCD likes soft cookies, so I had to keep that property, but I remembered reading about Alton Brown's The Chewy, where he makes thick, chewy cookies by substituting bread flour for the plain flour and thought I might try the same.

Long story short, I baked a heap of cookies, with the plan to take them into the office and perform more A/B testing, with 6 batches. Bread flour vs pizza flour, and dark choc, milk choc and m&ms.

D sees the cookies in the kitchen and asks what weird thing I'm doing now. I explain about the quest to find the best cookies, and he says, "Normally it'd be creepy... but it's you."

I don't know if I was genuinely saddened by that comment, or it's just the grief finally hitting me, but I just completely deflated. I gave up on the experiment. I left the remainder of the cookies on a plate (though not before finding out the votes at that point - milk choc (11) beating dark choc (4.5) and m&ms (1.5)).

On the trip home, I thought about my past. I've jokingly referred to myself as a stalker, and my friends play along with it. I don't think I've ever done anything maliciously, but as someone pointed out to me, it's not about what I think is malicious, it's how the recipient sees it. D and OCD are best friends, so I would expect him to be able to predict OCD's reaction.

Some of the other things I've done could be classified as creepy, too. Taking someone's photo, printing out a picture of their face, and then filming a James Bond parody is pretty damn creepy if you think about it. Asking a friend to look up a co-worker's birthday on Facebook is pretty creepy. Recording people's likes, dislikes, and coffee preferences is pretty creepy.

I think this part is the grief talking: I feel like I've lost my joy de vivre. My passion for experiments is gone. All the little ideas I had floating in the back of my mind for cheering people up have vanished. I spent an hour looking at ice-cream recipes today, and not one of them gave me any inspiration.

A thought occurred to me: Is the reason why I feel so compelled to do "nice" things for people because I want to hide the fact that deep-down, I'm a creepy monster?

Support Network

I have a friend at work who has a problem. While I was able to offer general advice and support, I was not equipped to solve said problem. Instead, I went to Mr Brioche, who I did think had the experience to solve the problem, and I relayed his advice back to my friend.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, if I were to win the lottery, I planned to fake my death, move to another country, open my mediocre cafe, and grant crappy wishes that people didn't actually ask for (I forgot to mention the faking my death part in the post, but I think it's an important factor, because I don't want to have my time taken up by my past).

I never actually factored in the whole support network aspect. My friend moved to Australia with her husband, and no other family or friends. While I take for granted that if I need someone to drive me to the airport, or want some people to watch a movie with, I can just make a post on Facebook, she doesn't have that luxury.

However, she was able to take advantage of my network.

I wonder if this is how some people contribute to society.

Sometimes I feel like I am like Don Corleone, in that I connect people with each other. I do things for people, who say they owe me a favour, and then I call in those favours to help out other people, earning me more favours. I don't know what I'm meant to do with these favours, but sometimes I use some of these favours for questionable things just because I want to do something nice for someone I like.

Is this how someone turns into a mob boss? They start out just wanting to help their friends and family. Then someone gets into trouble, and they bend the rules a little to help them out. The next thing you know, you're putting cement shoes on someone and half the police force owes you a marker.

Don Fodder. Sounds wrong.

I think I'll just stick to listening to people's relationship problems.

On that note, Special K was away today, so D was my surrogate female friend. He wasn't very good at the job.

Me: How are you with relationship problems? Girl problems?
D: Divorce him and take half of his stuff. Next?

Why Can't We Be Friends? (Guy's Side)

I have a friend, Bruce, who was interested in a mutual friend of ours. They spent a lot of time together, as they both worked in the same department at the same company. They had a lot of the same interests. He never told her how he felt.

Fast forward a year, and she starts dating someone romantically. He begins to cut her off. They used to get coffee together, now they don't. They used to eat lunch together, now they don't.

What happened?

I asked him if the he enjoyed being around her when she was single, wouldn't he still enjoy being around her for those same reasons? He said he wasn't interested in her anymore, but being around her was a painful reminder.

I can understand that.

It makes sense. It sucks to lose such a good friend, but when being around that person makes you feel sad, then it's probably not healthy to continue doing it until you feel like you've really moved past those feelings.

I really should have started this pair of posts from the girl's side, but I drew this comic first and it's 11:52 and I don't have time to draw another one and write a whole other post. This seems like a weak argument to me. Maybe I don't understand it.

Anyway, I'll write the other side tomorrow. I understand this side in theory, but I feel that it's a little bit wasteful. I find it quite rare to meet someone that I really click with, so when I do meet someone like that, I try to keep them in my life. Perhaps it's just because I'm partly masochistic, I do play Dota 2 after all, but there are some people that I really enjoy being around.

There's someone who I have had feelings for, and we've become friends instead, which I think was the better option in the end. There have been some difficult moments, but I'm glad I did it rather than cutting him off (though I nearly did at one point).

So yeah.... one of those "I understand in theory, but in practice, I don't do what I say" things. =/

One Hundred

Once again, I've hit the 100 posts in a row streak! A said I should post about something special, but today was just a regular work day. I had an interesting conversation at lunch about language.

Michael mentioned that when he first came to Australia, he found the word "arvo" (as in "afternoon") strange. I do remember being in primary school when I first heard that word, and Elise told me it was short for afternoon. Though I've never used it myself, I've never really thought about it either, and when I hear "arvo", I just think "afternoon", similar to how an Italian speaking person might hear "arriverderci" and think "goodbye" (not the word as such, but the sentiment). Michael thought that the way that Australians shorten words like that is a sign of laziness, but I disagreed, saying it's more a sign of closeness, similar to using tu (informal "you") compared to using vous (formal "you") in French.

(Side note: As I only knew about tu at the time, when I was starting conversations with people through the Hello Talk app, one of the people I spoke to corrected me saying that as we had just met, I should be using vous. But he said that in this case, he was happy for me to be using tu with him. So I started thinking about when you transition - do you formally ask someone (I read the phrase is On peut se tutoyer? but some people are replying that it is not used very often)? Is it like having that "boyfriend / girlfriend" conversation when dating someone? Do you become tu-official on Facebook? I don't remember ever having this conversation with Michael, but I started using tu with him as I didn't know any better at the time. He uses tu in return, so I guess it's OK.

Side side note: One of the other people I was speaking to specifically told me to use tu, as vous made him feel old (he was 19 according to his profile). Maybe it differs based on region? The first person was from Morocco, and the second person was from France. Some of the answers online say it's different in Belgium compared to France and also Canada.)

Back to Australian-English. So Michael commented that it seems like most Australians must be friendly if everyone seems to use "arvo". I think on the whole, most Australians are friendly by default. Even in formal office situations, at least in my experience, there hasn't been a lot of stiff formality. It probably helps that our CIO used to wear shorts on hot days, and was a huge advocate of casual days.

I've noticed that the trend for me is to be pretty casual with people I first meet, and it's only with people I don't like, or if the situation is incredibly formal (e.g. an interview), that I will be formal. I just find it makes it so much easier to get things done when you don't have a layer of formality over everything. That doesn't apply to everything, of course, and if someone is formal towards me, I will adjust and do the same in return, but my default stance is to be casual with people.

I wonder if it blurs the boundary between acquaintances and friends - without an obvious language change like that, how do you know when you are close enough to someone to become their friend?

Actually, I have no idea how that happened with any of my current friends. I wonder if there was a friendship activation point. It's not something that I distinctly remember. I thought maybe becoming Facebook friends is something, but I have a bunch of people that I met through conferences, or other events that I wouldn't really call friends.

Maybe for me, it's the email address point.

I currently have four email addresses that I regularly use: my personal email, my professional email, my friendly spam email, and my junk email.

My close friends have my personal email, complete with embarrassing moniker.

My professional email was initially created just for the purpose of sending out resumes, but when people at work have asked for my email address, I felt reluctant to give them my personal email address, so I started giving out this one instead.

However, I've found that there are some people who I don't really have much of a desire to keep in touch with. So I've started giving out my friendly spam email address to co-workers. It's my friendly spam email address because my actual junk email address has the word "junk" in it, and that's pretty embarrassing to say to someone's face.

It does get a bit awkward, when someone transitions from professional to close friend, especially if they meet a friend from another category and said friend organises something via email. Though maybe only creepy stalkers like me actually look at the email addresses in the To: field.

Packin' a Box

Helped a friend, M, pack boxes to prepare to move today, someone who I haven't seen in years. It was nice to catch up, and helping someone to move is a strangely good way to reminisce about past times.

I met M at uni, and I'm pretty sure he was the instigator of Late Night Settlers. In fact, he did mention that he still had the computer that stored all our LNS stats, and it was famous for rolling more 10s than any other number (I don't know if it was just a freak of stats, or if there was something broken in the RNG built into the client we used). I think LNS would have to have been one of the highlights of my time at university. M, as the host, would always get his preferred colour, which was red, and that colour always reminds me of him. Which is odd, because at work, I'm always the one who ends up playing red (we discovered last week that my red set is missing two road pieces, so that's probably why nobody else wants to play it).

One of the things I also enjoyed about today was not being the nerdiest person in the room. M and R both played Warhammer 40k, and various flavours of pen and paper roleplaying games. I had actually completely forgotten until now that M and I played Pendragon together, though I still feel bad about my character in that game, as she spent most of her time sleeping (I was the only spellcaster in the game, and in that particular system, you have to rest to recover from the exhaustion caused by casting spells. The more powerful the spell, the longer you have to rest).

It turns out that M is a fan of the Honor Harrington series, and I think I ended up reading at least one book while I was at uni, at his suggestion, but when he handed me a copy of the first book (of which he said he has 4), it didn't ring any bells at all, so I am going to give it a shot. It's fortunate that I just finished the last book I was reading on my kindle. He also tried to give me a CD containing a song from Civilisation IV (Baba Yetu, which is the first song from a video game to have won a Grammy), which I tried to decline, as I don't listen to music all that much. R ended up taking the CD, saying he was going to help me become more cultured. While dropping R off at home, he conveniently left the CD in my car...

Even though I hate moving, and hope not to have to do it again for a very long time, I enjoyed catching up with M and R, and I think the company is what made it enjoyable.

Winning Isn't Everything

Maelstrom linked an interesting video today: http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/tips-top-5-problem-players/

It lists annoying types of people who play board games. To save you from watching the video, here's the list in text form (though watch the video for more detail, it's a good watch):

1. Quarterbacking: the people who tend to aggressively tell other players how they should be playing without being asked. 
2. People who don't care: people who aren't paying attention and generally look like they don't want to be playing.
3. People who are too aggressive / aren't aggressive enough / care too much about winning / don't care enough about winning, i.e. People who aren't having fun the way you think they should be having fun: I didn't really understand this one, and I didn't really agree with his example that it's OK for a couple who are playing a game together not to attack each other*, but OK.
4. People who heckle during rules explanations: self-explanatory - luckily, I've never experienced this one either
5. People who bend cards or spill stuff: self explanatory again**

I didn't realise that I was doing it, but quarterbacking now really annoys me. I feel like it's inevitable in co-operative games, as everyone's chance of winning is dependent on each player playing the optimal strategy. I first noticed it in a Dungeons and Dragons game I was playing in, where a couple of the players seemed to be dictating what all the other plays should be doing, and in the end, I ended up thinking to myself that they might as well be playing all six characters themselves, and eventually I ended up leaving the game. It probably didn't help that one of the other players was a #2, and spent nearly ever session on the phone, or just doing what the other players said to do. Ever since then, I've tried to be really mindful about it.

However, what I wanted to write about was #3. Graham invited me and Sharon to playtest a board game that he had created. We played a couple of games, and I ended up winning both. Later that night, we bumped into RB, and we were talking about the game. RB asked who won, and Graham made an offhand remark, "Of course Anna did, she always wins, even at games that don't even have finished rules yet." Perhaps I am ovethinking it (and I have been thinking about it for a long time), but the way that he said it made it sound like I'm some cut-throat player who will win at all costs.

Time to delve into my past again. As a kid, I was a really sore loser. I think because I am the oldest of four children, and as many of my friends weren't into playing games, I usually ended up playing with my cousins, or my brother's friends, all of whom are younger than me. So for quite a while, I had an advantage over them, purely by being older and knowing more stuff. But after a while, that advantage grew smaller and smaller, until it got to the point where they were becoming equal, if not better than I was. I did not adjust well, to the point of accusing people of cheating if I lost. I am not proud of it, and I'd like to think that I've changed since then.

After that, I did a complete change, and went from being incredibly competitive to not caring about competition at all. Coming first felt as good to me as coming last - I really didn't care either way. While that meant that people were far more willing to play with me, it also meant that my rate of improvement slowed dramatically. But I didn't care.

All of this came to a head when AG took me aside and said that he thought it was really sad how little I applied myself, and that I should be competing because that's how you get better. I completely disagreed, and even though he and mum were both pushing me to enter competitions, I refused. My maths teachers and science teachers wanted me to enter, too, and I still refused. I felt like they were trying to pressure me into entering things for pointless reasons. I mean, come on, some of those crappy high school "competitions" were simply mini-exams, where you got a not-so-pretty certificate in the end, which you got to receive at a school assembly, along with fifty other students. Because they even had certificates of participation.

It was actually an 11-year-old kid at the chess club who said that he wanted to play in a tournament, but not by himself, so we signed up together and every Monday evening we'd play chess and then goof around in the chess club. The completely casual way that he handled competition was so awe-inspiring to me, and it made me realise that you can play against others and not have winning be so completely overwhelming. I ended up entering a few more comps, and played because I wanted to get better, not because I wanted to win.

So Graham's comment actually hit me pretty hard. I'm worried that the super competitive me is trying to make a comeback, and I really don't want to be that person. 

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* I played a Warcraft 3 free-for-all game with 7 other people, and built up my army, defended myself against a couple of attacks, and then launched an attack against another player (yellow). I see on my minimap that one of the other players (blue) was coming in from the other side of the yellow player, so I figure yellow is pretty much going to be wiped out soon, so win the fight I'm currently having against yellow's troops, and try to retreat so that I can rebuild while blue finishes yellow off. Then next thing I notice is that blue has marched completely unscathed through yellow's base, not attacking anything, and not being attacked in return. My army is smaller than blue's at this point, as I'd just been fighting yellow, so I get crushed. I go back to rebuilding, and defending, but eventually, the combined forces of blue and yellow go around crushing everyone else. After the game, I found out that blue and yellow are married, and for some reason, were allies in that game, when everyone else was playing a free-for-all. 

** Personally, unless the game is one where it depends on cards not being marked in any way, e.g. one of those secret role games, where someone is a traitor of some sort, but nobody knows who it is, so the cards need to be identical, it doesn't really bother me if people aren't 100% perfect with my games. My Settlers of Catan is becoming kinda worn, and I do wish I had put the cards in plastic sleeves, but I do love how our family Monopoly game is worn, and I'd like my Settlers to be the same. It feels homey. 

Different Friends

Following from my last post, I have to say that I'm not the greatest friend either - says the person who has a draft email replying to one that I received in November, 2013. I think I should step up my game, but also be a bit more forgiving of Brian. We probably just have different ideas of what hanging out with friends entails. I prefer smaller groups, but maybe he prefers larger groups.

On the topic of the email that never gets sent, I feel like it's never going to be sent. So much time has gone by it feels weird to bring up the topic all over again. So I've been trying to think of ways that I can make it up to him. Well, not make it up to him as such, but rather reconnect as friends. He has a regular roleplaying game, but I think my biggest issue with it is that I don't like the long-term regular commitment. Work is bad enough, having to go in 5 days a week. My gym schedule was fairly constant, but I could always fall back on the fact that if I really didn't want to go, then I didn't have to go. So even though he has offered in the past, I don't really want to join his game.

I guess I could suggest we just catch up for dinner or something after work, as we both work in roughly the same area (or at least he did the last time I spoke to him). I was thinking, since I am experimenting with so much cooking, why not go back to having those mini-dinner parties? I did it over the last Easter break, while MrFodder was away, with a few groups of friends, and I learned how to make cannelloni and BBQ pork. It's something that I would like to do again. Maybe when it's a bit warmer. Although this guy lives on the opposite side of the city, so it might be something that'll have to wait until we move, if we end up moving closer. It is a bit difficult to have five people sitting around a table in our house.

So I'm glad I waited to talk to Brian, since it seems like it's a conversation that doesn't need to happen. Though in the future, I'm not going to put myself in the same situation. If he wants to invite a large group of his friends, then he should be the one organising people and making the booking.

And that's all from Aggressive Anna today.

Maybe Means No

Grad Daniel and I are trying to get promoted. I asked Mike, one of the senior developers on my team, what he thinks I need to do to become a senior developer, and he said that he would like me to be more "aggressive". He didn't mean aggressive in the sense of aggressive, but he wanted me to want things more - to want to be challenged. I told him that that's just the way I am. "Be the river," I said. But I told him that I'd work on it. Mike also told me that one skill it's really important to have is to be able to have difficult conversations. Grad Daniel have adopted "Be aggressive" as our way of goading each other into doing more.

It started out as a lunch. "Hey, haven't seen you in a while, want to catch up during lunch?" I agreed, but was busy that week, so suggested a different week. Lunch turned into dinner, as Brian decided he wanted to go to a particular restaurant. I suggested that we invite the people we went to get burgers with last time, and he agreed. So I created a Facebook event, with a date, and invited those people, plus MrFodder. He asked to be made a host, so I did it.

I woke up the next day to find that the little catch up dinner had turned into an event with over 30 invitees. OK, fine, he's the one doing the challenge, whatever. To be honest, the idea of being a large dinner was not appealing to me at all. MrFodder dropped out, and I wanted to as well, but as the host, I felt obligated to go. The event was created 3 weeks and 2 days in advance, and I gave people until the week before the event to respond before I'd be making the booking.

At that point, I had 8 yes responses (including myself), and 3 maybes. So I made the booking for 8 people (Old Anna would have thought about some algorithm, looking at the statistics of people who say "maybe" and factoring in the likelihood of them coming. New Anna says maybe means no). The restaurant is pretty busy, and we only had a limited window to eat, as it was for a Friday night, during peak time.

The night before the event, I log in to Facebook, and see that it suddenly says 9 people are attending, the new person being one of Brian's friends (I know his name wasn't there, because I said that if people said they were going, and didn't show up, I'd have the right to slap them twice the next time I saw them, or once at a future undisclosed time. I wrote down those names so I would remember who said they were going). I call the restaurant asking if we can increase the booking from 8 to 9 people, and they tell me that they don't have room, and we can either eat an hour earlier, or two and a half hours later. Well, an hour earlier was not going to happen, as people needed time to get from work to the restaurant, and given that I now wake up at 5:20am to go to work I really didn't want to be starting dinner at 9pm. Old Anna would have started calling seven other people, try to get a diplomatic response, and then do whatever that was. New Anna called Brian and asked what he wanted to do. He wanted to move if to the earlier or later time. Old Anna would have said sure, and made it happen. New Anna said no.

And here's why. Eight managed to reply in time. Eight people had organised their day to take into account that we would be having dinner at 6:45. All because one person suddenly wanted to come did not mean that we should completely re-arrange everything. That is not fair for the eight other people who did the right thing. Who were organised enough to be able to click a button saying, "Yes, I will go".

As a compromise (because even New Anna knows that it's good to compromise), I figured at the worst case, we could all squish up a bit, and add another chair to the table. Even though, sigh, it means the poor waiters will have to constantly try and work their way around this oddly seated person. Until around 2pm, when I checked Facebook again, and got a message from another person saying, "Sorry, I know it's last minute, but since you're already calling to change the booking, could you add me as well?" I explained that I wasn't able to add more people to the booking, but said that if he was willing, he could come along and hope that someone doesn't show. And at the very worst case, if we're already squishing to fit an extra person, we should be able to do the same on the other side. But I told him that if there was no space to fit in, then the people who had responded earlier would take priority. He said that he understood.

I finally make it to the restaurant, and tell them that I have a booking. The guy takes me to the side section, and points to a couple of tables, then goes back to the hosting station. I wasn't quite sure which of the two 8-people tables he pointed to, but one of them already had a small group of people I didn't know, so I figured we must be at the other one. Slowly, people start to show up, including the 2pm RSVP dude (he messaged me earlier, but I was busy at work and didn't check until 2pm). We are now 7 people sitting at an 8 people table, and Brian and two other people we were expecting are nowhere to be seen (in case you're confused: we had six people who had responded, plus the 2pm RSVP dude, we were still waiting on Brian, his friend who responded on time (Patty), and his other friend who changed his response after the deadline).

We're 15 minutes in, and I check Facebook to see a message from Patty saying she's here with Harry. Who on Earth is Harry? I had checked the event quite a few times in the past couple of hours, and there was no mention of a Harry. We were well beyond the "squeeze in and fit a couple more chairs" stage. Brian finally arrives, says hi, and walks past our table to the other 8-people table next to it, greeting the people there. Oh, that must be Patty and Harry. And some other dude. And then another person shows up. So we are 12 people for an 8 people booking. Luckily, we are split over the two 8-people tables. And then it dawns on me, I had sat down at the wrong table. But it was too late for that now, as we had already ordered food. Nobody seemed to be kicking us out of the table either, so perhaps the group who had booked it didn't show. Phew.

Part way through our dinner, a few people appear behind us, and the waiter and host seem to be discussing something. Uh-oh, it looks like the people who had booked our table finally showed. Nobody spoke to us about it, and I don't know what they ended up doing with that group, but I really wanted to leave. It was unfair to that group that we were sitting at their table, and they now had to wait for another table large enough to be free. As soon as the people on my table finished eating (except me, because I'm so slow), I asked for my food to be boxed up and requested the bill (OK, Auto hadn't finished either, but he only had half a slice of pizza left).

To be honest, I was pretty pissed off during the entire dinner. My desire to spend time "catching up" with Brian has dropped significantly. Firstly, the only thing he did as a "host" was invite a crapton of people, almost none that I knew. Yep, great start to our "catch up". Secondly, either his friends are inconsiderate people, or he is an inconsiderate person.

When you go to eat at a restaurant, you take up space. There is no getting around that at this point in time. And each restaurant only has finite amount of space. Sure, you can add chairs to an extent, but people still need to move around, so for a popular restaurant on a Friday night, you can't just "drop in". I mentioned a week in advance that I would be booking. The date and time was known three weeks in advance. So the three people who showed up (all Brian's friends, by the way, at least mine had the decency to respond on time), either thought that it'd be fine, they could just show up, in which case they are inconsiderate, or they told Brian, and Brian didn't tell me. In which case Brian is inconsiderate. The last guy, the 2pm RSVP dude, did respond late, but at least he told me he wanted to come, and was accepting of the fact that he might not fit. When the 7 of us were sitting at the table, he looked like he was ready to say, "Sorry guys, I didn't respond last week, so I'm OK with someone else taking my seat."

You might be asking, if his friends are the ones who are inconsiderate, why should that stop you from wanting to see him? Well, I just want to avoid a repeat of this situation. As soon as I got off the phone with the restaurant knowing they wouldn't be able to fit extra people, I spent a lot of time fretting over what I was going to do. I was hoping people wouldn't show. I was mentally preparing myself, if Brian said that a non-RSVPer could stay over an RSVPer, I wanted to be ready to just get up and leave (hey, it's a seat). I guess a part of me had already lost respect for him after he was so willing to just change the time of the dinner (see my reason above).

Thirdly, I think we just don't have as much in common as we did when we met. I think because he is a huge fitness buff, and I was going through my fitness transformation, we had a lot to talk about. Now I find that fitness is jut a background event to me. Sure, I go to the gym, and I go to fitness classes, but they're just like chores now, I don't feel so OMG passionate about it that I want to talk about it all the time.

So when he has recovered from tonight's meal, I plan to have a difficult conversation with him. I want to say that while I'm happy to stay friends, and I am not going to avoid him if we end up at the same social event, I have no desire to go out of my way to meet up with him. Perhaps this is a harsh thing to do, but New Anna says life is too short to water that lemon tree when you don't really like lemons. I have friends who treat me better than that, and those are the friends that I would like to spend my limited social time with.

Am I being too hasty? Am I being too aggressive? I feel like I had to write this all out so that tomorrow morning, after I've slept on it, I will still have the same resolve that I feel now. Am I being too crazy about the etiquette of responding to events?

Edit: I just want to add that this incident alone isn't what makes me want to see him less. It's part of a pattern of behaviour. We have had many rescheduled lunches (sometimes it's my fault, sometimes it's his). But also times where he has been incredibly late, or messages at the last moment apologising but he's double-booked, or plain forgot. Everyone has bad days, but I just feel a general lack of respect for my time.

Friends and Colleagues

I'm having a hard time processing an episode of House that we just watched. As a bit of a side story in the episode, one of House's subordinates (Foreman) ends up writing and submitting a paper to a journal that another one (Cameron) has already written about. Cameron's wrote her paper first, but House ends up signing off on Foreman's and he gets published. Cameron is obviously pissed off about it. At the end of the episode, Cameron decides that they both had the right to write about that case as they both worked on it, and she goes and apologises for being so hostile towards Foreman. Foreman says that he doesn't need to apologise, and that in a few years, they probably won't even be working together. They might say hello or hug each other if they see each other at a conference, but as far as he's concerned, they're colleagues and not friends.

I'm sure you've all heard way too much about my movie already (which seems to have gone down OK, I didn't get any angry Facebook messages), but it's pretty clear that hearing about my colleague leaving hit me pretty hard. When Grad Daniel messaged me saying that the colleague was packing up for the last time, I was feeling pretty teary. It's probably a good thing that I was on the other side of the planet. I don't think that's how you're meant to react when a colleague leaves, I feel like spending hours editing a movie, and feeling teary is something that you do when friends leave your life.

Given the high turnover in retail and hospitality, it never really affected me when people quit Woolworths or the casino. There were the lifers, who had been there for years, and some of whom are still there, and the part timers, like myself, who were only there as a stepping stone for another job later in life. But this is my first real big job, and during my first rotation in the graduate program, one of my co-workers was made redundant. I'd only been in the team for a couple of months at that point, and I barely knew him, but I still found it tough to handle. He was the primary expert for one of our systems, and so it felt like anyone's head could be on the chopping block at any time (I thought I was the exception at the time, as I was on the graduate program, but I found out from another grad that the program had fired one of the grads, though we never found out why). I later found out that he was let go because he was a contractor (someone who is brought in on a temporary contract to do some work related to their specific skill set), and the work they had brought him in for had finished.

We've had a few more people come and go. I ended up leaving that team to move on to my next rotation in the graduate program, and again when I moved on to my third and last rotation. There are always comments that you'll keep in touch, but with one exception, that hasn't really happened. Perhaps that's what LinkedIn was meant to be for?

Earlier this year, my sub-team (a smaller portion of my overall team, which is assigned to working on particular assets within my team) drew the short straw, and had to move to a different floor from the rest of our team because we were expanding too much in order to try and get our major project track, and there wasn't enough space on our floor for everyone. I was pretty sad about it, because it meant that I wouldn't be on the same floor as the Daniels. Intern Daniel and I have a morning ritual where we go to the kitchen, fill our bottles with water (it's our equivalent of going to get a coffee), and discuss life, the universe and everything. Now that we're on different floors, I can't see when he gets in, and it's a bit of a hassle to change floors. It's also a pain in the ass, as we're separated from the support team, so when they rely on us for 3rd-level support, rather than just wandering over to our desks, they call us, or have to go upstairs.

One of my co-workers (who is on this sub-team) makes fun of me, because he says that I miss all of my "little friends". He agrees with Foreman, and that the people you work with are just colleagues, and eventually you move on, and they move on, and they just become a fond memory you might dwell on every now and again. That pretty much explains my interaction with most of the people I've worked with in my previous jobs. I actually try really hard to keep in contact with the people I worked with on my other graduate rotations. But maybe this is just the road to madness?

If you think about it, the rough time you're meant to spend in any one job before leaving is about 2 years (at least that's what some studies have shown for the field of IT - people who job hop end up getting paid 50% more than those who stick around hoping to be promoted during the regular cycle). If you're meeting 6-10 new people every two years, you can't realistically keep in touch with all of them. I'm struggling just keeping in touch with non-gaming people from high school and university, if I added everyone I've ever worked with, I'd never have any time for myself!

Maybe I'm just to keen to like everyone I meet. That works in high school, and niche majors in university, where you're somewhat forced to interact with the people you're in class with, but isn't really necessary at work. I can get my job done without hanging out with my co-workers on the weekend and catching up on the latest goss. In fact, it might be easier if I did that, as I wouldn't be stuck having 15 minute conversations whenever I go by someone's desk.

I still feel like Cameron is right, and that Foreman should have respected her enough not to write up the same case as her, and that you should try to be friends with the people you work with, but maybe I should be listening to those who have more experience in the matter?

Chill Lunch

I had lunch today with Grad Daniel, Intern Daniel, Uni Paul and Grad Paul. I don't know why, but it makes me so happy when I'm with people who share the same name. I even managed to get the two Daniels to sit on one side of the table and the two Pauls to sit on the other side. We had a super delicious lunch of KFC, but I ate so much of it that I felt a bit like throwing up. Grad Paul and I split a Streetwise Feast (6 pieces of original recipe, 6 nuggets, 3 chicken strips and 2 large chips).

It was good fun to hang out with people, without anything hanging over my head. As usual, I was the slowest one at eating, so by the end of my lunch, everyone was watching me eat. Uni Paul said that nobody was leaving until I finished my food, so I managed to stuff the last three pieces of chicken into my mouth somehow, so we could go back to work.

Uni Paul and Grad Daniel were reminiscing about growing up in the not-so-nice suburbs, and how there was a prostitution ring going on at one of their nearby schools. They said that there was a 15-year-old girl who needed money for something, so she agreed to sleep with other students for sex during one of their spare periods. Then some other girls did it as well just because. Yep. I like to think that no matter how many druggies we had at my high school, at least we didn't have a prostitution ring. I have to say, despite everything, Uni Paul and Grad Daniel turned out OK.

I had a really good time at lunch today. It was really nice to just chill and chat about things other than work, or relationships. The relationship I have with these people means that we tend to make fun of each other as a sign of affection - especially Intern Daniel. Everyone is just so relaxed and I don't ever feel like everything is a competition. I can say what's on my mind. It's really hard to pin down what it is - the five of us have very different backgrounds, but we seem to be able to talk to each other so easily. It's really what the doctor ordered, a nice, greasy stress-free lunch. I highly recommend it.

Twenty Friends

Imagine that you've just won a free buffet dinner at a five-star restaurant for you and twenty friends, who do you invite? If you have equal to, or less than twenty friends, that's a pretty easy question, but if you have more than that, it gets quite tricky - especially if you consider the fact that family could also be included.

If it was just a buffet dinner for two, that'd be easy, I'd invite MrFodder and nobody would bat an eye, if they even found out about it. Dinner for five or six, would probably be close family, or very close friends. Considering I asked Sharon to be my maid-of-honour, again, nobody would think twice if she was invited to this dinner and they were not.

Twenty is a big number that's actually a small number. If you didn't pick one of your friends to come to this dinner, you are basically saying to them, "You are not in my top twenty list", and not being in a top twenty list sounds like a big snub at the face of it. However, if you consider that many people will have partners by this stage in their life (or even someone close that they'd bring as a plus one), that's really only ten people that you are inviting to this dinner. I don't think that thought would cross people's minds though.

Also, the more people who are invited, the more likely it is for word to get out that you have an invite to a free five-star buffet dinner. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, someone is bound to say, "So excited to go to Fancy Buffet tonight, all for free thanks to Fodder!" or snap some pics of food. Especially as a lot of my friends are uni students who are unlikely to be throwing around that kind of money on a single meal for something that isn't a special occasion. Questions will be asked, and eventually, the story will leak, no matter how hard you try to get everyone to keep a lid on it.

I've been thinking about who I would put on my list of twenty. Free five-star buffet is probably not everyone's cup of tea, but one that I went to with MrFodder's family for Christmas one year was amazingly good, and I think the only buffet I went to where I didn't want to leave despite being so full. Perhaps I'm spoiled by regular buffets though, as we had one at work once, which was also free. Perhaps I should change the question to just a generic restaurant. I sometimes forget that not everyone loves buffets as much as I do. Food preferences aside, the question boils down to if you were to get some unexpected windfall, who would you most like to celebrate it with? Unlike winning the lottery, or bigger things like that, this is a once-off event that is hardly going to be life changing, so the only difficulty for my list is picking people I'd actually enjoy sitting at a dinner with, and trying to balance that list without making other people feel jealous that they didn't make the cut.

Maybe the advice is to make a top-twenty list, don't allow partners (unless you also like their partners), and screw everyone who is jealous that they didn't get invited. Though if you consider that I wrote messages to twenty-six people who I believe have made a big impact in my life, I think even that is going to be tough. Although, I guess a lot of them are no longer a part of my life, and I don't even know if we'd have anything to say to each other after so many years - especially some of my teachers from high school. I also tried tracking some of them down, because I thought it might be nice to drop a line and thank them for making such a difference to me, but a few of them came up with dead ends. I hope they're not dead.

OK, I have my list. When I took the no-partners-I-don't-like and jealous-be-damned approach, it wasn't as hard as I thought it'd be. I'm not going to post it though, because I don't want people to hate me. Sorry for the anti-climactic ending to this post.

Oh, Canada

About a year ago, I went to a LAN gaming meetup. There, I met Jane. We played Starcraft 2 and Dota together, and I found out that she is a huge fan of Final Fantasy XIV. She was here in Australia from Canada for some sort of overseas teaching peogram where she gets to work as a substitute teacher.

The thing that struck me the most was how similar we are. I know I've said this so many times and it sounds like I'm on some sort of grand quest to meet my personality double. I guess meeting people who are like me makes me feel like it's OK to be like me, because there are others out there doing it, too. Anyway, as I've already mentioned, she's a gamer, and quite a serious one at that. She said she was one of the top DPS in her free company (guild). That's one aspect we differ on, she loves DPS and hates healing, I'm the opposite. She feels just as confused by fashion as I do. She loves eating. Her relationship with her boyfriend sounds a lot like me and MrMan5.5.

We had a plan to both update our wardrobes together, to try and get a less WTF-am-I-doing look. However, that was kinda limited by her disposable income, or rather, the lack of. Unfortunately, she had long periods where she didn't get much work, so it was down to instant noodles for her. I felt bad, and I tried to take her out to eat, but she doesn't really like to be a charity case.

It's actually pretty funny to see us together. She's from one of the colder cities in Canada. She said that days that would normally be considered snow days in other cities are just regular days in her home town. So when we are together, I'm usually rugged up in a winter coat and scarf. She's in a T-shirt and thongs. She laughs at our Australian "Winter". On the flip side, I tried to warn her about our Summers and she said it couldn't be that bad. Luckily we only had a couple of 40+ days this year, but she was pretty much incapacitated. Though so was I as unfortunately I don't have heat resistance super powers.

She's younger than me, and I feel like she is where I was 5 years ago, except she's a lot more cultured than me, as she has also studied abroad in Japan.

Yesterday, I met up with her for lunch to say goodbye, as she is leaving Australia on Wednesday. I feel sad to see her go, but we'll still be able to keep in touch via Facebook. And who knows, maybe we'll see each other again when the expansion for FFXIV launches. By see each other, I mean in-game, of course.

Musings of a Friend

I had an interesting conversation with a friend about whether you can ever have a "true friend". Similar to whether you can ever perform an altruistic act, a true friend is someone that you choose to becomes friends with, and whom you have no ulterior motive for being with. Even if you are friends with someone who seems to be nothing but a leech, I guess you are getting some company out of it. Perhaps you even enjoy it to some extent, otherwise you wouldn't stay friends with them.

But what about that guy who is my mum's sister's piano teacher's son who my parents insist that I must stay friends with, you might ask. Well, you may not be getting anything from the friendship itself, but you are getting something from the fact that you are doing something for your family. They may not appreciate it, but it is ammunition you can bring to the table when you are trying to weasel out of something else. Depending on your family though, I guess.

I took a look through my friends list (if there's one thing that Facebook is good for, it's reminding me that of all those "friends" that I have that I can't quite remember off the top of my head), and a lot of the friends that I have I'm friends with for one reason or another. A large percentage of them are gaming friends (both video and board games), and I stay friends with them because I enjoy playing games with them. I hope that the feeling is mutual. Then there's my philosophising friends that I enjoy arguing with (hello GP who isn't on Facebook, I honestly don't know how I manage to remember you, it must be your charming personality). People from work, who I guess I friended to seem like a team player - although I actually like all of them. Family.... I don't think that counts, don't really have a choice there.

I have a reason to be friends with all of them, so I don't think I have any "true friends". Though perhaps that's not really something to aspire to. The best friendships are the ones where you both help each other out. When I think about the friendship I have with someone at work, we began as casual acquaintances. We talked to each other because we happened to start working there at the same time, but it was a lot of small talk, just passing the time kind of thing. I think the biggest turning point of our friendship was when he told me that he might not have a job once our secondment in that area was over. It was the first time I was able to help him in a meaningful way, by being someone to support him as he dealt with that realisation. Then there was all the support he provided me for my long weight-loss journey. We have a deep and meaningful relationship because of the fact that we do help each other out.

It also fascinates me how I can still be so close to a lot of my gaming friends despite the fact that we almost never see or speak to each other, but whenever we do meet up again, everything just picks up like there wasn't a gap at all. Is that what it means to have a "true friend"? Someone that you enjoy the company of, but doesn't require hours and hours of friendship tending? I do love the fact that a lot of my gaming friends are low-maintenance, but I also sometimes wonder if perhaps I am missing out on something, as some of these friendships don't seem as deep as some of my other friendships. Sure, we can spend hours together playing X, but with some of them, when we hang out offline, we don't have all that much to say.

Watching Castle, and it seems like a lot of characters seem to have a best friend who is such a good friend that they're often willing to cover up murders, affairs, and all kinds of illicit activities. It's probably just a plot device, as I don't know how many adults have that kind of BFF relationship with another person. I am leaning a little towards that being a true friend, but again, it's hardly a "pure" relationship, as you have someone who is willing to commit crimes with you! Also, you'd think that a true best friend would keep you out of that kind of situation to begin with.

I really do like the idea of a "true friend" though, as sometimes I do feel like there are people out there who just use me. Most of the time, I don't mind. It's probably a callous way to look at it, but I don't mind doing favours for friends if I feel like our overall friendship has been worth it to me. It just really hurts me when someone tries to make something out to be beneficial to me, only for it to turn out that they were just manipulating me for their own purposes.

In summary, I still remain unconvinced that you can ever have a "true friend", but the soft-hearted person in me is still waiting to meet that person, should someone out there wish to prove me wrong.

Not Unattractive, Part 2

So I did it today. It went about as badly as expected.

(not actual conversation, because I can't be bothered remoting in to check the chat log, but the gist of it)

Me: Would you be insulted if someone said you were not unattractive?
Grad Daniel (GD): Well, I guess it depends. Saying something like that would mean they have to say something back to preserve their social standing.
Me: So you think it's a negative thing?
GD: Well, yeah, nobody wants to hear that from anyone.
Me: Personally, I think it's nice. If you're not unattractive, them it means you are at least average, or better.
GD: Ooooooohhhhhhhhhh, double negative. That changes things. I guess it would be good to hear it, but very confronting.
Me: OK, well, in that case, I will tell you over IM so you can hide your reaction if you want. I think you are not unattractive.
GD: Ahhhhhh, Anna-senpai is so nice!
Me: I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not...

It went a lot better with Intern Daniel.

Me: I think you are not unattractive.
Intern Daniel: Well, that's better than being called ugly.

I got a lot of mixed advice about whether to use the term "not unattractive or not". I decided to go with "not unattractive" because then at least it's a decent conversation topic on its own, and I can decide based on how they respond whether to keep going or not. Not required for Intern Daniel, because we are always just talking about rubbish anyway.

However, unrelated to the Daniels, just in general, I have been told that using the phrase "not unattractive" gives the impression that I am purposely avoiding saying "attractive", which might cause the other person to think that they aren't attractive, otherwise I would have just used "attractive". It does also have connotations attached to it, regardless of how you preface it, "I'm already in a relationship, but I think you are an attractive person."

Oh, no, I just realised I never got a chance to explain myself to Grad Daniel why I thought he was an awesome person in the first place, because I was too busy with work. Oh well, I guess he will never know.

Anyway, I spoke to another married couple, and both of them seemed to agree that I was better off just saying nothing. So perhaps I need a better method to try and make people feel good about themselves. Grad Daniel wasn't my only target though, there were some other people who I wanted to tell this to, and I got the chance to as part of my research. But I also may have almost caused a fight.

If you recall, when I first brought this up, I ended up messaging a married friend as part of my experiment, and he didn't respond as he was asleep. I typed out an explanation below, and he replied to me the next morning telling me what his response would have been. But apparently his wife saw the first message, and was really panicked for a moment, until he told her to keep reading and she saw my explanation and they both laughed. He said she was OK with it, but I kinda feel like I should message her now to apologise, because in hindsight, it was a pretty terrible thing to do, I should have thought it through a bit more. In the past, I've always been able to be very candid with this friend, and I was used to being able to say any kind of rubbish to him, but I see now that the message would have had very dire consequences if she had taken it the wrong way. I feel really bad, and I'm not sure if I should message her to apologise, or if that would make it look even more suspicious.

Either way, going to chalk this one up to a horribly failed experiment.

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Today I learned that hemlock is a poison that is sometimes used in executions.

Not Unattractive

A friend of mine was feeling pretty down about going out to meet people, and he said he couldn't do it because he was unattractive. I told him that I didn't think he was unattractive, and he replied that it doesn't count if that comes from someone who isn't dating him, because then it's just a friend giving platitudes. It is only from someone who wants to have sex with you can you truly know whether you are attractive or not.

First of all, wow, now I know how it feels to be on the other side, where your friend doesn't trust your compliment simply because you are their friend. To be perfectly honest, I haven't seen him in a while, and he claims that he has gained a lot of weight since I last saw him. However, when I last saw him, he was also quite buff, as he had been going to the gym a lot, so I find it hard to believe that he has transformed so much in a few months that he can now label himself attractive. But I have to admit I was basing it on the last time I saw him, which he also agrees he was not unattractive at that point.

Anyway, if I haven't completely confused you by this point, I was thinking about what kind of friendship do you need to have where you can give each other compliments like that? I believe Intern Daniel and I have that kind of relationship. We have both dropped quite a lot of weight over the years, and we feel completely comfortable talking about each other's guns (or lack thereof). However, I believe part of that is the fact that he is in a long-term relationship and so am I, and we both know that.

In contrast, there's Grad Daniel, who eats nearly the same thing every day in order to bulk up (or because he gets really hungry, I'm really struggling to tell the difference now, as apparently he eats five meals a day and he said he has always been like that), and works out quite a lot. We will talk about his food, and about his gym habits, but never compliment him on his progress - even though he is actually quite tanky, you just can't tell unless he wears a T-shirt. I wanted to say something to him today, but I feel like he would take it the wrong way. He knows about MrMan5.5, so I don't think he would think I'm after him, or something silly like that, but I just get the feeling that he wouldn't react very well. Plus, I don't know if it's a factor, but he is single. Maybe that is the issue though, because of MrMan5.5, it would be really awkward for me to compliment someone on their attractiveness if they are single, because they might think I'm hitting on them.

Can you only give compliments to people who are already in relationships? That just seems messed up in the sense that the other partner might be worried you are trying to steal their man, or I don't know. I can't believe that's the case. So what is it? Thinking about some of my other friends who are in long term relationships, I don't know if it would work with them. I just messaged one say that I don't think he's not unattractive, and he hasn't responded. I hope his wife wasn't using his computer to browse the Internet, and happen to see that message. Oh no, what have I done?! Although Facebook says he's "online", Steam has him set to "snooze" so chances are he won't even see this until tomorrow morning. OK, I typed out an explanation in case his wife does stumble upon it, and I know it looks super suss, so next time I plan to do an experiment, I should wait for the other person to respond. I've lost all courage to continue the experiment now. T_T

I'm thinking back to that mating game post I wrote a while back, where you imagine everyone has a number on their head indicating how attractive they are. The 8-10s probably have a good idea that they are attractive based on the responses from the people around them, but the people in the middle have no idea where they sit, and since people tend not to praise others for being average, I wonder if a lot of them go through life believing they are below-average when they are really not. Secondly, I wonder if it would be a compliment to tell someone who thinks they are below average that they are simply average.

The aforementioned friend also said that I cannot rate myself as unattractive due to the fact that I have a partner, who must find me attractive, otherwise he wouldn't be with me. I asked him what he thought about the fact that MrMan5.5 might only be with me for my money, and he said that money can be part of what makes you attractive. So evidently we're not just talking about physical attractiveness here. Though I did try to tell a friend that he is attractive in the non-physical sense, i.e. he has a stable job that pays fairly well, he has his own house, he is intelligent, responsible, has a good sense of humour. He didn't seem to take it too well.

It's really hard to rate your own attractiveness. I guess it's easier for people with high physical attractiveness to rate their physical traits, because they can see them clearly, and will often get a reaction from others. Traits like sense of humour and stable income are pretty difficult to rate.

If I were to rate myself, I think I'd be a 6. I have a bunch of negative modifiers going for me: lack of confidence, billion health problems, high neuroticism, lack of ambition are the ones I can think of right now. I also have some pretty strong positive modifiers, like niche industry (hello software development, finance and gaming!), open-mindedness, good listening skills. As my friend said, I can't be completely unattractive, as I managed to trick four guys into dating me, and one into a friends with benefits relationship. My appearance is pretty much set, but I believe that I can work on some of the other things. I was really hung up on the appearance thing earlier though, especially in high school, and it meant that I didn't see a lot of my other awesome traits. In high school, I would have rated myself a 2. I feel like if someone had told me I had a lot of other good traits, I wouldn't have been so down on myself at that time.

That's going to be my new project, I want to try and show people how awesome they are, and raise their belief in their own attractiveness. I may have spent too long in /r/foreverAlone, and I will wake up and regret this idea in the morning.

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OK, I found someone who was awake at this time, but the experiment was a failure as I got a confused response more than anything else:

[12:31:53 AM] Me: i think you are not unattractive!
[12:31:59 AM] Friend: umm, thanks
[12:32:05 AM] Friend: : random?
[12:32:12 AM] Me: happy or sad reaction?
[12:32:20 AM] Friend: I think you told me that before
[12:32:28 AM] Me: neutral reaction?
[12:32:33 AM] Friend: I guess happy if I didn't know
-------------- snip----------------------
[12:36:07 AM] Friend: it's strange wording
[12:36:07 AM] Friend: like you don't want to say attractive
[12:36:13 AM] Me: what should I have said?
[12:36:20 AM] Friend: I dunno
[12:36:25 AM] Friend: it's strange to call someone normal
[12:36:36 AM] Friend: if they feel bad and think they are below normal
[12:36:39 AM] Friend: then it's nice to call them normal
[12:37:03 AM] Me: what if you are average?
[12:37:17 AM] Me: isn't it good to reaffirm that you are not below average?
[12:37:21 AM] Friend: then it sounds a bit strange to me
[12:37:22 AM] Friend: I suppose
[12:37:29 AM] Friend: that's why I don't feel bad about it
[12:39:14 AM] Me: would you have felt uncomfortable if I had said attractive instead?
[12:39:46 AM] Friend: I'd feel pretty happy and it wouldn't be uncomfortable

This friend happens to be married, so maybe you can only compliment people who are in a relationship on how attractive they are without having to worry that they think you're hitting on them.

I'm at a loss, how do I tell Grad Daniel that I think he's a great person without him thinking that I'm hitting on him, and without him thinking that I'm only saying it because he's my friend? Wait until he gets a girlfriend? But what if he doesn't feel confident enough because he doesn't realise how awesome he is, and so this opportunity never arises?

I'm too tired to think about this anymore, brain is exhausted from cramming.
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Today I learned that if a Java Object is eligible for garbage collection, and its finalize() method causes it to be no longer eligible for garbage collection, the next time it's up to be garbage collected, its finalize() method will not be called.