Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
MUGG wrote:
Dada, have you played RollerCoaster Tycoon?
Yes, and I love it. I remember like the third level was this gigantic forest that you could build a theme park in. I always just played that one level. And kept building until it was entirely full. I should download it again.
"What makes us who we are?" The survey is with regards to 'identity'.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (low to high), rate the importance of the following ten factors in terms of how they have helped to shape who you are today. The emphasis is placed on who you are, so there are no right or wrong answers.
- family and upbringing: 10
My upbringing has taught me that it's important to be excellent in everything I do, which made me the quasi-perfectionist I am (I'll either try to do a close to perfect job or get frustrated and quit if nobody forces me to finish the project. And I'm never positively surprised with the outcome). My younger relatives have at times been what's most important to me in my life, but nowadays they're old enough that they don't need me anymore.
- friends, peer groups: 8
I have learnt over the course of my life that friends come and go. The emphasis has been on the go part for me and as I'm a very long-time oriented person, I have figured the energy I need to invest to make new friends or to keep them just isn't worth the benefits. Under different circumstances, I might have become a people's person.
- sexuality: 10
My low libido has been one of my core problems when growing up, and it still is, but nowadays I'm already pretty used to it. My idea of love and relationships have always been totally different to those of the people around me. As I've felt somewhat incompatible with both sexes, I have at times claimed to be totally assexual (as an attempt to accept permanent failure in that area and move on to something else). However nowadays, I strongly desire to have a permanent female partner at some point again. As a result of my low libido, I'm presently not capable of making female beings feel loved and desired though. It's essentially what makes me the failure at life that I am.
- aspirations: 7
I have always had high aspirations, so I've never learned to just accept things as they are. My specific aspirations themselves did rather little to shape my character though.
- education, profession: 5/10
The 5 belongs to the public education system, the 10 to self-education.
- financial status: 9
I have never had to worry about having too little money (partly because I don't particularly enjoy spending it), so that would have to have shaped my life quite a bit.
- culture: 6
I hate Austrian culture. Most of my countrymen are just too carefree, they're happy as long as they can enjoy fun and laid-back lives. That kind of life could never make me happy. I have largely ignored cultural influences and am thus very poorly adapted to my surroundings.
- religion, beliefs: 7
I have never cared a lot about religion. There was one important point in my life though, where I first had to seriously face the possibility that there might not be such a thing as God. Which meant to me that I cannot rely on faith and prayer, but have to solve my problems on my own. Just to be on the safe side. I was around 14 in my life then, and it was around that time when I first seriously concidered suicide as a possible option to end my life. As my entire belief system has been totally shattered at least twice, I nowadays am very sceptical of absolutely everything.
- geography, climate: 9
I have some reason to assume that the amount of sunlight you are exposed to at various times of the year has a tremendous influence on forming anybody's personality.
- scientific and technological advances: 10
The internet has changed my life for the worse. Combine the internet with the fact that I don't really have any friends, and it's suddenly not enough to be among the best in your social circle anymore to be excellent, but I'd have to measure myself with the best of the best of the world. I simply can't, but I'll keep on trying.
On a scale of 1 to 10 (low to high), rate the importance of the following ten factors in terms of how they have helped to shape who you are today. The emphasis is placed on who you are, so there are no right or wrong answers. (Copy and paste the list below into your post.)
Will do.
- family and upbringing: 10. My parents had a great deal of effect to how I grew to be, in good and evil. Circumstances usually shape people.
- friends, peer groups: 9. Knowing how I compare to my peers, and having no serious friends in general for most of my life, has made me very self-conscious and introvert since the early childhood.
- sexuality: 3. My sexuality has developed slowly, which allowing me to adjust. Though the very fact may have shaped me more than I realize.
- aspirations: 1. I'd say aspirations come as a result from one's persona, not the other way around.
- education, profession: 2. Similar as above, I think my education and professional status have come as a consequence of what I am as a person rather than the other way around.
- financial status: 8. This is very difficult to rate. My parents were born in post-war Finland, where everyone was short of everything, things were rationed, and they really had to learn to spend efficiently, and to not waste. Naturally, they taught those principles to me, and I embraced those principles, for it was and still is wise in my opinion. Once their part of my upbringing was over, financial status stopped being an issue for me, because I have always somehow managed without having to invent new kind of compromises, and because I have absolutely never felt a desire to spend all that I have. Therefore my own financial status has not been a factor to my person; rather, it has been a consequence.
- culture: 2. It is impossible to tell how I would have grown, if it had been a different culture. I believe that as an introverted person to the core the culture's contribution to it has not been large.
- religion, beliefs: 4. I think the religion I grew with defined some kind of framework, put some fences, in which my values developed. Though my values now form more like a cloud that has different densities at different points and whose edges go beyond the childhood limits, I think it still centers in the proximity of the same spot as when I was a child. It changes shape from day to day, which is why I think it is use the analogy of a cloud. It is impossible to tell how exactly it differs from the contribution of my parents in general, or how it differs from the culture of the nation I grew in, or from simply the weight coefficients of my core nature to begin with.
- geography, climate: 5. Like anyone, I have grown to understand which weathers I like and which ones I don't. Biology is a factor to that equation. The percentual availability of the weathers that I like in the framework of the climate of my home country certainly has played some part in how much experience I have collected in different places.
- scientific and technological advances: 9. Computers have dominated my free time for about half of my life. I cannot imagine how my life would have been different in, say, the 1940s, or the 1800s. I have always had an inclination towards technology, or towards understanding how things work in general. As a child I disassembled many things, desperate to learn the working principles behind them and fascinated by their very existence.
DarkKobold,
What do you have against people having fun that doesn't bother others, except you apparently?
I'm sciencing as fast as I can !
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<adelikat> once more balls enter the picture, everything gets a lot more entertraining
<adelikat> mmmmm yummy penises
Dear Anyone who wants to answer this,
What are your opinions on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?
As of late, I've become quite addicted to the show... :3
I know you were not asking me, but I am also a Phil who is an annoying Canadian.
Do you think we should launch a study into the correlation of how being a Canadian Phil relates to annoyance?
For anyone with a lot of Internet experience,
Is the online disinhibition effect (i.e. GIFT) solely to blame for rude behaviour on the Internet? If not, what other factors do you think might play a role in someone's transformation from saint to devil whilst online?
My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!)
My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(
I doubt it's solely to blame, though it's almost certainly the largest contributor. You can also consider the echo chamber effect -- people online tend to only want to talk to people who agree with them, which in turn creates a false feeling of consensus. When they stumble across those who actually don't agree with them, then, culture shock ensues and could result in harsher responses than is actually warranted. Maybe.
Also consider the difficulty of expressing body language online. Someone may start out trying to be reasonable, but because of continually missed body language cues, their responses could end up getting more and more extreme as they get annoyed because the person they're talking to isn't getting their point. Maybe.
I of course have no evidence to back any of this up. It's just random hypothesizing. Still, the GIFT relies in large part on anonymity, and given that even highly-respected members of large communities (who are therefore no longer exactly anonymous -- their online identity has value to them) are still susceptible to ending up in massive flamewars, I can't say that the GIFT accounts for all of internet assholery.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Also consider the difficulty of expressing body language online. Someone may start out trying to be reasonable, but because of continually missed body language cues, their responses could end up getting more and more extreme as they get annoyed because the person they're talking to isn't getting their point. Maybe.
I can totally relate to that. I have trouble reading body language in real life too, so oftentimes I either try (and fail) to guess what the subtext of someone's dialog is, or ask them to play Captain Obvious and spell out what they're really feeling.
My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!)
My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(
I can totally relate to that. I have trouble reading body language in real life too, so oftentimes I either try (and fail) to guess what the subtext of someone's dialog is, or ask them to play Captain Obvious and spell out what they're really feeling.
If their body language is sending out ambigious signals, feel free to just take that interpretation which would be most beneficial to you and reward them with a smile. They most likely won't argue against it. If you deliberately ask them for why they used a certain kind of body language, chances are they're first going to be as clueless as you are, and then reply with that interpretation that'd be most beneficial to them instead. (probably that interpretation which is most congruent to how they want to see themselves. identity is just a construct.)
The problem is that body language which might seem ambiguous to me might be you-can-see-it-from-space obvious to anyone else. I also find myself frustrated when I have a lack of information and/or background in general. I find it safer to ask when possible, and I try to do so in a self-deprecating but humorous manner; from what little I can tell, it seems to make other people warm to me by being forthright and honest yet with a sense of humour.
My current project: Something mysterious (oooooh!)
My username is all lower-case letters. Please get it right :(
My point was that the knowledge you are missing, nobody really has. They aren't 100% sure of what it means either, they'll just assume something without giving much thought to it and make it real through the way they respond to it. Try reading a book about body language, and you'll know more than the average person about it, but if you're still afraid to just assume you're right and act based on that, it still wouldn't really change anything. You'd just feel more confused. Of course all of that doesn't apply to absolutely every situation, just wanted to get the general idea out.
If you're really having that much trouble, some general ideas are that subtle turning towards something and subtly mimicking something express sympathy. Open and closed body postures generally tell you if that person feels like engaging in social interaction atm, or how safe that person feels. Looking upwards means trying to remember some concept, looking downwards means trying to remember a certain feeling. If people feel insecure about something they've said, they're going to turn/look away after the fact. Body tension in various areas can also be very telling, but it's very context dependant.
