Marriage Business
by Oziriz
OK, people want to get married and live happily ever after. Sounds great and all, but I cannot seem to make sense of the current way people do marriage. Currently a marriage is a legal contract between you and your partner, where you threaten each other with taking half (or more, even all in some cases!) of their possessions if they no longer love you. To me it seems like a move you would make to ensure your partner will be unable to leave easily if they find someone else. They will not be able to leave without getting into a costly and lengthy legal and emotional battle. Would you really want that? Isn’t love all about respect and respecting your significant other enough to let them go if they find someone else rather than being unhappy and stuck with you? Would you really be happy that way yourself?
Now, why is it not OK for people to get married by doing the whole ring thing, kissing each other and living happily ever just trusting their significant other? I have no answer here, other than a lot of people just want to do it traditionally or maybe their parents or peers won’t agree with this (in their opinions) not really real way. You won’t be legally married and you won’t get whatever potential benefits you can get from the government – if any – but you can change your last name still if you absolutely need to do that.
I’ll never make sense of some of these weird traditions. :/
- Oz
Getting Your Mind Off Tomorrow (or A Crash Course on Late-Night Procrastination)
by Dave
Some nights you just need a temporary fix before an important day or a busy week. There’s several different ways I do this, and I’ll be calling them: losing yourself, chilling out, and drowning yourself.
Losing yourself
By this I mean losing yourself in a book or a show; you engage in an activity which is distracting because its reality supercedes your own. Fantasy novels come to mind: you might have several hours of work to do tomorrow, but Prince Xyz has just been betrayed by his companion and the city populace is being massacred. These stories really do illustrate how petty some of our day-to-day worries are, even if they are completely fictional stories (which I’d say most fantasy stories usually are). Nothing is as gripping as an intense book, I find. TV comedies also work for me, because they put you at ease (especially if they are sitcoms with familiar characters and locations), and they almost always depict disasters or tragedies which are just short of being too serious to not be funny. Lining up several shows in a row for a few hours is a sure way to cheer you up.
Chilling out
Get together with a friend, and do precisely nothing, or at most, very little. It works, though I don’t know why. Chatting with someone for several hours about whatever also counts. A part of a movie which always comes to mind when I think of the mentality behind this is in Fight Club, when the protagonist and Tyler are messing around out in the streets, doing almost nothing. I remember nameless nights in nearly empty CSS servers just walking around with a friend; it’s funny when you look back at it, but at the time it feels good and gets you in the right frame of mind to realise that there’s nothing to worry about.
Drowning yourself
I don’t actually mean drowning yourself, although you can try it if you wish. What I mean is listening to some deep, sad music. This may be different for different people, but for me, would be something like Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Basically, the theory is that you listen to depressing music for a while and then you feel better at the end of it. It might sound masochistic but it’s not really like that. Once again, this probably wouldn’t work for the majority of people, but for some this might be what you’re looking for.
I’ll add to this or write a follow-up post at some point in the future, perhaps when I delve into procrastination more when my uni semester starts again in March. I hope you enjoyed this.
Food Packaging
by Dave
Are you tired of human-proof packaging of food these days? I know I am.
Into the Wonderful World of Guitar
by Dave
Hey guys. So, I’ve decided to learn guitar. I’ve begun going through the beginner lessons on http://www.cyberfret.com/ but as my fingertips hurt on my left hand, I’m giving it a break for today.
One day I hope to be able to play music like this:
And perhaps one day, even like:
Though I don’t think that’s very likely!
2012 (Review)
by Dave
Just came back from watching 2012 at the Village ‘Gold Class’ cinemas, and thought I’d revive this blog a bit and write about 2012 while it’s still fresh in my memory. =)
2012 is mind-boggling in its epic scope of destruction. The CGI is incredible. The CGI guys for the movie had way too much fun putting this together, and it really works I think. If you’re not into total annihilation however, be warned that there’s little else the movie will offer you.
The movie is shown from multiple peoples’ perspectives, with their different paths intertwining, a bit like Pulp Fiction etc. 2012 does a very good job at highlighting the very global nature of the disaster, and got me wondering one or two times about the meaninglessness of material wealth (unless it consists of private planes!) and the triviality of small arguments and disagreements in the face of impending doom.
2012 is a movie more suited to the cinemas than say, your computer monitor / speakers, unless of course you have some sort of home theatre set up. I imagine the effects are better on such a large screen, and there are many low frequency sounds and vibrations. It’s rare that I actually go to the cinemas to watch a movie, and the difference is noticeable (now I’m deaf!). The movie is not short, at 158 minutes long. I find this to be a good thing, as most movies seem to end just when they’re getting started.
There’s really nothing much I can fault 2012 on, except for a minor detail regarding the ending, but I won’t mention it as it’s sort of a spoiler. The plot isn’t deep but let’s leave plots for other movies. Seeing it at the cinemas was a great experience personally and if you’re into wholesale destruction and dazzling effects, you’ll enjoy it too.
To Socialize or Not to Socialize, That’s the Question
by Oziriz
Warning: This is a fairly long post!
Is there a correct answer to the question “should you actively socialize?“? I don’t think there is, and I think most introverted people would agree, whereas most extroverted people would be more likely to say there is, and you should actively socialize. That’s what I’m going to be discussing in this article, and hopefully come to a good solution and answer.
First, here’s my definition of introverts and extroverts in this article:
Introvert: “Introverts tend to be more reserved and less assertive in social situations. They often take pleasure in solitary activities such as reading, writing, drawing, playing musical instruments or using computers.“[1]
Extrovert: “Extroverts tend to enjoy human interactions and to be enthusiastic, talkative, assertive, and gregarious. They take pleasure in activities that involve large social gatherings, such as parties, community activities, public demonstrations, and business or political groups“[1]
Now we can get started on the actual article. I’m going to start off saying that I am quite strongly introverted, though I can fare fairly well in social situations, I get very exhausted from them. From my experience other introverts seem to understand this perfectly (they feel the same about social situations mostly, so why wouldn’t they?), while extroverts seem to have a hard time wrapping their head around this, and can’t understand that you really don’t like it.
Extroverts I have asked and observed tend to think “oh, they’re just shy” or “they’re nervous around people, it’ll get better if they socialize more”. This is a fully understandable mindset as media tends to focus on extroverted people, they’re a lot more interesting to watch, and the general idea in the world simply seems to be that socializing is the normal and correct thing to do. As an introvert I have a whole different view on this matter, as I am not a very shy or socially nervous person, but I’m always speaking softly and not trying to be noisy. I do this out of respect for the people around me, but this communicates shyness. Other things I do also communicate shyness, including that I avoid eye contact with people, as this is the most effective way to keep people at a distance so I don’t get into yet another cumbersome social situation. People tend to view people who avoid eye contact as shy, untrustworthy or dishonest or even crazy, so they tend not to approach you. This has a funny side effect that makes it even harder for introverts; people who like dominating others approach these introverts as they’re often easier to dominate and won’t put up a fight, which make social interactions even more uncomfortable for the introvert.
The major problem with trying to get some of these extroverts to understand how we feel in social situations, is that the solitude we enjoy does not feel the same for them as social situations do for us, so they cannot do a direct comparison. Solitude may feel boring for them, like they want to talk to someone, get some excitement! But it’s not hard like their brain is already fully stimulated with things, and then someone throws some theoretical mathematics at it. Introverts are fully excited on their own, they are working on problems and situations that are not necessarily related to the complex social structures and situations around them. For an introvert a social situation is in addition to this inside excitement, and since their brain has been working internally all their life, they cannot just shut this part off and go into a “let’s figure this social structure of all this person’s friends, his/her friend’s friends, their complex relationships with each other and all other related things out” mode. This function may come very naturally to the extrovert, so naturally in fact that it requires no conscious thinking, and shutting it off would be rather impossible. There’s always the curiosity of what others are doing, figuring out your place and role in society and using this information to acquire more contacts, more complexity and thus also more excitement.
Now, just as this is impossible to shut off for an extrovert, the introvert cannot shut off his/her function processing equally complex structures of data related to other things than social structures (except maybe social structures from a non-biased more analytical point of view) and start functioning in an extroverted way any more than an extrovert can shut off his/her social function and start getting their brain fully stimulated by internal thoughts.
The reason why, I believe, most extroverts I ask and observe — and also a few introverts — believe that extroversion is the correct “version”, is that introverts seem to be completely disinterested in anything, they seem to be very lazy and odd, even stupid and unable to grasp the basic functions of the human being. They are hard to communicate with, predict or often even relate to, and this barrier of communication alone makes them hard to understand, and so in order to place them somewhere in your social structure you need to make quite a big assumption without a whole lot of information. In addition to this, introverts are generally viewed as needing to be treated, needing to see a psychologist to learn to be less socially inept. It does limit your life to some extent, but it is not a personality disorder or other psychological problem. It is harder to get a career if you’re socially inept, but that is also right in some places where the social structure of the work place is very important and you need to actively be a part of it, or things will not work out. Managers also often want to be able to read their employees and understand them so they can get to know the person in order to figure out whether it is good to employ them or not, but introverts are hard to read as they don’t communicate most things externally. However, just as it has its limits it also has its upsides. You get to know yourself to a degree extroverts never will, and introversion is needed for a lot of jobs where you really can’t socialize, sometimes for days even.
I could go on for much longer but I think by now you can see that introversion is not worse than extroversion, and extroversion is not worse than introversion. If people learned that this is a difference, not a chemical imbalance in the brain or any sort of psychological problem, this world would be a lot better off. We have lots to learn from each other in ways of thinking about different problems, introverts learning to organize and structure social situations better, and extroverts learning how to do the same with all the internal information in their brain.
- Oz
References:
[1] Extraversion and introversion on Wikipedia
Was this post helpful to you?
by Oziriz
Does anyone ever not abuse those things? People think it’s a “Do you agree with this post?” button, and the ratings get all wrong. Take IMDb for example, they have a simple “Was the above comment useful to you?” button. When someone posts a comment saying they disliked a movie and give good useful reasons, everyone rates it not useful for “I disagree”, because they loved the movie! The question isn’t “Do you agree with the above comment?”, it’s “was it helpful?”. Of course it wasn’t helpful if you already saw the movie, it’s for people who haven’t seen it yet to rate!
If you own a site with this question, you might as well make the question “Do you agree with the above comment?”, people are gonna treat it as such anyway.
That’s it for my little random rant, good job wasting a few minutes on something you already knew reading this!
- Oz
P.S. Was this rant helpful to you?
The Selfishness of People
by Oziriz
Do you consider yourself selfish? Probably not, but why not? Is it because you help old people cross the street? Is it because you donate money to help starving children in Africa?
Think about it for a minute, if you consider yourself a not-completely-selfish person, why is this?
Now, I’m gonna ask you why these are unselfish things to do. If you’ve ever donated to a service, weren’t you just being selfish, buying yourself a little peace of mind, making yourself feel a little better about yourself? When you helped that old person across the street, weren’t you just secretly hoping someone will help you when you’re old and walking is hard, hoping karma will help you across the street one day? Maybe you’re just lonely and tried to help yourself to a friend. Either way, no matter what you do, in the end, you’re doing whatever you’re doing to help yourself in some way. I’m not writing this post right now to tell you about how selfish we all are so we can become better people and not be so selfish, I’m writing it to have yet another post on my blog, to have yet one more idea out there to help myself when explaining this to people in the future, now I just have to link them here, plus it makes me feel good about myself, I haven’t posted in ages.
If whenever you’re “not being selfish” you’re just buying yourself a little peace of mind, why do people encourage you to be less selfish? That would be one of the most selfish things you can ever do, and most organized religions and governments encourage this, so you’ll be less tight and give up that moola, so they can buy themselves a little better car, a little better anything to feel a little better about themselves.
This also brings up the question whether money actually can make you happy. Fact is, it can, and it does, if you keep saving up you’ll be happy because you’re saving (if you’re that type of person), and there’s the additional bonus of knowing you’ll always have some money around should something happen, and that extra feeling of security and knowing you have all that potential happiness in your wallet adds to your overall happiness.
Is it really bad to be selfish though? And should you stop donating for that little peace of mind? The answer is really no, you’re actually “doing the right thing”, the same goes for anything that triggers that little area in your brain that sends a chemical through your head to make you feel better. If it makes you feel better about yourself, donate whatever amount gives the best ratio between lost money and gained happiness, it’s all simple economics, invest in what you think has the best return on investment. You obviously need to buy food, and whatever else keeps you alive, but invest the rest in whatever makes you happiest, in the end that’s all we’re living for.
One example of a truly unselfish act would be to take a job at a bar cleaning toilets for a year without pay, so the stranger who works there can have a paid year off, without ever letting them know who you are so you can’t gain anything from them. If this makes you feel like a complete idiot for doing it, you’re being truly unselfish, if on the other hand it makes you feel good, you’re most likely being selfish and doing it to feel good about yourself, wishing someone else will do the same for you.
When we buy a new car we’re getting a nice hit of adrenaline and endorphin (same chemical released as when you have an orgasm), this in turn makes us happy, happy, happy! You’re not seriously thinking you’re buying it because you can finally go from 0-60 MPH in 5 seconds flat, just in case, or because it’ll be able to drag your house with it if you like with all that power? You’re buying it because it’s an investment you’re fairly sure will make you feel good about yourself for making for a long time to come, potentially even helping you slightly in finding someone to help spread your genes with. [1]
So go ahead, do whatever it takes to get just one more hit, it’s all we’ve got until we figure out the meaning of life, except for spreading our genes (which, might I add, also are selfish according to Richard Dawkins [1]).
If you can come up with any reason why we’re not selfish (or why you aren’t) please post, I’d be very interested.
- Oz
Links
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
Our Own World
by Oziriz
Preface/Warning:
This is a 2 part post, and it is a slightly long one. I wrote this in the hopes of sparking some discussion on a few subjects that are quite interesting.
Part I – The rules
I’ve been thinking about the internet for a while, and how it will develop over the next 10, 20 and 50 years. How will people look back on this time? Will they look back on the internet, as we know it today, as a place where hackers ran free pillaging every site they came across, a place where people could say or do whatever they wanted? Maybe they will just look back at this time as the early days of a developing alternate reality or world?
It is obvious our beloved interwebz change every day. New technologies and ideas come along and become part of our online everyday, new people discover the ‘net, new memes are born on 4chan and so on. One thing has remained the same since the day I set my virtual foot in this odd world, the rules and laws. What rules and laws, you ask? That is exactly my point, why haven’t the governments of this world come to some agreement on some rules and stopped us from doing a bunch of stuff we like doing? I have a few answers, the short answer though, is as short as two words: they can’t! Let me elaborate on that a little bit:
It’s hard catching someone doing something on the internet, and it’s costly. It’s easy to hide your true identity, or just do your deeds from a public computer. They do spend money tracking people down if they think it is absolutely necessary, like when someone steals sensitive government data or something. But in order to set any rules they would have to have a way of enforcing these rules. The government would have to make our internet service providers track all our internet activities and have programs installed to let them know if someone does anything suspicious. They are trying hard to do this, some harder than others. The problem with this is that people have now tasted the refreshing freedom of the internet, we will not let the government attempt to control – or eavesdrop on – our internet behavior. That is what makes it such a great place, it is a place where you can truly be anonymous, a world where the limits are set by our own imaginations.
That would be all of the first part, what do you think? Should there be some rules or laws online, or should this odd world stay the way it is?
Part II – Our responsibility
The internet is truly a world of its own, it is different from the real world in many ways, but also like it in some respects. One of the key differences is that it lacks certain aspects of human interaction, like eye contact, and for the most part body language, which some people find more important than others. There are other obvious differences, and it feels pretty different than the real world, with the anonymity you have online and such. But for its differences, it is very much like the world in that it has societies, places that are pleasant and some that are less so. You could live out your entire life online if you wanted, as long as you get electricity, an internet connection, food and water from the real world. You wouldn’t miss out on much: People of all sorts get online and interact, some are nice, some are rude and some just don’t know how to act, just like in the real world. You can get a job online to support your online life, you can meet friends and even marry your significant other online. When it comes to procreation though, you have to do it in real life, unless you’re fine with having your wife artificially inseminated and calling the kid yours.
So this is a whole new world that we have created, a world that is shaped by us, it is our responsibility to make sure people don’t get out of line and to do something about it if they do. Most of the time it is private people online who start investigations, tracking down individuals who have done something online that makes them worthy of some real life attention. If they guy they’re tracking did something bad people report them to the police with all data they have gathered online. If they did not do this, the police would never find them (or really care much for that matter). This, I think, goes to prove that to some extent that we do not need “leaders” or governments in this world, but we can take care of ourselves just fine. People have learned how to stay away from bad sites and they don’t click on random flashing ads telling you you’re the 1,000,000th visitor to that site. People have learned how to protect themselves from the dangers online, and the online world is like a metaphor for the life the animal inside us knows.
So, what do you think? Is people hacking and illegally downloading stuff a sign that without a government or at least certain laws we’d be in complete chaos, people running around killing and stealing to their heart’s content? Some people do get viruses and click on stupid links and whatnot, but isn’t that just a virtual analog for survival of the fittest?
That was the end of part II, please leave a comment if you feel like discussing any of this, or just commenting on the post. I wrote it fast because the post just popped into my head, and I needed to write it down while it was fresh, as a result it could be of a lesser standard than what you’re used to. ;)
Thanks for reading!
- Oz
How are you?
by Oziriz
Don’t you just hate it when someone asks you that question? You know they don’t want you to give an honest answer, they want you to respond with “good” or “fine” or something like that. You’re not supposed to answer with “Well, I’m short on money, my back’s been hurting a lot and everything’s just bad at the moment…“, and if you ignore the question (especially online) people are gonna start asking why you ignore them or why you ignored their question, they want you to give them an answer, but not a negative one.
So, what is the point of this question? Can’t we change it to something else with other predefined answers? If we used random trivia every time, maybe people could learn from it even. For example, instead of asking “how are you?” you could ask “Who was the last person to be executed by electric chair in New York?“, and people would learn that it was Eddie Mays, 15 August 1963 (according to Wikipedia). Imagine if you learned something new each time you spoke to someone? You would know a lot more random trivia than you do now, that’s for sure.
I guess that’s it for today’s rant, but don’t worry, there will be more random ranting! Leave a comment or something if you feel like it, as long as it’s not to ask me how I am. ;)
- Oz