Because I’m bored this is just a random list of American animation that are truly AWESOME. Anything not on this list is just not sufficiently awesome and that’s all there is to it.

Gargoyles
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Samurai Jack
Reboot

The Pirates of Darkwater

Batman The Animated Series
Transformers (espcially The Movie)
Megas XLR
The Critic
The Simpsons
South Park
Family Guy
Futurama
Animaniacs
Pinky and the Brain
Darkwing Duck
Duck Tales

Think something else is awesome enough to be on this list?  Make your case!

American Animation only this time. No Anime.

Go here. And vote for QCCAN to win this silly little contest.

I don’t have anything clever or funny or inspiring to say to convince you. I’m just asking you to do it. Because I want you to.

Qccan’s blog is great. It’s hilarious. It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s informative. She finds the most interesting stuff to post. It’s a pleasure to read.

But more than that, she’s a great member of the Xanga community. She super active and she always has a kind or funny word to say to everyone and it’s always something on topic and relevant. Sometimes she says exactly what you most need to hear. And she has amazing friends on Xanga who know this and are willing to fight to see her win.

So please take a moment and vote. She should totally win this contest.  Really she deserves to have Xanga For Life. And I hope she continues to blog and comment forever. She deserves all of our support. She’s earned it.

Vote QCCAN!

YAAAYY!!!!

Not all that long ago I quit my lovely new job that took so long for me to finally get. I just walked in in the morning. Submitted my letter of resignation. Quit. And then left. I didn’t even give them one more hour of my time.

And soon I’ll be heading off half way across the country to take a new job that I have no idea how I got. Really, I am somewhat surprised. It’s not that I don’t think I can do the work or deserve the job. Rather, it’s that I didn’t even try very hard to get this job. Or hardly at all really. It just fell into my lap.

My natural paranoia keeps acting up too when I think about it. Makes me think that my life is being manipulated by outside forces. It is also odd that it pays exactly enough to convince me to go. No more. No less.

It’s an interesting adventure though and I am quite looking forward to it! First time I’ve ever left to live somewhere away from the East Coast. Hopefully everything will work out and maybe from here I’ll one day move to live in other more exotic locations where I will still continue to spend 99% of my time staring at a computer screen, but hey at least I can “say” I was there you know?

Well truly I was going to quit this current job one day whether I got a new job or not.  I suspected I might leave after the first day when I saw several odd warning signs that things weren’t quite right there.  Then on the fourth day I was absolutely sure of it.

That was the day I heard someone give someone else a “talk” that was utterly rude and totally inappropriate. In my old job before this one I remember overhearing a conversation that began with the boss walking into the programmer’s office and leading off with the statement “What the hell are you screwing up this time!”  That was one messed up conversation. Nobody should talk to anyone like that in a professional setting. Period.

This one was much worse.

Again it was a boss talking to his subordinate. The subordinate is again a programmer, this time a girl who sits right next to me.  She was also, I think, the smartest and most skilled programmer at the place. And also the most dedicated and determined. By herself she went through the system and documented all of the chaotic slapstick code we were supposed to be developing. She did this during her spare time while still doing all of the coding for her regular assignments. All this while reading and researching so much about the systems the company was working on that she was fast on her way to becoming an expert in cryptography and security technologies. Fields she knew little of before entering this job.

And on top of that she was one of the only people there who was willing to take the time out to help me by actually explaining what things were and how things work as well as pointing me in the direction of what I would need to read and who I should ask in order to learn more.  She clearly had a kind of a “helper” personality  and she excelled at explaining and assisting people, keeping people on track and going in the same direction.  She’s also more passive than most of her male coworkers, or at least she chooses to be so while on the job.

So why then did her boss feel the need to talk down to her like that? He was so incredibly rude. Badgering her. Attacking her. Treating her as if she wasn’t good at her job or didn’t know what she was doing. When she tried to explain herself, he was totally arrogant and dismissive, talking to her as if she were a no nothing child. All this I gathered was because she was late on some assignment or other. Although the entire time I was there I didn’t hear anyone mention a single deadline of any sort, I think they’re far too disorganized for that. Anyway, even if she was late, big fucking deal. It was so ridiculous.

I have never before over heard a conversation that more lead me to want to stand up walk over and punch someone in the face. I really wish I had. I’d be a much happier person today if I had, despite the criminal charges that would have surely been brought to bear against me. That would be after I got out of the hospital as he would have surely beaten the crap out of me first. Still, it’d have been worth it just for the feeling of satisfaction.

I’m a lot like her too. I like to understand things fully before I start working on them. I do research. I study. I make diagrams. I don’t just rush into things and start coding. And I’m also a “helper” type, I love to explain things to people to get them to understand it. I like helping other people’s knowledge and capabilities grow. And I’m even more quiet and passive than she was.

So I’m sure before long had I stayed I would have had someone coming to me and giving me a “talk” like that.  (but probably not since I’m a somewhat large black man and they’d be too afraid to) Even though I’m not in her same chain of command, there were other signs of a similar disregard for her from others in the institution for much the same reason. And the organization clearly valued swift immediate progress over clean consistent organized design. Being clever was more important than being right.

There were other things I didn’t like about that place. Lots of little things. I probably would have wanted to leave even if that asshole guy had never been there. He only came in a couple days a week anyway and I barely ever had to interact with him. (Good thing cuz after that day I couldn’t stand looking at him) Still, the environment just wasn’t for me. It’s one of those places where nobody talks to anybody. Rather everyone just sits in front of their cubicles and does their work. There’s no team work. No communication. No meetings. No IMs. Not even emails to reply to. That means I spent most of every day trying not to fall asleep at my desk. And often failing.

And then there were the assignments they gave me. They were sooo stupid. Clearly they were “testing” me trying to see if I was capable of doing this stuff. But the tests were so damned stupid I felt no desire to do them. Like Build this code or build that code or install this software on unix or add validators to these fields.  Clearly I was supposed to figure things out on my own but the stuff I was figuring out was not worth figuring out. Someone who knows could just spend two seconds out of their busy day to show me and then I’d know too. Or instead just automate this crap so that nobody really needs to know it at all. Instead I was supposed to dig things up on my own. Supposedly it was a skill test. In reality, it was just a waste of life.

So anyway, good news is the girl who sat next to me quit a week before I did and got a much better job. Yaaayy! I was so happy. The company is stupid. They didn’t seem to care that much that she was leaving. That’s dumb. They should have been begging her to stay. They should have told her to name her price and then paid her that. But no… they don’t know how to assess the abilities or maximize the talent of their personnel. And that’s sad.

And yet, I still felt really bad about leaving. The way I left was somewhat unprofessional I know but that didn’t bother me so much. The truth is I wasn’t doing anything for them. Zilch. Nothing productive. I was just costing them money. And I felt bad about continuing to earn a paycheck from them for two more weeks even knowing that I wasn’t intending to stay. So I didn’t give notice. I saved them money in the end and I don’t feel bad about that at all.

What made me feel sad is that the boss man was so sad. He’s not a bad guy and it’s clear he’s be struggling for a long time to try and find talent capable of doing the work and willing to work there. He’s constrained by what his superiors are willing to pay and plagued by environmental issues and personality conflicts and the tight labor market for programmers and developers. And he had had no idea that I was thinking about leaving.  He said he’d been going through a never ending battle trying to find programmers. It was so sad.  And I feel sort of bad about the whole experience. Since I accomplished so little it really does feel like I was just using them to earn a paycheck until something better came along.

But that’s not the attitude I had while in the job. I really would have given it more of a chance. I probably would have stayed the full six month contract period despite the “talk” I overheard and seen if and what they would have offered to me as an employee. If only it were any other opportunity except *this* opportunity that I got. It really might be, I think, a once in a life time opportunity, this new job. I hope it is anyway. And it fell right into my lap. I wouldn’t quit my job and travel half way across the country to the middle of nowhere for less. And best of all the new job involves me programming in PERL! And everybody knows that’s totally the second best programming language ever created.
 
So umm if any of you are reading this and are programmers in the northern VA area looking for work and you think the environment I’ve described might be ok for you then feel free to Message me and I’ll pass you along to him. It pays ok. And they might be willing to pay more now since they just lost two people.  Yeah I figure offering to do that is the least I can do.

Curved roads are funny things.  I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately.

There’s this place near where MD crosses into VA where the big highway curves very sharply to the left.

I hate driving here. There’s this big giant orange speed limit sign on the wall  right in front of your field of vision as you make that turn.  “50 MPH!!”, the sign screams at you.

That place. That sign. It gives me the deepest sense of foreboding I’ve ever felt about a place. Th sign just feels wrong. It’s unsettling.  Maybe it’s because it’s just bigger than any speed limit sign out to be. Maybe because it’s location is where speed limit signs are never placed. Maybe because the color is slightly off. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it feels really wrong. I don’t ever want to drive there. I’d go out of my way to avoid that curve in the road.

If you think about it, maybe it’s the place. That sign probably wasn’t there forever. They put it up for a reason. The road is extremely fast and always very very crowded. And the curve is hard to see. But it’s way too sharp for you to make safely at high speeds unless you know what you’re doing. Most people don’t. And if you hit the turn too fast, you’ll smash into the wall and hit other cars and cause a big old accident. So I wonder how many people died in that spot? I wonder how many times, before that sign was put there that people  just didn’t notice and drove too fast and BAM!! Death. Mutilation. Maybe that’s what’s causing the unsettling feeling I feel as I drive there. Maybe…

But I really don’t usually believe in supernatural stuff. I think it’s all interesting and I’d love it if it were true, but in the absence of evidence I assume it’s possible but not confirmed. It’s not that I don’t believe so much as I just don’t let myself think about things I don’t hve sufficient evidence for. What would be the point? There will be plenty of time to think about it once the evidence presents itself and so it becomes a true part of my reality.

However, I am quite interested in explanations. Especially those of the psychological type. It’s quite possible that curved roads are metaphorical and that my sense of aversion is a result not of some sixth sense but just of my subconscious manifesting my uncertainty about this upcoming move and this new life.  A curved road generally represents a change in direction. And I’m definitely changing directions. I’ve been changing a lot lately. Over the past year I’ve changed more probably than I have in a life time before that. Maybe I feel foreboding  because I’m afraid of the changes that I’m undergoing.  Maybe I’m afraid I might “crash”.

But the good news is, it’s just a speed limit sign. Not a stop sign. The change will be fine. Maybe a little scary. But all I have to do is take my time. Slow down. And maybe things will work out just fine. I’ll be on the straight away again soon enough!

My oldest brother attended for a time a certain famous school. I won’t tell you the name but it’s in the New England area and it has a technical focus. Yeah. That one.

Sometimes people ask me outright where he went to school and yo know I’m not going to lie so I tell them. The reaction I get is immediate. It’s usually something along the lines of “Oh wow.”  or “He must be REALLY smart.” Yadda. Yadda. Yadda.  It gets even worse when I tell them the subject he was studying there.

And yeah he IS really smart. But that’s besides the point. The thing is… when I tell people where I went to school the reaction is somewhat different. It’s something along the lines of:

“Where?”

Haha. Nobody’s ever even heard of my school. I have to explain where it is located. Can you imagine someone saying “I went to Stanford” and having someone ask them “And where is that located?”  Nope. Never. Not gonna happen. But my school? I often have to explain where it’s at. People don’t know. People haven’t even heard of it. It isn’t in the public consciousness.

So when I’m applying for jobs most people’s eyes just glance right over the school name when reading my resume. Even though I put it first so it stands out more, they are more likely to remark more upon the subject I was studying or other minor trivial details on my resume than about the school I attended. For a time I put my SAT scores on my resume (though you’re not supposed to do that) and I got far more comments and praise about my SAT scores than I got about the college I atended. And SAT scores are utterly meaningless. But with regards to my school of choice, mostly I just get that “Where?”, “What’s that?” “Never heard of it” kind of an attitude.

But sometimes, there’s these oh so rare occassions when you meet someone and you’re talking to them normally and then they say it casually like it doesn’t matter, dropping it into the middle of the conversation while on their way to other subjects.

“And I see you went to Swarthmore.“

And there’s this funny little glint in their eyes. They give that special little inflection when they say the word. And then I know. This person is one of them. The mysterious cult. Those few proud entities who know the true meaning of the school. The secret that all the rest of society is kept in purposeful ignorance of.  The dark society. Those who hail from that place where only the very brave and very liberal dare to tread. Can’t you sense the power behind that name. The deep history lying in its bones. Swarthmore.

Uh oh. I’ve already said too much. They’ll be after me soon. The Swatties are not a force to be trifled with. If you don’t hear from me soon, you know what happened to me. Spread the word! Don’t let them take over. I trust the fate of the world in your hands!

And what exactly does their loving you back have to do with your love for them?

Just continue to exercise your love for them. You can do it by talking with the person if they’ll let you, by spending time with the person, if they’ll let you, or by helping the person or being there for that person if they’ll let you. And if not, you can still exercise your love for them, by thinking about them, by remembering them, by honoring them in your mind and learning from the things they have taught you. Heck, if you want, you can blog about them (but please don’t mention their name without permission) or write poetry in their honor.  Or whatever.

I’m not saying pester the person until they acknowledge you. That will surely lead to their hatred of you. I’m just saying don’t feel as if your love is something wrong to act upon just because it isn’t returned.

Absolutely anything you do out of a sense of respect and devotion for a person can be an act of love. That could even mean walking away or leaving them alone, giving them space or even ignoring them, if that’s what they need from you. It could mean pretending not to care when they are around. It could mean anything. Just do it. Whatever you feel you need to. Just don’t make yourself stop loving them because of these things.

So just go ahead and do these things. Honestly, you probably won’t really be able to stop yourself anyway, so don’t even try. If you try to suppress your love, get rid of it, or ignore it, you will quickly find yourself miserable and unhappy. It might seem like that’s the best way to “move on” but I don’t think so. It may work, eventually, but it’s a hard path to tread.

Instead, I’d say don’t prerequisite your love on the expectation that it be returned in equal measure. So just keep feeling what you’re feeling and don’t be ashamed of it. And take pleasure in your acts of love for someone. Take heart and be happy that you had the opportunity to feel love for someone. There can be a kind of honor in that.

And it may be that one day that person’s feelings toward you will change in the ways that you want them to change.

And they might not.

Or it may be that one day that person will feel something for you, if not exactly love, or the same kind of love that you want them to feel, then at least a kind of meaningful affection that you can be proud of and that you can take pleasure in.

Or they might not.

But in any case even as you exercise your love for that person, be careful not to close yourself off in the process. Keep your mind open and your heart open and who knows maybe some day you’ll find someone whom you will love and who will love you in the way that you want to be loved. Don’t let your feelings for one person close yourself to the possibilities. I believe the human heart is very much capable of developing feelings for any number of people at the same time if you let it. Each love will be different, but no less significant.

And yet again…. you also might not.

You might not find such a person. No matter how hard you look. That person just might not exist for you.

I think this is important too. I’m not going to give you that fairy tale bullshit that everybody else spouts regularly. Life doesn’t give you any guarantee that there will be someone out there for you. You might never find anyone who loves you in the way you want to be loved. It might just not ever happen. The reality is all so very disgustingly darwinian. Certain character traits are selected over others. Some lines die out.  It’s the natural order of things. Even if we had a perfect selection and pairing mechanism, it’s still not hard at all to prove that some people will logically have to be left out. It might be you. It could very easily be you.

So that’s why it’s important to not have such high expectations. Don’t demand to be loved in return and don’t withhold your love just because you are waiting for someone who will love you back. Just feel what you feel and try to find whatever joy you can in this oh so brief life wherever you can find it.

Just live your life.

In this as with all things, that’s how you move on.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Ah yes. The fundamental question. Can we change? Do we really change?  I wonder about this all the time.



Of course we’re not talking about trivialities. OF COURSE people make
all kinds of minor changes to themselves all the time. You can change
your hair syle or change your opinion in a microsecond.



No the question is about can your essential nature change? Can your
core beliefs and principles and feelings really change? Can you become
a different person?



Can you become a better person?



I think we can. I believe it with all my heart. Why? Because I would
not want to continue to exist in a world where people can’t change. I
would kill myself if I thought that there was no hope for me or anyone
else to change.  People have to be able to change.



But it doesn’t have to be easy.
I think many people try hard day in and day out to change and fail and
fail again. Progress is slow. It’s hard to change. We, very often can’t
just change ourselves on a whim. We need help. Sometimes we need lots
of help.



But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It’s still very possible. I’ve
seen many people who seem to me to have changed. People who seem to
live their lives differently now than they did before. People who act
and think and even talk and carry themselves differently. People whose
very belief systems seem to have radically rewritten themselves over
the years. I’ve seen this. And not just once. The only question is
whether these changes were genuine changes? Were they fundamental
shifts? Or were the people just pretending? I don’t know.



I do know that when people change for real, it’s because they
themselves truly wanted to change. The opposite of that though is
something I see far too often. People trying to change for someone
else.



This bothers me a lot. People try to be something they are not in order
to be something that someone else wants them to be, or in order to
prove to someone that they can be a certain way, or even to get back at
someone for, or as a means of making amends to someone.



And then when those changes fail to make an impact on the person for
whom they are changing, the person usually feels something along the
lines of a sense of failure. They think they didn’t change enough. They
think they made mistakes. They think that whatever happened was all or
partially their fault and had they only tried harder maybe things would have worked out.



I hate that. It pisses me off. It isn’t their fault. Nobody should
expect you to change for them. You shouldn’t feel the need to try and
be someone that someone else wants you to be. Rather it should be the
other way around. The people who are around you and care about you
should support you as you struggle to become whatever it is that you
truly want to be. And as you encounter hardships and struggles in that
fight to become that person, it isn’t your fault at all. It’s nobody’s
fault. But the people who care about you should feel the need to try
harder in that case to want to help you more. Because that’s what you
want.



In short the people you spend time with should respect who you are now,
not push upon you some vision of what you ought to be. And you should
not try to be anything for the sole purpose of effecting another
person’s feelings or beliefs. You can only really change if you are
doing it for yourself. Otherwise you are just pretending and that never
ends well.



We can change. We do. But each and every change we make is just a manifestation of us coming more and more truly into ourselves.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

I am deeply involved into writing up the fourth and hopefully final installment of my featured question omnibus. But for now I’ve noticed some of my answers getting ridiculously long. So the next few posts are going to be individual posts of some of the longer answers to featured questions I’ve written. I will then link to those posts within the omnibus.

I was going to wait until I had completed more questions and cleaned it up a bit before posting this. But oh well I’m bored now and I feel like it’s been too long since I posed anything. Here goes.

What’s on your wishlist?

I’m
afraid to write it down on a list. That would sort of make it too
permanent. And I’d be afraid to look back upon it a few years later and
have to admit to all the things I wished for that I still hadn’t
achieved.

I do have broad wishes though.
Like the wish to develop meaningful friendships, to find some sort of
career path I’ll enjoy and not be so bored with, the wish to help
people in need, and the wish to read lots of great books, watch lots of
great anime and movies, and play lots of extraordinary games. And I
mustn’t forget the wish to never stop writing no matter what.

Do you like or dislike speaking in public?

Oh
I absolutely adore speaking in public! The sweaty hands, the cold
shakes, the tears in my eyes, the feeling like I’m going to puke. I
find it all absolutely enrapturing. <sarcasm>

What do you hope your life to be like at the age of 65?

That’s
like the most depressing question ever. My primary hope is that I’ll
still be alive and functioning but considering my eating habits I find
that rather unlikely.

Truthfully though I
just hope that as long as I live my friends remain my friends and my
family remains my family. Other than that, who cares? I can live in a
cardboard box on the side of the road or under a rock somewhere for all
I care.

Has our generation become increasingly picky as to who we date or marry?

Isn’t
it interesting how this question says “our generation” as if all
Xangans are part of the same generation?  But Xangans represent a range
of age going from like 7 to 70 or something like that. It’s true that
most are in the 20-30 range, but still even that represent a rather
large difference. Someone who is 20 is likely to think differently than
someone who is 30.

So I’ll change the
question to is it the case that as time goes by, each generation is
becoming increasingly picky as to who we date or marry?  That’s an
interesting question. I’m not sure that’s true. In the old days,
marriage wasn’t an individual choice, but more of a family choice
imposed upon children. But back then people were pretty picky about it
too. The kids had to be of “good upbringing” whatever that means.
Actually I know exactly what that means. It means wealthy.

Today,
it’s different. Money is still a part of the equation but more nebulous
things seem to have more bearing like “compassion” and “responsibility”
and some incomprehensible thing called “love”. And it’s not like we
ignore appearance, or habits, or shared tastes and similar demeanors
and avoiding disease and not being psychos all that good stuff.

Is
this picky? Well sort of, but not excessively so. Another way to look
at it is that since we are living longer, we have more time to make our
decision and because we are more connected we have a larger pool from
which to choose from. As a result what we perceive of as being “picky”
might just be generations becoming increasingly more “rational” about
this business of choosing a permanent mate.

What are your New Year’s resolutions?

Although
to be honest I made it significantly before new years, my primary resolution
was to open up to more people. To share more of myself. To be more
truthful. To make more friends. And to be closer to the friends I have.
That’s a big part of how come I’ve been able to meet and interact with
so many interesting xangans over the past few months. And it’s a big
part of why some of my blog entries are sometimes more whiny and
self-absorbed lately than they usually are.

But
still overall I haven’t been doing too great a job of following this
resolution. Online is good but in the real world I’ve fallen far short
of my goals. But the year is far from over.

Also, these days I wonder if it isn’t possible to have revealed too much. Some truths may be better kept secret.

What is one thing about you that most people probably don’t know?

Are
you sure you really want to know? Some things are better off not
knowing. For if you were to accidentally let such truths slip, there
could be dire dire consequences.

What you still demand an answer? Very well then. You were warned. Here goes my super secret secret you’ve been waiting for…

I don’t even like featured questions that much…

How do you want to be remembered after you pass away?

I
said that other question was the most depressing question. I was wrong.
This one’s worse. Who wants to think about after they are gone? What’s
the point? We won’t be around to care.

I’m
not sure I really want to be remembered. I don’t want people to think
about me and get sad or nostalgic or any of that BS. They should just
live their lives and be happy as best they can. They shouldn’t spare me
a second thought.

Do you think violent video games are to blame for recent shootings in the US?

::ROFL::

Should second chances be given to someone who has broken your trust?

Absolutely
anything and everything can be given a second chance. It’s the third
chance that is the hard question.  For the second chance, it could just
be a mistake or a misunderstanding. On the second chance someone might
learn from their previous wrong doing and might be regretful that
they’ve hurt you.  Second chances are good as they allow people to grow.

Third
chances should be given too, but they’re tougher. They can’t be given
out unconditionally. There has to be consequences to actions. If
someone betrays your trust not once, but twice, consider then how
important it is to you that they change and what you can do to make it
so.

Do you feel the mental health system is helping or hurting people today? Do you have an example?

These
systems exist for a reason. They are undoubtedly helping people. A lot
of smart people who care a lot went through a lot of effort to build up
these systems. They are far from perfect and I’m sure some have been
hurt by them. So there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of them causing
harm. But the same is true of ANY beneficial system from higher
education to medicine to governments. The question is does the good
outweigh the bad? I think it does.

No I don’t have any examples. Guess everybody I know is sane, or too crazy to know when they need help.

What would you do with your extra time if you did not need to sleep?

http://weblog.xanga.com/nephyo/632370854/what-would-you-do-with-your-extra-time-if-you-did-not-need-to-sleep.html

Would you raise your child the same way your parents raised you?

It’d
be stupid not to learn from their choices. So I have to say no.
However, I would raise my kids in a manner very similar to the way in
which I was raised. But I’d make changes where I think could result in
improving the lot and happiness of my children.

Do you find it comfortable keeping eye contact in conversations?

Nope. But I suppose it depends a little on how enamored I am with the person’s eyes…

Should people accept it as their duty to take care of their aging parents?

See
society sucks. We haven’t thought any of this out very well. We *could*
develop a system where everyone is taken care of as they get older
automatically and so children are free to live their own lives. Sounds
like a great idea huh?

We tried. It was called SS. It doesn’t seem to be doing so well these days.

But
that was just hap slashed together in an era where people didn’t
understand economics and demographics half so well as we don’t
understand them today. Ideally we’d build a system that could be
increasingly improved with the intent of ensuring that people are taken
care of to the best of our ability as a society at any given time.

Or
we could equally just say “screw-em”. And let it be everyone’s sole
responsibilty to take care of themselves, regardless of circumstances.
So, if you happen to be sickly and of retirement age during a
depression, we just say “boo hoo. Too bad for you! Off on the streets
you go!”

Or we could use a traditions and
enforce a contract where children must take care of their parents. We
could do that. Sucks for kids with aging parents. Sucks for kids with
parents who are assholes too.

Or we could
have a modified traditions system, where children are default expected
to take care of their parents but only on the condition that their
parents treat them well and are good people. If they aren’t then the
children should be able to “disown” them.

Are you sending a care package to the troops this holiday season?

Huh?
Was I supposed to have? I didn’t. Nobody told me! geez. I feel left
out. I think I could have sent them some Naruto Manga. I think that’s
wholly appropriate. The US is so totally Konoha and Sasuke is Bin
Laden…

What do you work for: the love of success or the fear of failure?

http://weblog.xanga.com/nephyo/633112969/what-do-you-work-for-the-love-of-success-or-the-fear-of-failure.html

Who can you count on when you needed advice or help? Why?
hmm…
I tend to ask a lot of people for advice… but I often don’t get any
advice. But maybe it only seems that way because when I do get advice I
don’t usually take it. In fact if I don’t like the advice, I don’t even
hear it.

As for help… my friends and family have all helped me an enormous amount. Just not in the areas that I want help in.

How far have you gone/would you go to help a friend in the military?

Exactly as far and no further than I would go to help any other friend.

How would you explain racism to someone who was born blind?

I’m
sure if you were born blind you’d certainly know well enough the basic
necessary concepts just from living in a society filled with not blind
people. Seriously you’d have to be living under a rock to not have at
least had the concept of colors explained to you like a billion times
before. So I’d explain racisim to a blind person just like I would
anyone else. Being blind doesn’t make you somehow incapable of
understanding something discrimination. Indeed, I should think that
being blind would make you uniquely qualified to understand irrational
discrimination since I’m sure the blind have to face it every day.

But
the spirit of this question is sort of like saying that racism is so
absurd it really ought to be incomprehensible. I can get behind that
idea. If some super rational alien species were to come to Earth I do
believe they would laugh themselves to death when they heard of this
stupid species’ called humanity’s hang up on something as ridiculous as
skin tone.

I wouldn’t try to explain it to them. I’d just laugh along with them.

What would you do if someone broke into your home while you were sleeping?

Keep sleeping.

Are you an Internet addict?

No
of course not! The fact that I break into a cold sweat, start shaking
uncontrollable, and get migraines when I’ve been away from the internet
for a few hours is just a coincidence!

If you could be invisible for 1 day, what would you do, where would you go, and why that?

I’d probably chain myself down and do nothing. Otherwise, I might do something really really bad. Why? Because I could!

Do you have a friend who is serving overseas?

No.

What does it mean to be “trustworthy”? Do you think you are trustworthy?

I believe being “trustworthy” requires too things:  
1. sound judgment
2. sincerity

What
I mean by that is fairly simple. Say someone entrusts you with a
secret. To me being trustworthy does not mean blindly holding on to
that secret no matter what it is and no matter what the circumstances.
That’s just being stubborn. Anybody can do that and to be honest
virtually nobody does.

Rather, a
“trustworthy” person is sincere in their desire to do what’s best for
the person who entrusted them with that secret. If that means not ever
sharing it, then that’s what that person will do. But if that means
that the person needs to share it with certain people, then that person
will do their very best to exercise sound judgment in choosing with
whom and when to share that secret.

In
short, the “trustworthy” person is the person who holds trusts in turn
only sharing them with those whom he or she soundly judges to be
“trustworthy”. The end result is a network of trust where secrets flow
slowly from trustworthy person to trustworthy of person. That’s the
best security possible in this world, we can’t hope for any other.

Of
course, all trust networks eventually fail.  It’s just a matter of time
really. Just think about it. Nobody can exercise perfectly sound
judgment all the time. We’ll make mistakes and one day entrust a secret
with someone we shouldn’t with dire consequences. Furthermore, people
change. At one point a person may well care greatly for someone and be
willing to sincerely hold that person’s secrets in their trust. Then a
week later, they might hate that person’s guts and out of sheer hatred
or desire for revenge reveal that person’s secrets or the secrets that
person is holding in trust for someone else deliberately to
untrustworthy persons.

That’s the sad fate
of the world. So really if you have a secret and you don’t want anyone
to know, the only way to make sure of it is to tell no one, not even
your closest confidant. This is just like computer technology. The only
real way to keep a computer secure, guaranteed is to disconnect it from
everything and lock it in fort Knox. That’s about the only possibility.

OK,
now the second part of the question, am I “trustworthy”?   I think so.
I have revealed secrets entrusted to me to others, and sometimes I’ve
felt really guilty about that.  But the only times I’ve ever done that,
the person I shared it with was someone for whom I had the deepest
respect or a profound amount of trust or I just felt deep down perhaps
irrationally that I could trust this person. And there was a reason I
shared it too. Either because I felt I had to in order to prevent my
own insanity or because the person with whom I shared it I felt had a
need to know or because I felt the secret was something that needed to
be shared for the well being of the secret giver.

But
I don’t know if I am “trustworthy” really. I certainly have the
“sincerity” I think, but I’m not sure if my judgment has always been
sound. Sometimes I think I may have revealed information about myself
or about others that I really shouldn’t have. I think sometimes I may
have made things worse by telling the truth or being honest. I don’t
think it is unreasonable to say that perhaps I may have, in the past,
broken people’s trust.

But I certainly do try
to be trustworthy. I’m as trustworthy as I am able to be right now. And
I just hope as I grow older and wiser, my judgment improves and so I
grow more and more trustworthy in the process.

And really that’s the best I think any of us can strive for.

How do you support your friends who are in the military?
I
don’t have any right now. If I did, I would support them in much the
way I support everyone else, by telling them what I sincerely believe
and by trying to listen to them when they have something that they need
to talk about.

Sharing what I sincerely
believe though might not be so good for the military personnel. Because
I would certainly tell them that I think our incursions into Iraq and
Afghanistan are folly. I would also tell them that our military is way
too big, too cumbersome, too powerful, and downright dangerous for the
democracy of our nation.

That’s not to say
that I would discourage them from being a part of the military. I
wouldn’t. I would say to them that they should do whatever makes them
happy and whatever they can do to get the most out of life. For some
the disciplined life of the military is exactly what they need to
better themselves. For others, the military provides an unparalleled
opportunity for economic advancement to elevate them out of dangerously
un-prosperous situations.

But I would warn
them too that I really do believe that the military thrives on being
one of the most powerful propaganda and indoctrination machines on the
planet. I would tell them to make sure they hold to their own beliefs
and make their own judgments and be true to themselves because to be
sure the military will try to convince them to hold to theirs.  This
isn’t particularly distinctive of the US military (thought the US
military is particularly good at it), but ALL MILITARIZES.  That’s the
very *reason* why modern governments are designed to limit the power of
the military and place it under control of the civilians. It isn’t
their superior weaponry and better training that makes the military a
threat to peace and democracy. It’s their cohesiveness. Their
indoctrination capacity. That is, an evil person could easily use those
systems to get a large quantity of loyal deadly followers wiling to
work to obtain goals that lead to that evil person’s own power.

And
all along the military personnel will keep saying the refrain that they
were “just following orders”. Don’t become a person like that, that’s
what I’d tell my friends in the military. Always act in accordance with
your ideals.

What’s the best solution to boredom?

Anime!!!

I
think there’s a place you can go to get thrown into a den of ravenous
lions with meats that they enjoy strapped all over your body and
several cuts put on you so you are bleeding profusely.  Fighting them
off might be an alternative way to alleviate your boredom. Or if you prefer, I’m sure there’s a
pool of sharks that you can likewise be thrown into.


In the spirit of the new year, what is one thing that you wish for and why?

Only
one? I can only say one!?!? That’s sooo hard. I wish for so many
things. Which should I say? If I say anything it’ll sound like it’s the
most important thing that I wish for, but that might not necessarily be
true. There’s all kinds of things I wish for equally. So many. Oh well,
but I guess I have to answer.

I wish for my friends and family to be happier.

That’s
sort of really general though. Maybe since this was asked around the
New Years the intent was to have a wish specifically for the year 2008,
not a general wish. Hmm..  Still a million wishes there. OK, I guess
I’ll say something.

I wish that I get a job during the year 2008 that I will not hate. That I will enjoy doing, at least a little.


If you had to name the one thing that most frightens you about growing old, what would it be?

What
I’ve observed far too often is that people as they grow older also tend
to grow more distant from their friends. They adopt their own lives and
become en wrapped in them and they forget about one another. They grow
further and further apart. The old shared interests that brought them
together are dismissed and abandoned as childish pursuits of days gone
by. And then as they start to grow particularly old, they become even
more distant, as if preparing themselves for a time when those people
they once cared about will be dead and gone so that it won’ hurt as
much.

This is what frightens me. Even worse
than the fear of having everyone you’ve ever known die, there’s the
fear of having them be so distant from you as to be effectively dead
before their death. That terrifies me. It’d be so sad. It’s already
happening actually. I’m not even 30 but I already I see as I grow
older, people grow further and further apart.

But damn I was wrong about those other two questions. THIS is the most depressing question.

But
take heart! The good news is as you get older you can make more old
people friends with whom you can commiserate about aches and pains and
you share no haunting echoes of happier times to depress you. Bust out
your Bingo boards and have a ball!


What do you consider to be your accomplishments this past year?

I quit my job last year. And thank god for that. I didn’t accomplish anything else of note.


What do you like the most about yourself?

::shrugs::

What
should I like most about myself? Singling one thing out seems unfair to
all those other things about me that are not chosen.

Really I try not to judge myself in that way. I am who and what I am and that’s all there is to it.

—–

Geez. At this rate, I’ll never finish all of these!

In another life I think I would have been a chatterbox. People who know
me know that I talk very little and very cautiously. I weigh my words
before I speak and often go into long brooding silences. I never
learned the art of casual communication about nothing. Smalltalk is an
alien thing that I have to try really hard to engage in and it doesn’t
come easily. When I do do it, it feels like I’m pretending.

But there’s another side of me too. When I get really comfortable
around people they find me talking more and more forcefully. Not just
about anything, but about subjects I care about I get off into a “rant”
and I can go on and on about it to the point that I never let the other
person get a word in edgewise. These experiences are rare. And after my
rant is over I soon blanket myself again in thoughtful silence.

Online provides greater evidence of my chatterbox soul. I write long
winding rambling blog posts, like this, bouncing from idea to idea,
from thought to thought without hardly a single pause to really
consider what I am saying or why I am saying it. And my emails, for
those few entrusted enough to receive them, are even worse! I can say a
lot in those rambling missives. Sometimes I don’t think about what I’m
saying. I blurt it out in writing just as I feel it. Sometimes I say
stuff that gets me into trouble. Sometimes I say stuff that I meant at
the time I wrote it, but stopped feeling or feeling as much five
minutes later. But that’s too late to stop it from disturbing or
offending.

And IMs I can be even worse. I
can ramble on and on in response to someone’s chatting with me. I tell
my stories. I ramble on stating my opinion even when the person didn’t
ask for it and doesn’t necessarily care what I think.  And not just my
opinions or my thoughts. I say all kinds of stuff. Sometimes I’ve
excessively apologetic, other times overly aggressive.  And it’s at its
worst the more upset I am. When something is bothering me a great deal
and I chat with you, you will find that I can’t seem to shut up or
pause for an instance. I just go on and on. Furthermore, if I am upset,
I tend to bug people to chat more often than I ought to. Whenever they
are online, I try to message them and engage them in conversation all
to fulfill that need to communicate.

I’m not always like this online. But I am far more often than anyone
would suspect who has interacted with me in person. It’s not
unreasonable then to suspect that in another world I could have been
this way in real life too.

The chatterbox variant of me also has certain other interesting
characteristics to him. You know who my favorite hero characters in
stories tend to be? (heroines are a different matter and would take too
long to explore)  Usually it’s the “wise-cracking” hero.  That is the
ones who in the midst of stress or struggle, manages to come up with a
witty phrase or clever turn of the tongue either verbally or in
internal dialog.  Example include Spiderman, Nightcrawler (X-Men), Mat
Cauthon (WoT), Ned (Ysabel), Rafael (tmnt), Bumblebee (transformers),
Sokka (avatar), . The list goes on and on. These are characters who see
the world around them as somewhat ironic, strange and funny. They like
to twist things and shift things and make people laugh or rather,
primarily to amuse themselves and ward off their own darkness and fear.

I could see chatterbox variant of me being a little like that too.
Sometimes on IMs and on forums or blog responses, I do respond in a
somewhat witty and non-serious way even to serious matters. Sometimes I
do just joke for no reason at all and sometimes I describe things that
have happened to me in life as a funny story when in truth I find it
all too unfunny. 

But in person, I’m not like this at all. I rarely have a funny phrase
to say. Oft, my jokes attempted fall flat, are misinterpreted, or even
offend. Sometimes I do think of the perfect response, but I do so 60
seconds later, far after the conversation has already moved on to other
things.

Chatterbox me has a darker side too. You see, he would also be like
those bitter villain characters who look upon everyone around them with
a kind of disgust filled scorn. Chatterbox me would say things to
people with a smile on his face that are bitterly caustic and biting
and designed specifically to hurt people. These things chatterbox me
would say are just a manifestation of the inner thoughts he has, the
constantly running dialog flowing through his head wherein he sees all
others as inadequate, stupid, and just generally absurd. It’s the flip
side of the wise-cracking hero. Same observations, just with a darker
twist and a employed with a more vindictive aim. This part of
chatterbox me wants, I think, to hurt people sometimes. It makes him
feel better.

I know this me could have existed because I see these things in me
sometimes. At work, at times, I find myself thinking dark thoughts
about my coworkers. Cruel and vicious my mind’s imaginings. And as I
walk down the street or travel to the store, there’s ever a clever
witicism that comes to mind that goes unspoken. And online, I write and
write and write. A neverending flow of meandering ramblings and rants
about anything and everything that comes to mind.  

So maybe in another world chatterbox me does exist. He’s exactly as I
am only he just won’t ever stfu. Exactly like me except he hates
silence just as much as I thrive on it.

I sort of want to meet this chatterbox me one day. I want to get in a room alone with him….

And then I’ll beat the crap out of him!!! And hence forth prove that this me who is me is the best me that there could be!

But maybe I won’t just leave his broken body for the vultures. I’ll
absorb his powers ala Rogue like and call forth the chatterbox me from
time to time when the need arises. And then I’ll be still just as
perfect me, but with an extra super power on the side. Personality
metamorphosis. How cool would that be?

A while back everything on the internet was a “post” content phenomenon. I mean that people posted their web pages or posted their blogs or posted their FTP site or whatever and then they waited around for people to come across their content through a search engine or word of mouth or whatever.

Then things started to change. With the beauty of XML and RSS everyone caught on to the “push” craze. Now instead of waiting to be stumbled upon, you sort of “push” your content out there sending it to the people who are subscribed to receive whatever content you happen to feel like peddling at the time.

The premier popular example of “push” content is the podcast. Podcasts have such enormous popular support these days that you’d think there never before was a world where you actually had to go a website and find a particular media file or newscast you wanted to listen to.  Rather you just sync up every day and have the next installment pushed to you. It’s like television or newspapers or magzine subscriptions now. It’s less like going to the store or the library.

Facebook changed the game somewhat when it personalized “push” in a unique new way. Facebook made it so you could push information about yourself out in the form of small snippets of data that would go out to all of your friends in a “feed”. In short you became your own sort of broadcasters. Only the things you were broadcasting were random things like how you are feeling today, what games you were playing lately, what pictures you’d recently uploaded, and your relationship status. 

I don’t know if it was the first site to build such a massively comprehensive “feed” broadcast system, but it is certainly the most popular today. 

It’s true that Myspace dwarfs  Facebook in user base still, but although it has made use of many similar ideas in reaction to facebook’s popularity, it is still and always was conceived as very much a “post” system. You make your “Space” and you get others to visit it. You don’t push your space upon others. It’s a fundamental difference in philosophy.

It should be noted that in a very real sense Xanga was ahead of the game on push with its subscription system which according to the great Wikipedia has been a part of Xanga since 2000, long before yuppie upstarts like Facebook hit the scene.  But Xanga didn’t start expanding on this and adding other things besides blogging like pictures and pulses to its “push” system until 2006, which is around the time that Facebook’s popularity was skyrocketing. There are other precursors of Facebook too, but it was Facebook that managed to capture the imagination of the populace, or at least the important part of the populace. The trend setters. The college students.

Why am I giving you this history lesson? Only to stress how integral the concept of “push” has become to the new internet environment in which we all partake. It’s a fundamentally decentralized democratic system. We’re all now our own little nexuses of content expression, radiating our ideas and our lives outwards for the world to see.

In truth this is the very conception of the Internet as it was always meant to be. It was never supposed to be read-only or corporate dominated. Originally it was expected that all of our individual computers would serve as their own servers. We’d build and host our own websites. We’d write content as much as we read others. And it’d be a community of equals all linked together through HTML links.  But HTML wasn’t strong enough to bring about this world all on its own, despite the dreams of Tim Berners-Lee. In the old world those who had the most money to advertise were able to make their pages the centralized repositories for data to which everyone else had to go.  Things changed though with the arrival of “helper” systems like blogs and social networking sites  and video hosting sites that allowed individuals to simulate independent decentralization. You can’t host a website on your own computer very easily or safely or cheaply, but you can have a ten blogs and be a member of five social networking sites and have your own little video blogging world too.  All this is thanks in large part to “push”.

“Push” survives because users love it and advertisers love that users love it. Basically the advertisers don’t even have to worry about what content to which they are attaching themselves anymore. They just attach themselves to the big content enabling sites. Ala Facebook and Myspace. And then, no matter what content the users are peddling out to their like-minded friends it gets little ads coming right along with it creating product impressions and generating revenue for the companies looking for a new way to reach consumers. When you combine this with the power of context sensitive advertisements, a cash making cow as Google has shown, and you get the advertisers wet dream. They hardly have to do anything, the oh so democratic internet generates the right ads and sends them to the right people who are most likely to be most influenced and least offended by them. And they spread out virally without anyone having to so much as push a button. It’s a total win.

All that I like about “push”. It’s a great and necessary change to the way in which the internet works. But there’s one thing I don’t. There’s one aspect of “push” that just pisses me off.

Spam.

The way “push” works you see is that you’re sort of radiating your content outwards. The problem is, a lot of these sites don’t give you all that much control over what exactly you are radiating. Most notably, it can be a pain in the ass even to “see” what you have broadcast out to the world for others to see. On your feed in Facebook for example you see what all your friends are up to, but it is not immediately obvious how to see what the heck your friends are seeing on THEIR feed or being delivered to THEIR inbox about you. Often you just don’t know. You have no clue. Xanga’s universal inbox is much the same way. What if you mistake? What if you send some information you *don’t* necessarily want your friends to see? Often you just have to suck it up. By the time you’ve noticed, all your friends and connections have already seen.

And this is particularly annoying since a lot of things you do on these sites causes information to be sent from you without your explicit consent. A change to your profile for example. Or the coming up of your birthday.

On facebook you are allowed to give out general rules to say this application can and can’t send information to your feed, but if you give it permission or forget to deny it permission you can’t really control what information IT decides your friends want to know about your experience with this application.  And since applications are in the business of expanding user base (to increase advertising revenues) one of their best forms of self-advertisement is to post to the feeds of the people who have installed the application hence reminding that person’s friends of the application’s existence and increasing the probability that some of those friends might install.

The end result, spam! A plethora of spam. A chaotic monstrosity of spam being flung about throughout the feed and the notifications and the requests on Facebook. It gets out of control rather quickly. And people hate it. I hate it.

I’ve never had a problem with Facebook applications. I love a great many of them and I love how open the platform is to application development. In fact I think social gaming in particular is the future of gaming. This is the new application development platform of the future. To ignore it  would be folly for any company or person.

But the spam just grates on my nerves. Because it makes me feel like I’m responsible for annoying people. It makes me feel like I’m sending out email spam letters to all my friends. And I just don’t know when I am. I have very little control over it. It’s annoying. It’s like the application has somehow tricked me into joining in on its heinous acts.

This, I think is a big part of what has caused Facebook applications to start to be looked upon with a great deal of scorn in a lot of circles. I still think the good outweighs the bad, but the annoyance is understandable. This, also, I think has a lot to do with the negative reception the “universal inbox” received amongst some Xangans when it first arrived on the scene. Same concept. You are an accomplice in spamming your friends and subscribers now. Recommendations build upon this idea too.

Don’t get me wrong. “Push” is very good. More than that, it’s necessary to preserve democracy on the internet. It just has that weakness of easily going out of control.

That’s why it is imperative that sites give you as much control as possible over what content you are receiving and over what content you are broadcasting. You have to *know* what the hell you are spamming to your friends so you can feel some responsibility over controlling it. And the more you control it, the better you will be able to enjoy the benefits of the “push” system without getting that guilty feeling all the time.