Wednesday, March 1, 2006

And the sun shines...

Comments! Azure: The Milgram experiment isn’t to do with behaving outside of yourself- it’s about coercion and obedience to authority. They didn’t want to inflict the shocks, but they felt they had to because they were being told to, and it wasn’t everyone who conformed to the experimenter’s wishes anyway. It’s not relevant to decisions made by and from yourself. The point I’m making about gaming is that you’re still limited by what the game tells you to do. Like Counterstrike- it’s a shoot’em up, and nothing else. You can strategise a bit, but everything you do is about killing other people, which makes arguing about ethics in it entirely pointless. The very fact that people are playing that specific game says something about them, even if it’s just the fact that they enjoy that kind of fast-paced action game. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they secretly want to kill their friends for a cheap laugh or to piss them off and doodle on their corpse. You’re ignoring the fact that personality is a hugely dynamic, complex set of ideals. You can’t compare one person to another and expect them to have the same quality when crossing so many variables at one time. And like you say: Why can't we write as a woman not because that's what we want to do inherently, but because we enjoy seeing people's reactions to strange happenings? Of course you can. But whether you do it inherently or whether you do it for enjoyment still shows that you feel compelled to do it; i.e. you make the conscious decision to partake in pretending to be a 50-year old woman because you either enjoy it or are unaware of it because it’s what you do anyway, ergo it’s still part of your behaviour. Not all behaviour is unconscious reflex, which is what it seems to me you’re trying to put across. And asking why you behave in certain ways would require a massive psychological breakdown of every person you try to assess; it’s not as simple an argument as you make it out to be. You’re looking at things on too small a scale, and repeating a cyclical argument. When (heh, I should say ‘if’) I act as a woman, I am not a woman, I am acting as one, and I know this. You have misunderstood my point. The fact that I enjoy acting is the part of my personality, and the woman is the role I’ve been given or choose to play. The behaviour I exhibit as a woman might give the impression to the audience that I am a woman, but the behaviour inherent in me says otherwise. That’s exactly the same with playing games (i.e. you playing games is the behaviour, and the game you play is the object you display it with) and with internet discussion (where and what you type, how you type it and everything else is your behaviour and the internet is the object used to display it). I don’t change myself depending on where I am. I’m always me. With the internet, for example, the information I give out may be different depending on the situation (i.e. which forum I go to), but that stands to reason- you don’t go to a Chemistry lecture and expect to be taught Classical French. When it comes to being in person I still have the same thoughts and feelings I do when I’m on the net, even if I don’t express them as readily because either: the people around me wouldn’t appreciate what I have to say; the thought would be inappropriate or whatever else. I’m not rude to strangers just because I don’t know them, because it’s not who I am. The name Solo Tremaine means nothing in this context. It’s a pseudonym that I choose to display instead of my real name because I don’t feel comfortable giving out my real name on such a potentially massive scale. I could just as easily give my real name and it wouldn’t make the blindest bit of difference. By your standards, even by being myself I’m not myself, and that the choices I make have nothing to do with me despite the fact that I have made the conscious decision to do whatever it is in question. Which is a fairly incongruous point. If I may ask a question: When you type here, if you aren't yourself, then who are you? If your current mask is AzureWolf, then what controls that mask? John: Par-tay indeed ^_^ It was great, hehe. More details below... Last night was great. I had a fantastic time, and this is even with some people I'd barely met before. Josh and Gemma I knew, and I'd briefly met a couple of the others, but the rest I hadn't but managed to get along with them swimmingly anyway. Lovely bunch of chaps ^_^ We ate first, even though I really didn't feel like eating as I'd pigged myself on *cough*McDonald's*cough* earlier in the day. The Scampi were pretty nice, though, even if they do look like Popplers. Lots of laughs to be had over dinner. I hadn't realised how early it was when we moved into the next bar (I weren't drinking though- I had to drive home). I expected it to be between nine and ten- it was only half past eight. More funs were had there. Funnily enough, time shot by once we'd entered the Chicago Rock Cafe. It wasn't nearly as fun inside because the music was so loud you couldn't have a decent conversation. There was karaoke, though... Unknown Waters I have never been a karaoke person. I have never particularly wanted to be a karaoke person. So why, then, did I volunteer to sing with Gemma when she asked me if I wanted to sing Madonna's 'Material Girl' on stage? It was her birthday, after all ^_^; It wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be, though, and it's kinda set me up for doing more in future... but I need to expand on my library of songs at the moment. I'd be hard pressed to find (let alone sing along to) a L'Arc-en-Ciel or X-Japan song. Urgh, karaoke does bring up some rather weird elements, though. Couples trying to be lovey; fat, loud men; and a really geeky-looking guy who couldn't sing but insisted on doing Backstreet Boys songs. Ironically, he got the biggest cheer out of everyone... I left fairly soon after that, cause I have a meeting to get to this morning. I kind of wsh we'd all been able to talk more, but it was good fun all the same. I didn't realise how much I missed just going out and being with people. So cool ^_^

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