A friend of mine recently wrote a blog post about conformity which has prompted me to do the same. While his post is about conformity in web design, I would like to generalize it a bit more. Conformity is much more than most people think it is. It’s not just emo kids who all wear dark clothes. It’s not just polo shirt wearing middle managers who go home to their comfortable house in their cookie cutter housing developments. It’s not just how everyone on digg has the same political views. No, it’s about not having the ability to formulate your own opinions, lacking the ability to think freely, and being too inhibited to express those thoughts and opinions. Everyone likes to believe they are unique. No one will ever tell you that they are a conformist, after all, conforming is always a bad thing, right? Or is it? Society is […]
Life
Stuff about life
Living in digital worlds
As a long time MMORPG player, I have noticed many things in my days of playing. I find that you only really reflect on these finer points about games, after you have both played, and quit, many of them. What I have noticed most is the behavior of people within the games, their attitudes toward people who have quit the games, and also, their feelings about all other MMO’s, except the one they currently play. If humans are good at rationalization, then MMO players are masters of it.RR
Fabricating reasons to hate people
Hate is definitely not the correct word for this article, at least not in my case, but sometimes, especially when you live with someone, you start looking for excuses to dislike them, and the great thing is, you almost always find the excuses you were looking for. The same is probably true for racism, sexism, and really any other type of blind prejudice. You simply start finding reasons to dislike a person, or a group of people, which are mostly baseless. The problem is, even when you know this, it’s almost impossible to avoid it. Why must it be like this? It is as if one, perhaps legitimate, reason you had to dislike someone, becomes that small rip in your jeans. You know, the kind of rip that every once in a while gets a little bit bigger; One thing is definite, it never gets smaller. It might start out […]
Making a bad situation worse
Why do people have a tendency to sulk? Have you ever been really mad at someone, and just held a grudge? Too stubborn to back down when you know you were wrong? Have problems apologizing? Purposely use body language to let your girlfriend know you are pissed off at her, but never actually say anything about it? Roommates having a party you don’t feel like participating in, and instead of just sucking it up and having fun, you isolate yourself from the group? I hate all of these things, and yet, I also do them on a regular basis, but why? I really don’t know, to be honest. If i did, I would probably be a much happier person. Sometimes it is easier to just stomp off in a 5-year-old huff then it is to just accept a situation for what it is. I have always been semi anti-social, not really in a bad […]
Managing your online identity
For a long time I thought a lot about my online identity. By this I don’t mean “What do people think of me online” or “Could I become a victim of identity theft”, but more “How visible am I on the internet”. I thought a lot about it mostly because I didn’t want people to be able to google my name and find out a whole lot about me. I wanted to be invisible and anonymous on the internet. I have heard so many stories about bosses googling their employees, potential employers googling their candidates, girlfriends googling their boyfriends, etc. Search engines make it possible for employers to scour all manner of digital dirt to vet employees. Online profile company Ziggs.com CEO Tim DeMello fired an intern after he discovered that on the intern’s Facebook profile he divulged that while at Ziggs he would “spend most of my days […]