I am a social person.

You might not guess that if you just met me. You might not guess that if you don’t know me well. Even if you do know me well that statement may come as a shock to you. I despise social rituals; I don’t enjoy small talk or meeting new people. I find spending time with most people boring. Don’t misunderstand me and think that I am an elitist jerk. I simply recognize that I have little in common with many people and have no desire to interact with them.

It may come as a surprise then that I received my diploma almost two weeks ago and I am bored because my days are spent alone. As an introvert, and I have done a bit of research in this area and consider myself an extreme introvert, I can enjoy time alone. It is exhausting to socialize and interact with people I do not know. Nothing is as tiring or stressful as attending a party largely populated with strangers. But in the last two years I have lived with a small group of people and grown close to them. When I got home from class sometimes my roommate would be there and more often than not there was someone across the hall I could briefly socialize with. At any time in the evening I could wander the dorm and find someone. We didn’t engage in activities every night, we were too busy with studies, but they were there.

Now that I am at home I find myself wanting to hang out with friends every night or else I am bored. I haven’t played computer games since I got back except when at a friend’s house. I bought three board games to play with my friends. Yet my friends have their own lives. They have spent the last three years living in this city and they have other friends to hang out with and other responsibilities. I have my small group of friends which is growing smaller with one person moving up towards San Jose to work and another living in LA and going to school. Used to living in the dorms and after spending my time alone all day, I could hang out with my friends every night but they can’t.

I could make new friends. I don’t do that easily and in three months I will be gone again. I could spend all my time working. This may end up happening but my current project is something I’ll be working on alone. For some reason, working with other people is one of my greatest enjoyments and yet I always end up working alone. In my three years at school I found some people I thoroughly enjoyed working with, but no one perfect. I dream of making games, but more so I dream of working alongside friends to make those games. Maybe I will find some of those people at RIT.

So here I am at home doing a little bit of programming, wasting time, and reading.

I am looking for work this summer and am sending out a copious amount of resumes. One company requested that I send them a “flavor of your personality.” This is a first draft of that flavor.

I am a introvert who believes that interaction with other people is one of the most important things in life. I consider rules to be exciting because creating them is an opportunity for design, and they give a foundation for creativity.

Design and theory are what I most enjoy about academic topics, preferring to focus on high level concepts than to dwell on details. Designing an application is more interesting than writing low-level algorithms, however if creative design is a part of writing the algorithm, then it can be just as interesting.

I have spent nine years playing roller hockey and through this I have come to realize why I enjoy the sport so much. It is not the action or the speed or the complexity, though I do enjoy those aspects, it is the interaction and coordination between teammates. I am however motivated to independantly learn things that interest me. It was my desire for weirdness and departure from the norm that interested me in juggling and unicycling, but it was my discipline and self-motivation that allowed me to enjoy these activities, despite never having any companions.

If a more boring description is necessary, you might want to look at this description of the INTJ personality type, as it describes me well.

... I have for my future.

Today I was thinking about things I want to do in the future. These are perhaps things I cannot accomplish here at school due to the location, the circumstance, or the time. This is a short list of a few of those things.

I really don’t understand socialism, if I may use the word to describe how people interact and not in an economic sense. There seem to be rules about how people should interact with each other. Certain events are “fun” and we are supposed to enjoy them. Specific events require certain things of people, yet there are no rules. I like rules. They let me know what it is that I am allowed to due, how I should do it, and how far I can bend those rules. Social interaction is completely devoid of any such hard rules. One may point to a book of etiquette but the truth is that no one I know follows those rules and therefore not pertinent.

If there are no rules to apply to a situation, how should one approach the problem of acting correctly? Is form the most important thing? Is doing things on time and the right way what is important? Or are the reasons and motivations behind the actions more important? You, being an intelligent human being who thinks for yourself would argue that it is the motivation and thought that matters more than the action. It is the thought that counts. I would agree, but in society that is not good enough. If you break the rules of the formalities in order to carry out your good intentions, it is not allowed. There is no jury that will convict you of your crime, as I said there are no official rules, but there are still criminals.

In this world of fuzzy gray social etiquette I shy away from enacting the motions without any personal motivation for doing them. I am sure I fail in many other ways I am not aware of. Please accept my apologies for not doing a better job at following the socially acceptable norms. I will however continue in my quirky manners and will continue to confuse people who might be offended or misunderstand my actions. I try my best to get along with my fellow human beings. I play the games as well as I can in order to fit in with the rest of you. This is not meant as a criticism of your practices, but instead an insight into how those who do not intuitively understand the rules deal with this.

There is no comfortable place for people like this. Just because we feel that the standard social rules are inadequate doesn’t mean we have come up with better ones.

So go out and play the game, but remember why you play it. Play it because you have to, but embrace the things you do that break the rules for something better.

There was a LAN party tonight that I went to. It was a different group of people than those that I usually play with. They mostly played games I don?t find particularly interesting. I started off playing some Counter-Strike, which is fun. I did all right, nearly a positive kill ratio in most games, which isn?t too bad considering I never play the game. I also played some Battlefield 1942, but since there were only about eight players, the server was filled with bots to have 20v20. The bots are annoyingly stupid, usually the ones on your own team and I was frustrated. Last I played some Half-Life 2 deathmatch and actually got a positive kill ratio. All of those games are fairly light on the teamwork aspect. I am sorry Counter-Strike players, but when I think of teamwork I heavily weight the amount of strategic decisions that must be made and the carrying out of those decisions. Counter-Strike lacks those.

I have come to realize, probably over the last several years, but most drastically in the last few months, that I really appreciate games that require teamwork. I want to design teamwork-oriented games. I have also begun to realize that the social organization is something that interests me. How do I get these 20 people who will never see each other, to cooperate? Heck how do I get my 5 friends to cooperate with each other? As I see no other inruiging thoughts on that I move on to, ?why do I want to design games like this?? For the why in a reason often gives great insight. My thought process went something like this: I love people, I love teamwork, I love cooperation, strategy, organization, tactics, plans, rules, structure. I love having control over these things. While I do not think I am a great leader, I enjoy the responsibility of challenges. I have always liked design, whether it was building Lego castles, or changing the rules of whatever game I made up when I was little, or designing games from scratch, or building a Popsicle stick bridge, or modeling, or creating Warcraft III maps. I like to design. Then it hit me.

In designing games I am trying to be god. Think for a moment before you judge. When creating a game I design it in a way that would be interesting to me. I get to decide everything; I get to tweak whatever I want. Then if I play it and I don?t like something I can change it. I am in complete control. I am god. This is of course human nature to want to be god. And so my first response was a bit of shock and repulsion. But what is wrong with realizing that that is a motivation behind my interest. It is much better that I recognize this so I can deal with it if necessary.

So what does this mean? ?This game is created in my image and I see that it is good,? does not seem so farfetched. Isn?t that what artists do when they paint? We have this need to create things that mirror ourselves. I am not sure I can learn much from this, except I can learn about myself from what I create. So I will continue to think about designs, eventually work on some of them, and from it learn who I am.

Is it a good idea to post when you have nothing to post about? I am on spring break this week so I am back home. I am spending my time writing a resume, finding companies to send it to, playing a little bit on the computer. The rest of my time I spend trying to figure out what I should be doing. I can’t quite decide if I should relax and just play, or completely throw myself into looking for work.

I am spending some time with friends. You would think that after being gone for so long and not seeing anyone I’d be eager to hang out and have fun. Oddly enough I am sort of apathetic about it. Don’t get me wrong I want to spend time with my friends, but I end up not being enthusiastic about anything.

I started work on a little program I have been thinking about writing. You can read about the concept here. Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to spend and I’ve only gotten a little bit of GUI done. I have to remember all this stuff as all my recent programs have been command line.

Well that’s it for a post about nothing.

Today is not a good day.

Yesterday my hard drive crashed. I took it to IAIT and they said I’d have to come back the next morning. So I left it. When I got back this morning I was told that nothing was saved. I lost everything on my hard drive.

Losing your hard drive is like having your old dog die and getting a new puppy. You have trained your old dog and he is exactly what you want. You know him, he knows you. He does what you tell him and he treats you like he should. When he dies you think about all the things you will miss about him. On the other hand he is old and doesn’t run around as much as he used to. And then you get a new puppy. He knows nothing and you have to train him. You expect him to act like your old dog, but he doesn’t. You have to teach him everything. You can’t even remember all that you need to. What did you teach your old dog so long ago that you forget now? A new dog has oppurtunity. You can teach him whatever you want, and any bad habits your old dog had, your new dog doesn’t. He is a clean slate and you have endless oppurtunities.

It is the same way with a computer. You lose your old hard drive and you lose everything you had put on there. Not only software, but data. You lose papers and projects. You lose pictures. You lose your windows settings. This is an overlooked but important one. I now have to download and install everything I had. There are things I won’t reinstall, and this will keep my new hard drive cleaner. I lost all my music. I will have to re-rip all my CD’s.

The biggest problem is, I know I’ve lost stuff. I’ve lost my bookmarks, documents, backgrounds. But I know I’ve lost stuff that I can’t remember what it is. I imagine it’s like losing your memory. You know you can’t remember something you want to remember, but you can’t remember what it is. Is this a better state than remembeing something you desperately want? That is what makes me the saddest. I’ve lost stuff I knew I wanted, but I don’t know what it is.

Most of the stuff I’ve I could find again. Most of my bookmarks I could find. But what about my CS projects? Those are gone. 90% of them were small projects I don’t care about. But I used them from time to time to figure out how I’d done something.

But I now have a fresh install. I have to reconfigure windows. I can’t seem to make my folders look the way they should. Something is odd about them. My control panel is not the way I like it, but I can’t remember how to change it. These are things you change once a year when you have to reinstall windows.

I joke about losing my hard drive. Actually, I joked about it last night when it was only a possibility. I dont feel like joking anymore.

I am taking a popular literature class this quarter. We are reading several genres, including detective, horror, fantasy, and thriller. I just finished reading “The Hedge Knight” by George R.R. Martin, the author of the Song of Ice and Fire series. “The Hedge Knight” is actually a sort of prequel to that series, taking place in the same world. I have played A Game of Thrones, the board game, and so I have heard the names of the houses like Lannister, Baratheon, Tyrel, Stark, and Greyjoy. The short story was quite enjoyable, if not particularly thought provoking, and I am considering buying the series.

These usually come to me late at night, or more accurately early in the morning. I don’t really know why I’m posting this I don’t have anything intelligent to say. I’m not feeling terribly clever at the moment, nor humorous, nor introspective. I am feeling a bit purposeless. Homework is light this weekend leaving me to do whatever I want, but I don’t really have anything to do, so I sit around discussing random game theory, which I usually love, but none of the issues are terribly important right now. I then spent the rest of the evening hanging out in the freshman dorm I hang out in.

Now its 3:18am and I actually feel like going to bed. I’m not sure this is really a good thing. The times I stay up really late it is usually because I have something to discuss or write on. Tonight there is nothing of that sort.

I could get to looking over this AI competition. Surely I would enjoy it, and it would occupy some time. The problem is after tomorrow I will be back to doing homework everynight and I won’t have time to do it as much as I want, so I don’t get started. When will I have time to work on anything important outside of school? I certainly don’t regret spending my time studying, but it seems like there are so many really cool things I could get into and do so much, but I can’t because I have class.

Class… on the one hand classes take up so much time. On the other I feel like there is a lot of wasted time and I could be learning this so much more I focused on nothing else. I have always had a strong desire to focus on one thing and one thing only. One thing at a time. If it is important its worth focusing on with my entire being, or else not bothering with at all. I focus on something till I am bored with it and then there is an abrubt stop. Surely I am more this way than other people. I am able to focus on something far longer than other people, and when I do get sucked into something, I don’t bother with anything else. I do this with computer games. I will play one game for a week or two and nothing else, but after approximately that much time I will get bored with it and won’t play it anymore for months. I realize this is fantastically impossible in the real world. Multitasking is the name of the game in real life.

What does this mean for my professional career? Will I be 200% into a project for a month or two and then lose complete interest? That won’t fly.

PS – This post was strangely lacking in the depressing department. I thought it would be.

Why are we attracted to that which frightens us? I have two theories. One is mildly interesting, but I prefer the second one. It is the more romantic and entertaining. I do not propose one over the other in terms of realism. I believe both are possible.

My first theory is that if there is something we desire, but is too scary for us to attain. Its status among us desires is increased because it is not within our grasp. There is nothing special about the danger that attracts us. The desire is simply a byproduct of our inability to attain something we fear. That is to say there is nothing attractive about the danger itself

I prefer the second theory I came up with. There is something about danger that innately attracts us. We will always be attracted to things that are normal to us and safe. It is what we often seek. But we will always desire something that scares us. Continuing to seek after what is safe does not satisfy. Perhaps one reason why the danger attracts us, is that it is different. Things that are safe are things we understand and consider similar. Things which are different from us scare us. Perhaps it is truly the desire for something different than us that instills a desire for danger. (I am unable to come up with a suitable link for this, therefore I am not including one.)