Timewaster's Guide Archive
General => Rants and Stuff => Topic started by: 42 on September 26, 2006, 08:53:18 PM
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I just had some one say that they needed to take a break from "real life." By "real life" they meant World of Warcraft.
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My impression was that "real life" meant "other people."
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My impression was that by "real life" he meant to seduce others into his cult of "believers" and bring forth the Old Ones.
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My impression was that "real life" meant "other people."
Different conversation.
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My impression was that by "real life" he meant to seduce others into his cult of "believers" and bring forth the Old Ones.
You called?
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you may be old, but you're too comprehensible to be an Old One (capital O, capital O)
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You seem to have forgotten my original login name (with a capital O, capital O). I'll have to consider a suitable punishment.
:P
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How about E putting you in the corner?
Oh, wait, you meant a punishment for him...good luck with that; he had ninja monkeys.
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that name was obviously a fake. For, as I said, you are far too comprehensible, not to mention predictable, to be one of the Old Ones.
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The Old Ones were totally predictable--what did they do that you didn't expect them to do?
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Die off.
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And it a good thing that the Old Ones die or else they wouldn't need me to write wills, trusts and other such estate planning devices for them (at a $150 an hour).
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Wowzers. :o No wonder you went and bought a house. Sweet. If I made that kind of money, I might be able to afford a house in Massachusetts. Some day. :P Houses are far, far too expensive out here.
Stacer, how does it compare to Seattle? Didn't you say that the market's terribly inflated?
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I'm slightly disturbed that there are no shopping carts at Barnes and Nobles. I guess it's unrealistic for people to regularly fill up a shopping cart with books, but I can dream. Can't I?
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42, you can dream, but I find that I have better dreams then filling a shopping cart with books. That's probably because I have bought enough books to fill a shopping cart before, but buying a bunch of law textbooks isn't what you were dreaming of, was it?
http://Shrain Posted on: Sep 29th, 2006, 11:02am
Wowzers. No wonder you went and bought a house. Sweet. If I made that kind of money, I might be able to afford a house in Massachusetts. Some day. Houses are far, far too expensive out here.
The firm may charge people $150 an hour for my services, but there is a lot of overhead and other expenses, so my salary isn't that big. But it was enough for me to buy a nice, fixer-upper in Aurora, CO. It will be a nice house when we have all the home-improvement project done. We are starting with cabinets, because, for some reason, several cabinets were missing when we bought the house. We are also getting carpet because the mats in the basement may legally be considered carpet but common sense would say otherwise.
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A cabinet caper, eh? Too bad. Still, congrats on the new home sweet home. :)
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So this is an unusual case that I heard about occurring. A couple years back there was student enrolled in a Human Anatomy class. The student promptly dropped the class after the first week. The student then went to the counseling center. Apparently, this student recognized one of the cadavers as her grandfather.
Could be Urban legend, but I also heard it from people who would know if something like that happened.
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Every time i look at the clock it is 11:11. It freaks me out. I will just be sitting there, typing, when i decided to check the time and it's either 1:11 or 11:11!
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So in one of my classes, my instructor talked about pedophilia. Apparently, he worked with a number of pedophiles who had voluntarily gone through chemical castration even though they had never molested a child or done anything illegal.
I find it to be rather noble, but also creepy.
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I just left a college Statistics class wherein several students didn't know the basic concepts of taking an average.
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Geez. I'm math-phobic and even I know about averages.
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this is like the honors English class I took were the prof had to spend a week on the apostrophe. I mean, geez.
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So I'm looking at a box of stuff that has been left on my dining room table and what do I find? Well, EUOL's college diploma of course. I should have realized that my table was a perfect spot for it years ago.
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Send it to me I need another.
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I feel a great disturbance in the force. That is to say, I have a random feeling of foreboding, and I couldn't really tell you why. Does anyone else know what I am talking about?
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what disturbs me is that I *do* know what you're talking about.
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I know that feeling too well. I usually try to ignore it.
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I have that terrible feeling of foreboding right now. There is definately a disturbance in the force. It's being caused by my wife going to Italy for a week and leaving me as the primary caretaker over our sons. The disturbance will end next week when she returns.
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What can two little boys possibly do? Mwuhahaha!
Hey, 42! Wanna talk to your nephews and give them a few ideas? I'm sure my three sons can give them some pointers on how to handle one parent.
*evil giggle*
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So after spending most of the day staring at the names of over 65000 students, I 've decided some parents should be fined for the names they give their kids. Names like "Keednap" and "Ransom" are just screaming abusive parenting.
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Ransom is the name of a CS Lewis character, though, so maybe they were just hoping he'd follow in those footsteps...
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Even so, those names are sick and wrong.
With so many other ways to mess up your children, you think people could at least manage to give them normal names. :P
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I read a book recently that addressed the impact of names on childrens behaviors. The book was "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt, Ph.d. Such names are generally sick and wrong but Dr. Levitt did point out that one dad named his first son "Winner" and his second son "Loser". Winner is a doing time prison and Loser is a sucessful business person. Dr. Levitt theorized that Winner assumed that he was entitled to success and his sense of entitlement was his downfall. Loser worked hard and was successful because he didn't expect success otherwise.
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There's no correlation between names and success, or names and personality, as far as current studies can show. The reason for that, I would venture to guess, is because different names combined with different personalities and different environments will cause people to react in different reaction from other people to the name. Essentially, there's too many factors that effect the personality (under tabula rasa theory) during development to see a strong specific trend from just one of those factors, unless it is a very strong factor like socio-economic surroundings.
I don't think that older adolescents or adults (in the winner/loser case) would venture so far as to assume their names controlled their entitlement to that degree, that's something I could see a child thinking, but not a man who got himself into jail. At that point, he should probably have figured out his name doesn't entitle him to anything, unless he was a complete dunce. I think more likely Loser was ridiculed as a child, etc. so he worked hard as a form of output and vengeance. Just like thousands of others who are told they wont amount to anything, even jokingly, and form a grudge and work very hard just to prove the others wrong.
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Gorgon, you just contradicted yourself. You say that people who are ridiculed often work harder to prove their tormentors wrong, but that would mean that there is a practical relationship between name, or rather the connotation of a name, and the way a person interacts with other people. If something helps to define the way you interact with other people, then it could certainly affect how successful you are. I do agree with you though that it is not a predictable pattern, since there are so many other factors to be considered, but that doesn't mean that there is no correlation.
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No, what I said was there is no known correlation between names (specific names) and success or personality, meaning that there's no reason to believe people named Patrick will be a certain type of person. Then I went on to say that you can't see a strong specific trend from just one minor factor such as a name because it is that factor combined with many other factors that make a person who they are.
Note that most the people ridiculed who work harder to prove their tormentors wrong aren't doing so because of their names (so I would imagine). I would venture to guess there are a lot more people who are made fun of for being imperfect in other ways, especially being shy or having few social skills, than people who are made fun of because their name. I didn't say a name can't have an effect on how successful you are, especially in an indirect way. I said there's no correlation between names and success, and the book by Dr. Levitt (which is what I was specifically responding to) talks especially about trends between one name and all the people with that name. A large-scale correlation does not appear, even if a person's name does have an effect on who they are, which it often does, which means that there is no correlation between names and success, or names and personality, as far as current studies can show.
Or, more specifically, and probably more understandably, a specific name does not correlate with a specific success rate or personality according to any legitimate current study, showing now correlation between any name and the success of the person with it, or between that name and a personality type.