Apologies in advance for the novella. And any spelling errors that I don’t catch (I’m typing in notepad, among other excuses). It’s always very nice when I come across something that reminds me that there are not only people in the world who can actually think rationally, but that many of them are way better at it than me. I don’t like mentioning this so early in any introduction, but my vision is terrible to the point of uselessness; I mostly just avoid calling myself “blind” because it internally feels like that would be giving up on the tiny power left in my right eye. I mention it now just because it will probably be relevant by the end of my rambling. (Feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you’d rather avoid all the backstory.) I’m from northeast Arkansas. My parents were never really religious (I kinda internalized the ambient mythos of “God=good and fluffy cloud heaven, Satan=bad and fire and brimstone hell” just because it seemed to be the accepted way of things among all of my other relatives. TUrns out my dad identified himself as a Buddhist after one of our many trips to Disneyworld. … they.… really like Disney. They have a dog named Disney.).
They did emphasize the importance of education and individualism and all of those ideals from the late eighties and nineties that turned out to be counterproductive (though I’m having trouble finding the cracked.com articles that point this out in the most academically sound manner imaginable. (note: the previous statement was sarcastic)). So I tried to learn as much as I could in the general direction of science. Being that this was all done at public schools, and that a whole 0 of the more advanced science books I wanted were available in braille, this didn’t get me very far. I did my last two years of highschool at the Arkansas School of Mathematics and Science (which added “and the arts” when I got there, though before they’d actually added an art program), and somehow graduated without actually doing much science (I did a study of the effects of atmosphere on dreams for the year-and-a-half science project that everyone had to do, but forewent trying to organize an experiment and just wrote a terrible research paper). Then I got to college, and everything went to hell. I’d somehow managed to sneak around learning things like vectors, dot/cross products, and actual lab reports in highschool, and the experiments we did in gen physics never felt like experiments so much as demonstrations (“Behold: gravity still works!”). This is about where it became extremely clear to me that I simply could no longer make myself do things by force of will alone (and it became doubly clear that no one else seemed capable of understanding that I wasn’t just “blowing off” everything). It took several semesters after that for me to realize that I had seriously missed out on some basic life things and that I actually needed friends (and that I needed to seriously reevaluate what qualified as friendship). They finally made me pick a new major, seeing as I’d kinda kept away from physics after the first semester ended in disaster. So I took the quickest way out, that being French, and now I’m still living with my parents, have about a dozen essays on Franco-african literature to write, and am about $30,000 in debt (that’s only counting the loans in my name; my parents took the rest of the financial burden in their names). So I mostly try to focus on creative endeavors, such as fiction and video games. Except the lack-of-vision thing makes that harder (I’ve been focusing on developing audio games for the past couple years, but it’s virtually impossible to actually live off the tiny audio games market. Oh, but I could write pages on my observations there, and I rather want to, as I’m sure many of you could make some meaningful observations/analyses on some of those trends.). … Well crap, I just wrote a few pages without actually getting to anything useful. I have serious need of better rationality skills than I’m currently applying: independence, dealing with emotional/cognative weirdness, finding ways to actually travel outside of my house (public transportation might as well not exist anywhere but the capital in Arkansas, and good sidewalks are hard to find), social issues, productivity issues, finding ways to get in physical activity, being unemployed with an apparent hiring bias against disabilities, financial ability, etc. The total money that I have to work with is less than $400, so I can’t exactly sign up for cryonics or hire a driver to take me places. And this wall-o-text demonstrates my horrible disorganization rather well, I fear. (Hm, is there not a way to preview a comment before one posts it?)
Apologies in advance for the novella. And any spelling errors that I don’t catch (I’m typing in notepad, among other excuses).
It’s always very nice when I come across something that reminds me that there are not only people in the world who can actually think rationally, but that many of them are way better at it than me.
I don’t like mentioning this so early in any introduction, but my vision is terrible to the point of uselessness; I mostly just avoid calling myself “blind” because it internally feels like that would be giving up on the tiny power left in my right eye. I mention it now just because it will probably be relevant by the end of my rambling. (Feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you’d rather avoid all the backstory.)
I’m from northeast Arkansas. My parents were never really religious (I kinda internalized the ambient mythos of “God=good and fluffy cloud heaven, Satan=bad and fire and brimstone hell” just because it seemed to be the accepted way of things among all of my other relatives. TUrns out my dad identified himself as a Buddhist after one of our many trips to Disneyworld. … they.… really like Disney. They have a dog named Disney.). They did emphasize the importance of education and individualism and all of those ideals from the late eighties and nineties that turned out to be counterproductive (though I’m having trouble finding the cracked.com articles that point this out in the most academically sound manner imaginable. (note: the previous statement was sarcastic)). So I tried to learn as much as I could in the general direction of science. Being that this was all done at public schools, and that a whole 0 of the more advanced science books I wanted were available in braille, this didn’t get me very far.
I did my last two years of highschool at the Arkansas School of Mathematics and Science (which added “and the arts” when I got there, though before they’d actually added an art program), and somehow graduated without actually doing much science (I did a study of the effects of atmosphere on dreams for the year-and-a-half science project that everyone had to do, but forewent trying to organize an experiment and just wrote a terrible research paper). Then I got to college, and everything went to hell. I’d somehow managed to sneak around learning things like vectors, dot/cross products, and actual lab reports in highschool, and the experiments we did in gen physics never felt like experiments so much as demonstrations (“Behold: gravity still works!”). This is about where it became extremely clear to me that I simply could no longer make myself do things by force of will alone (and it became doubly clear that no one else seemed capable of understanding that I wasn’t just “blowing off” everything). It took several semesters after that for me to realize that I had seriously missed out on some basic life things and that I actually needed friends (and that I needed to seriously reevaluate what qualified as friendship). They finally made me pick a new major, seeing as I’d kinda kept away from physics after the first semester ended in disaster. So I took the quickest way out, that being French, and now I’m still living with my parents, have about a dozen essays on Franco-african literature to write, and am about $30,000 in debt (that’s only counting the loans in my name; my parents took the rest of the financial burden in their names).
So I mostly try to focus on creative endeavors, such as fiction and video games. Except the lack-of-vision thing makes that harder (I’ve been focusing on developing audio games for the past couple years, but it’s virtually impossible to actually live off the tiny audio games market. Oh, but I could write pages on my observations there, and I rather want to, as I’m sure many of you could make some meaningful observations/analyses on some of those trends.).
… Well crap, I just wrote a few pages without actually getting to anything useful. I have serious need of better rationality skills than I’m currently applying: independence, dealing with emotional/cognative weirdness, finding ways to actually travel outside of my house (public transportation might as well not exist anywhere but the capital in Arkansas, and good sidewalks are hard to find), social issues, productivity issues, finding ways to get in physical activity, being unemployed with an apparent hiring bias against disabilities, financial ability, etc. The total money that I have to work with is less than $400, so I can’t exactly sign up for cryonics or hire a driver to take me places. And this wall-o-text demonstrates my horrible disorganization rather well, I fear. (Hm, is there not a way to preview a comment before one posts it?)