Internet VS Real Life

Hello again. I was just having a discussion online about video games and online v real life friends.

Many people seem to say that video games is bad, or that being online a lot is bad, since it will isolate you from the true social experiences. But what are really the social experiences one should experience? If the "normal" social activity is decided upon what all the other people in the society is doing, isn't fairly safe to say that gaming and online interaction have in some way become a new way for people to communicate with everyone?

Yes, it might not have all the benefits to it as the real world, like the need for food, doctors and that occasional job. But nobody really ever spends that amount of time online or gaming, do they? And if they do, it certainly isn't the majority, or we would have had a society of agoraphobic gamers who's vocabulary mainly consisted of laughs sounding a lot like "lol" followed by a small intake of air, and a poor club life, since there would be no people who would dare to dance.

And then there is the trouble of getting new friends. We all know that friends you get online aren't real friends, right? We can't really see who we talk with, so anybody could be a potential pervert. But there are perverts in real life too, and they are even harder to spot. All you gotta do is know how to protect yourself from these people.

People online are just like people in real life! They all think, feel, and have opinions. You might even have a core group of online friends that you prefer to playing with because you think they are cooler to play with. In real life you hang with people because you think they are cool to hang out with. Only difference is that online you don't have to look good to be popular, since its mostly done with words and letters.

The internet can be a pretty big and spooky place, but if you know where to look, and how to behave, then it is an excellent place for exchanging opinions, ideas, theories, hobbies, passions, and all of this without the possible negative effects real life could have, such as nervousness (you don't stutter or sound bad when using a keyboard as long as you know how to spell), you don't have to consider your appearance might deter others opinion of you, and you don't have to worry about other nuisances like toilet, sweating, heat, cold, being sick and whatnot. You can even take a break mid-sentence in order to go grab something to drink and finish the rest later without any negative side effects! And my personal favorite: if you come to the internet to discuss, then you will not be affected by real life gender restrictions. Nobody will have a reason to be prejudice against you from being different, taller, thinner, different gender... These matters easily evaporate in the avalanche of words that is the internet.

And with this I will bid you good evening!

Funny anecdotes: Incidents with B.Z.

Hi again y'all! I'm back for my second post, and this time it's just a couple of anecdotes. The first one happened a while back while we were walking down to the store. As we were walking, B.Z. and I start discussing some boring stuff, and while doing so he started to imagine several outcomes (some of them involving his imminent and inescapable doom) in quite an astonishing way. While he was in the middle of his rant, I interrupted him and told him to shut up, and he did.

Here I should add that about a week later we we're walking the same route, only on the other side of the road (same direction) and he was doing the exact same thing, and I told him that thinking like that might give him anxiety, and then he smiled, laughed and said "Yeah, I'm just over thinking it a bit" and we went about our business.

Back to the main story: I just told him to shut up after being real imaginative. So I tell him "B.Z. Shut up! This is gonna wow you." so he shuts up, and I say "Last time we walked across this bridge in the exact same direction, you were doing the same thing, and using the same excuse!" Then he remembered last time, laughed, and we now call that bridge his "anxiety-bridge".

The second incident happened today, right after we had watched some Penn&Teller. We we're sitting around and talking about something or other. As the episode ended (I spent 5 minutes trying to remember this) I was eating a nice sammich, and as I was done with the last piece, I exhaled deeply in relief due to the mastication finally being a thing of the past, and proclaimed to the living room in general: "That was tiresome to eat". He then asked which part of eating it was that was tiresome. "Was it the eating part?" I told him that it was getting tiresome to masticate, since that's basically what eating is (chewing and swallowing, if you exclude the parts you cant control yourself). He agreed, and said "sometimes I'm not entirely in it with the mind".

Before we watched P&T he had mentioned the same thing. So I told him "You know what? I'm gonna give you brain-excercises since you seem to be having trouble losing your train of thought." He looks oddly at me in disbelief and laughs a bit nervously. I am dead serious, ofcourse, as he is about to learn. He then said "It's just that I can have some short-term trouble sometimes. Its not that I forget what we're talking about. I'm just thinking along this line, and suddenly it splits into MANY lines, and it goes off into a random direction."

I then stare at him in disbelief and say: "Dude, thats exactly what losing your train of thought is!" and after he had stared a bit at me I added "Ok, here's my first Brain-excercise: Tell me about what just happened." He starts laughing and puts his face into his hands as I pressure him to recount it. After a while he starts, and recounts the whole thing.

Man, ain't I an asshole?

Hope this was vaguely entertaining. I had spent the day thinking about stupidity and politics, but I guess theres enough of that, so it can wait.

See you next time!