Lost My Only Follower *shrugs*
So in the tags of the pictures, I said that mythicalmoments was also me, so the person following trackingdestiny apparently also followed mythicalmoments for a little bit, and something about mythicalmoments must have been displeasing, because now she’s not following either of my tumblrs. O.o
I don’t really understand this logic? First, understand that it’s not that I’m upset that tradingdestiny lost a follower. TD is mostly just for my long text rants, and those aren’t exactly that much fun to have popping up on your dash. I’m perfectly fine with TD never gaining any followers.
What I’m slightly miffed about is that it seems like trackingdestiny wasn’t judged by its own merit. Rather, it was something on mythicalmoments that made her dislike me as a person, which then made her dislike trackingdestiny? These two are separate tumblrs for a reason. Why can’t you dislike one and just follow the other? (The only answer I can come up with is that she utterly hates me as a person, which is a bit depressing) And the only reason I had any crossover at all between my tumblrs is that I wanted more people to see the pictures, and since MM has more followers, I uploaded it on there first, and rather than having to upload the same picture twice, it was easier to just hit the reblog button.
Here’s the breakdown of my tumblrs again, even though I already covered this in my first post:
Mythicalmoments is my most frequently used tumblr, as it is for RANDOM reblogging. It is a mix of food photos, fandom stuff, interesting pieces of KNOWLEDGE, and things I consider FUNNY. I don’t think anything there was particularly OFFENSIVE or dislikeable, but apparently I was WRONG.
Responsestootherposts is EXACTLY what it sounds like. A few paragraphs in response to other people’s posts. Generally, it’s when I have DISAGREEMENTS with something, but if I’m entering a contest or recommending animes/tv shows, those posts also go on RtoP.
Trackingdestiny is for my long text posts. It’s a journal/DIARY of my thoughts and life.
Opinionatedrabbit is my currently-on-hiatus REVIEW blog.
Again, you can like one blog and dislike another. People are COMPLICATED, and a 100% match in tastes and personality is basically IMPOSSIBLE.
So if I was a bit a braver/brasher, I’d ask my lost follower, in a neutral voice, “why did you stop following trackingdestiny?” And there are many valid reasons to stop following TD. “There’s too much text that I was just scrolling through and not even reading.” “There’s too much complaining on trackingdestiny.” “Too many sentences are incoherent.” “The topics you pick are really boring.” I don’t know; there are probably tons more reasons that my brain can’t come up with right now.
But what I don’t consider to be a valid reason is, “mythicalmoments annoys me” If mythicalmoments annoys you, then don’t follow MM. Besides the fact that I run both of them, there’s not that much overlap between the two. And if the reasoning is, “I hate mythicalmoments so much that I can’t stand the sight of you or anything even remotely connected to you including trackingdestiny,” I’d really, really like to know what part of mythicalmoments reflects so poorly on my moral character and personality that causes you to then dislike everything I do.
Again, I really didn’t think anything on mythicalmoments was very controversial, but apparently people can get offended over anything these days?
Drafts, Drafts, Drafts
Man, you won’t believe the amount of posts that never actually get posted, but for the past couple of days, I’ve been saving these scrapped posts as drafts, in case I ever want to go back to them. Now why didn’t I do that earlier?
Now, because they’re drafts, it means I might reread them sometime, and my future actual posts might refer to other posts that don’t exist. If that ever happens, I apologize in advance.
What were my drafts on? I had a meeting with my Insight mentor on Sunday. Insight is a group of four undergrads and an older mentor who get together once a month to talk about internship, LinkedIn, and other job stuff. And long story short, the other group members had to leave early, and since I still don’t know what I’m doing this summer, the mentor was somewhat pushy and rude about the whole thing. (I said, I do really want to do something this summer and I realize that I’m behind on this whole internship search thing, but I’m really up for anything, since summer of my sophomore year is the last year I don’t need to have a legit internship. I could volunteer at an animal shelter or something. And she responded with “13-year-olds volunteer at animal shelters. That’s not something that will look good on your resume”) On one hand, she’s probably right, and on the hand, her delivery left a lot to be desired. Something must have shown in my expression because we spent the rest of the time talking about stress management, studying habits, and how to have a healthy lifestyle instead.
And another draft is on willpower and how I don’t have it. XD
But it snowed and Wednesday, and everything was so white, quiet, and pretty that I really just wanted to take pretty pictures and upload those rather than go back to drafts about me whining about life.
I think optimism is my drug of choice. I hate getting hijacked by reality, even though living in the present would probably be better for me.
In from the Night
Planetarium on a Snowy Night
The Liar Game
Wow, I need to stop taking over a week to post stuff. Or else I’ll perpetually be talking about the events of last week.
So last Wednesday, the 20th, I went to a psych study at my college, because it’s easy money. I’ve taken a lot of surveys for the business school and for the poli-sci department, but this was my first psych study and it was so much fun! I would have definitely done it for free if I knew what it involved.
So first, you take a quick personality questionnaire to determine your baseline. Then the study begins, and it was almost like a game in The Liar Game! (The Liar Game is one of my favorite mangas. The art isn’t that great, but the plotline is absolutely amazing.) There are five players, and everyone has 20 tokens. You then determine how many tokens you want to give to other players. Tokens received are doubled in value. So the optimal choice is obviously everybody gives everybody else 20 tokens so then everyone ends up with 40 tokens. But of course, trust comes into play, so this doesn’t exactly happen right away. The study also tests how miscommunication factors in by having the computer adding a 15% chance of the value being changed by 1-3 tokens.
There were ten rounds of this game. We were all in computer cubicles and the rounds weren’t cumulative (you started back with 20 tokens at the top of every round), so it wasn’t as intense as it could have been, but it was still really exciting. Player 1 was really nice and started out by giving everyone 20 tokens, which was awesome. I don’t know if he achieved a 20/20 exchange right away? I gave everyone 15 to start with, but player 2 only gave me like, 8 (although it could have been 11 or 5 for all I know, because the computer could have randomized a different value) and player 3 was really mean and only gave me 1. (I was player 4, and we believe player 5 was the computer, because we never saw a fifth player) I was so mad at player 3 for several rounds, I couldn’t believe how strong my emotions were, considering it was just a one hour psych study. So it wound up being a constant 20/20 exchange with player 1, a six or seven round build up to achieve 20/20 with player 2, and I think I ended round 10 by giving player 3 16 tokens because my anger wore off somewhat and we were exchanging in the double digits before then.
And in Micro-310-2 right now, we’re covering game theory, which is also really interesting. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is probably the most well known game. If both prisoners keep silent, they both get a slap on the wrist, say a couple months. If one confesses, they get no jail time and their partner gets some large positive amount, let’s say 10 years. If they both confess, they both get some jail time less then 10, let’s say 3. And at first, you’d think, of course they just both won’t confess and both get off with a slap on the wrist. But game theory states that if both prisoners are thinking logically, they’ll both confess because that’s the better option regardless of what the other person does. Because if the other prisoner doesn’t confessing, you confessing is the other option because no prison time is still better than a couple months. And if the other prisoner confesses, you should also confess because 3 years is better than 10. Of course, in the real world, there’s reputation and loyalty and other traits that mess with pure logic, but I still think it’s interesting how rational theory works.
This is the third time I’m covering Prisoner’s Dilemma in a class though, so I was like, “Great, again Cue eye roll.” But we’ve covered some really interesting games besides Prisoner’s Dilemma too. TA sections normally just go over homework, but my TA is really awesome, so we covered some new games.
First, there’s the Hotelling model. Basically, imagine a small town only has two gas stations. These gas stations are run by different people who each want more profit for themselves, but otherwise, the two gas stations are identical. The only deciding factor of which gas station people choose is distance. People will go to the gas station that’s closer to where they live. Both gas stations will end up clustered at the center of the town, because if your gas station is closer to the center than the competing business’s, then you get the bigger market share.
Also, we covered The Pirate Game today. Basically, there are five pirates trying to divide 100 gold coins. (It’s an extended Ultimatum game) Pirate 1 gets to decide how to split the coins. If an equal or greater number of pirates vote to accept the decision, then the decision passes. If not, then Pirate 1 is killed, and Pirate 2 gets to decide how to split the coins. How should Pirate 1 split the coins so that he/she can get the most amount of coins without getting killed? I’m not going to blog the answer because I want to see if I can stump future me. It’s on Wikipedia, if anybody reads this and gets curious. And if you want to try to figure it out yourself (and hint for future me), start from the end and work backwards.
One last pitch for The Liar Game. There’s a ton of cool psychology and game theory in that manga, so I would really recommend everyone to read it. (As long as you’re not super picky about art.)
This past weekend, because of the psych study and micro, I had the sudden urge to reread The Liar Game, except I didn’t because it’s only been a little over a month since I last reread it so it’s still too fresh in my mind. So I decided to read One Outs, which is another manga by the same author, and also super psychological with lots of mind games, but it also incorporates baseball, of all things. (I don’t know what’s more impressive, coming up with psychological games while also having to follow the rules of baseball or coming up with completely original games). But One Outs has really sporadic translations, so there’s a gap in the middle where there’s no 32-54 and no 63-81. The anime covers the story up to chapter 81, so it’s not a huge loss, except I wound up marathoning all 25 episodes of One Outs this weekend too. And watching anime episodes takes a lot more time than reading manga, so I pulled an all nighter on Saturday and I’ve just been kind of woozy and disoriented all week.
Sternberg’s triangular theory of love
(via mythicalmoments)
Belated Valentines Day Thoughts on Relationships
Has it really been a week since I last posted? Wow, how time flies when real life (and admittedly marapets) steals you away.
Okay, quick tangent on marapets. I saw this tumblr post on neopets last weekend complaining about inflation on neopets, and that made me go, “you know one site that miraculously never had inflation? Marapets.” So I went back on for the first time in over a year, and yep, still no inflation. But since I was there, I got a few dailies, did a few quests, and then wound up getting addicted and spending a few hours there every day since. It’s really not that great of a site, so I don’t know why it keeps luring me. Probably part nostalgia, part procrastination, and part short term, easily obtainable goals that don’t exist in college. Anyway, if you’re interested, here’s my referral link: www.marapets.com/refer.php?id=lidya14
First of all, Valentines Day came and went without a mention on this blog, because at the time, I really did treat it as just another day. A few frats and sororities were selling roses as a fundraiser thing, but other than that, it didn’t really come up in my life. But for the past few days, that’s made me kind of sad.
See, last year, as a freshman, I actually tried really hard to be social, and it was a lot of fun. I actually spent Valentines Day with my first ever boyfriend. We tried making gumbo because we had it at a restaurant and really liked it, but it was kind of difficult and it came out pretty bland. We also had cheese and crackers, but my then boyfriend is somewhat lactose intolerant, so he wound up sleeping on the couch after dinner while I did my postmodern literature reading.
But even besides the boyfriend thing, in high school, I would give my teachers chocolate roses, wish my friends a Happy Valentines day. A few people would go around all their classes passing out candy or cookies or whatever. And same with some of the teachers. Valentines Day was not a huge thing for me in high school either, but it was still an event that made that day different from regular, mundane life.
So I had been meaning to make a post called “Friendships versus Relationships” on Valentines Day, but I couldn’t collect my thoughts enough, so I wrote “Blogging and Music” instead, although I’m not really sure how coherent that post wound up being either. This post probably sounds as incoherent as “Friendships versus Relationships” did, but I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind for now and not edit myself too much.
Having been in a six-month relationship, here’s what I realized about myself:
1. I’m shallow
Appearances do matter to me when it comes to romantic relationships. I don’t ever judge my friends by how they look (although maybe unconsciously I do, but I’m not going to start talking about my potential unconscious behavior or else I’d be here until Monday), but I was constantly mentally ragging about my boyfriend’s appearance. “He’s too short” “His chin’s too long” “He’s not fit enough”
My last year’s roommate and I were very different people, so we weren’t good friends, but I overheard her say something to one of her friends that I really felt applied to me. “Relationships work best when two people are of equal attractiveness.” I don’t want my future boyfriend to look like a supermodel. I’d probably be constantly intimidated, jealous, and insecure about my own looks. But I don’t want to feel like I’m settling either. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’m 35 and the owner of several cats, but for now, I want to find and date someone who I think is “rather cute.” Not drop dead gorgeous, but not someone who I want to harp about their looks either.
Physical appearances also matter in relationships, because if you don’t like how someone looks or how someone’s built, you don’t really want to get physical with them outside of a hug or normal friend things. I mean, my boyfriend and I cuddled, kissed, got most of the way to first base, but that was about it. I was never interested in going any further, and he was nice enough that he didn’t push.
2. Shared hobbies create amazing friends but really doesn’t do much for relationships
Superficially, I don’t think I’ll ever find anybody as similar to me as my ex. We both liked watching NBA Basketball, anime, liked reading the same books, had similar taste in music (I’m slightly more heavy rock than he is, and he liked oldies more than I did, but overall, it was pretty similar), liked the same foods for the most part. Even besides just tastes and hobbies, we were both moderates, spiritual but not religious.
I mean, on paper, it looks like a perfect match. After I broke up with him, I oscillated between the two extremes of “he’s a terrible person, my decision was definitely the right one” and “I’ll never find another person who’s more similar to me, this is awful.” Of course, the truth is that it’s neither. He’s not a terrible person, he just wasn’t boyfriend material for me, and superficial similarities and even values might not matter. I need someone who’s personality and looks fit mine. Not hobbies, political issues I’m not passionate about, etc.
3. I have to find myself first
As a freshman in college, I thought I was going to be so much more mature. That I had finished the “defining myself” phase in high school, and now I was ready to apply myself and change the world. Of course, that was very quickly shot down, and part of that had to do with my boyfriend. Now, don’t get me wrong, he was a sweetheart, and he never tried to change me. It was just easier to conform to him and his social group. It was easier to go with the flow than change the world, so that’s what I did. I guess you could say while he never tried to change me and is a genuinely nice and caring person, he didn’t inspire me to be better and help me discover more positive things about myself. And now I’m not sure I’m ready for any romantic relationship, because I’m pretty sure such a person doesn’t exist. Or even if they exist, I wouldn’t date them because then I would be under a haze of guilt that they’re being too perfect and I’m not offering them anything in return. Because really, even with my ex, what did I offer him? I offered him companionship? I never felt like going above and beyond for him, which probably contributed to why I broke up with him.
4. Familiarity breeds contempt and absence makes the heart grow fonder
Again, this will change when I’m 35 and the owner of several cats, but for now, I don’t want my relationship to be 100% settled and comfortable. It’s not that my boyfriend and I never did anything even remotely exciting. We went to an NBA game, went to House on the Rock all the way up in Wisconsin, dinner at restaurants, movies, etc. But there was never any extra spark. It didn’t feel any different spending time with him than say, spending time doing those things with my parents. Nothing surprised and excited me. I read on tumblr that romantic love lasts a year and then commitment love settles in. I don’t think I had a romantic love stage ever. After the initial month of getting to know him better, it immediately tried to settle to commitment love. And I don’t want something so…stable and boring as a college student. Most of our time was spent just walking around campus or hanging out in his apartment. I want more…pizazz. (Like I said before, I’m shallow) Also, I know studies have shown that absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder, you just tend to grow more distant and forget about the person, but as an introvert, I like having alone time, but as an extrovert, he didn’t feel the same way. They tend to say introverts go well with extroverts. To that, I respond, it depends on how you’re defining introverts and extroverts. If you define it as introverts are shy and quiet people and extroverts are outgoing, then yeah, you might not want two quiet people sitting awkwardly together in a room and you might not want to boisterous people shouting over each other and being bad listeners. But if you define introverts as someone who’s content on their own and extroverts as someone who’s always happier with people, then you run into problems. Then, two introverts together work perfectly fine together, and they’ll also both be content when they’re apart. While two extroverts will be happy to always have that other person’s presence. When you mix an introvert and an extrovert in this case, the introvert (me) finds the extrovert (him) too clingy and dependent. And while I can’t necessarily speak for him, I bet he probably felt like I was too distant and never leaned on him. So more space makes me feel better and him worse. It’s a no win situation in this case.
So I do plan on making a post sometime that’s basically a “Memories” post of my first relationship. How it started, notable events, more details about why it ended, etc. I’m pretty talked about about this topic for now though. I still have to make a post about schoolwork, being a “bad” Asian, and The Liar Game, so there’s a lot more writing to do. (Although because of the way tumblr is set up, you’ll have already read those posts)
Thus, this is it for now. I’m off to dinner, and when I get back, I’m off to other topics. If you’re curious about anything, my ask box is open to all questions. Toodles
Stressing About Grades
Why is college so difficult? I can still remember it like yesterday: the summer of senior year—approaching college with rose colored glasses. I knew college wasn’t going to be like high school. The average person at my college was going to be smarter than the average person at my high school; it was going to be a more level playing field. But I still thought I could maintain a 3.6 or 3.7 GPA. Then winter quarter of last year came around and crushed me. Maybe I had too much on my plate (four clubs, a boyfriend—it’s hard to go from hyper-committed senior back to an overwhelmed freshmen). Maybe I procrastinated too much. Maybe I chose the wrong classes. My GPA was dismal, but hey, it had only been two quarters. I had another ten to make it up.
Don’t get me wrong, I did make it up somewhat spring quarter with a lot of effort and turning myself into a hermit But this year, it’s all falling apart again. I can’t focus. All my midterm grades have been below the curve. And in way, it’s even worse this year, because not only have my grades fallen, but I haven’t been doing anything else either.
Arg, I’m such a waste of space…
Sorry. I promised this wouldn’t turn into a whiny, annoying blog like the original trackdestiny did. It’s just been a rough week. And it’s always significantly harder to shake off a bad test in college considering you only have two or three in the entire quarter and that makes up your entire grade.
Blogging and Music
So I added music to this tumblr a couple days ago……but it’s on autoplay.I apologize in advance if any future person who stumbles across my blog gets annoyed. For now, I figured it’ll be a nice surprise for myself when I open up my own tumblr page.
First, a long tangent about why this is on tumblr and why this is public.
I’ve always kept a diary, admittedly super sporadically, often in several notebooks and word documents at once, with weeks and months of gaps between entries. Then, in seventh or eighth grade, I discovered blogging, and all of sudden, instead of just scribbling in a notebook or typing in a word document, I had to organize your thoughts in a coherent fashion for people who can’t necessarily read your mind. It was glorious. I actually organized my thoughts, and posted somewhat regularly.
Then one of my real friends got the url and things got weird. It’s really strange, how the prospect of a stranger reading these posts is a little exciting, but the prospect of a friend reading this just ratchets up the pressure and the need to be politically correct. I guess it’s because the opinions of strangers about these posts don’t matter nearly as much as the opinion of a friend on one of these posts. Anyway, none of my friends know this tumblr, not even my internet friends. While meeting new people through this tumblr is kind of thrilling, I don’t want to make posts with the goal of not offending any of my friends in mind. I feel like that would lead to even more editing than I already do.
Why tumblr? (Wow, I just tried to skirt around the real reason several times and wound up deleting my ramblings.) Okay, so the real reason is that I felt like tumblr has lost its spirit as a blogging site, and I wanted to change that by creating a traditional, mostly text, personal blog. Tumblr is great for pictures of cute animals, fandom stuff, art, fashion, quotes, and jokes, and don’t get me wrong, I love that stuff too (that’s what mythicalmoments is for). It’s a glorious place that’s like an amalgamation of deviantart, fan sites, reddit, and more. But do you know what almost never shows up on my dash? Long, detailed personal posts about someone’s day, and even personal pictures and short blurb posts about the blogger are rare.
Maybe I’m not following the right people. (A lot of people posting in the “first post” tag seem to be starting private journal based tumblrs, and I’ve followed some of them. I hope they’ll keep posting about themselves beyond the introductory post.) Still, I feel like most people don’t type long text posts. People who want to (like my cousin) tend to move off of tumblr onto a more text based site like wordpress. Maybe I would have done that too, except I was already familiar with the tumblr interface and had an unused url waiting to be filled, so thus my ramblings on are tumblr.
Okay, finally getting to the music part of this post.
This theme is kind of gothic with the red and the swirly fronds and the dark stripes, so I tried to pick songs that matched the theme. My favorite genre is what I described as soft metal, like the first two songs on the playlist, “Life is Beautiful (Acoustic)” by Sixx AM and “Louder Than Thunder” by Devil Wears Prada. Of course, I think all six of these songs are beautiful. Few songs give me chills like “Orchard of Mines” by Globus does. “Lions” by Lights is really adorable techno pop. “Endlessly” by The Cab is also really cute. And of course, “Speeding Cars” by the goddess Imogen Heap. I want to add more songs, except I need to find/remember more songs that fit the theme/mood I want first.
And what do I normally listen to? I listen to a lot of different stuff, so it really depends on the day and what I feel like. I really dislike the statement, “I listen to everything except…” because your exception list is going to be huge. The most common exceptions I see are just “except country” or “except rap.” I feel like shaking them and asking them: Do you listen to show tunes? Music from the 60s and 70s? Classical? Jazz? Death metal? No, you don’t listen to all these things? Then freaking make your exception list bigger.
But I guess it’s one of those questions that you can’t win either way. Because the list of stuff you do listen to is also going to be huge.
I do want to ramble about all the genres I dabble in and some of my favorites in each genre, but it’s getting really late and my brain is fuzzy, and I don’t like saving things as drafts, because most of my drafts end up getting deleted rather than published because I go all perfectionist on it, so this is it for now. Sorry that the tangent wound up being far longer than what this post was supposed to be about.
Oreo Cheesecake
It’s cheese cake fluff with crust batter mixed in and Oreos on top. I had two. I regret nothing.
Since no one actually reads trackingdestiny, pictures will go on mythicalmoments first.
