You know you're a nerd when...

Since I made a nice long compilation of these, I figure I might as well put them somewhere convenient. Here goes.

You know you're a nerd when...

When you write page-long Facebook comments about *serious business*. Heck, when you write page-long Facebook *anything* about serious business.

When your choice of favorite hang-out ends with a TLD.

When Feynman is a household name.

When you verbalize your actions with Net slang. A laugh is just a 'lol', a sigh is just a *sigh*...

When the Rules of the Internet are more familiar to you than the Rules of Fight Club.

When you go to Sporcle to train.

When you prefer Primer to Avatar.

When Neo first shows off his powers irl and you think, "Oh shit, they're embedded in nested Matrices!"

When you are ashamed of your sesquipedalian loquaciousness.

When you decide that referencing xkcd for nerd cred is cheating.

When you bet on the inclusion of one preposition in one line of one book. (It's "Aragorn sped *on* up the hill." Obviously.)

When Twenty Questions really means "Keep asking till you give up."

When the food is problematic.

When you cannot get through the day without your fix of silly cats.

Alternatively, when you disdain silly cats, but think silly dogs are the shit.

When you're good friends with someone you've never met in meatspace.

When you're at the bookstore, and start riffling through a book to see if you want to buy it...and realize, a while later, that it would be pointless to buy a book you've already read, and also that the sun's gone down.

When you consciously verb nouns. Double points if that makes you think of Calvin and Hobbes.

When you make sure your [sarc][/sarc] tags are properly formatted.

When weirdness becomes a goal to attain rather than a quality to shun.

When you are a Timmy, Johnny, or Spike. Melvin or Vorthos? Okay, now you're just a smartass.

When the fate of your debate rests on a fictional planetary ecologist.

When you feel a compulsive need to use xor to remove logical ambiguity.

When you are familiar with the Laws of Poe, Sturgeon, Godwin, Moore, and Finagle.

When TV Tropes ruins your vocabulary.

When you describe Jesus as a subclass of God that implements the Human interface.

When the zeta function is elementary. (Except when it isn't.)

When you think that Transcendentalists must not have liked polynomials very much.

When you worry about the effects of drunkenness on your mental math.

When your response to use of the words pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, electrophotomicrographically, and floccinaucinihilipilification is something other than "Gesundheit".

When you worry about your use of the Oxford comma.

When your reaction to hearing about Homo floresiensis is to muse that Tolkien was telling the truth all along.

When you join a party by making a charsheet.

When you realize that the Ringworld is unstable.

When you consider the joke "there are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't," and its higher-base variations, to be old hat.

When your chat with a friend bounces between nontrivial reasoning in philosophical thought experiments and appropriate balance for interacting feats/spells in D&D.

When you start dismissing nerdy pickup lines because the math/science involved is too elementary.

When, in your conversations, the term "lawyer" refers to a gaming pedant rather than the profession.

When the Chinese in Firefly breaks immersion because it's really BAD Chinese, or the dialect changes mid-episode.

When your bedside table reading pile is really a bedside table, three desk shelves, the top of your clothes drawer, and the lower bed bunk--and you leave the room at 3 AM to go find a different book.

When you lose The Game.

When you feel a little sad inside that someone, somewhere, knows more digits of Pi than you.

When hearing a relatively obscure mathematical term causes you to break out in song (Mandelbrot set, anyone? Bonus points if you started singing on 'Julia set' instead).

When you sit down to read all the goddamn codex entries in Dragon Age.

When you start min/maxing your Pokemon's attributes.

When you've been clicking on the 'random article' button for the last two hours.

When you find yourself having to choose between chess and go for the next game.

When you lol irl.

When people compliment you on your Renfaire or cosplay costume.

When you are genuinely outraged that Tom Bombadil got replaced by a random encounter with wood-elves, and then wonder whether those wood-elves were more likely to be Sindarin or Noldorin.

When you have tried to memorize the elements...lyrically.

When you show up to your school's traditional first-day hazing...wearing your self-made chainmaille coif.

When Quenya is your second language.

When you rack your brains thinking of ways to contribute to this list.

********************************************

(note: about 95% of these are actual self-reference, but not all.)

More will be added below when appropriate.

If, at any time during the last 525,600 minutes, you have mused on the diminishing cost of a gigabyte of memory...you might be a nerd.

Related: The probability that you are a nerd increases asymptotically to 1 with the number of arbitrary unit conversions you have memorized.

Writing

Those who know me know I have a problem with writing. It's not that I write poorly, as I hope a quick sampling of this blog would show. I've never gotten a grade below A- in any English class, and a large part of that is my cumulative essay grade. (Certainly it's not my work ethic.) No, writing well is not the problem. Writing quickly is the problem. I take forever to put fingers to keyboard, far longer to put pen to paper. Every sentence is a hard-fought battle against my twin desires to rewrite the sentence (I'm doing it now, with this sentence--and yes, I often end up with long paranthetical remarks as a result of this) and to go surfing my routine websites (a smattering of webcomics, manga websites, and Facebook-related material) for the umpteenth time just to get away from the writing.

This difficulty is made infinitely more frustrating by the fact that I deeply enjoy writing. As an avid reader, it's hard for me not to fantasize about turning my own ideas into essays and stories--hence this blog, at least regarding the essays part. I look forward to filling white space with words, words that interconnect to form rich dialogue, complex analysis, (I'm freezing up again here, trying to come up with another example to fill the gap and fit the rule of three) evocative poesy, and all the other types of literature I so eagerly gobble up from the reader's end. (My brain is screaming "aagh, repetition!" I'm trying to ignore it.) I go on Facebook and read my friends' poems, stories, and essays, and I think, "I want to do that!" or even "I could do better than that!" Yet my resolve dwindles after another few (synonym for frustrating, synonym for frustrating...ah, what the heck) hours watching a white screen remain infuriatingly (yay, found a synonym!) blank--unless I fill the screen (and the time) with games or other escapes.

Much of the problem is what rests between my ears--not too little, but too much. This is not a reference to my intellect, but rather to my extraordinary dependence on mapping out everything I plan to write before writing anything at all. (I'm doing it now--gotta stop, gotta stop!) The papers I turn in for my English classes are generally my first drafts--with an inner voice driving me to perfect everything as I write it, revision often proves redundant. Yet going through the whole process of revision would still take less time than the time it takes me to produce those first drafts, more because the tension of producing quality work according to plan in one go drives me quite literally to distraction than because it's more difficult to produce quality work. Write well, write quickly, or write according to plan--I can only do two of the three at any given time.

Therefore, I'm now working on how to facilitate the interplay of planning and writing so that each helps, rather than hinders, the other. As part of this exercise, I'm writing a story. What kind of story? I had no idea when it started. I went with a bar joke and let the characters play out from there. As I write, the story takes shape--something like the result of a three-way between Watchmen, R.A. Salvatore's work, and Order of the Stick. That's if the story doesn't change, which it's guaranteed to, but so it goes. From here on out, I'll post weekly updates to the story, and I promise they will be substantial. I mean, as long as I'm producing large quantities of verbeage, why not throw it to whatever snarling Internet trolls (or possibly even reasonable people, if I'm lucky) might frequent this blog?

Perspective on Religion, Prayer, and Meditation

I recently received a questionnaire from a classmate related to a class assignment, and I feel like my responses were worthwhile enough that I should lengthen my memory of them by posting them here. Some of the answers are very shallow; I plan to contemplate the questions further when I have time.

1. What is prayer to you? What is your definition of prayer?

Prayer (meditation) is a process of stillness, focus, awareness, contemplation, and understanding - in that order.
[secondary] Prayer is stress relief, an emotional buffer between my raw feelings and my actions.

2. Why do you pray?

I pray (meditate) when I am most emotional, and when I am least emotional. When I am intensely emotional, I seek to calm my feelings and restore my self-control. When I am emotionless, I seek to enter the process described above through stillness.

3. What form does your prayer take?

I quiet myself, assume a posture (no specifics other than tucked chin and straight back; it's pretty spontaneous) and focus on my breathing.

4. To whom do you pray? What is your image of God?

If I pray to anyone, I suppose it's myself. In a sense, I pray that I may improve myself.

5. How often do you pray?

Intermittently over the past five-ish years, recently increasing in frequency. I now pray (meditate) in some fashion on most days.

6. Do you feel that God ever communicates to you? How?
7. Have you ever had a time when you felt that one of your prayers was answered? Describe the incident. If not, is there a time where you feel or felt close to God?

No, and no.

8. At what point do you feel most spiritual? With whom? When?

I am most spiritual when I am surrounded by my own thoughts. In that sense, I am always alone when I am spiritual, even though I may be with other people.

9. Why are you religious (or not)?

Because I was not brought up in a religious context, I am not predisposed to believe in a higher power, which precludes a belief in most religions. When it comes to my worldview, I value the empirical over the hypothetical, the descriptive over the normative, the real over the ideal; as such, I prefer to restrict my belief in the supernatural and/or transcendent. Finally, the material plane satisfies my capacity for wonder, so that I have no real desire to add a divine element to the mix. The causes and consequences of humanity interest me more than the causes and consequences of deities.

10. Do you want to be religious or are you pushed otherwise? Why?

While going to a religious school has certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities of faith, I remain unwilling to circumscribe my worldview with religious doctrine. To adopt religion seems a limited and limiting way of life. At this time, the most religion I would allow into my life would be the admission of a higher power (Deism) mixed with elements of philosophy and meditation from various Eastern religions. And at this point, I think my beliefs would be most accurately described as agnostic, which is a shift from my atheism prior to entering Bellarmine.