hobbies

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

With so many people talking about MMOs as their hobbies, I thought I'd talk some too. I thought I was unusual when at four or five years of age I used to have sexual fantasies that I would meet a girl at the playground who shares my pation for collecting caps from dairy product bottles. Now I see I was average: this guy collects smarties and smarties caps.

http://hometown.aol.co.uk/northerntrumpet/...be_Gallery.html

 

I remember wondering when I was 4 years old why the light brown smartie disappeared, but thought at the moment it was replaced by a second purple colour. I wasn't concious enough then to seriously enquire about it, just set some aside as proof, showed it to my disinterested grandmother, and ate them half a year later during a smartie shortage. Now I know better, that what I thought was purple was actually blue, and that the change occured 1 year before Noticed it.

 

I also saw on his website the boxes,

http://hometown.aol.co.uk/northerntrumpet/..._07_12g_box.jpg

and it brought floods of warm memories to me. I did not understand why they changed to

http://hometown.aol.co.uk/northerntrumpet/...bbies_front.jpg

and I had mixed feelings about it. It was more colourful, but the old one was nicer.

 

The cap collecting craze ended a year after it started, and in 1989 computer gaming became my favourite activity on our 8088.

And You?

[sparhawk]

I started with computers because I saw the movie "Wargames" and was quite impressed. At that time I was asking around how much computers costed and the general answer was that they were only affordable for banks and insurance companies. A few monthsl later I learned that there was something like Personal Computers, which at that time was a Commodore VIC 20 (which became my first computer) and later on the C64. Those were great times, when everybody was impressed because I already had a 1541 where almost all the others still used the tapes.

[Arumakani]

1. Video Games

2. Watches

3. Cars.

 

p.s. I would put naked women as 1, but the wife is of the bad tempered variety.

[Vadrosaul]

1. Videogames

2. Travel

3. Horse riding (western saddle)

4. Billiards

5. Naked wife

[sparhawk]

1. Reading

2. Computers

3. Physics

4. Inline skating

5. All kind of other stuff.

[jdude]

1.Mapping / Arhitecture

2.Snowboarding / Biking

3.Running / Acrobatics

4.Macromedia Flash / Photoshop

5.Electronics in general

[OrbWeaver]

1. Porn

2. See item 1

[sparhawk]

Porn is not a hobby it is an essential, and thus not required to be mentioned.

[Nyarlathotep]

No, I think he means making it. (Spider-porn anyone? )

[OrbWeaver]

Actually I read the other week that the company that produces a lot of my favourite porn is actually seeking a CTO with J2EE and development experience. Of course it is in America and I don't have the necessary experience anyway, but working as CTO for a porn company would be a fantastic job to have (especially when people ask what you do for a living).

[sparhawk]

And whenever you feel like it you could earn some extra cash with your favourite hobby.

[Maximius]

Porn is not a hobby it is an essential, and thus not required to be mentioned.

 

 

I've taken porn to an art form, I like to think. I'm applying for a grant from the National Well-Endowment for the Arts for my new one man show.

[oDDity]

It's weird, but I've become so desensitised to nudity through staring at nude references all day, both in photo and video format, in a totally non-sexual way, that I really don't find myself looking at porn much any more (even though I know all the tricks to get terabytes of free porn any time I want)

I frequently found myself studying the humping, sweating couples for their anatomy reference.

I'm beginning to to see people more as interesting organic objects and how they're put together, rather than sentient beings.

I really feel no different when studying every detail of a young female human, or young female horse. They both have more or less the same bones and muscles, just in different positions and proportions.

[Schatten]

No, I think he means making it. (Spider-porn anyone? )

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comment...der_kama_sutra/

[Vadrosaul]

Question is, can you become desensitized to the sexual act as well?

[OrbWeaver]

Anybody can be desensitised to anything given enough exposure. That is why I make it my mission to offend people's sensitivities at every available opportunity. There is no place in a rational society for "off limits" and taboos.

[oDDity]

Question is, can you become desensitized to the sexual act as well?

 

Of course. Anyone who's been with a sexual partner for more than a year can testify to that. You get desensitised to that person, at least as far as sex is concerned.

[Vadrosaul]

Of course. Anyone who's been with a sexual partner for more than a year can testify to that. You get desensitised to that person, at least as far as sex is concerned.

No, I meant the act itself, not with the same partner. A lot of people tend to 'change things up' or commit adultery to get around that, but could you become permanently bored with the act itself, no matter whom/how/where/why?

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

I think it's possible.

 

I've been thinking of people as a collection of complexely regulated micromachines. Especially after taking molecular biology. Cells, hormones, tissues, etc, lately. This is bad, because I've started losing the ethical view which is required to live in a society. So I've started forcing myself to regard people more as "humans" than "homo sapiens".

 

I've just done my first exam, and went to the movie theatre, as usual for a random movie. Oh boy, this one had flying Christians, devil worshippers, evil corporations, southerners living in the bayou, fire from the sky, raining frogs, etc. I've gone to the movie theatre three times this school year, always to a random show, whatever's soonest. All three movies were about apocalypse. What is the world turning to?

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

I'm trying to find some good videos of PS3 in action, something inspirational. Even though it's released, all I've found so far is pre-release tech-demoes which show the same thing over and over again, some game trailers with lots of running and annoying rock music which are playing very jaggedly (bad servers, tight compression) and some crappy youtube videos of some idiots showing the introductory screen for 16 minutes. Any advice as to where I can find some genuine demonstrations of PS3's power? So far my opinion is that all people are very slow idiots and the only difference PS3 has is more polygons on people. I was hoping to see massive fly-bys of impressive vistas which demonstrate its capacity for massive simultaneous processing.

[Maximius]

I've been thinking of people as a collection of complexely regulated micromachines. Especially after taking molecular biology. Cells, hormones, tissues, etc, lately. This is bad, because I've started losing the ethical view which is required to live in a society. So I've started forcing myself to regard people more as "humans" than "homo sapiens".

 

 

For several years, I forced myself to think about everyone I looked at, including myself, as a chimpanzee. What I mean to say is I tried to see the ape in the human, intentionally see someone scratching their butt as a chimp might, men arguing, people lifting stuff, doing work, watching people eat food is fascinating this way, some are so careful and delicate and others look like the ape-men in the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey ripping flesh from bone. Porn is really recast from this point of view, you see human faces and ape bodies slapping and grinding, limbs splayed and hands clutching automatically, its a bit disconcerting at times. The point of all this was to break down some of my culturally hard wired perceptions of people and it worked to a great degree, people are so much more animalistic to me now and I think its perhaps a somewhat clearer image of what we are. I don't mean animalistic in a negative sense, I mean natural, living, organic and less of the trappings that we load onto our ideas of ourselves.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

So you and I force ourselves to look in opposite directions.

[demagogue]

My hobby is incessant philosophizing. ... also jazz piano, languages (Japanese, French, & Hebrew, but also linguistics, e.g., like computational lingustics, why I like IF so much, because I'm interested in parsers), international politics/law (my academic bent), and cognitive science.

 

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(optional reading for anyone that cares: )

 

Fortunately, this thread has already given me a good opportunity for the first item.

 

I look at humans in still a third way, a la Sartre and existentialism, with radical freedom at the center. A person can take on a project to (try to) become whatever he or she wants, monkey or man or woman or whatever, althoguh of course with various resistances of the real world and "human nature/condition" pushing back to be sure, very often unbearably so, but at the center the absolute, anxious/elating feeling that you can take on the project to be anything you want and know that you might really succeed or fail. (I should add that all of this is reconcilable with what I understand of cogsci; no weirdo metaphysics, but I think what is allowable allows for a lot more than many people give it credit for ... I mean, nobody could have invented something queerer than quantum theory.)

 

Anyway, all of this actually fits in with the previous question: As for keeping one's self from being desensitized, e.g., to sex or other "heightened experiences", I take inspiration from groups like the surrealists, existentialists, tantra, etc, which turns sex into something like an (almost religious-like) practice that keeps a lot of the mystery, "freshness" or vitality right at the heart of it as literally part of the practice. Or maybe a better way to explain it is like a craft that you and your partner work on together, but not in the cheap-ass "hobby"/free-time way people think about doing crafts (and sex, for that matter) in the West, but the more spiritual way people think about craftsmanship like in Japan or tantric buddhism, where you are really putting all of your spirit into it at the same time it is directing you, as if you're trying to acheive some kind of unobtainable perfection and it gives you the path there, honing technique each time, and keeping some of the mystery of it alive. Like it's more than a way to just relieve stress, but an actual kind of routine spiritual practice essential to your well-being. Of course, you have to have a partner that's going along with it, though, and you have to be sure to keep the "mystery" part as actually part of the practice or the whole thing starts to fall flat. Also, a good dose of humor ... which is why I like the surrealist version much better than the tantric version.

Edited April 18, 2007 by demagogue

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

From what you said what I get, boiled down, is you're saying spirituality is the key to happiness.

With regards to tantric or surrealist sex, I prefer a theme which these days is called gothic. Namely, restrictiness, formality, expressiveness, aspiring for high feelings and high culture, etc, etc. And I like gothic-revival buildings a lot too, contrary to my chinese friends who like the modern glass-paneled airy high-rise buildings.

[demagogue]

I'm actually going to voltre-face disclaim some of what I just said ... I was describing the way that that practice is, but that isn't really even what's best about it, not for me ... anything that smacks of routine or "honing skills" (don't know why I used that awful term), can start going a bad direction.

 

I think the most important part isn't the practice, or even spirituality per se, but imagination ... and surrealist eroticism, tantra, gothic (another fine practice), are all just different windows for that, as long as you keep the imagination part important and not take the "rules" too seriously and let them pull you down with them, but also not fall too far the other direction where it becomes too every-day and it's "just a pasttime".

 

Free expression of imagination is the key to happiness, IMO (inspired imagination, anyway, not just the first stupid thing that crosses your mind). Spirituality can just as well help or hurt the cause. So you keep your focus on what's important, and draw carefully from the stock of centuries of human experience, but as a means to an end, ready to put aside the bunk when it gets in the way, but also ready to take all that's good from collective wisdom to keep your imagination alight.

Edited April 18, 2007 by demagogue