Question Meme
oxlajujimox recently made a post about a meme in which he answered a set of five questions asked of him and then as the answerer people could ask him to put forth five questions for their answering and so on the chain goes I suppose, Well I asked him to question me.
1) If you got to pick the year of your death, what year would it be?
What a morbid question to ask... My first inclination is to answer i or the square root of -1 as it were, but since we don't really count time that way it doesn't work. I'm assuming that this question assumes that I'm not some type of immortal. I mean I don't think my parents are Time Lords and I don't foresee any fortuitous vampire bites in my future (my soul is a little important to me tarnished as it may be anyway) and the whole idea of ritual decapitation kind of weirds me out at this point. So, given that I won't have eternal youth I have to decide basically at what age is life no longer worth living, in itself a hard question to ask having not been there. I'm thinking that at 100 most people aren't really that mobile so I'm going to cut it a little short of 2080 and say something more like 2060, it'll be interesting to see how society has progressed at that point (Wow that's a long way off).
2) In old age, assuming a sufficient supply of wealth, what would you most like to collect?
I'm assuming you're asking this because of my collector mentality and perhaps slight OCD in that regard, and that money is what is usually needed to fulfill said compulsion (If you can't tell I'm trying to figure out why you asked me the questions you did and if you can good for you because I'm not answering them in order, this is one of the reasons I like participating in these sort of memes is just trying to figure out the psychology of it all, the other reason is trying to subvert the question which I've always liked to do until I figured out that when teachers don't appreciate that it hurts your GPA, though when they do it usually resulted in raising it).
The funny (to me) answer would be money, the evil megalomaniac answer would be my enemies souls (but I think that I'm generally likable and won't acquire that many enemies), the sentimental answer would be good memories, the bitter about life answer would be a long list of ex-girlfriends, the deeply shallow answer would be fame and fortune, the touching answer that I would probably be the most happy with would be friends and family, the answer that probably fits the spirit of your question the best would be vintage cars and motorcycles, well any type of motor vehicle.
Close runners up were vinyl records, guitars and stylish coats/jackets.
Of course that could all have a very good chance of changing between now and my old age, unless the answer to your first question is off... I could be wanting to collect cures for cancer then.
3) In which period of history would you most like to spend a year as a visitor?
Probably the hardest question you asked. There are so many interesting periods in history, perhaps explaining my major, and my major perhaps explaining why you asked me this...
I'm going to assume that you don't know that I have a half-working time machine in my basement and aren't trying to suss out whether or not you want to go with me on it's inaugural voyage. Also I'm going to assume that I wouldn't have a huge impact on causality and the time line in general. I usually have enough knowledge on how to get myself in trouble in situations however am lacking on the way to get myself out therefore I try to avoid situations where I encounter said trouble.
1985, 1955, (not fitting your question) 2015, and 1885 are the Back to the Future answers to your question. Following that sort of causality be damned line of thought going back to 1989 to give myself advice on how to get through life would be a good answer.
I'm going to go ahead and say that I feel like life for most people hasn't really changed that much in the last probably 500 or more years of human society, so a whole year would be rather boring unless you lived in a particularly tumultuous place. That and if you're going to go gallivanting across the time space continuum you might as well have either some cool or valuable souvenirs or pictures to show for your journey. I'm also assuming you mean some sort of vacation by stating visitor, in stead of some schlup who has to work for a living. That and the language barrier would greatly reduce the places I could visit without a babel fish of some sort so I'm going to assume I have one.
I think it would be cool to get some shots of the Pyramids of Giza being constructed, but other than that ancient Egyptian life doesn't really hold any place in my heart. Ancient Rome would be pretty interesting with all it's debauchery, but I'm not sure I could get all the enjoyment out of it as they did with my modern sense of decency. It would be interesting to see what Minoan culture was actually like without all the conjecture. Anything pre-historic would be cool just to answer a bunch of questions. The English civil war (the one involving Cromwell if I'm too shaky on my English history and there is more than one, and I'm not counting the American revolution as a civil war, though you could if you wanted to) would be interesting. I'm often fascinated at the ingenuity, scale and sometimes absurdity of inventions that came about during both world wars.
However all this considered I'd probably have to say the American West late 19th century. I can't pick a actual year because there is too much going in any given historical period that crosses various yearly barriers. I think that since I was a small child I have had an infatuation with this time period (as evidenced by my wearing a felt cowboy hat in my early developmental stages constantly until it finally dissolved in a pool). I often over romanticize it in my head, but I think that the reality of the period given my historical study of it still brings it into really interesting place/time. And if I were given the chance to screw with causality I would like to see what it would be like if I were to bring a few M-16s and Abrams tanks to Sitting Bull, but I like the fact that I exist too much to try something like that.
Runner up goes to slightly Pre-Tokugawa Japan. I think that samurai influenced much of the martial arts I learned (even though I've learned primarily Korean martial arts, that's a whole scholarly journal article in and of itself, and they were probably more the reason why I learned them) it would be interesting to see the whole thing happening and the architecture of the period fascinates me to a certain degree, not that it's particularly ingenious in any engineering aspect but in my perceived beauty of it with the curved roofs and whatnot.
"New-Spain" read the Spanish colonies in this hemisphere have grown on me in my last couple years of school in how interesting they are, but I imagine them to be highly unpleasant pretty much throughout until close to modern times that might flow somewhat into my initial choice of the American West. I guess the problem I would have with this period is the sugar cultivation and and everything associated with it, though I do like the architecture and culture of exploration.
4) What is the stupidest thing you've ever seen someone do? (You may keep this answer anonymous, if you wish.)
I'll have to qualify this one further I think since I've worked in a security department that compiled "best of" tapes, and if I start using things that I wasn't there in person for I'd at least have to mention that I've seen an episode or two of Crocodile Hunter (I'm not really sure that this joke is in good taste).
I'm searching the brainbanks and can't really seem to think of anything that involves you as the person performing the stupid act. You've been privy to some of the stupid moments, read the bite your own nose incident. Also searching the brainbanks for random stupid moments is somewhat difficult, usually they pop to mind when reminded by something related, so given that I'll have to assume the things that I can think of right now are the highlights. It also might say something of what you think of me that you ask me this question (I'm not exactly sure what), and for that reason I'll also exclude the stupid things I've done (I didn't really see myself doing them, so I think that counts too, though I think your allowance to keep this anonymous was to give me an out for this, but the answer I would give to that question would be mean spirited). I'm also trying to keep the answer funny, so this is going to try to be a mix of the funniest stupid moment, since there are many different forms of stupid and this is the kind of stupid I think you were referring to. Oh yea, and I won't mention any time I've seen someone buy a Coldplay CD, or any actions of the Bush administration.
Without further ado, the story. The setting is the Burger King parking lot in Columbus circa 97 or 98. Some friends and I had been cruising which in and of itself is pretty stupid in retrospect, but like so many other stupid actions it seemed like a good idea at the time and gas was much cheaper. Whilst cruising we ran into an acquaintance and his girlfriend in his Ranger. We decided to stop in said parking lot to chat for a bit. At the end of said chatting one of my friends had his hand on the bed of the Ranger and he said something lewd as he is wont to do. Well the acquaintance decided to open the throttle body of his Ranger quickly after the comment which I suppose for a hormone infused high school student isn't such an unremarkable reaction. Well my friend who made the comment with his hand on the bed of the truck reacted in a way that was probably intuitive but highly counterproductive. Much to everyone's surprise, in stead of loosening his grip he tightened it and was pulled/launched into the bed of the truck. The acquaintance decided that it would not be prudent, or a good idea, or not funny, (I'm not really sure which) to stop at that point but I believe if my memory is serving me to proceed around the cruise route a couple more times until we finally convinced him to stop at the local Wal-Mart and release our friend from his current mobile prison. Fortunately no friends were harmed in the telling of this story and only slightly wounded (a cut finger) in the events that made it's telling possible.
A runner up for this story would be something I thought incredibly stupid, but only witnessed the aftermath of and not the actual happening, though I saw it via CCTV later. One day at the first and, at this point, last location of a certain Wal-Mart competitor I worked at as a security grunt a girl came in asking for help. Her problem requires a slight explanation of the parking lot. To the west side of this building there is a section of parking lot that runs perpendicular to the front of the store. This section of the parking lot is at a higher level than the front of the building so there is a section where there is a vertical face between the parking lot and the sidewalk in front of the store. This is where she was parked. I would try to make an ASCII diagram but I think anyone who reads this is intelligent enough to understand what I'm talking about, and I don't think it would show up well without a unicode typeface which I really don't feel like figuring out how to do within LJ. Well, I learned that when this girl tried to leave the store she put her car in drive rather than the obvious choice of reverse and must have not noticed when she hit the curb because when I went to view the scene her car was hanging precariously over the retaining wall between the lot and sidewalk. Her mom was on her way, and looking at the problem I thought it could be solved with simply putting the car in reverse and perhaps adding weight to certain places outside the moment of inertia of the car and driving it backwards. However my employer's concern about liability prevented me from going through with my little physics experiment and they went for outside help at a nearby tire store where indeed the people put into action what I thought necessary and it did work. Funny nonetheless for a bored security worker. Bright spot in my day.
5) If you could instantaneously gain fluency in any one language, what would it be?
x86 Assembly would probably offer me many job opportunities, but at this point in life I'm not really interested in persueing that career path, and who knows how long that architecture will be around anyway.
By the way this was the most obvious to me question to subvert which is a natural inclination given a certain creative thinking class we both took from middle school partway through high school. It just put my head in that mode.
I'd say English to be funny, but I still have many problems with it. Comma splices haunt me in my sleep, but I feel that I'm okay enough with it to get by. Probably much to the chagrin of people who read anything I write. That and you can't go wasting away magical genie wishes on thing that you know pretty well anyway.
I guess the answer to this has to be Japanese just for revenge (To those who don't know this doesn't reflect at all on the Japanese people, just their difficulty of their language).
If anyone would like me to send questions their way just let me know in a reply to this post. You don't have to be a LJ member, just have a public place you can post the responses.
1) If you got to pick the year of your death, what year would it be?
What a morbid question to ask... My first inclination is to answer i or the square root of -1 as it were, but since we don't really count time that way it doesn't work. I'm assuming that this question assumes that I'm not some type of immortal. I mean I don't think my parents are Time Lords and I don't foresee any fortuitous vampire bites in my future (my soul is a little important to me tarnished as it may be anyway) and the whole idea of ritual decapitation kind of weirds me out at this point. So, given that I won't have eternal youth I have to decide basically at what age is life no longer worth living, in itself a hard question to ask having not been there. I'm thinking that at 100 most people aren't really that mobile so I'm going to cut it a little short of 2080 and say something more like 2060, it'll be interesting to see how society has progressed at that point (Wow that's a long way off).
2) In old age, assuming a sufficient supply of wealth, what would you most like to collect?
I'm assuming you're asking this because of my collector mentality and perhaps slight OCD in that regard, and that money is what is usually needed to fulfill said compulsion (If you can't tell I'm trying to figure out why you asked me the questions you did and if you can good for you because I'm not answering them in order, this is one of the reasons I like participating in these sort of memes is just trying to figure out the psychology of it all, the other reason is trying to subvert the question which I've always liked to do until I figured out that when teachers don't appreciate that it hurts your GPA, though when they do it usually resulted in raising it).
The funny (to me) answer would be money, the evil megalomaniac answer would be my enemies souls (but I think that I'm generally likable and won't acquire that many enemies), the sentimental answer would be good memories, the bitter about life answer would be a long list of ex-girlfriends, the deeply shallow answer would be fame and fortune, the touching answer that I would probably be the most happy with would be friends and family, the answer that probably fits the spirit of your question the best would be vintage cars and motorcycles, well any type of motor vehicle.
Close runners up were vinyl records, guitars and stylish coats/jackets.
Of course that could all have a very good chance of changing between now and my old age, unless the answer to your first question is off... I could be wanting to collect cures for cancer then.
3) In which period of history would you most like to spend a year as a visitor?
Probably the hardest question you asked. There are so many interesting periods in history, perhaps explaining my major, and my major perhaps explaining why you asked me this...
I'm going to assume that you don't know that I have a half-working time machine in my basement and aren't trying to suss out whether or not you want to go with me on it's inaugural voyage. Also I'm going to assume that I wouldn't have a huge impact on causality and the time line in general. I usually have enough knowledge on how to get myself in trouble in situations however am lacking on the way to get myself out therefore I try to avoid situations where I encounter said trouble.
1985, 1955, (not fitting your question) 2015, and 1885 are the Back to the Future answers to your question. Following that sort of causality be damned line of thought going back to 1989 to give myself advice on how to get through life would be a good answer.
I'm going to go ahead and say that I feel like life for most people hasn't really changed that much in the last probably 500 or more years of human society, so a whole year would be rather boring unless you lived in a particularly tumultuous place. That and if you're going to go gallivanting across the time space continuum you might as well have either some cool or valuable souvenirs or pictures to show for your journey. I'm also assuming you mean some sort of vacation by stating visitor, in stead of some schlup who has to work for a living. That and the language barrier would greatly reduce the places I could visit without a babel fish of some sort so I'm going to assume I have one.
I think it would be cool to get some shots of the Pyramids of Giza being constructed, but other than that ancient Egyptian life doesn't really hold any place in my heart. Ancient Rome would be pretty interesting with all it's debauchery, but I'm not sure I could get all the enjoyment out of it as they did with my modern sense of decency. It would be interesting to see what Minoan culture was actually like without all the conjecture. Anything pre-historic would be cool just to answer a bunch of questions. The English civil war (the one involving Cromwell if I'm too shaky on my English history and there is more than one, and I'm not counting the American revolution as a civil war, though you could if you wanted to) would be interesting. I'm often fascinated at the ingenuity, scale and sometimes absurdity of inventions that came about during both world wars.
However all this considered I'd probably have to say the American West late 19th century. I can't pick a actual year because there is too much going in any given historical period that crosses various yearly barriers. I think that since I was a small child I have had an infatuation with this time period (as evidenced by my wearing a felt cowboy hat in my early developmental stages constantly until it finally dissolved in a pool). I often over romanticize it in my head, but I think that the reality of the period given my historical study of it still brings it into really interesting place/time. And if I were given the chance to screw with causality I would like to see what it would be like if I were to bring a few M-16s and Abrams tanks to Sitting Bull, but I like the fact that I exist too much to try something like that.
Runner up goes to slightly Pre-Tokugawa Japan. I think that samurai influenced much of the martial arts I learned (even though I've learned primarily Korean martial arts, that's a whole scholarly journal article in and of itself, and they were probably more the reason why I learned them) it would be interesting to see the whole thing happening and the architecture of the period fascinates me to a certain degree, not that it's particularly ingenious in any engineering aspect but in my perceived beauty of it with the curved roofs and whatnot.
"New-Spain" read the Spanish colonies in this hemisphere have grown on me in my last couple years of school in how interesting they are, but I imagine them to be highly unpleasant pretty much throughout until close to modern times that might flow somewhat into my initial choice of the American West. I guess the problem I would have with this period is the sugar cultivation and and everything associated with it, though I do like the architecture and culture of exploration.
4) What is the stupidest thing you've ever seen someone do? (You may keep this answer anonymous, if you wish.)
I'll have to qualify this one further I think since I've worked in a security department that compiled "best of" tapes, and if I start using things that I wasn't there in person for I'd at least have to mention that I've seen an episode or two of Crocodile Hunter (I'm not really sure that this joke is in good taste).
I'm searching the brainbanks and can't really seem to think of anything that involves you as the person performing the stupid act. You've been privy to some of the stupid moments, read the bite your own nose incident. Also searching the brainbanks for random stupid moments is somewhat difficult, usually they pop to mind when reminded by something related, so given that I'll have to assume the things that I can think of right now are the highlights. It also might say something of what you think of me that you ask me this question (I'm not exactly sure what), and for that reason I'll also exclude the stupid things I've done (I didn't really see myself doing them, so I think that counts too, though I think your allowance to keep this anonymous was to give me an out for this, but the answer I would give to that question would be mean spirited). I'm also trying to keep the answer funny, so this is going to try to be a mix of the funniest stupid moment, since there are many different forms of stupid and this is the kind of stupid I think you were referring to. Oh yea, and I won't mention any time I've seen someone buy a Coldplay CD, or any actions of the Bush administration.
Without further ado, the story. The setting is the Burger King parking lot in Columbus circa 97 or 98. Some friends and I had been cruising which in and of itself is pretty stupid in retrospect, but like so many other stupid actions it seemed like a good idea at the time and gas was much cheaper. Whilst cruising we ran into an acquaintance and his girlfriend in his Ranger. We decided to stop in said parking lot to chat for a bit. At the end of said chatting one of my friends had his hand on the bed of the Ranger and he said something lewd as he is wont to do. Well the acquaintance decided to open the throttle body of his Ranger quickly after the comment which I suppose for a hormone infused high school student isn't such an unremarkable reaction. Well my friend who made the comment with his hand on the bed of the truck reacted in a way that was probably intuitive but highly counterproductive. Much to everyone's surprise, in stead of loosening his grip he tightened it and was pulled/launched into the bed of the truck. The acquaintance decided that it would not be prudent, or a good idea, or not funny, (I'm not really sure which) to stop at that point but I believe if my memory is serving me to proceed around the cruise route a couple more times until we finally convinced him to stop at the local Wal-Mart and release our friend from his current mobile prison. Fortunately no friends were harmed in the telling of this story and only slightly wounded (a cut finger) in the events that made it's telling possible.
A runner up for this story would be something I thought incredibly stupid, but only witnessed the aftermath of and not the actual happening, though I saw it via CCTV later. One day at the first and, at this point, last location of a certain Wal-Mart competitor I worked at as a security grunt a girl came in asking for help. Her problem requires a slight explanation of the parking lot. To the west side of this building there is a section of parking lot that runs perpendicular to the front of the store. This section of the parking lot is at a higher level than the front of the building so there is a section where there is a vertical face between the parking lot and the sidewalk in front of the store. This is where she was parked. I would try to make an ASCII diagram but I think anyone who reads this is intelligent enough to understand what I'm talking about, and I don't think it would show up well without a unicode typeface which I really don't feel like figuring out how to do within LJ. Well, I learned that when this girl tried to leave the store she put her car in drive rather than the obvious choice of reverse and must have not noticed when she hit the curb because when I went to view the scene her car was hanging precariously over the retaining wall between the lot and sidewalk. Her mom was on her way, and looking at the problem I thought it could be solved with simply putting the car in reverse and perhaps adding weight to certain places outside the moment of inertia of the car and driving it backwards. However my employer's concern about liability prevented me from going through with my little physics experiment and they went for outside help at a nearby tire store where indeed the people put into action what I thought necessary and it did work. Funny nonetheless for a bored security worker. Bright spot in my day.
5) If you could instantaneously gain fluency in any one language, what would it be?
x86 Assembly would probably offer me many job opportunities, but at this point in life I'm not really interested in persueing that career path, and who knows how long that architecture will be around anyway.
By the way this was the most obvious to me question to subvert which is a natural inclination given a certain creative thinking class we both took from middle school partway through high school. It just put my head in that mode.
I'd say English to be funny, but I still have many problems with it. Comma splices haunt me in my sleep, but I feel that I'm okay enough with it to get by. Probably much to the chagrin of people who read anything I write. That and you can't go wasting away magical genie wishes on thing that you know pretty well anyway.
I guess the answer to this has to be Japanese just for revenge (To those who don't know this doesn't reflect at all on the Japanese people, just their difficulty of their language).
If anyone would like me to send questions their way just let me know in a reply to this post. You don't have to be a LJ member, just have a public place you can post the responses.