win or die.
Name: Amanda
How did you find out about the community? If it's through an LJ user, please tell us who it is (individual user if possible, not just a community name!): The interest tags.
Age: 22
Location: Australia
Occupation: Disability support worker
All About You
1. Describe your ideal house/home. Please go into as much detail as possible, and be sure to include your ideal geographical location in the description!.
Although I’d never be able to do it, I’d love to live on one of the smaller, tropically located islands - the ones with small, close-knit populations, which are mostly self-sufficient or rely on occasional shipments. The Pitcairn Islands are a perfect example of this. In terms of the actual home, I’d like a mud brick cottage with two rooms (bed/bath and kitchen/living), a porch with a rocking chair and a small table, and a large, low-fenced vegetable garden.
2. Imagine you’re given the classic opportunity: a genie granting you three wishes. What would you wish for? Please be as elaborate as you can. Wishing for more wishes is not permitted!
“I wish I could wish for more wishes!”
- I wish that I could move to a house and a location like the one I described above. It would be excellent to have the means to immediately do so. Of course, tied in with this wish is the unspoken desire to no longer be addicted to the internet, and to have it be financially viable to do so by growing and trading vegetables.
- I wish I had a horse! I’d love to have the money to care for one, the knowledge and experience to train one, and the space and equipment to house one. I adore horses, but I don’t have the knowledge to keep one or the space in my yard for a barn.
- I wish that I could learn faster. It takes me a long time to memorise rules for a game (such as Warhammer), and attempts to learn a new language are generally futile. I can’t pick up new tasks very quickly, and I need to take copious notes. Once I do learn things, I’m hard-pressed to forget them. I just want the learning to come faster!
3. In your life so far, what accomplishment are you the most proud of? Why? You can list more than one if you have trouble deciding. ;)
I’m most proud of moving out of home. When I was graduating high school, I was coming out of a very rough period, mentally, and I hadn’t really bothered with school. I had grown up being told that without academic success, I would never be financially independent. Despite knowing that this premise is fallacious at best, I’ve still been fearful of never leaving home since I was seventeen. I moved out earlier this year. :)
4. Which of the following is most important to you: Love, Money, Knowledge, Family, Friendship, Adventure, or Pleasure? Which is the least important to you? Please explain why for each choice.
It’s difficult to answer this, because I feel like they’re all related to each other: love and family, friendship family, adventure and knowledge, pleasure and money … for me, they’re all very much related, so I can’t exactly decide which one is the most important to me.
If I absolutely had to decide, and I’m sure this decision would change every few weeks, at the moment I’d have to say that pleasure is the most important of these values / experiences. More than anything else, pleasure is linked to the others in a unique way, and success and life in general bring pleasure. It seems unavoidable to experience pleasure in a proper life.
5. What's one quote (or passage, song lyric, etc.) that effectively describes you and your values? Explain.
I’d like to use two quotes, in lieu of detailed explanations. I feel that they’re self-explanatory.
‘Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.’ - Jane Austen
‘Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.’ - George Eliot
6. How do you manage your money? On that note, how important is money/financial security to you? Go into as much detail as you can.
I am not very good with money management. I need to allocate my finances as soon as I’m paid, including withdrawing all of the money necessary for payments on the day I get paid and settling BPAY accounts immediately. This prevents me from spending my money superfluously. Prevention is my management.
Financial security is quite important to me, as a 22-year-old bankrupt. I was absolutely ridiculous about money management and any need for financial security four years ago, and obtained (and subsequently maxed out) two credit cards as soon as I turned eighteen.
It was ridiculous, I’ve learned my lesson, I try not to dwell on it, and am learning from my mistakes.
7. Name (and elaborate on) some of your hobbies. What are your favorite things to do outside of school/the office?
- Gaming, both video game and table top. My three vices are Warhammer Fantasy, where I’m building a Lizardmen army, World of Warcraft, where I main an Alliance Mage, and Animal Crossing: New Leaf, where I’ve been neglecting in favour of building up my museum. I’m not very good at ACNL, but it’s arguably my favourite of the three.
- Reading. I have an ereader, and I do the vast bulk of my reading on the ereader (except for comics, manga and magazines). I’m also a little bit obsessed with hardcovers, though, and where I can buy a book I love in hardcover, I buy. I’m a pretty slow reader, but I manage about a book a week. I prefer fiction.
- Aquascaping. I have one fighting fish, and he’s as much a decoration as he is a pet. He lives in a 60 litre (15.8 gallon) tank, which he shares with a vast number of plants. It’s a wet jungle out there. Cultivating, trimming, fertilizing, planting, cleaning … I love it. I find aquatic plant care meditative, relaxing and thought-provoking.
8. Name three things you are afraid of. Explain.
- Spiders. It’s a phobia more than a fear, and I feel like ‘eight legs and hairy’ is the most accurate explanation, but I think that it’s related to my mother getting extremely sick after being bitten by two red backs when I was little.
- Heights. I always get a lurching feeling in my stomach, and become afraid that I’m going to fall (or be pushed) from a great height. I don’t even like standing near the windows of tall buildings. However, I almost like this specific fear. I get a large adrenaline rush, so while I’m on my hands and knees hyperventilating, I’m thinking to myself “this is so cool!”
- My dog dying. She’s my whole world and my furry baby. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I don’t think this needs an explanation.
9. Name (and elaborate on) your top three BEST and top three WORST qualities (personality-related, not physical). Please answer as fully as you can, as this is an important question.
It’s difficult for me to answer this, because I feel as though all of my best qualities are physical. I suppose that leads me to my first worst quality.
WORST:
- I am extremely critical of myself. I have a tendency to blame myself for everything that goes wrong, and to perceive wrongdoings (on my behalf) where there are none. I am my own worst enemy and my own harshest critic.
- I am a perfectionist, to a fault. If I don’t get something right the first time, I’m apt to quit or start all over again, even if it’s very recoverable. I need to everything that I do to be perfect. This makes it extremely difficult to finish things, especially when coupled with the above trait.
- I can be a rather slow learner, as mentioned above in the wish question. I tend to take longer to remember a sequence of tasks or rules than the person next to me, and it causes me to get frustrated. Becoming frustrated, in turn, causes me to take even longer to complete something - which makes me likely to quit, due to my extreme perfectionism.
BEST:
- I suppose I’m quite compassionate. I’m almost endlessly forgiving, and I will go to great lengths to help people. I’ve spent hours in a video game leading another player through something frustrating, and I’ve taken strangers from one end of a city to the other so that they could find their destination.
- I adapt to other people easily. I easily adjust my tone, mannerisms, word selection and behaviour based on the people I’m around, in order to promote greater comfort and harmony in a group of people. I’m often a mediator.
- I am extremely perceptive to the undercurrents of social situations, and will pick up on these before others in a group of people. Subtle changes in tone, environment, et cetera will cause me to shift my attention. I suppose you could say that I can “feel out” a room a bit easier than my friends. The practical application of this is that I can calm down drunks who are hitting on my friends before those friends realise that the person is getting angry.
Typing this out, I’ve noticed that my worst traits are all intrapersonal and my best traits are all interpersonal. I’ve never really looked at it that way before.
A Song of Ice and Fire Related
1.How many books from the series have you completed?
All five. None of the extraneous books.
2.Who are your favorite three characters in the series? Why?
Sansa, Cersei and Margaery. I love the women of the Keep as a whole, and these three particularly because they’re main runners. It’s actually thanks to the show that Margaery wins a place here, as I feel that the show has done an excellent job expanding upon what was provided in the books.
These three women are all adaptable and powerful - even Sansa. I feel that she just doesn’t know how to manipulate her power to her advantage yet. They all strike me as very capable of very bad things. And let’s face it, who didn’t love reading about Cersei’s total breakdown?
3.Who are your least favorite three characters in the series? Why?
Arya, Bran and Jon. With the exception Sansa, I really don’t like the Starks as a whole because they’re boring. Arya, Bran and Jon are particularly boring. I skim-read Bran’s chapters, and I only enjoy Arya’s chapters for descriptions of her surroundings and Jon’s chapters for the Wall and the Watch.
4.#1 Favorite moment in all of ASOIAF so far? Why?
I CAN’T DECIDE. T___________________________T
Dany’s dragons burning the Quentin Martell. He was an arrogant fool to think that he could whip a dragon and bring it in line, and he deserved his fate. It was extremely satisfying to watch an unlikeable character totally fail to tame the untameable.
5. In your dream-world, how would you like to see the series end, and why?
I make a very firm point not to speculate about the ending.