Tag: meta

Posting with my real name

[I just wrote this over at The City Beat. I’m still working through some things.]

Ben T., Information Architects had some good things to say about posting comments with your real name.

http://informationarchitects.jp/use-your-real-name-when-you-comment/

I go back and forth on this, and I think it’s a really interesting topic. For one, I like knowing what I said, and now that Google has just about everything I’ve ever written on the Internet, if I always posted with my real name, I could go back and check up on it. So could other people, and this is what irks me about myself: do I want other people to be able to dredge up what I’ve said? A lot of it’s opinion, some of it’s having fun, and some of it reflects me having a bad day, or a bad year (I started blogging in high school, which means all sorts of “angry at the world” stuff.

What bothers me is that I have a problem with that. Shouldn’t I be able to stand behind everything I say, or everything I’ve ever said? I think I should, and yet I still post under a (normally transparent) pseudonym. I know that I want to be proud of everything I say, but it seems like things get blown way out of proportion online, compared to in person. If we met in person and I said “I’m just so pissed off, I’m never eating pickles again” (or something more serious), you could tell that I was momentarily pissed off, and that I probably would eat pickles again. Online, words have staying power, and no matter what you were thinking when you wrote them (“I hate you, I hope you die”), they can get dredged up by someone else and used against you.

This is possible to do in real life as well, but then when I say “I wasn’t serious, I was having a bad day,” how can you believe me, and how can I believe you when you say “I understand, we all have bad days sometimes”?

I’ve said some pretty stupid things in my life, online and off, and I’m trying to stop doing that (things like insulting people because they disagree with me). I’ve found that it’s immensely helpful to post under my real name, because it prevents me from going off half-cocked.

[Later]
Another question is whether or not I want to have an online presence at all. For someone as opinionated and communicative (sometimes) as I am, that’s a simple question to answer, but things are much more difficult online than they are in person, because you’re interacting with a much larger number of people.

I also forgot to mention that it seems weird to me that people use “throwaway” identities rather than a standard alter ego. If I did that, I’d forget what I wrote if I went back and read something again. Maybe that’s another issue: I go back and read things again, while others seem to do drive-by postings, where they drop their opinion, run, and never look back to see if anyone had something to say in reply. Why post if you don’t want to hear what the other person has to say?

There’s beauty in breakdown…

YoungFemaleScientist

I wish I could say the same thing. I wish I could say that I would rather do science for the sake of science, but life just sucks because I need money to survive. Which I cannot get. I would love to produce something out of my own research that could support my other endeavors (and even feed me) so that I would not have to rely on someone else for handouts all the time.

Is this a common idea?

I don’t WANT to need money, but I don’t WANT to be someone’s slave my entire life, and the cycle has already begun–grad school is not a job, but they control whether I live or die, in essence.

the wondrous (part II)

(if you haven’t read part I yet, please do so.)

I live over a bar in downtown Grand Forks, which is one of the reasons I am still up right now. Although I can sleep through most anything, the combination of it being Friday night and it being slightly noisy downstairs allows me to stay up later than I normally would. If you want to know how the bar is, I couldn’t tell you, since I haven’t been down to visit it. I arrived here in the beginning of January (having left directly after New Year’s Day, the party celebrating which was sufficiently spectacular, and hopefully will contribute to the continuing tradition) during a warm spell. Yes, it was above freezing in North Dakota up until a few days ago, and this morning it was positively (but only barely) chilly on my way to my 8 am class.

I have a great desire to meet new people, but little forceful enough motivation, and I am out of practice. So it goes. I say this not to whine about not knowing anybody, simply as a state of fact, and I am sure that I will cure myself of this eventually, as I open myself up to more and more people each day I am on campus. I see little point in making my way through the smokey barroom tonight or any night though, or, as I should say, I am afraid of going down and trying to meet people. I’d rather go relax somewhere than deal with noise and expensive drinks (although my solution to that is to come back upstairs . . . the drink part anyway!) Perhaps I am different than other people in this, but there are times when I can be incredibly social, and people expect it of one, do they not? I’m half kidding; I know how to act towards people, but the effort of being exactly what everyone expects me to be wears after a while. This is not coming out right at all, but those of you who know me know who I am, and I doubt that anyone else’s snap jusdgements based upon reading this will affect me much in any case.

I would gladly play my guitar or sing or perform in front of any number of people without feeling poorly about it at all [Wow!  How things change over time.  This is an interesting comment when juxtaposed against the previous paragraph. 2014-02-04]. The rush of the spotlight is always fun, and I guess that’s part of the reason I am the way that I am, not always wanting the center of attention but needing it sometimes. It’s a substitute drug for all those that I have never done. The same feeling comes from racing: the pure thought of it throws me into an adrenalin rush. That’s where I seek approval the least, I suppose. Winning or losing, singing well or not, I feel the same (perhaps losing a race is different for awhile, but if I did what I could, I can’t ask for more). The past is in the past, embrace the present and the future, in equal parts as situations dictate. I enjoy entertaining.

This little sketch would not be complete without my love of learning in general, which probably should have been in part I, but permeates most of my decisions. New situations are always useful in learning, and if this sounds hypocritical to my not going down to the bar tonight, then you can chalk it up to my being a poor student whose loan hasn’t been disbursed yet. I enjoy doing new things, but that ‘kick’ to get over it and just do something is sometimes a large one. I read a great deal, listen to people a lot (both to my friends and to strangers), and am working on my own theories of different psychology and how it relates to myself, for how can one learn psychology without it being in reference to themselves? I cycle and run, I am very competitive in almost everything I do. Music makes me happy.

What more could you ask?

the wondrous (part I)

A little midnight blogging, just because I’m here, and because I feel like writing/explaining, so this shoudl be a good place for it. I suppose that this blog varies in topic a great deal–it is a personal blog, but anyone googling my name the right way can find it quite easily, including potential employers in the future, present fellow students, and colleagues.

Whether what I say here means anything to them one way or another is up to them–I certainly am making no attempt to portray myself in a way that makes me look better than I actually am, no matter how you slice it. That said, I am not blogging my entire life, for a number of reasons: first, that would take up too much of my time, and my time lately has been spent enough using the computer as it is; second, there are aspects of my life I don’t want to spread out for the whole world to see, because although I am an open book to people who know me, that comes as a prerequisite for getting all the goods; third, I don’t think it will interest anyone, as much as I could try to fancy it up with great english prose style (or in the style of any other language), and to do that would, again, take more time out of my life than I am prepared to give.

This is still a personal blog, and as cheaply as possible, a personal blog includes things that interest you. I see something on the internet, and I drop a link. It is a bad habit, to be sure, but so it goes. There are times like these when I will discourse about my day, and maybe include some little of my psyche. Think of it as a cross between a documentary and any plot-driven (as opposed to character-driven) television show: You need to think in order to understand me. I know that my close friends are typically my only readers, but I like to think that I can speak to a greater audience than the people who are closest to me. We all want to be known, and the blogging revolution has given everyone their own 15 digital minutes of “fame.” barring the fact that most of the world does not have this ability.

If you don’t already know, I am currently a Masters student in Geology at the University of North Dakota, in Grand Forks. I plan for my focus to be in vertebrate paleontology, but it is only my first semester here and I am taking classes to make up for not having taken them during my undergrad, which was at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY (that’s up-upstate, 18 miles from Canada, in case you don’t know) where I received a BS in Geology.

My Honors thesis at SLU was entitled “An analysis of multiple trackways of Protichnites Owen, 1852, from the Potsdam Sandstone (Late Cambrian), St. Lawrence Valley, NY,” and can be found at SLU or by contacting me directly. Essentially, I studied an outcropping of ~500 ma Potsdam Sandstone in northern New York which contained a collection of what have been interpreted as early arthropod trackways. Since the Potsdam is a beachfront formation, the question arises of whether or not these (and similar trackways found in southern Quebec and Ontario) were produced subaerially (i.e., on dry land) or underwater. This is an important point to consider because the oldest known terrestrial (land-dwelling) animals stem from approximately this point in the history of the earth, and so there was a fairly serious change in lifestyle occurring for the organisms in question: the transition of species from marine (or even fluvial/lacrustrine) to amphibious to fully terrestrial settings. To make matters more interesting in the field, no body fossils have yet been discovered in this formation, leaving our idea of what produced these trackways up to a combination of imagination and “best guess” according to what data we already have from other localities around the world and throughout the rock record. Finally, if this isn’t enough, the ichnogenus (“ichnos” = trace or track) Protichnites was first described in 1852 (by Sir Richard Owen of the British Museum), and has since encompassed a very wide variety of forms, many of which bear little resemblance to one another!

While my current educational goal is not to focus on this research, it remains an ongoing interest of mine.

wondrous (part II)

when i run out of words bury me with a dictionary

Creativity again…sooner or later I will photograph and upload some drawings I’ve done recently, it’s something a litte different from what I usually do, which tends toward either sculpture or multimedia/video (I even started work on a surrealist film in the vein of Salvidore Dali while in Oz, but I never finished it, due to lack of a good digital camera). Right now I’m working on drawings so I can design a series of logos for this, that, and the other thing, just in case I need them (and maybe you’ll see them sooner than you think). Strangely enough, I have never built a sculpture out of a bicycle. I think this is because I see bicycles as cheap transportation, and using parts that are still valuable to a working machine seems sacreligious. Recently I built a bookshelf out of a pair of skis and some wood from an old dresser, a pretty solid piece of work in itself that kept me occupied for a day or so.

Incidentally, I’m interested in other artistic projects while I’m still here in Vermont, whether they are sculpture or paint or drawing or film or multiedia or writing. I’m looking for people who would like to collaborate.

Speaking of which, before the site disappears (until I find a new server at least), if you are from SLU (or even if you are not, and have a grasp of world events from 2002-2003) PLEASE visit my site on the Green Wall [edit, see Flickr] and drop me a comment here on what you think. I want to put together some sort of ‘world political picture’ book, using some of the imagery and tying it in with events on and off campus from that year. What I am looking for are memories of world events, campus events, whatever, that explain or enhance the stuff I have photographed–you will get full credit if you want it for what you supply, of course. There was so much going on that year that I was unable to write down some of the meanings behind some of the graffiti, and some of it I still don’t understand. By the way, if the pages suggest posting to some forum, don’t post there, please comment on this site only–any forum I may have set up does not exist anymore; at least, it is not active and is not likely to be ever. Thanks for the information.

wanting nothing but a cool glass of lemonade and some sunshine

When I get famous as a writer, I can just see the reviews of my blog:

“While most of the entries are entertainingly self-sufficient, intelligent, and written in a style that no one alive or dead could ever hope to imitate, the occasional descension into apparent self-loathing and despair takes away from the author that we truly know and love. If you can deal with the personal side of this literary mogul and its lack of writing ability, you will find nothing but joy in his blog.”

Of course, when I get famous as a musician, the reviews will be different:

“Where are the lyrics? Where are the motivations? Why does he hold back and not bare his soul to the world more often, instead of reviewing news and views held by other people? When an artist such as this chooses to represent himself in a blog, should he not be as emotionally captivating as he is on stage? He apparently doesn’t think so.”

Maybe fame as a geologist?:

“If you have interest in people and the randomness of life, this blog will keep you somewhat entertained, but if you visit the site in order to hear the ideas of tomorrow given first form, you will be saly disappointed, as science is rarely the topic and geology less so.”

And, of course, psychologists would have little use for me, no matter how famous I end up in other fields:

“It is sad to say that such a great figure in modern history, culture and spirituality has so little formal schooling in modern psychology that he disbelieves, on principal, everything that Freud ever said.”