Why do you do what you do? How does it affect you?

[2010DigitalBoy]

[COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]I'm a writer[/COLOR]. I find that it connects to my life.

Okay, here's the thing. I noticed it when I was playing with the little kids at this birthday party. (I love little kids. They flock to me, and I always amaze parents with my ability to deal with them. Everyone wishes I was their babysitter :animesmil ) anywho, I noticed how I am always so sympathetic to parents. How I always want to try and help them, tell them something that'll make thier time easier. Sympathetic to the kids, who I always feel sorry for when their parents are strict, so I always try to cheer em up.

When I look at a random person who's in trouble, I always want to help them. I only have very little courage and therefore only help in subtle ways, like maybe giving some advice or something.

It seems I like to help people a great deal. It's selfish in a way. It's like I'm trying to control people... trying to give them the ending I want. When I see a story, I want it to end a certain way, and I want to help it get there.

Luckily my endings are happy.

This also explains why when I get to know a person well I have a tendancy to have feelings for them. I want to make sure they get a happy ending. I've become particularly involved in one story... but this is getting away from the point a bit I guess.

My writing is inspired by a story which I want to go my way. I get involved with my characters and try to work them towards their ending. I think that's why I have such a hard time putting characters through trouble. It hurts me personally.

When I watch anime or play games, I almost always want to write fanfictioin so that I can end everyone's lives. When I fall in love with a cast of characters, I want to know how they turned out. Make sure it's all good.

With Tales of Symohonia (my alltime favortie game) after beating it I wrote fanfics covering about the next 7 years of the characters' lives, and would have wrote up to their deaths had the fic not died.

I think the main problem I'm having in life is that I want to write my stroy in a certain way... with a certain person... in a certain place... but the plot twists have flung me around. My ending seems impossible. If I change the story now, it'll be like I didn't get 100%. Like I got one of the "bad endings".

[SIZE=1]A post in this thread is worth 100 [COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]OtakuBucks[/COLOR][/SIZE]

[pooperson]

I am a musician. Therefore, I see things "differently" from other people... it's a proven fact that musicians basically don't think the same way as non-musicians.
So I have found myself finding the beauty in life, just as I would find the beauty in a song. I look for the major and minor chords, the melodies, the soft voices... just as in life, I look for the good in people, positive physical features, etc.
Also, I have taken a liking to photography and taking pictures & enhancing them. Bringing out beauty - once again. It's just what I do.

[TheResplendent]

I write for many reasons. When it comes to articles, to express my intellegence and better explain and analyze things worth being known to others. When it comes to fiction and stories, to express my active imagination, but most of all it is a method to live out events, goals, relationships, and journeys that i could never experience in real life. To be able to live and understand anything i want to through my characters, and their own story, believing it's the next best thing to living it myself since most of what i write is only slightly possible in reality but not entirely. It's my way of creating adventures that are meant to enthrall and characters whom are meant to impact.

I do many other things, but i guess writing is currently my biggest interest. I won't go into the others right now...

[2010DigitalBoy]

[quote name='taperson']I am a musician. Therefore, I see things "differently" from other people... it's a proven fact that musicians basically don't think the same way as non-musicians.[/quote]

...Im revoking your 100 [COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]OtakuBucks [/COLOR] for your post.

Numero Uno: Nothing is proven fact. *puts up Flamewalls*

Nii-ban: Anyone can think in any way. It all depends on what they have learned. It is not musicians who think unlike others. It is people within the said mindset who become musicians. It is the way they find they express themselves.

Number Three: NO 2 MUSICIANS ARE THE SAME. Musicians are only different from others in the fact that they are musicians, meaning every clich (sp?) s different from every other and every person is different because when you get right down to it, no two thought processes look alike.

In the immortal words of Bill Engvall, [COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]here's your sign[/COLOR].

[Albert Flasher]

[COLOR=Sienna]I'm a consumer. I consume things, often in vast quantities. I'm of the opinion that if it can't be deep fried, barbecued, or doesn't come in an individually sealed package, it is of little to no use to me.

It is often said that consumers see the world differently than other people. For example, instead of fingers, we see sausages - big, juicey sausages, ready for the grill... mmmm... Instead of hubcaps, we see pizza pans. Everything non-edable appears in a lower resolution than food or things that our brains mistake for food. This allows us to distingusih our prey much easier.

I pretty much live to consume, and prepare things for consumption. I love the sound of sizzling meat on the grill, or fries frying in oil, those sounds are the ones that make life worth while.

Our stomachs are botomless consumption holes. I'm not the kind of consumer built for speed, but for durability - I don't have the pure speed of uh... that skinny Japanese guy who shames his family with each hotdog eating compatition he wins. I'm built more like Micheal Moore - I can eat for endless stretches of time and facistly spread my opinion at the same time.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I smell baconbits... [/COLOR]

[DeadSeraphim]

[size=1][color=indigo][font=arial]I do what I do because I like to do what I like doing, which is the best reason why someone should do the things that they like to be doing.[/font][/color][/size]

[Fyxe]

[size=1][color=slategray]I'm a gamer. I tend to insist to everyone that playing video games is very beneficial to me. That it improves hand-eye coordination, that the games make me think, and that they quicken my reflexes. When, really. I know my excuses are all BS.

I just do it for entertainment.

I also find myself unhealthily attatched to fictional characters. It's getting harder for me to separate my dreams and my real life.

Go figure, I'm a geek.[/color][/size]

[Fasteriskhead]

[QUOTE=Tical]Numero Uno: Nothing is proven fact. *puts up Flamewalls*

Nii-ban: Anyone can think in any way. It all depends on what they have learned. It is not musicians who think unlike others. It is people within the said mindset who become musicians. It is the way they find they express themselves.

Number Three: NO 2 MUSICIANS ARE THE SAME. Musicians are only different from others in the fact that they are musicians, meaning every clich (sp?) s different from every other and every person is different because when you get right down to it, no two thought processes look alike.[/QUOTE]For 1: true enough if we're only talking about trying to get absolute true facts out of empirical (i.e. "experiential") observations, but I don't think this is what taperson is getting at (although it isn't phrased very clearly). Rather, we're talking about trends and rules that hold for many cases, a [I]useful guideline[/I], which is about all you can ask for in this area.

This leads right into 2 - which is my favorite point, because with all the others you're objecting to generalizations but here you drop one of your own. This last part doesn't seem to hold true if you've ever met someone who started learning to play an instrument at 5 - i.e. someone who got hooked into doing it by their parents. I don't doubt that there are some musicians who do it to "express" themselves (I've posted about this elsewhere), but there are others who've simply done it for so long that the methods have been written into them. The [I]potential[/I] and the [I]desire[/I] to become a musician is one thing, but it seems to me almost impossible for someone to spend hours and hours and hours practicing in a certain very careful and regulated way without it deeply changing how they reason, how they address certain issues, how they "think" as taperson puts it.

3 is much the same as 1: you're quite right, but I think for the moment we're looking at statistical trends rather than absolutes. For my own part (diverging from the original post), I've found that musicians, the classically trained ones at least, generally TEND to think with a strong emphasis on structure. They seem to address problems by looking at them for regularity and repitition. This is NOT to say that they themselves are particularly "balanced," though - some of the wildest people I've ever met have been musicians, and myself being only an amateur (at best) I could never quite understand the jump from their extremely regimented practicing to, well, how they led the rest of their life. But that's only a trend within a trend, though, so take it with a grain of salt.


Now onto the topic itself. I don't know what to name what I do, except maybe to just call it "thinking." "Thinking" doesn't doesn't sound very exciting, obviously.

Anyways, I don't see a distinction between "why" I do it and "how" it effects me - I do it to become a better person. By no means, then, am I just doing empty intellectual pondering to make myself look smart. When I post here or write an article I do it secondarily in the hope that I can help someone out, maybe help them in learning something. But first of all I do it to try to understand something more clearly for myself (writing usually helps me do this). I'm trying to think of a good way to explain this better.

Okay, so there's a section at the end of Plato's Charmides that I was going to save for an article, but I might as well use it here. Socrates and two others have been going around for several pages trying to figure out what [i]sophrosune[/i], "temperance" or "moderation," the highest "moral value" of ancient Athens, actually is. They get to the point where they're able to conceive it as a certain particular kind of knowledge, as the knowledge that knows whether or not the knower has or doesn't have another kind of knowledge - e.g., it allows one to know whether one does or doesn't know anything about shoemaking. After that they get stuck, and they have some difficulty figuring out exactly how this is useful. Finally, they suddenly hit upon something more fundamental: [i]sophrosune[/i] is the knowledge of [i]to agathon te kai kakon[/i], usually badly translated as "good and evil" (which, taken in the usual way, makes little sense). "Good" here means that which is fitting, that which is proper, the "natural" and unclouded, close proximity to truth. "Evil" then means the unfitting, the improper, the "unnatural," the confused. [i]Sophrosune[/i] is knowledge such that one can be and act in accordance with the good, in other words, that knowledge which leads to a good life. If anything sums up what I'm trying to get at with what I do, this is it. Hopefully that makes sense, and clears up what I was saying above to a degree...

Ah, well, I probably write this in vain. No one's going to be able to top Red 6's post.

[pooperson]

[QUOTE=Tical]...Im revoking your 100 [COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]OtakuBucks [/COLOR] for your post.

Numero Uno: Nothing is proven fact. *puts up Flamewalls*

Nii-ban: Anyone can think in any way. It all depends on what they have learned. It is not musicians who think unlike others. It is people within the said mindset who become musicians. It is the way they find they express themselves.

Number Three: NO 2 MUSICIANS ARE THE SAME. Musicians are only different from others in the fact that they are musicians, meaning every clich (sp?) s different from every other and every person is different because when you get right down to it, no two thought processes look alike.

In the immortal words of Bill Engvall, [COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]here's your sign[/COLOR].[/QUOTE]

Number 1 - Ok, you got me there. I don't want to be all philosophical here - it's not worth it.
Ni-ban TO san-ban [hai, nihongo o hanase] - [COLOR=DarkOrange][URL=http://www.webmd.com/content/Article/107/108473.htm]Go here.[/URL][/COLOR]
[COLOR=Blue][URL=http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part2.pdf]and here.[/URL] [/COLOR]
The first is a WebMD which talks about how practicing a musical instrument can alter the habits of someone.Then [COLOR=DeepSkyBlue][URL=http://www.webmd.com/content/article/32/1728_79229.htm]this[/URL] [/COLOR]WebMD article talks about the brains of musicians and how they form differently.
The second is a study on how the brain can "change". There is one quote I would like to mention if you choose to not read the article.
[QUOTE=Mark Prensky]
A comparison of musicians versus nonplayers (sic) brains via magnetic resonance imaging showed a 5 percent greater volume in the musicians' cerebellums, ascribed to adaptations in the brain's structure resulting from intensive musical training and practice.[/QUOTE]
There's my proof. My [I]personal [/I]reason for believing this is because it was proven to me. In band class, we are required to play complex pieces where there is more than one melody, harmony, etc. In one piece, there was an exciting, fast-paced melody being played along with - at the same time, mind you - the tune of "I am Jesus' Little Lamb" - a softer, sadder tune. Pieces like this force you to listen to what's going on around you and be more aware. This applies also in real life. If you have played a piece like that, it [U]trains your mind[/U] to be more aware to EVERYTHING.
That's all for now.

[Guest Mysterious]

the things that i do never affect me in a good way example kid theratens my life in class now in todays day you cant take that as a joke so i stood up in my defence teachers seperate us after school we runs up on me i swing he goes down and hits a adminastrater this affects me in a bad way because now im in trouble with the man and been put on probation.

why i did what i did cause if i diddnt fight him some kid would think i was soft and try to make a name for him and fight me and if i did people know not to mess with me for a little while.

[The13thMan]

[QUOTE=Tical]...Im revoking your 100 [COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]OtakuBucks [/COLOR] for your post.

Numero Uno: Nothing is proven fact. *puts up Flamewalls*

Nii-ban: Anyone can think in any way. It all depends on what they have learned. It is not musicians who think unlike others. It is people within the said mindset who become musicians. It is the way they find they express themselves.

Number Three: NO 2 MUSICIANS ARE THE SAME. Musicians are only different from others in the fact that they are musicians, meaning every clich (sp?) s different from every other and every person is different because when you get right down to it, no two thought processes look alike.

In the immortal words of Bill Engvall, [COLOR=DarkSlateBlue]here's your sign[/COLOR].[/QUOTE]
[FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]I thought numero uno was especially funny. If nothing is a proven fact then the statement in itself cannot be a proven fact, therefore disproving itself. It's like saying "i only speak in lies" or "i choose not to choose". Besides that the statements wrong for other reasons. There are plenty of proven facts. Ever do math? 2 + 2 = 4, that is a proven fact, it will never ever change.

And i have a question, are you musician?

Just wondering....

Me personally i'm a couple things. I'm an intellectual (or so i like to think), i'm a mathematician (i love math), i'm a musician (i play guitar, alto sax, bassoon, and clarinet), i'm an artist (i draw), and i'm a couple of other things. I'm not defined by only one thing and that's the way i like it. But i did name off the big things that define me.

So that's what i think i am...but i personally like getting other people's opinions about me. I think i'm either too arrogant or too modest when i judge myself. Haha. What the hell am i talking about?

Later.
[/COLOR] [/FONT]

[Sojiro47]

I do what I do, because it suits me! No other reason, not that I need one to begin with! If I had to give another answer, I would have to cut you down with my Katana Shinobu because I can't give another answer!

[Fasteriskhead]

[quote name='The13thMan][FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]I thought numero uno was especially funny. If nothing is a proven fact then the statement in itself cannot be a proven fact, therefore disproving itself.[/COLOR'] [/FONT][/quote]Not necessarily. It would be nice if Tical had elaborated a little more on what she (he? I'm going with she) meant by numero uno ("Nothing is proven fact"). As it is, I'm going to assume that by that she means to say: nothing discovered [i]empirically[/i] (i.e. gathered through "experience") can ever be absolutely proven. Such a statement doesn't concern itself with this or that lesson which we can "know" from experience, but rather talks about the CONDITIONS that have to exist before we can even begin to formulate those lessons at all. The idea of "truth," from the earliest interpreters of Aristotle on, has meant the correspondence of a [i]representation[/i] (a statement, a judgment, a mental picture) to something out in the world. By definition a representation [i]cannot be identical[/i] with what it represents, so there's always a distance between thinking and what is thought about; "Nothing is proven fact" says only this. The statement cannot be itself proven, yes, but that's only because we HAVE to take it up when we also take up the idea of truth as representation (and we DO do this). Truth proving itself is like a snake eating its own tail.

[quote name='The13thMan][FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange] There are plenty of proven facts. Ever do math? 2 + 2 = 4, that is a proven fact, it will never ever change. [/COLOR'] [/FONT][/quote]This is an interesting issue which I can't address here. I suggest you (and anyone else interested!) read the Prefaces and Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly the parts concerning the distinction between [i]a priori[/i] and [i]a posteriori[/i] knowledge - I'm sure there's a copy online somewhere. You do quote Arty Schopenhauer in your sig, so a little Kant should just be a walk next door.

(you could also just look up the distinction on wikipedia or something)

(what? what do you mean, "Can we get back to the topic"?)

[2010DigitalBoy]

[QUOTE=The13thMan][FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]I thought numero uno was especially funny. If nothing is a proven fact then the statement in itself cannot be a proven fact, therefore disproving itself. It's like saying "i only speak in lies" or "i choose not to choose". Besides that the statements wrong for other reasons. There are plenty of proven facts. Ever do math? 2 + 2 = 4, that is a proven fact, it will never ever change.

And i have a question, are you musician?[/COLOR] [/FONT][/QUOTE]

The way I look at life is not that all things are lies, but all things are true. Everything coexists as one being and therefor all things are all things. Changing facts is easy as all things are only fact in the minds of people, therefor if no one thought that 2 + 2 = 4 than it would not be true any longer. Just check out the book 1984 and you can see it in effect.

Also, I am a musician in a way. I'm a singer/songwriter without the band. I am capable of playing instruments, but my love is singing.