Follow up: Love and Hate

Today's post is a follow up on my previous one: http://rekisublog.blogspot.com/2010/06/love-hate-and-forgiveness.html. I've received a few comments and had quite a lot of conversation in relation to the post and I felt it would good to share everything I've heard. Interestingly enough, all of these ideas I've received separately, however they actually tie in together quite nicely. Just to note, this post will only be touching on the transition from loving someone to hating someone, and not on the forgiveness part.

First up we have Fodder's idea: A way of thinking about love and hate can be something like a score which ranges from -100 (you actually want to kill the person) to +100 (you love the person so much you'd die for them), and people who you are completely indifferent to are a 0. So a person has a base score which can be adjusted but certain things you do can also give you a timely positive or negative bonus (i.e. you can have a base score of 40 but because you just punched them in the face you've got a -80 score added to that). What I like about this way of mapping things out is that it nicely allows for variation in people. So if you're a fickle person a +30 could be "love" and a -10 could be "hate", or if you're someone who generally dislikes all people, 0 could already be in your hate range.

The idea implies that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and in essence, that you can't love and hate someone at the same time. Supposing this is true it makes it very easy to explain the transition people have from love to hate (and back again). Personally I don't have any issues with this idea's implication either. Even if I love someone, if they do something that makes me "hate" them I don't feel both love and hate at the same time, but once I cool down the "hate" goes away and the love feeling comes back. I know that it is possible to hate and love someone at the same time, but I've never personally experienced the feeling before, nor have I ever seen anyone that does. Also, supposing that it is possible it could be described as someone's score rapidly changing.

Jeffro's idea: Jeffro points out that moving from love to hate can be attributed to a number of different ideas. It's best explained when you think of the situation where you're in a relationship with someone and enjoying it, and then they break up with you. At first there's a bit of confusion because you need to try to adjust your feelings from liking them to not liking them. The part I find most interesting is the idea that the anger can come from a means of self protection: because they've broken up with you they have some kind of emotional influence on you and so to disrupt this emotional influence you force yourself to hate the person.

This ties in very nicely with Fodder's idea, the person you liked was say around +70, but then because they broke up with you, you try to bring them back down to something lower, say +10. To do this the easiest way is to add quite a few "hate" bonuses to the base score to bring the current feeling down and adjust the base score. In essence these two idea combined really help to explain the concept of loving then hating someone.

Another concept brought up during an IM I had involves looking at how people remember things. Humans are quite terrible at remembering the specifics of an event, instead it's very good at remembering enough to get the important information across when you "look up" an event in memory. Because of this what the brain *does* remember very well are the emotions you felt around a certain event, and if you felt strong emotions during an event, a person's brain is also likely to treat the event as a particularly important and therefore record more details about it. A good example of this is a first date. Most people remember their first date with a partner quite clearly, yet would they remember what they did on their 4th, 5th, 20th date? Since the brain stores information in this way when you're with a person you like the details don't become important, what is important is the feeling you get while being around the person. So then what happens when the feelings change?

I personally love this example, probably first of all because it's a bit more scientific and so I see the evidence as being a bit more concrete, but largely because I can personally relate to it, and I've seen a large number of examples which fall within this model. To me spending time with my girlfriend doesn't mean we have to do something special, what I enjoy most is simply being with her and how I feel when I'm around her. On the other hand this idea beautifully explains how some couples break up. Two people have been going out for a while but something happens and the feeling drastically changes and so they break up. The other way to look at it is how couples stay together. The couples that stay together are the ones that can look at both the feeling and the details. Sure something bad might have happened but those who can look at the relationship as a whole and judge whether it's worth loosing everything they have over one incident are a lot more likely to be successful.

As a side note: I wonder if that means a relationship is likely to last longer if the people involved are less emotionally attached to the relationship, however in that case would those people enjoy the relationship as much? I wonder if you could graph something like the success of relationships based on emotional investment/length of an enjoyable relationship.

The last idea for today is look at emotions from a completely biological point of view. Most feelings, including emotions, are regulated simply by chemical releases in the body (which are controlled by the brain). It starts getting interesting when you look at it from a homeostatic point of view. Homeostasis is in essence the body's ability to keep itself alive, it includes functions like keeping your body at a set temperature and ensuring that you have the right amount of water in your body. This actually plays a very very large factor in the way humans and animals behave. For example, say you don't have enough water in your body: you can go through all these really complex processes to try and keep the water that you currently have in your body, but the easiest way to take care of things by far is to simply feel thirsty. Feeling thirsty will cause you to seek out water, and hence, directly affects your behaviour.

Loving someone is no different, the feelings of love that humans experience are a mix of feelings that the body itself produces. These feelings are also passed down genetically, making the need to love someone somewhat instinctive, or at the very least the need to reproduce is. When you think about it this way, Fodder's model works perfectly: a person you don't know produces no feeling (0 points) and someone you like can automatically cause your body to produce a feeling (+ve base points). What happens around you can cause reactions in your body which produces +ve or -ve feelings in response to a person.

Anyhow that's enough for me for one day. If anything seems unclear, doesn't make sense, or you just want to talk about what I've written feel free to talk with me by the usual means. I also want to thank those who have taken the time to either comment on my blog or talk to me in person about these ideas.

Goal

Sorry about the long delay between posts, I've been working on this one for a while but for some reason I've been having a bit of trouble coming up with the right words. Anyway, for today's post I'm going to share with you a bit about myself. In essence I'll be talking about a part of my personality and why I'm the way I am.

People who have known me for a while will often see a particular pattern to my behaviour, I have a tendency to become "obsessed" with things. It's not something I do deliberately, it's something that just happens. So what do I mean by "obsessed"? Well I'll run you through the typical situation. Someone will introduce me to something completely new that I've never done before. Typically it's something like a game (video or board game), although a new sport or watching and talking about a new anime series is also completely possible.

As I start trying this new activity out I'll find it incredibly interesting and I'll make it something that I regularly do. My interest in the activity will steadily grow until it becomes a central part in what I do. So my life would be for example: attend uni, go home, do activity. However after a period of time, for no real reason in particular I'd suddenly drop the activity. Sometimes it's because I'd start getting bored with it but more often then not for no particular reason I'll stop doing it. Eventually I'd find something new to do and this process will repeat itself over and over again.

To be honest I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this side of myself. To some extent I wish I could just pick an activity I know I like and stick with it, but at the same time my life has been fun enough so far, so it's not like I'm not enjoying being like this. I've become a bit of a "jack of all trades" kind of person. I seem to have developed a skill in learning new things, I have the ability to pick up the basics in something quite quickly even though I've never done it before. I also seem to have a fairly wide-spread area of knowledge, yet I don't know the fine details in most of these areas. I guess part of the problem is that I also feel a bit like a "master of none", which kinda makes me feel a bit useless at times I guess. For example, I'll always completely fail in any trivia activity even if it involves questions that fall under my areas of expertise, simply because the questions asked often require some kind of detailed knowledge about the subject, or I'll have forgotten the answer even though I'll know I knew it at one point in time.

Interestingly enough there is one activity which I'm not quite as "obsessed" with, but has stuck with me for years on end. I've been programming for over 6 years now and I still find it highly enjoyable. I continually learn something new with it and I just find writing programs enjoyable. However despite this programming seems to be more like a secondary thing to me. Although I do tend to give myself programming projects which force me to learn and expand my knowledge in the area, I still tend to only do this when I'm not focusing or am unable to do what I'm currently "obsessed" with. Because of this, despite programming for so long, I'm so far from being a truly good programmer that I feel like I don't really have the right to be proud of my skill in it - despite the fact that it's probably my single best skill.

So how does all of this tie in with the title of today's post? Well, in essence I find myself lacking any particular goal. When I'm in my "obsessed" mode I get a kind of temporary goal which is usually "get better at this activity" and that goal is fine for the moment. However I feel it's no good simply hopping from one of my obsessions to another (although I don't really understand why I feel this way). I'm getting older and moving towards the time in my life where I need to be making decisions for the future, however because I lack a goal, because I don't have anything I want to achieve, I find no answers to these decisions.

I guess I'd like a job that doesn't completely suck and I'd like to be able to live comfortably, but they're not exactly something I really feel like I can strive for, it's not really something that motivates me. I guess I'm the type of person who's natural state is to lazily go with the flow. This is a deep contrast to my parents who are the type of people who are always striving to do as much as possible whenever they get the chance. They often push for me to be more like them, and I can understand why they do, however I just have no drive to be like that, and I often feel that either don't understand my lack of motivation or they don't see it as a reason to not be in the 'go' mode all the time. I know I would be better off if I was more like them in that regard, but without anything to strive for it's not going to happen.

In all honesty I actually wish I had a goal at the moment. I see people who have goals, who are motivated to put in so much work towards something and gain the satisfaction of getting closer to obtaining that goal - and I feel jealous that they have something that can drive them forward in the long run. I guess, for the time being, all I can do is go with the flow and hope I find my own goal.

Love, Hate and Forgiveness

Today's post will be my first ever post on human behaviour, I have no idea how this'll turn out so get ready for (what I presume to be) a bumpy ride. The topic for today is, as you can tell, love and hate, and in particular how humans seem to be able to switch from loving someone to hating someone so easily.

I can't remember where I heard it, but a couple (I think) months ago I heard a quote which went something along these line, "Humans...what foolish creatures. It amazes me to see how they can go from loving another of their kind, to hating them so quickly". I believe the quote was either from some kind of Sci-Fi movie or game, possibly even an anime. I've tried searching for it but pretty much any search I did with the words '"love" and "hate" together gave me links to those answer sites with questions like "Is it possible to love someone you hate?" or forum posts with "I hate x for loving someone who isn't me". What really made the quote stick in my mind was how true I found it to be.

It's actually not that unusual a scenario when you think about it. Isn't easy to picture a couple who's broken up and hate each other's guts? Why is it that there are plenty of stories about couples that break up and then go on to smash up their ex loved one's car or house. I even encountered a scenario in Fable 2 (a quest based RPG game set in the medieval for the Xbox 360) that I found quite interesting.

You encounter a ghost who tells you his story: He was in love with a woman named Joan and she was in love with him, they both agreed to get married, but on the day of the wedding the bride doesn't show. Grief stricken the man took his own life and due to his regret he remains as a ghost, who gives you the task of exacting revenge. The task is to make Joan fall in love with you, and then when she's ready to marry you hand her a rejection letter that goes something along the lines of "I don't really love you, this was all a trick. P.S. I think you're a dirty cow". Making someone fall in love with you is stupidly easy in Fable 2 (after you meet a person for the first time all you have to do is dance for a minute or so and they're ready for marriage), and so it didn't take long until I was ready to hand Joan the letter.

Upon receiving the letter she runs out of town in distress and you never see her in town again. When you go back to pick up the reward from the ghost man (you get some gold and oddly enough become more renowned as a hero of the world =/ although you also get some evil points), you encounter a conversation between the ghost of the man and the ghost of Joan. She goes on to say that she always loved the man (and never thought she could love again until your dancing seduces her) but just didn't think she was ready for marriage at the time, however she's willing to give it a go with him again as a ghost. This gets interrupted when she realizes that the main character is there and the whole thing was a set up. She gets extremely upset with the male ghost and the main character and runs away for good while cursing your names.

I think this is an almost perfect example of what I'm trying to get at today. I didn't find anything about this scenario particularly out of place (except for you know...the whole ghost thing) and found both the male ghost and Joan's behaviour to be quite reasonable. This actually surprised me quite a bit when I looked back at it. Here you've got a man who loved a woman so much he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her...except now he's out for revenge. The ghost of Joan, upon finding the ghost of her (lost) love is overjoyed that she can be with him again...until she finds out about his plot. Am I the only one who finds it odd that these characters can go from loving someone one minute, to hating their guts the next? Why would you exact revenge on someone that you love? (and if I didn't make it clear before; ghost-man does still love Joan). Despite the fact that ghost Joan clearly loved ghost man - upon learning about his plot not only does she not love him, she hates him!

From my personal experience love is a feeling, not something that you can easily put into words. It doesn't matter that someone did something mean or completely horrible to you, it doesn't mean that the feeling that you had for that person is gone. Sure you might be mad or angry at them at first, but is it really worth forcing yourself to hate someone for the rest of your life (or death in this case I suppose) just because they wronged you? Sure my girlfriend does stuff that makes me angry from time to time but that doesn't mean that I stay angry at her forever. My mum shits me up the wall - sometimes for weeks on end to the point where I feel I'm going to crack, but that doesn't mean that I don't love her, it just means that I'm pissed off at her for the time being. Even just with friends; if a friend does something that mightily embarrasses me or pisses me off I'm not going to stop being their friend, I'm just going to be pissed off at them for a while, but eventually I'll get over it and forgive them.

This brings me to an interesting point my girlfriend said to me once which actually shocked me quite a bit. After getting super crazy 100% mightily pissed off(!!!!) with one of her friends, she decided that she wasn't going to be friends with them anymore. Despite this, within about a week she started wanting to talk to and spend time with her friend again. When I asked her, "why not just talk with her then?" her response was somewhere along the lines of, "because I shouldn't! I'm supposed to be pissed off with her!" and then later down the track she came up with something like, "I'm such a weak person for wanting to spend time with her again, I wish I could hate people more! You know how some people can hate someone and just keep hating them forever? I can't do that, I forgive them too easily."

Hearing her say this really made me think: why is it bad that she wants to forgive her friend? I can understand the feeling that she has, but I have no idea where the pressure of needing to continue to hate someone comes from. This is something I really would like to hear some opinions/theories from others about. Does the idea come from movies, or those drama TV shows were people are like (deep breath here), "I thought I could love you but then you stepped on my grape and squished it and got grape juice on my floor and then took the skin of the grape on the underside of your shoe so now I can't even beat the grape for leaving juice on my floor and so now you're my worst enemy even though I still secretly love you and if I want my character to have more screen time I'll eventually have a second go with you." I can understand how she felt a "pressure" to keep hating her friend, however at the same time it doesn't make sense, and at the very least I really don't agree with it (even if I do act on this "pressure" sometimes). Am I too weak a person because I prefer the idea of forgiving people rather than staying pissed at them forever?

Curiously enough, to me this kind of situation actually gives a +1 to religion. I'm not a particularity religious person (even if I did go to a Anglican school), however I often feel that Christianity has the right idea for the most part. If only it's believers actually focused on the main ideas rather than "Ohh look that man (supposedly) came back from the dead so we should thank him for everything we do, and focus on people who are (apparently) spiritually closer to this guy and listen to what they say". The other alternative seems to be, "I have to follow what was written here by the letter, but I don't agree with that part there, so I'm going to create my own spin-off version of this religion which is going to be exactly the same except for this part which says I can now sleep with lots of women.

Getting back on track...a main guiding principle behind Christianity is forgiveness: humans aren't perfect, we make mistakes and we do things that hurt others or piss them off, so understand that people are like that, forgive them for doing it to you, and understand that you also do it to other people. To me this is actually on the right page. Yes someone you love(d) or your best friend might have done something extremely bad to you or pissed you off but that doesn't mean that you should hate them forever, try to understand them and forgive them for what they did.

I'm exhausted after writing all that, and it took a while too (writing blogs is surprisingly slower than reading them :P), so I'm going to leave the post here for today. I am extremely interested in hearing what people have to say about what I've talked about today. I'm happy to talk about anything related to what I've written about today, but I'll also quickly sum up the main points I'm interested in hearing about below. To talk to me about this stuff either: comment on my blog, send me an email or chat to me on IM (if I don't already have you as a contact send me an email first or you'll be ignored).

Summary:

1) How people can go from loving someone to hating someone so easily, and

2) Why it's not particularly surprising that this happens (i.e. does the Fable 2 scenario seem weird/out of place to you and why?)

3) Is it bad to forgive people so easily, and

4) Why does there seem to be a kind of "pressure" that says it's wrong to forgive others?

5) Is it really bad to want to forgive others?

How it started (Part 2)

The previous post ended up being much bigger than I expected so I decided to split the two stories into different posts. So today's post is all about where the name Rekisu came from (in my opinion it's not as entertaining as the other story).

Rekisu is actually a fairly modern development, which came around only three or four years ago when I started becoming a more active member of the internet. I came up with the name alexnickolias for creating an account online, and that's pretty much what I've used it for. I've never intended for it to be my online name, or a name that people would use to refer to me. Instead whenever I've had to register something or create an account to view something I've always used the name alexnickolias.

So being a computer nerd I spent a lot of time around the internet reading forums and being on IRC channels, however I never really took a part in them. I would always enjoy watching people have conversations and despite my own opinions I would never actually put in. As time went on I started wanting to put in more and more, but what held me back was (yet again) the lack of a good name people could refer to me by.

Around the same time I was introduced into the world of anime fans. I first got into anime at high school, however at that time I only knew of one other person who was into really into anime. Towards the end of my highschool days I stumbled upon some people (who were literally friends of a friend's friend) who were also anime fans. Thus through them I got to learn the good sides and the bad sides of other anime fans.

In this group there was one person in particular who was studying Japanese, and during one particular meet up she decided to work out the Japanese equivalent of our names. The Japanese language actually has a whole alphabet called Katakana, which is used for writing/saying foreign words in Japanese. For example take the English word "cream": in Japanese there are characters for 'ku' ク, 'ri' リ, and 'mu' ム, so 'cream' is written as クリーム, literally 'kuri-mu'.

So on that day I was named レキス or Rekisu, funnily enough this isn't strictly correct (my name having an L and an X in it makes it hard to convert it to Japanese), Rekusu is actually the proper way to to turn Lex into Katakana. By the time I found out I had already gotten used to being called Rekisu and so I decided not to mention anything and just stick with it.

From here on it should be pretty obvious. With Rekisu being my 'second' name I decided to use it as my online name too. It actually works extremely well as an online name, Lex is an uncommon enough name as it is, and Rekisu seems to be even rarer (I think I've only even encountered one situation where the name Rekisu was taken). I use it whenever I expect people online to refer to me by name, so most people probably see it when I'm playing games.

So there you have it, now you know how the names alexnickolias and Rekisu came to be.

How it started (Part 1)

Time for my first real blog post! I figured I'd start off by telling a story about myself, one that I find often interests most people who meet me. I'm sure you've noticed the name of this blog, and possibly my email address too. A lot of people I meet ask me where my usernames alexnickolias and Rekisu come from, and it's a bit of a long story so I usually shrug the question off until it gets brought up during a time I can be bothered talking about it >_<. I'll start off with my first username alexnickolias, the screen name I created for myself when I was 10 years old, and stuck with me ever since.

At the time I was in the 5th grade, not too long after we moved to Australia from the big US of A; I was actually born in Melbourne but for work purposes my whole family moved to sunny California when I was just 3 years old. We stayed there for 6 years and then moved back to Australia when I was 9 years old. Not long after we moved back I was enrolled into one of those fancy pants all boys private schools called Trinity Grammar (http://www.trinity.vic.edu.au).

As a requirement all boys in year 5 and up got their own personal laptops to use as a study tool, and to familiarize kids how to use emerging technology (this was back in 1999 when most families would easily share one computer (and not really know how to use it)). And so I received my first laptop, a Toshiba Satellite (I can't remember the model number). I can still remember just how happy I was to have a whole laptop computer to myself. It had colour screen (laptops 2-3 years before ours didn't even have colour screens), 800 MHz Intel Pentium II processor, 32MB of RAM and a 3GB hdd, all weighing in at just 3.5kg, and all this for only $2000! This laptop was seriously teh shitz, matching the specs of my family's 6 month old Dell *desktop* which would have cost about $1500 at the time.

Naturally having a classroom of 25 boys all armed with their own laptops for purely educational purposes meant that it didn't take long before we were all playing games whenever our teacher wasn't looking, however we had a problem, it wasn't easy to give games to each other. At the time there were two games that everyone wanted to, or was, playing: Croc (the original) and Star Wars: Jedi Knights (also the original). These games were around 100MB in size and we had no real way of transferring files that large between each other. USB's weren't around back then, and floppy disks could only hold 1.4MB. Eventually we came across a solution when someone discovered that you could split a zip file into multiple parts! By splitting a game into a few dozen 2MB files we could attachment to an email and email them to each other! (We could only do this while at school and it took about 15 minutes per file to attach).

The only flaw in our plan was that all school emails were tracked by the Deputy Headmaster, and so if we were to email games around, we'd quickly get found out. That was until we made another brilliant discovery, hotmail! Within the space of a day nearly all 75 people spread across three grade 5 classes had a hotmail account with cool usernames like daniiboy3973! The only person in our class who didn't have a hotmail account was myself, not because I didn't want to, or because I didn't know how to sign up for an account, but because I was terribly uncreative and couldn't come up with a cool username.

Home I went that fateful night wondering what I could possibly call my new online identity. In the end I couldn't come up with anything, and so I did what any 10 year old boy does when they get stuck; I asked my parents for help. I can still remember the exact advice Dad gave me "Try to be a bit creative, but you need to make sure it's something that people will recognize you by, so make it something close to your real name". I think what came next is a perfect example of what they call "children's logic".

I was born into this world as Alexander, but I have always been known as Lex (take Alex without the A). So when my Dad told me to use my real name, I took that literally. Following that theme I decided that I would combine my real first name, with my middle name Nikolajs (pronounced: Nick-o-lies). Unfortunately at the time, I didn't know how to spell my middle name, so I took my best guess, "nickolias" hence my first username was born, alexnickolias!

In the beginning...

So what is this blog supposed to be about? For me it's largely a bit of an experiment. Partially to practice writing, partially to try opening up a bit, and largely because I often see various bits of human behaviour that interests me, but I never seem to talk about it. On top of that I'm likely to blog about anything in particular, or tell stories of what's happened in my past. In short, this blog is largely going to be about various things I have and will experience. I except that at first only my friends will really read this blog, but as time goes on I hope that other readers such as friends of friends might pick it up.

What I don't want this blog to be is an online diary, I would like for this blog to be a place of discussion; not my own, larger scale twitter. I'm also hoping that the people who do read this blog will take a part in it. I want to know what other people think, I want to hear other people's opinions. To me, what would be ideal is something like a Flog (Forum-Blog), where I could write an article and there would be an open environment to discuss it. To me blog comments have always seemed less open to discussion compared to a forum. Anyway, for the time being I'll settle for blog comments and if I get a large enough response I might open up something else.

Moving on, I guess I should probably give an introduction. My name is Lex, I live around Melbourne Victoria (that's in Australia for those of you who don't know), I'm a 21 year old male currently differed from my Computer Science degree at The University of Melbourne until the next semester starts. My main two interests would be video games and anime.

In terms of video games I grew up with classic platformers and RPGs on the SNES, and those tend to be the types of games I like the most (although I play a wide variety of games). On the anime side of things I tend to favour action based stuff although I watch just about anything (although I tend to not like shojo (girly) stuff as much). All in all I'm pretty much your standard nerd.

As someone who does Computer Science I tend to spend a lot of my time around computers. I do a lot of programming, and when I'm not working on projects for uni I'm often slowly working on my own little programming projects. As such you'll probably get some programming based posts from time to time. I currently work for a group of people known as StudentIT for Melbourne Uni. We provide first level (although usually higher) IT support for students by manning helpdesks that sit in computer labs. We support students with their own laptops and we maintain the computers in the labs.

Anyway, I'll leave the introductions here for now. I hope you enjoy your stay with my blog and don't forget to comment!

Hello World

It's all got to start with a "Hello World"...