Big Big Question

Your (or your kid’s) weirdest Halloween costume?

(hat tip)

What song(s) are you embarrassed that you listen to (and love)? Could be junk, top 40, misogynistic - it’s the idea that you’re repulsed by the fact that you love it.

Is there a movie you’ve seen recently that left you wanting? A movie that had you wishing you could put in disc 2 and continue to follow the characters?

I’m thinking of Yard Darts (aka Lawn Darts, aka Jarts?) personally — though I think we only got away with that because my grandma had an old set sitting around from when they were popular.

If you were in Oregon in the eighties, you’ve got a better than average chance of having seen Goonies and Stand By Me—both shot in our fine state, and extra-famous because of that.

Where are you from, and what movies do locals pretty much Have To See on account of the locale?

Two epic guys with lots of respective canon. Both interested in peace. Both vilified by their contemporary powers-that-be.

Somewhat different methods and personal philosophies.

So what would the Christ and the Vigilante be able to get together on? What are the irreconcilables?

What major or minor errors or faux pas did you make in your early days of using the Internet? Any embarrassing moments or behaviors?

I first got online in 1998. At one time I started noticing that a lot of search results I got were from some site called “wikipedia.” Being the naive little teenager I was, I assumed it was some kind of Wiccan encyclopedia.

Though unfamiliar with the term, I once created a sockpuppet at a major online forum (not Metafilter). I was called out in approximately 0.0001 milliseconds.

Imagine some economic/ecological/othertypical disaster strikes before we’re properly able to get out of our current petroleum culture. What might the world look like carless? Who would be worst off? Who would manage best? What unexpected effects might we encounter?

note: other things which likewise run on gas may or may not continue operation in this hypothetical, depending entirely on the preference of the answerer. If you want to tell me about a world sans automobiles, but which still has functional air planes, knock yourself out. If you want to assume all modern petroleum fueled transportation is out, that’s awesome, too.

I’ve found myself in a few discussions about just how permanent web content is, and how permanent it should be, and what folks expectations on that front are. It’s a big question, and I’m curious what sort of take you folks have on it.

What do you expect to stay around? What do you not count on? Why? Is how you things see right now how you’d like to see them? Where do your feelings on this come from, historically?

Etc. Go crazy.

It is the year Eleventy-Billion CE. The last vestiges of humanity have boarded the spaceship that soon will take flight toward what we hope is a habitable star system (Glorb-32, if you’re curious) some 10000 light years away. The ship can only move at half the speed of light, so the journey will take approximately 20 thousand years. Given that we have aboard a library of all human knowledge to date and the means to continually update that knowledge base, what procedures and protocols would you set in place to assure that the future settlers of Planet Glorb have the necessary cultural and intellectual equipment in place to successfully colonize the planet? Remember, they’ve been on the ship for twice as long as recorded human history on Earth. They’ve never set foot on a planet, never tilled a field, never dug a mine, never swam in a river. What methods could be used to make sure that our colonists are ready to leave the womb of the ship and start anew on Planet Glorb?

Take spammer Stephen Sanchez, iProfile shill, who (round of applause here) is the first person to try sockpuppet spam on the Big Big Question.

Steve-o posted a (bizarrely practical!) question about resumes and then thoughtfully answered it himself under a different account, couched in a fictional happy discovery of a great new resource blah blah blah etc.

So, here’s the dilemma: Stephen had to have (a) found the site, (b) discerned that it was, indeed, a question-and-answer resource of some sort, and (c) had the wherewithal to bother with a two-account sockpuppet show — all of which are arguments toward having some notion of what you’re on about, at least — and yet the end result was so baldly, embarrassingly obvious that any credit lent above is revoked with prejudice.

While this sort of spam may be new to the BBQ, it’s old hat at mefi and has been running wild on the net for a good long time. So there’s a culture for it to fester in — one of naivety or indifference or even encouragement in some places. In that case, rather than raw stupidity being to blame, is it that this unchallenging environment has made otherwise bright, attentitive stars of the die-in-a-fire spam-and-shill sector lazy?

I’m also willing to accept “all of the above” as an answer.

As the world changes around us, we tend to get used to the “new”; this is especially true of those who are younger, and never really knew the “old”. Over time, this leads to a situation where it may be difficult to imagine having to live in a world without the things we today take for granted.

With that in mind, the question I pose is a simple one: what recent advancement has “spoiled” you, to the point where you simply cannot imagine having to live in a world where it did not exist?

This does not have to be limited to tech toys and gadgets; it could be social, political, or really anything you could imagine. If pressed for a definition of “recent”, I would say “within 10 years of your date of birth”; so, within your own lifetime, or close to it.

So what is it for you?

It occurred to me that if we do find some kind of life on another planet, our first instinct is probably going to be try and communicate with it.

What if it is an animal with the intelligence equivalent of a dolphin, horse, or a cat?

It seems to me we have an extremely long way to go with “communicating” with cats and the like, how in the world can we expect to converse with an equivalent alien being?

Would it behoove us to make more of an effort on human to animal communication?

How do you handle panhandlers? Do you give cash? Do you feel guilty about it, either way? Are you actually helping, or just enabling, and is that a bad thing?

Vital, necessary research here:

Boxers or briefs?  Or something else?  Why?  When?  What made the change for you?  Do you maintain a hybrid schedule?  Do you have a word in what your partner chooses?

(Also, hey, look under there!  Yes.  Yes.  I just made you say “under where”.  Happy Friday!)

Do you vote in local or national elections? If so, why? If not, why not?

The office cubicle — four interchangeable grey walls surrounding a desk — is the fixture of the modern corporate work aesthetic. Nobody likes them, but abolishing them by force of will won’t work, so:

What could make cubicles better? What’s been done already?

I’m sure there are some people out there who are confused about whether they’re attractive or not. But I bet most of us have a gut-level feeling about our looks.

It doesn’t matter (to this question) whether our feelings are based in reality or not (whether there’s such a thing as objective beauty is a subject for another question). I’m just interested in hearing from people who consider themselves — who feel themselves to be — attractive.

It may be hard for such people to fess up, because doing so sounds conceited. But I’m hoping that at least some people will get over this. I’d really love to hear thoughtful answers.

As for me, I’ve never felt attractive. Let me clarify that a little. I’ve certainly felt that specific people have liked the way I look. And that felt good. And it might have even briefly made me feel attractive. But still, at my core, I never felt that their assessment was correct. I’ve never been able to sustain the feeling that I’m attractive.

At worst I feel ugly. At best, I feel average. I’m a little ashamed to admit this (though I doubt my confession will surprise anyone), but my self-assessment has had a huge impact on my life. Not a day goes by when I don’t, at least once, think about my (lack of) looks. I compare myself with other people (and usually come off the worst); I covet other people’s beauty; etc.

Even unrelated traits tie into my body image. Instead of thinking, “I’m smart,” I think, “Well, at least I’m smart.”

I’m not trying to garner pity. Truth is, in my 40s, all this stuff bothers me much less than it did when I was younger. But I can’t deny that it had a significant role in shaping who I am, how I relate to others, and how I feel about myself.

There’s tons of literature about people like me. But I never hear the other side. I’m really curious about what it’s like to have a general feeling that you’re attractive. I can’t imagine what that would be like. I wonder how it would impact a person’s life.

Please note that I’m not talking about “how good it feels when my boyfriend tells me I’m good looking” or “how charged I get when the ladies look my way.” I can understand that. I’m talking about a general, every-day feeling: what you think about yourself when no one’s there and you look in the mirror. And how that affects you.

There are folks who malign, and folks who defend, video games as a one of the main forms of entertainment for the current generation of kids; and it seems to me that one of the touchstone arguments in either direction is a comparison to what kids were doing thirty or fifty years ago instead.

But what are video games replacing?  Is it books that are getting aside?  Is it cowboys and indians in the backyard?  Burning ants with magnifying glasses?

What’s being offset, and is it a good thing or a bad thing or just a neutral thing?

What do you choose when you’re at the grocery store? Why? Is your answer “(c) other”?

Do you even have a choice? Do you remember a point where you didn’t?

I recently read a book which included an argument that the story of human history was our desire to impose power and control structures over each other - men over women, the rich over the poor, etc. Since my Master’s work focused on this type of topic (the nature of power structures that society uses, and how they are changed), this argument really resonated with me.

What I found interesting was the statement in the book that we will not know our true nature as a species until we are free of these structures. Which lead me to wonder - is it not our nature as a species to create them? Can we ever be free of structures like these, or is it “hard-wired” into us, that we must create methods that give some group more power than others?

Is doing something repulsive well a valuable kind of art? What merit do you see (or not see) in refined, skillful ugliness in graphic art, music, writing? Does a mastery of something unpleasant make it more reprehensible, or subvert its reprehensibility, or both?

What piece of art (door wide open for what qualifies) has most struck you relevant to these questions? What has caught your eye, or makes your point?

If you could change the country where you were born and raised, would you? I’m not talkin’ about being born and moving to another country as a baby. If you could change your birth place and culture, would you? If so, where would you rather have been born and raised? And why would you change it?