I’m watching an anime full-screen right now called “Lucky Star”. I read the description before watching it and didn’t really want to watch it, but I thought I’d experience it anyway just to further my knowledge. I thought I’d turn it on for a minute or two, watch it, and then discard it as a childish cartoon. Unfortunately, the opening song is so fast-paced that it immediately caught my attention in a worse way than a television jingle. The chick who seems to be the main character, despite being both smart and athletic, doesn’t use all of her skills. She doesn’t join sports clubs at school or get good grades. The lack of grades is due to her disregarding the given homework.

Instead, she plays online video games and watches anime all day. When she’s talking to her friends at school, she bumbles on about her online video game friends even though they don’t necessarily understand her. During the episode, she actually describes her real life and her online video game life as being one and the same. It’s kind of sad in one way, but it describes the progression of video games and the psychology of world society through technology in another way. I can definitely relate to her friends in that way, especially around OmegaBot.

OmegaBot will slip out of talking about the video game areas/item/character statistics and into talking about real world objects as they would be reflected if they were in the game played. It’s quite amazing, really. I occasionally want to reach over and poke OmegaBot in the shoulder and say “Come back to the real world!”, and sometimes I do something of the sort. Most often, though, I stop myself and think about how boring the real world can be at times and try to imagine myself in the game world. I don’t always succeed, but by the time I fail I just don’t care anymore and I’ve moved on to thinking about something else or I’ve zoned off into my own little world. Of course, if I fail to imagine myself in the video game world and zone off into my own little world, people start thinking that something is wrong because I can’t relate to the conversation and have stopped talking. The thing is, it doesn’t matter to me at that point (usually).

I’m already in my own zone at that point, watching things happen around me that aren’t really happening. In that way, you could say that there is a similarity between being lost in my head and somebody else treading the social line between virtual life and real life. I’ll go and tread the line between imagined life and real life (aka daydream — I consider this both a source and a symptom of “extreme empathy”). Whilst the gamers are weaving their discussions in such as way as to intertwine real time and game time, I’m already looking out the window and walking down the street. I’ll occasionally stop to read an advertisement, or a poster on a wall. I’ll make my way back to the place where I’m sitting and start moving people’s things around, rifling through their bags, and listening to their conversations. I’ll sit next to them and joke around with them and maybe even provide some useful ideas. Perhaps then I’ll go sit on the floor and watch the room as if from a reverse perspective, seeing myself staring off into the distance, seeing the gamers become animated about their intertwined lives…no…I have to come up with a name for that now. I shall call it… “The Qwerty Perspective”.

The Qwerty Perspective. An original thing, my own term. They’re seeing the world through a keyboard’s or computer’s view, but also putting their input from this world back into the keyboard when they get a chance. They’re speaking a language that both gamers and non-gamers can understand, although the game specific terminology can get a little muddy to non-gamers, and the gamers who aren’t present would require real-world context to understand the similarities being drawn between the game and real life. I can’t say anything like “it’s a trap into which the unimaginative fall”, because that would make it sound like a bad thing, and it’s not necessarily. I actually think it’s a positive thing that games and computers can help people describe things with words where they would otherwise not have such a description. Through the Qwerty Perspective, people can relay emotions and describe things in a way (although game-specific at times, unfortunately) that allows another person to empathize with them more deeply. Through such empathy, bonds are formed. The Qwerty Perspective is a GOOD thing. No, that’s not Martha. I will, however, say that the truly imaginative people out there stand to bury original perspectives under the Qwerty Perspective and that it could take them years to recover.

Extreme empathy. Hmmm…for fun, I looked that up just now. I came up with this article, which describes very briefly something called mirror-touch synaesthesia (MTS). (I haven’t taken this, but for those of you interested, here is your empathy quotient.) [I believe that the best massage therapists have MTS.] When I say extreme empathy, I don’t mean MTS. I mean it in the sense of the word that my mind puts me in their place. This is one of the reasons that I have trouble watching horror movies. I don’t like feeling the pain of the characters. The scene with the patient and the eyes in 28 Weeks Later left me somewhat scarred. The memory of that pain is almost too unbearable to handle. I am EXTREMELY thankful that my mind is already starting to bury that.

MS messaged me a little over an hour ago — sorry MS, I’m not ignoring you!

There’s SO MUCH to write about right now…and I’m getting tired again. I’m tired a lot these days, but I think it has to do with work. Work…hmmm…so much stuff going on there lately. I’m dealing with some complex clients at work, and tomorrow…well…today at this point, I have to go train somebody else to deal with the clients so that I can get back to doing my normal job. I have a day to train this person, but the clients take a month to learn. I have a feeling that the trainee and I will be interacting rather closely over the next month until the clients are learned. Yes, I’m writing in passive voice on purpose. Shut yer beautiful traps and deal with it, grammar majors.

I really wanted to do DDR/ITG today (this brings to mind what it would be like if Pepsi had children), but I ended up taking a much needed nap instead. Hopefully between that and the sleep I get tonight, I won’t have trouble waking up early this morning. *insert yawn here*

Dang it!!!! I can’t stop surfing. And as such, I’ve decided that Yuri Ebihara is now one of the most beautiful AND cute women on the planet. Okay. Bedtime.

First thing’s first — I’m getting a cold sore, and I don’t like it. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about it. I guess that just means I don’t get to taste any Pepsi this weekend. There are plenty of other fun things to do though, I s’pose. The forecast says that there’s a 30% chance of rain on both Saturday and Sunday, so that’s a “maybe” to beach weather. At least it’s only going to be a high of 89 degrees this weekend.

You have to understand when I say “only”, though. Monday night, 06/11/2007, my air conditioner decided to break. I guess I need to look on the bright side, though. At least I wasn’t a Catholic in Cologne on this day in 1964. Anyway…I didn’t sleep at all on Monday night. Period. At 4:30 AM on Tuesday, 06/12/2007, I gave up trying to sleep when I realized that it was 84 degrees in my apartment, and the sun hadn’t even come up yet. I simply drove into work and started working in the air-conditioned office. Calls every 2 hours to the landlady finally proved fruitful and an air conditioner repairman was sent out to fix the problem. I met him here, in my NINETY DEGREE APARTMENT.

Fixing the problem meant that I finally met my downstairs neighbor, PoliceGirl, as my air conditioner electrical lines run down through her air conditioner closet as well. She was born in the same state as me We struck up a lively conversation in the awkward lull while the repairman was out gathering the tools of his trade. We both told our entire life stories to each other in under two and a half minutes each. I was rather impressed, actually. I hope I get to interact with her more, she really was cool.

So…he fixed it, I left, he left, everybody’s happy. Then I get a call from Pepsi telling me that Gator(yeah, from Gainesville) is in my area and implying that it’s my duty to keep the Gator sufficiently amused for at least a short time. I’m dead tired. What to do, what to do…I know! I’ll agree to meet Gator, chug a power peanut butter smoothie, and then wear myself out at the local arcade for free. That took all of three hours to do. But hey…I did my duty.

Now I’m dead tired, but I can’t sleep just yet. I think it’s because I was very very awake at this same time yesterday morning. I also blame the wonderful (that’s not sarcasm, but I don’t know how to get you to believe me) people over at Questionable Content for one of the best webcomics *ever*. Read these comics, I implore you. It’s like a story about my life, even my life right now! Methinks the author has been secretly watching me for years to create this masterpiece.

I think that’s all I can handle. I also think that one of the reasons that I can’t sleep is because I need to take a shower. G’night.

I’ve had this song for years. It was originally on mp3.com, but when the site went down and changed into cnet mp3s, this song wasn’t carried over. Created by Michael Cruz in 1998, this song falls under the “Trance” genre and is a musical embodiment of his idea of a rainstorm. Get the song here.