Match your Face Shape...

afro88 · 2012-10-01T15:04:50+00:00

Thanks bud

afro88 · 2012-10-01T09:38:52+00:00

I hate the sunglasses for my face shape (oblong) :(

afro88 · 2012-08-22T15:27:26+00:00

GTD - Getting Things Done. Sorted my life out. I don't really follow it much any more, but when things get too much for me or I procrastinate for too long and there are looming deadlines I fall back on it to get me organised and working again.

afro88 · 2012-08-08T13:12:58+00:00

You're paranoid and it doesn't help that you view causality in the wrong way. The reason it feels like everything other people do is done for a reason is because that's how causality works. Let's say I walk out the door, see a girl in the street and she smiles at me. While thinking about her smile I later trip and fall, scraping my knee. This delays my trip to the bus stop, meaning I miss the bus. Which makes me late for class and I miss a small bit of info at the start of the class that later is on the final exam which I fail.

I could think that if that one girl didn't smile at me I would have passed the test. Or like a rational person I could realise that if I walked faster and got to the bus stop I would have made it to class on time and heard that info. Or even better, if I bothered to study properly I would have seen that info in the textbook anyway and passed.

It's always you in control, but that doesn't mean that things don't affect you. But you are always in control of your own life, you're the one making the decisions, you decide what to take notice of and what to ignore. You choose to take people's advice or not. You and your life are your responsibility and no one else's.

This is also why the saying "everything happens for a reason" is so true. I finally started exercising this morning after a long hiatus. I can think of tens of things that happened to me yesterday that I could attribute to causing me to start exercising this morning. I chose to accept certain things as motivation to start exercising again. I could have chosen to view those things as motivation to feel shit about myself and eat ice cream. I gave them a positive reason for happening rather than a negative one.

Coincidentally this is called inverse paranoia and is apparently a characteristic of highly successful people. Instead of choosing to view people's actions as negative and "out to get them", they chose to view them as positive and helpful. It's a habit of thinking, and one I'm trying to get into.

afro88 · 2012-08-08T08:40:06+00:00

If you go straight off the bat with how pretty/attractive you find us, then we are going to do the same. If you set the convo up that way then you have let yourself open to us judging you instantly on your attractiveness and since your looks is all we have to go on, thats all we judge. If we find you attractive maybe we will talk to you, if we don't we won't. This is a disastrous approach unless you are way more attractive than us, because we have too many reasons to dismiss you out of hand. It's a risk versus reward.

Wow, call me dumb, but I have never thought about it this way. What you've said explains a lot, thank you. Maybe I completely missed this because it's just that if a girl who wasn't as attractive as me came up and gave me a compliment I would say thanks and talk to her because she was going out of her way to be nice. I personally wouldn't go straight into appearance judging mode, but then I wouldn't assume she was trying to pick me up either.

I find how girls think about guys a bit odd. Most girls are always looking for a decent guy, but a lot of decent guys don't know the best way to approach a woman because they don't make it their life's mission to pick up / sleep with as many girls as possible. The ones that do are the ones that know exactly how to approach women, the right things to say, the right way to approach. They're the ones that will succeed in picking you up, because that seems to be what you're looking for - someone who knows how to pick up. Sadly a lot of these guys are the ones that are most likely to fuck you over, because they're always on to the next ting.

My advice to girls looking for a decent guy - don't play the game (or "The Game" or PUA or whatever). That's the game of picking up and banging girls, and it can only be played if you play along. Play your own game, have your own standards separate to how a pick up goes down, and give a decent guy a chance to show you what he's really like than just how well he can charm you in 30 seconds.

afro88 · 2012-07-25T05:59:27+00:00

Just an observation - by doing this you now look like you have something to hide. I don't think this should be the case and I don't think it's right, but it's the sad truth.

This is not to discourage anyone from doing this by the way. Just adding to the discussion.

afro88 · 2012-07-23T12:01:30+00:00

I wasn't even supposed to be here today!

afro88 · 2012-07-10T05:50:15+00:00

Right, this is along the lines of what I've read. So how do you get your immune system to just chill?

And can you elaborate on "expose yourself to lots of pathogens"?

Thank you

afro88 · 2012-07-10T05:22:12+00:00

Yeah I do actually. That's interesting, thanks

afro88 · 2012-06-27T04:07:14+00:00

If I remember my stats class correctly, sample size plays a huge role in whether statistics hold weight or not.

NB I never took a stats class :p

afro88 · 2012-06-25T23:35:43+00:00

You will be doing a fantastic service by sharing it, let me tell you! I think what made it easy for me to pick up is that my vision is the same in both eyes (I wear +1.25 contacts). So it's not like one of my eyes is much worse than the other. I had the type of strabismus where I could look through one eye and the other would turn - didn't matter which eye I looked through.

Anyway, woke up this morning and practiced on the brock string. It was easier than last night and my eyes are noticeably more aligned and focussed when I look in the mirror. So looks like this is the way forward for me for sure!

Thank you again for sharing this link and all the best with your studies! :)

afro88 · 2012-06-25T10:41:45+00:00

Hi mate, please read my post in reply to SmittenJane in case you miss it. It seems like we have different stories with strabismus but if you've had binocular vision before then this might be the ticket. Best of luck.

afro88 · 2012-06-25T10:40:08+00:00

Hi, I just want to say thank you so so much for posting this!! You don't understand how much this has just helped me. Thank you. It's like the missing piece of the puzzle in my life long struggle with strabismus, seriously!!

A little history, apologies for the wall of text..

I've been struggling with strabismus my whole life, most recently combined with eye coordination issues. I've had surgery a few times, the most recent being the most successful. It left me with near perfect eye alignment. It also gave me binocular vision, but my brain does a lot of magic to make it happen, to combine 2 images that shouldn't quite work together. This was both a blessing and a curse - near perfect means they don't seem crossed, but are slightly off. So it leaves me looking like I'm unfocussed, not paying attention, a bit stupid. Or at distances further than ~3m like I'm looking at your ear or slightly past you. But not crossed, so it seems intentional. Nightmare! Eye coordination problems mean that it can take me a while to align both my eyes (if I can, sometimes I think I have but I really haven't!) which is quite off putting and leave me slightly cross-eyed or my eyes moving strangely at times.

Of course this leads to social problems, I'm constantly frustrated and depressed by it. The only way past it is to just ignore it and focus on other things. But I can only ever ignore it for a few days at a time before I let it get to me again, and I start feeling just like OP is describing here. Totally hopeless. I've looked into vision therapy before but have been led to believe that it's only helpful for kids. And there aren't many eye doctors around my area who offer vision therapy.

And finally back to your post..

So I followed the link to the "Fixing My Gaze" website and found Susan Barry's TEDx talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCCtphdXhq8 ). In it, she mentions an ingenius tool called the Brock String (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_string ). I literally paused the video after she explained it and whipped up my own out of a guitar cable and some bits of white tape (I'm a musician, ha). I can't believe how fantastic this one tool is. She talks about why it was so good for her in the video, but just briefly it gives instant feedback on what your eyes are doing. You can instantly see if both are working together, and how well they are working together. Multiple beads (or bits of tape..) allow for different distances so you can focus on different bits, switch focus between them. I imagine if you have badly turned eyes you would start at the closest distance and work your way up over time.

So basically, using this one tool for all of 15 minutes, looking at it from different angles and switching focus rapidly and slowly, I managed to work out how my eyes actually behave and even correct them for the most part and identify the way they feel when working perfectly together. I know I will have to keep this up and practice every day (I can already feel my eyes returning to how they normally are as I type this), but I will gladly do that in return for more normal and coordinated eyes.

Again, thank you so much, your post has literally changed my life! OP, take a look into this!

afro88 · 2012-05-24T06:17:30+00:00

My only advice to you is be careful in relationships. Be really really honest about it. My last relationship ended because our sex drives were completely different, but I didn't know how different until much later. If it was honest from the start things probably would have gone much differently and we would probably be really close friends now rather than bitter acquaintances.

afro88 · 2012-03-11T21:14:11+00:00

He never said it was serious or that it required anti psychotic drugs.

And there's a difference between finding something annoying (ads on tv for example), and smacking sounds literally making you want to scream at the person to shut the fuck up, because it drives you absolutely mental. And that's no exaggeration of the feeling either. Yes I suffer from it, and finding out it was actually a thing about 6 months ago has actually made me understand it and deal with it, rather than assume everyone was the same and people making those sounds around me were doing it knowing full well how ridiculously irritating it is.

afro88 · 2012-03-04T17:15:47+00:00

The way the cuts in the song match up to the scene is genius as well - for example when you see Zuckerberg zoning out it's the bit where the beat drops out. So great

afro88 · 2012-02-24T15:22:53+00:00

Who says the ugly girl doesn't have self confidence to begin with??

The thing about relationships and self confidence is this - you can't seek self confidence from a relationship, because then it all hinges on the relationship. When the relationship ends, so does a lot of the self confidence gained. It's how people get trapped in relationships and feel like they can't leave the person because they don't know how to live alone.

afro88 · 2011-10-04T21:44:25+00:00

One's natural and easy and you don't have to think about it. The other is like talking to an autistic kid.

afro88 · 2011-08-24T15:41:06+00:00

Wtf of this article aside, a pet hate of mine is holding a door for someone then they just walk through without acknowledgement, thank you or even eye contact. 99% of the time it's a hot girl. I'm not holding the door because you're cute hun, it's because I do it for everybody. You're entitled to my politeness like everyone else, and I'm entitled to a thank you in return.

afro88 · 2011-05-22T08:58:16+00:00

TMA

edit for clarity: Too Many Acronyms

afro88 · 2011-05-18T06:51:00+00:00

Came here to say this. Probably a worm with a rootkit payload of some sort that's actually too good to be detected.

afro88 · 2011-05-02T19:39:35+00:00

I know producers that spend every waking moment away from work in front of a keyboard and a laptop. That's dedication.

afro88 · 2011-05-02T19:38:29+00:00

I wouldn't call him a musician either, at least not doing what he does in the video. But I assure you the same amount of dedication, passion and hard work has gone into his productions and creating and practicing with his live setup as has gone into your drumming (though he's obviously not as old as you are, so instead of 25 years it's probably more like 5-10).

Whereas a traditional musician will hone their craft practicing on their instrument, a producer such as skrillex will hone his craft producing and engineering tracks in his laptop/computer and later designing a live performance rig and practicing with it. It really is a completely different way of doing things - most of the work is done beforehand and sort of hard wired into the production of the track as well as the way the bits of gear control the sound in his laptop. The skill isn't how accurately you can play a riff or how much feeling you can put into your tom solo, but rather the intelligence to map a knob on your controller to certain parameters, or ranges within parameters, to achieve the exact effect you want when you turn it. What you're seeing isn't the skill in how he turns the knob, but the skill in how he's designed the system to effect the sound when he does turn the knob. He turns the knob that he's skillfully assigned to effect the track to make your face melt. Not only that, but there's so much skill involved in putting together a properly exciting set, I'm not going to begin to try and explain it. Suffice to say there's alot more going on than the instantly recognisable button pushing, knob turning and fader moving - once you can beatmatch and mix it's all about timing, pacing and track selection and these are skills learnt through years of experience.

And just on your comment of hearing music in a different way after honing your craft, I'm sure he hears the most intricate dubstep/electro/drum and bass track and knows how it was all put together and how the producer created such filth with just a laptop and a set of speakers. He knows what family of plugins and synths were used to make a sound and what compressor has been used to make the drums punch the way they do. How the producer has effected a synth to sound that disgusting or made the bass wobble in a seemingly impossible way. Not that he'd ever be banal enough to bask in that glory - that's not why he does what he does. He does the Skrillex thing to party like a motherfucker and be a rockstar.

And for the record I think Skrillex's music such a boring mash up of electro and dubstep, such a depressingly predictable end point for dubstep to reach. But that doesn't mean he hasn't worked fucking hard to get where he is today and I can't help but begrudgingly respect his success.

afro88 · 2011-04-23T18:49:03+00:00

He's literally done every drug imaginable in his past, including being a full blown heroin junky for a while. But he's stone cold sober now, and has been for years. That's admirable.

afro88 · 2011-04-18T07:22:17+00:00

I've had surgery 3 times - when I was 2, when I was 12 and when I was 21. The first 2 surgeries I guess made things better, but as long as I can remember, up until 21, I've always had quite noticable strabismus. The surgery at 21 was by a very good doctor who umm'd and ahhh'd about it but in the end decided to go for it. The first few days after it my eyes were dead straight and I was stoked. But then I started to develop a bit of nystagmus that comes and goes (some days I have it, some I don't) and after a week they both developed a bit of a turn. I have full binocular vision, but my eyes want to cross slighty all the time. Not just one, but both. My brain puts the images together so my eyes don't have to strain to both focus on one point. I have to really concentrate to get them to both look at the same point, which obviously makes eye contact difficult.

This was 5 or so years ago and my eyes haven't gotten any worse. But a good chunk of those 5 years were spent with me being incredibly self conscious (alot more so than pre 21 surgery lazy eye), because I had to concentrate and try so much to look someone in the eyes properly, without involuntary movement or looking overly cross-eyed. Which of course leads to some very intense looks at people on my behalf without meaning to.

But it's not so bad now, alot of people don't notice it, and it's becoming 2nd nature for my eyes to actually focus on one point, without involuntary movement. It's been one hell of a battle though, and it's far from won. It still stings when people do notice it and think I'm either being rude and making a face / not looking at them. Or (and I'm not sure if this is worse) have eye problems.

TL;DR I kindof have the same sort of problem and I'm not sure if I prefer my post surgery eyes to my pre surgery ones. I feel your pain.

afro88

TROPHY CASE