(no subject)
Nov. 24th, 2008 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phthalombrageI should post to livejournal because I don't have to be in lab right now and don't feel like doing actual work because it's the cluster, which is loud!
Flaherty is so creepy lately. I bet he likes Nazi porn.
I am otherwise pretty blank right now. Have been volleying emails with my godfather about ethnic food and lawn care, etc.
I was reading livejournal comments to try to remember exactly when in September I did laundry (just did two loads yesterday for the first time since) and stumbled upon something that chrisamaphone wrote that made me think, so I will write about that to kill time.
So I definitely stalk people on the internet, all the time, because that way I can know about them and not have to deal with talking to them and having that be awkward. I am curious about people and enjoy the process of hunting down information about them more than I do actually extracting it from them, although talking to people sometimes gives you more clues about where to look for more information, or lets you make connections that provide a more cohesive portrait.
I have always used various names and email addresses online so my mom can't find out things about me (she stalks my aim statuses, and she independently found and watched all the DS youtube videos fall of my freshman year, and correctly identified which pieces I was in without my having told her, despite grainy shitty video quality, and continues to remember girls like Erin and Rachel that she's only met once, but can pick out in photos and videos), and sometimes wonder if other people can track them at all. I have even forgotten a couple of them. Tall Sasha found my lastfm profile... but I dunno if anyone other than my old inklink friends could find me on random obscure art sites I frequented in middle school.
I would find it creepy yet awesome if anyone managed to gather a sizeable amount of information on me without talking to me, as my name turns up a lot of other people on google, even with more specific keywords added. More creepy if it were an employer, but more awesome if they still wanted to hire me. More more creepy if it were a gross old man who wanted to hire me for weird stuff. This is why I should never work for google.
Sometimes I leave paths between different things in case anyone is bored and wants more information. I mean, honestly, I'm not any more of an interesting person than anyone else, but whatever. Sometimes the creepiness should probably raise some ethical flags, I think, just because it seems so creepy, but seeing old fat pictures of a professor is pretty hilarious.
At the same time, I was always me, with these various names, and I find it sort of disturbing when people make up internet personas. The Daily Kitten comments always frighten me. Every day I look for the clockwork, predictably-structured comments of someone with a red-haired man avatar and cringe, but in a way, I have connected with that person?, and if I didn't find him appalling, I might try to figure out who dropped him on his head as a child. Or perhaps there's hope and it's just an internet persona. (That passes for hope these days?) In any case, most other people have kitten avatars and whole sickening online "families" of cats, some of which have "gone to rainbow bridge", so maybe I choose to pick on him just because he's still bad, but at least has a human avatar. I don't have an account there and refuse to, so I probably won't learn anything more. That's okay with me, for once.
Today my professor talked about the CMU undergrad buckyball project in the late 80s/early 90s. I read about this (not in detail) in some paperwork I shredded two weeks ago in a scary closet. He also mentioned how some of the students who worked on it are professors now. I know who one of them is, related to the above. Last week I was also assigned to shred a bunch of random emails, and thus learned the name of someone who participated in the exchange program I am interested in. Unfortunately, as this was back in 2002, this won't be of much use to me, but it's reassuring to know that there has historically been some flux of students back and forth in the program. I find old papers perversely interesting, even if they are confidential stuff, so I won't discuss them and probably don't remember that much anyway, but if somebody gave me the OK, I would totally read through stacks of it and be happy. Even the old forms of CMU letterhead are interesting to me, which professors got here when (partially obvious because of the change in email username systems), and the former names of the MSE department. I wonder when certain changes went into effect and why, and some of these were answered in memos in the scary closet. I think part of why I continue to be an MSE despite mostly picking it for the study abroad, failing at life, and my too-late interest in computer science instead is because I have invested so much of my time in researching what the department is about (I stopped wanting to make biodegradable plastics because I don't think I could learn o-chem well enough). It's almost like I have some sort of direction, without actually having a focused direction.
So in conclusion, I am a terrible and creepy person, but if I am stalking someone, that just means I think they are an interesting person, or something.
Flaherty is so creepy lately. I bet he likes Nazi porn.
I am otherwise pretty blank right now. Have been volleying emails with my godfather about ethnic food and lawn care, etc.
I was reading livejournal comments to try to remember exactly when in September I did laundry (just did two loads yesterday for the first time since) and stumbled upon something that chrisamaphone wrote that made me think, so I will write about that to kill time.
So I definitely stalk people on the internet, all the time, because that way I can know about them and not have to deal with talking to them and having that be awkward. I am curious about people and enjoy the process of hunting down information about them more than I do actually extracting it from them, although talking to people sometimes gives you more clues about where to look for more information, or lets you make connections that provide a more cohesive portrait.
I have always used various names and email addresses online so my mom can't find out things about me (she stalks my aim statuses, and she independently found and watched all the DS youtube videos fall of my freshman year, and correctly identified which pieces I was in without my having told her, despite grainy shitty video quality, and continues to remember girls like Erin and Rachel that she's only met once, but can pick out in photos and videos), and sometimes wonder if other people can track them at all. I have even forgotten a couple of them. Tall Sasha found my lastfm profile... but I dunno if anyone other than my old inklink friends could find me on random obscure art sites I frequented in middle school.
I would find it creepy yet awesome if anyone managed to gather a sizeable amount of information on me without talking to me, as my name turns up a lot of other people on google, even with more specific keywords added. More creepy if it were an employer, but more awesome if they still wanted to hire me. More more creepy if it were a gross old man who wanted to hire me for weird stuff. This is why I should never work for google.
Sometimes I leave paths between different things in case anyone is bored and wants more information. I mean, honestly, I'm not any more of an interesting person than anyone else, but whatever. Sometimes the creepiness should probably raise some ethical flags, I think, just because it seems so creepy, but seeing old fat pictures of a professor is pretty hilarious.
At the same time, I was always me, with these various names, and I find it sort of disturbing when people make up internet personas. The Daily Kitten comments always frighten me. Every day I look for the clockwork, predictably-structured comments of someone with a red-haired man avatar and cringe, but in a way, I have connected with that person?, and if I didn't find him appalling, I might try to figure out who dropped him on his head as a child. Or perhaps there's hope and it's just an internet persona. (That passes for hope these days?) In any case, most other people have kitten avatars and whole sickening online "families" of cats, some of which have "gone to rainbow bridge", so maybe I choose to pick on him just because he's still bad, but at least has a human avatar. I don't have an account there and refuse to, so I probably won't learn anything more. That's okay with me, for once.
Today my professor talked about the CMU undergrad buckyball project in the late 80s/early 90s. I read about this (not in detail) in some paperwork I shredded two weeks ago in a scary closet. He also mentioned how some of the students who worked on it are professors now. I know who one of them is, related to the above. Last week I was also assigned to shred a bunch of random emails, and thus learned the name of someone who participated in the exchange program I am interested in. Unfortunately, as this was back in 2002, this won't be of much use to me, but it's reassuring to know that there has historically been some flux of students back and forth in the program. I find old papers perversely interesting, even if they are confidential stuff, so I won't discuss them and probably don't remember that much anyway, but if somebody gave me the OK, I would totally read through stacks of it and be happy. Even the old forms of CMU letterhead are interesting to me, which professors got here when (partially obvious because of the change in email username systems), and the former names of the MSE department. I wonder when certain changes went into effect and why, and some of these were answered in memos in the scary closet. I think part of why I continue to be an MSE despite mostly picking it for the study abroad, failing at life, and my too-late interest in computer science instead is because I have invested so much of my time in researching what the department is about (I stopped wanting to make biodegradable plastics because I don't think I could learn o-chem well enough). It's almost like I have some sort of direction, without actually having a focused direction.
So in conclusion, I am a terrible and creepy person, but if I am stalking someone, that just means I think they are an interesting person, or something.
