#anuveon

I'm tagging:

anuveon, elqiao, mayathebea, niceguys-fucktoo, rinkara, teawithiroh, thetinygypsy, tv-is-my-life, write-me-off

Sorry if you've been tagged before, and you don't have to answer if you don't want to!

1) Is there a certain type of fictional character you have a tendency to fall for? If yes, what kind?

YES, there is! I am completely in love with unlucky characters that don't seem to get what they want/deserve. Archetypes include noble rivals/people that always lose that really shouldn't (Tremaine from Valdemar series, Kaiba from YGO!), best friends that don't get the love interest (let's not bother listing them), disgruntled jaded once-idealists (Vimes from Discworld), and people who are just...unfortunate (Zuko from Avatar, Elend from Mistborn). I cry tears of joy when my favorite characters manage not to get killed off, though it's usually too much to hope for for them to get satisfying endings.

2) If you were given a change to explore an alien civilization, with a means to communicate with them, but would not be able to ever return to Earth, would you take it (you would have roughly the same risk of premature death as you have now)?

This depends on one thing: Can I relay what I've learned back to Earth in any fashion? If yes, then I would go; otherwise, no. If I can't advance the knowledge of anyone besides myself, then it only makes sense to think of what I want, and there are a lot of people and things here that I couldn't leave forever. I'm very attached to what I already have!

3) What is your favourite bad habit (according to your own definition of bad)?

Bad here I'm going to define as something I do that I would change if I could. My favorite then would be my tendency to draw. I usually do so when I have many more important things to do-lately I've been not drawing for many days at a time, then suddenly drawing until 6am in the morning. I'm not that good, and I don't feel like putting the effort into improving, so all in all the hobby's rather pointless. Nevertheless, I'm usually fond of most things I do draw.

4) When choosing your userpic on Tumblr, do you take into account the fact that people who haven’t met you in real life will always imagine you as whatever is in that picture?

Actually, I do. I've noticed that I think some people are prettier if they have an avatar of someone pretty, and I'm biased negatively towards people with an icon I don't like. I don't want people's opinions to be colored like that about me, so I usually don't put in a userpic.

5) When picking an unhealthy snack, do you go for salty or sweet?

Ooh, I crave a pattern of about 3 times sweet, 1 times salty. Often I just do sweet a lot, but it's because I usually only have sweet snacks.

6) If you watch cartoons, or if you have ever watched cartoons, do/did you prefer animals of humanish types as main characters?

If this is asking if I like animal-human hybrids then my answer is no, but otherwise I think I don't have a preference. I would have liked Arthur just as much if they'd all been people, and I would have liked Magic School Bus just as much if Arnold had been an aardvark.

7) As a child, did you prefer toys or make believe?

Make believe, though toys really helped with that. I was a very unimaginative child though...I mostly made my toys go to school or cook and clean around the house.

8) Is there a certain band or a solo artist that you always go for when trying to induce a certain mood? If yes, which artist(s) and for which mood(s)?

I'm a big fan of soundtracks, so I pick and choose a lot if I'm going for a certain feel (Yasunori Mitsuda, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, John Powell, and let's not get into classical composers...) Rather than moods, music more often reminds me of places and things. For instance, I wrote a lot of my 2012 NaNo listening to Miike Snow's Silvia and Neon Trees's Animal, and I've mentally coded a lot of seasons of each year with a certain song, and listen to it if I want to feel nostalgic.

9) If you had to pick one live-action movie universe different from ours that you had to live in, which would it be?

oh gosh, I can't really think of a good answer for this, considering most of the live-action movies I've watched have something terrible in them (no, I do not imagine myself to be one of the protagonists, so I wouldn't dare put myself in say the movies based off the Marvel universe). Maybe Shaolin Soccer? It's implied that everyone in the end learns awesome martial arts hahaha

10) Is it better to try to change the system from within, or via civil resistance?

If it's possible, then within, but such things have to be tempered with practicality-can you afford to wait that long? Who's getting hurt in the meantime? It's a wishy-washy answer, but this is a case by case basis.

11) What is the most significant thing you’ve learnt from Tumblr that you wouldn’t have learned anywhere else?

Discrimination, in general, all over. I admit, I'm pretty sheltered, and don't care for politics because every time I hear about it, it makes me angry. I never really thought to delve into gender studies, cultural studies, LGBTQ studies, etc... just because I thought-well I didn't think about it much, but I just figured the answers would be obvious enough if any questions came up. As long as no one's getting hurt, live the way you want to and let others live the way they want to-okay great, we've solved 90% of issues yes?

Since browsing tumblr (and honestly I can't believe I started it basically following a small handful of art blogs), I've realized how dreadfully wrong this is. Inequality is everywhere, and it's not solved just by confronting a problem that comes up to you. Discrimination isn't always someone jumping out at you from a bush saying 'women are weak!' or 'I'm making a movie about how all non-white people are evil gangsters!' It's everywhere and so embedded in our society, every society, that without someone pointing it out to you, you're likely to just gloss over it. I didn't even know what rape culture was, let alone how prevalent it was.

Unfortunately, this does bring me to a point that I dislike very much about tumblr-before coming here and reading and learning about people's experiences about gender issues, sexuality issues, disorder issues, I just had no exposure and didn't know anything. I didn't know what asexuality was, I didn't know what transsexuality meant at all, I didn't know anything about mental disorders beyond the typical raging lunatic on TV, which is well wrong. I had some notions that were wrong, but I wasn't strongly married to them-if someone just told me 'hey, that's actually rather rude to say' or 'hey, that's actually a misconception', I'd be like 'ok great, sorry about that' and everyone goes home happier and wiser.

Instead, often somebody makes a bad remark in a rather innocent way and then there's always someone who goes NO YOU DUMB BITCH and just rages about how could this person be such an ignorant dumbass and ohh man just so sick of your shit and blah blah blah like the original poster. My psychology teacher once told me something: People get frustrated with others because they know something that the other people don't.

Despite his many flaws, that really stuck with me. Why do you think that person is dumb? Because they don't know something that you do! Why do you have no patience for this other person? Because they don't get something that you do. Is it their fault that they haven't encountered and had to think about the problems that you have? Is it their fault that they tried as much as you did and didn't get it? I think everyone can relate to a time when they didn't know as much as someone else, or didn't do something as well as someone else-and yet, we still hold this sort of thing against other people. This is just so especially prevalent on tumblr, when instead of polite nudges in the right direction, people are much more likely to BRING OUT THE CAPS AND GET ANGRY BECAUSE GODDAMMIT I KNOW THIS SHIT A LOT BETTER THAN YOU DO! It's like everyone is constantly trying to outdo each other by how crazy they are-I mean jesus some of these kids aren't even out of middle school how politically correct and well read do you expect them to be?

Okay I wrote a whole damn essay here, but the point was that I learned a lot about what makes people tick, but I'd really appreciate it if people learned to hold their horses a bit, and think about whether or not the person on the other end is a bigot or just misinformed more often.

My questions:

1.) How do you eat an Oreo? Reeses?

2.) If you had 100,000 dollars and you weren't allowed to use it to make more money, what would you do with it?

3.) What's the most recent book you read, and what did you think of it?

4.) What TV/fictional trope really irks you?

5.) What fictional character would you pick to be your best friend?

6.) Are there things you want to blog more about but don't? If so, what are they?

7.) What games are you playing? If you're not, then what's your favorite?

8.) Musicians that more people should know about?

9.) What would be your ideal snow day (if you had them)?

10.) What do/would you look for in a significant other?