I may have underestimated how many questions I would get, on top of overestimating how quickly I would be able to answer these questions.
I apologize for my lack of timeliness. Instead, think of it as savoring the anticipation!
What's your favorite task here on MCGamer?
Support Tickets.
Getting yelled at by kids 1/2 my age.
Having misguided parents threaten to sue the network/report us to the police.
Being called corrupt and biased by people who don't understand what those words mean.
My lovely mountain of paperwork.
Truthfully, my favorite task here is setting up a solid, intense, and important project with a good team of people. Operation Clean Sweep, the Hacker Recidivism Study, PSA writing, and other such projects could not have been done by myself alone, and they would have easily failed were it not for the quality of the help I'd received. The success of those projects is very much dependent on the quality of work put into it.
That's the thing about management and leadership: it's about so much more than having authority and telling people what to do. It's about knowing the goal, planning how to make it all work together, getting a team organized, and then putting each person on a task that they work best at whilst compensating for their weaknesses. It's like a puzzle where the pieces and images are always changing, but once everything comes together, it can be quite marvelous.
Philosophical questions. I think yes.
- If you could remove one item from it's entire existence, what would it be? (Example: removing all guns or removing all nuclear weapons.)
- If you could change anything, but only one thing, about Earth, what would you change?
- What defines you?
- In your opinion, what makes a "good" friend?
- Who decides what morality is?
- Where is the line between insanity and creativeness?
- Do you even?
- Is it more important to be likes or to be respected?
Less philosophy questions, more personal ones.
- I know what degree you're getting, but what job do you plan to get once you are older?
- What is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you?
- How many bones have you broken, fractured, or sprained?
- What are your religious beliefs?
- What is the largest story, essay, or thread you have ever made?
- Family? (Not names, that's a bit too personal)
Welp, you officially beat Nick's question record, Scott. But for brevity's sake, I will only answer a few.
Philosophical questions:
1. Assuming that they can only be man-made material goods, I would not remove any items from its existence, since it would be pointless. If humanity made it before, it would inevitably build it again. And if it can't build something specific again, it will find a way to build an alternative. Human industry is persistent like that.
But if I could remove a man-made item and the notions associated with it, I would remove all religious texts and scripture. If there really is a higher deity whom wishes to communicate to humanity, then they should not have to convey their message through the fallible and imperfect human kind. Removing all of the human-filtered creations of religion would remove the entire idea of a permanent religion itself, thus removing an entire aspect of human kind that has proven difficult as of late.
5. The individual decides what morality is. The complicating issue is that morality is often influenced by the society they grew up in, and vice versa. Morality as a concept is easy to understand, but morality's fluidity between people is what makes the entire concept imperfect.
8. It is more important to be respected than liked. Ideally, being liked also means that you are also respected (which is what I personally try to strive for), but the same is not true of the reversal. But being liked only means people think well of you and enjoy your presence; there is no inherent influence if you are liked but not respected. But if you are respected without being liked (i.e. a tyrant), you still exert influence over others. And it is with that influence, you can do something good to benefit others and thus gain appreciation, or you can do something selfish to benefit yourself and thus exert your influence further. Being liked just means people smile for you; being respected means history will remember you.
Non-Philosophical Questions
1. I'd like to get into Data Analytics, preferably something related to video games without being a grunt-work developer. However, I would also like to make some passive income as a hobbyist game developer. I live and breathe games, and I'd like to maintain that as I get older.
2. I've nearly drowned in a pool when I was 12. I've almost died after an asthma attack and nearly getting run over at the same time in Singapore last year. I've nearly drowned (again) in a river rafting accident where our boat overturned and I was nearly knocked out underwater after my exposed head hit a large rock.
But oddly enough, none of those really "scared" me at the moment. I think back on those near-death moments, and recall how okay and accepting I was of basically experiencing my own demise. Asking myself, "what does that say about me as a person?" is the scariest thing that has ever happened to me.
4. I am an athiest, but I'm absolutely accepting of tolerant religions, and I'll change my mind once I'm convinced of a higher power. Heck, I often even encourage religion on a conceptual level: it's a powerful unifying factor that can be used for social good, like the religiously-charged American Civil Rights movement. But whenever I see people look at Islamist terrorism and say, "Islam is inherently a violent religion that should be banned", I feel compelled to tell them, "Islam isn't the problem. Those terrorists are just terrible people with political motivations, and Islam is their excuse".
5. When I was 14, I wrote a 303 page, 109,545 word fiction book as a hobby, titled, "The Soldier Among Us".
The premise starts with a black-ops-trained child soldier is reintroduced to civilian life as an American high school student after their unit is decommissioned. He struggles to adjust to civilian life, but after his school is caught up in an invasion of the United States by an unknown organization, he steps back into service. With himself, a rag-tag team of volunteers, and a convoy full of refugees and students under his leadership, he has to guide them out of enemy territory and back to safety, no matter the costs. (God, that premise is awful... but that's what 14 year old avid-Tom-Clancy-fan-me liked.)
The book took me a year and a half to finish, and was done with the help/competition of a friend of mine who professed himself to be an aspiring science-fiction novelist, and I wanted to one-up him. It was absolute self-insert garbage that can be attributed to a first-time writer whose skills barely exceeded Honors English.
But looking back on it, I'm nonetheless proud of it. It might be a book that stinks, but it's a book I wrote; how many others can truthfully say that?
I've also started another short story for a previous Gmod RP community (abandoned and now non-canon), written entire 5k word count biographies for some previous characters (there were at least 3), and I have an in-progress story that I chisel away at once a week or so. As you can see, I have a pretty good word count under my belt. I just wish I could write more eloquently as opposed to more verbosely...