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Put to the Question 2: Confess!
Jun. 22nd, 2003 04:21 pmAn interesting set of questions from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ephraim, exactly as I'd expect from him. For those of you not familiar with him, his real name is John Shockley, and he's one of the best roleplayers and most interesting guys I know. He's taken his first steps into RPG writing, too, with some excellent Nobilis work for Bruce.
1) If there was one thing in the world that you could make disappear, what would it be?
Can an attitude count as a thing? In which case, I'd like to see an end to selfishness, particularly that mean-spirited sort that allows people to suffer just so other people can be lazy. I'm coming round to the belief that passivity and inaction actually cause more suffering in this world than evil deeds. Doing something wrong tends to stir up people to oppose that act. Action causes reaction. Allowing terrible things to happen through apathy just seems to generate further apathy. Inaction just breeds more inaction.
2) What is, in your opinion, the greatest development of the past 30 years?
Perhaps predictably, as someone who makes his living communicating, I think it's the internet. This is linked with question 1 above. A lot of selfishness and ignorant behaviour stems from a lack of contact and communication with other people. It's easy to demonise that which with you have no contact. It's easy to not care when you don't know. The internet is the most efficient information dissemination device that humanity has yet conceived and has the potential to have the same effect on society as the printing press.
The internet makes it easy to keep family and friendship bonds strong even over long distances and also facilitates whole new forums of debate. Through the internet people are becoming more used to expressing opinions again, after decades of declining debate on political issues and dropping involvement in the democratic process.
The internet is inherently a medium of communication, and I think we've only just scratched the surface of what it allows us to achieve.
3) How far does your belief in the supernatural extend?
A long way. As a Christian, it's impossible for me not to believe in the supernatural. The Bible speaks explicitly of the existence of supernatural beings, both good and evil, and God himself is inherently supernatural. I've had direct, personal experience of the Holy Spirit that makes it very, very hard indeed to ignore the fact that there is a whole other world we have little or no contact with on a conscious level.
However, it also gives a moral framework to that supernatural world, one that makes most people think that Christians have no belief in the supernatural, for reasons I've never been able to fathom.
4) Can you think of 3 things that a PC will do better than a Mac? Name them. ;0P
I had problems with this one, if only because all the answers I came up with were facetious initially. As a little background here, I actually use a PC more than I use Macs, because I have one on my desk in the office. So, I'm in a reasonably good position to make a comparison here. In the day to day working environment, Macs still win hands down, for me. I'm more efficient and faster on a Mac than a PC. I considered shareware, but while there's a smaller range available for the Mac, generally there's everything you need and it's often better quality, too. So, after some serious brain-wracking, my answers are:
(1) PCs are better at being upgraded. This has been the ethos of PC manufacture since day one and is still pretty much the case. You can steadily improve your PC as time goes by. (As an aside, I note Bill Gates is pushing something called the Athens initiative, which aims to make PCs better designed at the price of making them less expandable. I'm not sure this is the right route for the company to be pushing the manufacturers into.)
(2) PCs are better for enterprise-level applications. This is a no-brainer. The big software houses just don't make the server-driven enterprise software applications for the Mac, because of the relative market shares in the corporate sector and the type of companies that tend to use Apple kit.
(3) PCs are better for online gaming. With the honourable exception of Blizzard and its games, even if an online game comes to the Mac platform, it usually ends up on different servers or online systems to the PC versions, giving a much smaller pool of players.
5) If you could fulfill one ambition, what would that ambition be?
This one surprised me, if only because I've achieved a number of the ambitions I set myself: become a journalist, edit a magazine myself and so on. I think my major ambitions now are very simple: find a way to move back to the country and to have children.
Right. Anyone else got any questions?
ephraim, exactly as I'd expect from him. For those of you not familiar with him, his real name is John Shockley, and he's one of the best roleplayers and most interesting guys I know. He's taken his first steps into RPG writing, too, with some excellent Nobilis work for Bruce.1) If there was one thing in the world that you could make disappear, what would it be?
Can an attitude count as a thing? In which case, I'd like to see an end to selfishness, particularly that mean-spirited sort that allows people to suffer just so other people can be lazy. I'm coming round to the belief that passivity and inaction actually cause more suffering in this world than evil deeds. Doing something wrong tends to stir up people to oppose that act. Action causes reaction. Allowing terrible things to happen through apathy just seems to generate further apathy. Inaction just breeds more inaction.
2) What is, in your opinion, the greatest development of the past 30 years?
Perhaps predictably, as someone who makes his living communicating, I think it's the internet. This is linked with question 1 above. A lot of selfishness and ignorant behaviour stems from a lack of contact and communication with other people. It's easy to demonise that which with you have no contact. It's easy to not care when you don't know. The internet is the most efficient information dissemination device that humanity has yet conceived and has the potential to have the same effect on society as the printing press.
The internet makes it easy to keep family and friendship bonds strong even over long distances and also facilitates whole new forums of debate. Through the internet people are becoming more used to expressing opinions again, after decades of declining debate on political issues and dropping involvement in the democratic process.
The internet is inherently a medium of communication, and I think we've only just scratched the surface of what it allows us to achieve.
3) How far does your belief in the supernatural extend?
A long way. As a Christian, it's impossible for me not to believe in the supernatural. The Bible speaks explicitly of the existence of supernatural beings, both good and evil, and God himself is inherently supernatural. I've had direct, personal experience of the Holy Spirit that makes it very, very hard indeed to ignore the fact that there is a whole other world we have little or no contact with on a conscious level.
However, it also gives a moral framework to that supernatural world, one that makes most people think that Christians have no belief in the supernatural, for reasons I've never been able to fathom.
4) Can you think of 3 things that a PC will do better than a Mac? Name them. ;0P
I had problems with this one, if only because all the answers I came up with were facetious initially. As a little background here, I actually use a PC more than I use Macs, because I have one on my desk in the office. So, I'm in a reasonably good position to make a comparison here. In the day to day working environment, Macs still win hands down, for me. I'm more efficient and faster on a Mac than a PC. I considered shareware, but while there's a smaller range available for the Mac, generally there's everything you need and it's often better quality, too. So, after some serious brain-wracking, my answers are:
(1) PCs are better at being upgraded. This has been the ethos of PC manufacture since day one and is still pretty much the case. You can steadily improve your PC as time goes by. (As an aside, I note Bill Gates is pushing something called the Athens initiative, which aims to make PCs better designed at the price of making them less expandable. I'm not sure this is the right route for the company to be pushing the manufacturers into.)
(2) PCs are better for enterprise-level applications. This is a no-brainer. The big software houses just don't make the server-driven enterprise software applications for the Mac, because of the relative market shares in the corporate sector and the type of companies that tend to use Apple kit.
(3) PCs are better for online gaming. With the honourable exception of Blizzard and its games, even if an online game comes to the Mac platform, it usually ends up on different servers or online systems to the PC versions, giving a much smaller pool of players.
5) If you could fulfill one ambition, what would that ambition be?
This one surprised me, if only because I've achieved a number of the ambitions I set myself: become a journalist, edit a magazine myself and so on. I think my major ambitions now are very simple: find a way to move back to the country and to have children.
Right. Anyone else got any questions?
