[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:19:41 GMT ]
Yes, I know, lots of this stuff lately. Sue me.
> Human rights refer to the “basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled.”
> (Wikipedia)
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
> (United States Declaration of independence)
For an atheist like myself, to believe that human beings are ultimately “entitled” to something, nor that any truths are “self-evident”. It is actually obvious, if you look at the world, that general human rights are far from self-evident to members of the human race, and that we are inherently entitled to exactly nothing. If these truths were indeed self-evident, simple, and obvious, we would have been spared from a lot of atrocities and suffering in our history.
The most important words of sentence of the US Declaration of Independence above are not “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—they are “we hold”. We hold these truths to be self-evident: we believe in this, we will make it so, we choose these principles to be the basis of our government. (Never mind for now that the States just like everyone else at the time sort of failed in that mission what with all the racial stuff that came later, this point is more general.)
The most important words in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not so much the exact listings of the rights. The most important stuff is in the Preamble, where they give the reasoning for formulating these rights:
> Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
> Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
>[...]
>Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.
This document, which might very well be the most important document in existence regarding our current civilization, even when it speaks of “inherent” dignity, is in an end an agreement. A contract. A sacred pledge between people and peoples. It is not written because you are entitled to something, because you are born with rights bestowed upon you by Gods or Nature, because the universe is benevolent and made it so. No, it is written exactly because of the opposite. God does not exist and Nature is totally indifferent to your dignity. People are products of their upbringing and whims and some very minimal effect of learning and independence on that.
This is serious stuff now, so pay attention. Human rights exist because we choose to believe in them. Emphasis on we, and emphasis on choose. We choose it because we believe it is necessary, or the right thing, or for whatever other reason, but in the end, it is we who choose. You cannot just expect these rights to exist, because they are not, not really, “self-evident”, or “inalienable”, or “inherent”, or “universal”. They need your belief in them, and your work against everyone who tries to take them away from anyone, to exist.
> If you do not believe in freedom of speech for those you despise, then you do not believe in it at all.
> (Noam Chomsky)
Posted in Plain English | Tags ihmisoikeudet, politiikka | 2 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:37:16 GMT ]
> Ma and her girls were Americans, above doing men’s work.
>(Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter)
When I first read those words as a child, they shocked me. I had not before that realized how it is possible to oppress someone by praise, by convincing them that they are so precious and so fragile that they take pride in not even trying. Those words are burned to my brain now, and pop up whenever anything remotely like that seems to be happening around me. (For example, whenever “women’s pushups” are mentioned.)
Sometimes these days I wonder if we are oppressing our children and especially teenagers that way, trying to push the idea that childhood is so precious that people should be completely free of cares and responsibilities during it, to the point of not asking 12-year-olds to do chores, and not letting 16-year-olds work during summer breaks.
Free Range Kids seems to think so, anyway.
Posted in Plain English | Tags lapset, yhteiskunta | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:04:58 GMT ]
I fly a lot. By “a lot” I mean more than twice a year, typically one or two of those intercontinental. Definitely more than my share. Occasionally, I get asked if I do not feel guilty about that, by friends or colleagues, and a bit more often I seem to sense a subtle (or not so much so) disapproval when my preferred form of vacationing comes up.
On one hand, yes, I do. This is the hand that puts the CO2 and stuff in the atmosphere, something I seriously think we should not do quite as much as we do. I feel vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that all my efforts to consume less are more than offset by the fact that I am one of those people who gladly travel to the other side of the globe to see a frigging big tree while rarely bothering to see one in their own country. Not to mention offset by that I consider it a good use of my time to spend an extra week in a total braindead jetlag just so that I can spend a week working face-to-face with collaborators (and doing that in a total braindead jetlag too). I find it less and less easy to justify flying and I think that with a couple of more years my vacationing habits will change because of that alone.
On the other hand, it is likely we will never find out if they would, since it is so likely that flight prices will skyrocket inside that same time frame so that it becomes economically too silly for me to buy a ticket, anyway. (I can then stop because I am forced to and convince myself I stopped to be ethical, of course; always nice to feel good about yourself without extra effort, right?) On this hand, no, I do not feel guilty: not at all about using “more than my share” of the world’s oil. Conservation of materials only makes sense to me if either 1) by conserving you can balance consumption and production so that you can make it reasonably likely that we will never run out (e.g. we should use only so much wood that we can grow enough to replace it), or 2) the stuff is worth conserving because it has some inherent value and you want to make sure something of it exists for your children’s children to admire too. Natural life, landscapes, etc have the latter kind of value to me; oil doesn’t, maybe apart from a sample in a jar in some museum.
My understanding is that we will run out of oil, sooner or later, and that there’s pretty much nothing we can do about that. By conservation of oil, we can delay that point, but I fail to see what the point of that delay would be—theoretically, it would allow for more time to develop alternative technologies, but in practice it seems that large scale development will only start for real when oil starts to be prohibitively expensive. Times will likely get rather nasty for a while when that starts to happen, in any case, and then we will either pull through or not. Personally I think we will, and while the world will definitely change, dark fantasy fans will have to wait for their post-apocalypse a bit more… but you never know. So bring it! Since it is inevitable, we might as well start, and have it over with, rather than fiddle and fret about estimates of how much longer we really do have.
Posted in Plain English | Tags ekologia, elämä | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:42:22 GMT ]
hiiltä ilmakehään
pakkauksia kaatopaikalle
kiukkuisia aikuisia
turhaan tuhlattua rahaa
pojalle lätkätreenit
olohuoneeseen uusi matto
aurinkolaineet mökkilaiturilla
rommikaakao syysmyrskyssä
niissä on minun työni tuotto
Posted in Sama suomeksi | Tags runot | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:31:14 GMT ]
At the risk of angering some people and sounding holier-than-thou, I will say that I am bothered by the usage of psychiatric medications around me, especially that of the SSRI depression pills and sleeping aids. Specifically, I am bothered by the widely spread usage of those aids in order to cope with stresses of busy life. Not so much by the fact that people can be traumatized by said stresses enough need pills to recover - though that is fucked up in its own way too - but by the way that said pills are so very often used to cope with the stresses, not to recover from them.
Common sense (well, my sense anyway) suggests that:
* If your work conditions are so bad a psychological hell that you cannot sleep at night, you might take a sleeping pill simply to feel better the next morning, but if you take that sleeping pill because otherwise you are not able to work at your psychological hell the next day, something is wrong. I don’t know about the countries with zero employee protection laws, but in Finland, if your work is really making you sick, you do not take a pill and go back to work, you call in sick and alert your occupational health care contacts.
* If you are a basically healthy and happy person whose work and life and schedules are so stressful that you exhaust yourself and need a pill to go on, you are using that pill not as medication but as a drug. With maybe less side effects than the amphetamine used by combat pilots, but with the same idea. If drugging yourself in order to complete your schedules sounds like a good idea to you, by all means, go ahead, but be honest about it. (On the honesty front: I hereby confess that I use caffeine as a performance-enhancing drug.) If it does not, edit your life, not your brain chemistry.
* Having a diagnosed depression (or another mental disorder) and pills to “take care of it” does not excuse you from identifying which parts of your life and habits are contributing to it or making it worse, and working to fix those parts. If anything, it makes the necessity to do so greater. If a person with a mild allergy kept on calling sick every other day and eating a ton of allergy meds a month instead of trying to avoid the problem substance and staying healthy, we’d call him a moron. For some reason we do not call burn-out cases who keep on burning themselves out nasty names, but pat them on the back understandingly and give them another prescription. Yes, I am fully aware it is harder for a person suffering from depression to change their lives or work than it is for someone allergic to onions to not eat onions. This was not a comparison, it was an analogy, and it does hold.
* The wide-spread practice in health care of giving burnt-out, depressed people depression meds without offering frequent- and long-enough counseling (at least once a week for a couple of months) at the same time or as an alternative is total fucking crap and needs to stop. (I challenge you to direct me to research that says that pills alone are as effective as counseling or counseling and pills in new, stress-induced depression. If you manage to convince me, I promise to consider changing my mind and starting to advocate putting the whole nation on SSRIs to enhance happiness and productivity. Emphasis on consider, because I still think that a society that requires us to drug the population to keep going is crap.)
Finally, a disclaimer: note that I am not anti-medication, merely anti-no-other-means. I do not believe we need to aim to be natural and pure and not use those evil drugs. Chemistry is pure, nature is dirty, and I am absolutely in favor of “better life through chemistry”, and I would altogether rather not go back to the times where I would be dead four times by now without the evil pharmacological inventions of the 20th century. I am also generally quite ok with chemical mind-enhancing, be it therapeutic, ambitious, or recreational, as long as people make informed choices, know the risks involved, and take care that in the worst case they only screw their own lives, not those of innocent bystanders. The above is absolutely not to be read as encouragement to any individual to stop using their current medication, and especially not without consulting about it with their treating professional.
It is to be read as encouragement for people who need these medications, or think they might need some, to examine their lives to recognize factors that make the symptoms worse, and to work for alleviating or removing those factors, putting focus from “coping” with undue stress to first eliminating as much of it as possible.
Posted in Plain English | Tags lääkkeet, psykiatria, yhteiskunta | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:57:24 GMT ]
After two pairs of Feelmax shoes worn to shreds in four weeks of walking on pavements (which, I know, they told me not to do, but what use is a shoe I cannot walk on a pavement with?) I figured that if the aim is to “simulate going barefeet” I might as well go barefeet instead of buying an expensive pair of shoes every couple of months. So I have started to. So far, looks like moving to thin-soles and then to no shoes is one of the best shoe-decisions I’ve done in my life.
It does make me self-conscious like hell, though—especially when it is not that terribly hot and I am not in beach-compatible wear otherwise. And it gets me looks. And questions. “Hey! You are not wearing any shoes!” Thanks, genius. Do I give such a harebrained impression that it is actually likely I simply forgot to put shoes on this morning, and have not noticed since?
Here’s a little Q&A.
Why are you not wearing any shoes?
Why should I be wearing any?
Don’t your feet get cold?
When I am outside and walking, no. Finland is not actually the warmest of the countries of Western civilization, but it is still well above freezing here in July. So far, the coldest I have walked without shoes in has been 12 degrees C, and that was quite ok still. My feet do get cold when I sit still for long times, which I of course do every day at work. I wear socks then.
Don’t your feet get wet when it rains?
Yes, they do (genius). It feels nice. Wet socks and shoes is what makes wet feet feel unpleasant, not the water itself.
Don’t you get splinters and stuff in your feet?
So far, no, I don’t.
Doesn’t it hurt?
It does, some. But you get used to most of it pretty fast - two weeks ago walking on rough pavement was immediately distinctly uncomfortable, now it starts to be after 2 kilometers or so. Walking on the rubble outside our house used to be painful to the verge of impossible, now it is uncomfortable but doable. Worst spot so far is the metal stairs up to the swords salle. I got through unwounded. Whenever I can, I walk on smooth sand or grass, though today not so much to avoid pain, but simply because it feels nice. On some surfaces - rough sand, say—it does not exactly hurt, but I have to walk slower than with shoes on to be comfortable. I do not consider this a problem. (If I go with people who might consider slower speed a problem, I wear shoes.)
Don’t your feet get tired?
They do. I consider that exercise. We laugh at those quaint ideas that all women need to wear corsets because otherwise they get back pains and other horrible consequences because on their own, their backs are too weak to support them. Yet we accept without a blink the idea that everyone needs to wear shoes, because otherwise the arches of their feet collapse and they get all sorts of pains. Don’t know about you, but that sounds seriously fucked-up reasoning to me.
Don’t your feet get dirty?
I can wash them.
But what about winter?
Not wearing shoes now does in no way force me to walk without shoes in the snow. (Genius.) For to get me closer to snowy times without reverting to thick-soles, I’m still thinking giving a go to the Feelmax new model (Niesa or so), which supposedly has a tougher sole. I also have vague plans of making moccasins out of thin neoprene or something with maybe some sort of a rubber for a sole (I know how to make moccasins out of cloth or leather, so it is a material question rather than knowing how).
But what about parties and other formal occasions?
I did not throw my good shoes away simply because I do not want to use shoes every day, either.
Posted in Plain English | Tags elämä, kengät | 10 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:29:05 GMT ]
Merriam-Webster defines “motive” as “something (as a need or desire) that causes a person to act” and motivation as “the condition of being motivated”, that is, of possessing a motive, or “a motivating [something that provides a motive] force, stimulus, or influence : incentive, drive”. I do not personally like the word much, the way it is usually used in my hearing. I am ok with the usage that emphasizes the “need or desire”, the personal reason for to do something, as in “my sole motivation to do X is that it is necessary for Y, which I really want”, though even then I would prefer “reason” or “incentive”.
Motivation seems to separate into three things:
1. a need or desire for something (motive),
2. something that causes one to act on that need or desire (incentive), and
3. the energy to stay at the task (drive).
When people say “I do not have the motivation” or “I do not feel motivated”, they can mean any or any combination of these. Saying that alone is not usually helpful. To figure out how to solve your “lack of motivation”, you need to figure out which of these it is, and then act on that. If you wait until you “feel motivated”, chances are it will never happen, because three such complex things will need to coincide by chance. It is possible to desire something because it is The Thing to desire, act on it simply because you expect praise or rewards from others if you succeed, and have energy simply because you are feeling energetic in general. I would guess a lot of us have managed at least a couple of major life goals simply by that, by a combination of energy of youth, strikes of luck, and the design of the society. This might be what creates the expectation that we need to “be motivated” to achieve things.
1. The motive.
First question to ask yourself when you do not feel motivated is this: do I actually really want this thing to happen? If so, why exactly? Here are two test questions: A. If I did not know any of the people I know now, would I still want it? B. If I had enough wealth that I could amuse myself in any way I wanted without the fear of ever being hungry or homeless, would I still want it? Wanting things because they bring company or security is not bad. It is, however, crucial to understand that you want something because you enjoy the company, or because you want the additional freedom that wealth brings, instead of the something itself.
Self-awareness to the level where you figure what you really want is not easy. I suppose that a lot of our stories and other escapism deal with people with Fates and Missions and stuff because it would be ever so much easier to have one given to us than it is to figure it out ourselves.
But the truth remains that if you do not have a motive, you will not have motivation, and you can as well stop wishing you did, and start doing something else.
2. The incentive
If the motive is about “why exactly do I want this in the first place”, the incentive is about “what all will I miss or lose if I do not do get off my arse and actually do this thing?” The trick is not to be stuck with the first answer, but to do a chain of so-whats.
If I do not finish this document today, then I will not finish it by the deadline, because there will not be enough time. So what? Well, then I will have to go to the team meeting and explain why it is not ready. So what? The others will be pissed off. So what? I really don’t want N.N. to be pissed off with me. Bingo—apparently N.N. being pissed off is something that you really care of. Would that be an incentive enough to actually get off your arse: “I really like N.N. and do not want her to feel angry or her work to suffer because I do not do my part”?
Or maybe there is no N.N and the chain goes on. If they are pissed off, that could reflect badly on my review. So what? These are uncertain times, and there might be layoffs. So what? If I am fired, I am not sure I can get another job. So what? I do not have enough savings to live on just social security and keep my house. So what? Well I really goddamn like that house! Would that be incentive enough? “I want to do well in this job so that I do not have to face the insecurity of having to find another one.”
Or maybe it goes on until you arrive to “oh screw it, I don’t even want this job”, in which case you are back to the motivation step. That’s ok.
3. The drive
Once you have the motive and the incentive, this step is relatively easy. Here’s how. Realize these points: A. You will never feel energetic all the time, and B. If you do fifteen minutes of it, it is more than not at all.
If you labor under the illusion (surprisingly common these days) that healthy, happy people are energetic and “motivated” and driven and light-hearted all or even most the time, get rid of that idea right now. It is simply not true. Energy levels and moods come and go. Spikes are fun, but for the most of us, they are rare. If you wait until you are highly “motivated” (with the meaning of energetic and feeling like it) before you do things, you will accomplish very little and spend a lot of time feeling bad and wrong about “not being motivated”, when in fact there is nothing whatsoever bad or wrong about you.
If you really want to do something (you have the motive and the incentive) but you do not seem to be able to find the energy, then make a deal with yourself: agree that you will do something for it for fifteen minutes, and then you are free to go and not worry about it anymore today (this morning, this evening, this week, for an hour, whatever). Fifteen minutes sounds like nothing. It is nothing. It should be easy accomplish. Think of the tiniest little thing that you can do right now to promote your pursuit, set a timer to fifteen minutes and then think about your motive and your incentive, and do that thing or nothing until the alarm goes (and when I say nothing I mean absolutely nothing: no web, no IRC, no getting up and walking around, no TV or radio, no reading a book, no drinking tea or having a sandwich or going to the toilet).
Of course, often after the first fifteen minutes or tiniest little thing you will feel like doing more, because the hardest thing is to start—and you can, if you want to. But that is not the point: this is not a trick to get you started. The point is that those fifteen minutes are more than you would do if you instead just sat around fretting about not having motivation, and so doing them you are already on the winning side: doing more than you were about to, getting better at getting it done.
And if you really end up sitting that fifteen minutes doing nothing—then either you really needed the rest, or the tiniest little thing was not tiny enough, or you were mistaken about your motive and incentive. That’s ok too. Simply retry. Today, or tomorrow.
Screw motivation. Just do it, if you want to, and don’t, if you don’t.
(Disclaimer: actually not having the energy for anything ever and/or the inability to recognize at least 1-3 real needs/desires/motives can be symptoms of burn-out and/or clinical depression. I do not mean to belittle these conditions or to discourage people potentially suffering from them from seeking medical advice.)
(Disclaimer 2: despite being posted right after several people used the “not feeling motivated” phrase on an IRC channel, this post is not aimed at them. I have planned it for a couple of weeks now—and have a todo list trace to prove that. The latest examples simply served to remind me of a pet peeve.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags unsolicited advice | no comments
[ Posted by Janka
Sat, 30 May 2009 14:54:09 GMT ]
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online game about spaceships, and if that sentence made your eyes glaze over you might want to skip this post, unless “sportsmanship” is interesting to you in general (in which case I recommend you read it anyway). If EVE is familiar for you, you can skip the next four paragraphs.
EVE differs from most (all?) other MMOGs in some crucial respects, most of which belong to another post (or ‘con speech) completely. For this post, what is important to understand is that EVE is not a level- or score-based game where you can measure your achievement against filling some objectives set by the game, such as reaching a particular level or completing a particular quest or raid. There is no “end game”. You cannot win the game, you cannot finish it. Instead, it is a sandbox game where you measure yourself only against other players – you fight for regions, resources, glory and fame, but the game itself rewards none of these. You get no points, no levels, no nothing. The only reward is the fame and glory themselves, and the resources you can control to produce more of those.
In EVE, you set your goals yourself, and you can go about achieving them in different ways. You can change your goals at any point (though if you have made them known first, people will spot this, and you might lose glory in their eyes). Skills and equipment help, but in the end what scores you a kill or wins you a solar system and gives you the upper hand on a regional market is player skill and dedication. While you can play this game solo or with a small band of friends, in the end, if you really want to be one of the “big players”, you have to do it by banding together with others. The biggest powerblocks in the game consist of thousands of players. Co-ordinating that is no little feat and requires real commitment. Even the tiniest alliances, in serious conflict only for the control of some small local area of space, require co-operation with tens of other players, against similar bands.
While “dying” in the game hurts (more than in most games), it does not obviously really kill you off or exclude you from the game. You can push someone out of a particular solar system, you can kill their structures there, you can make them die in horrible ways when they enter the regions you control, you can make it pretty damn close impossible for them to win that control from you, but you cannot make it completely impossible, and you cannot stop them from coming at you and being a bloody nuisance at least. The only thing that can break any player alliance in EVE is the loss of morale, the loss of interest in the fight. Competition is fierce, and the human emotional drama involved is as high as or higher than most of the players probably ever experience in their work places or other such “real life”.
If you think this a little insane, compare to competition sports and their following. Just saying.
Views regularly surface in the game that when it comes to spaceships actually shooting at each other it is not “sportsmanlike” to crush the opponent using superior numbers or otherwise superior force, such as ships specifically designed against their attack. There are several pejorative names for people who are “cowardly” enough to use superior force to crush someone “brave” enough to put up a fight in a fleet that will most likely lose. I totally disagree with these views. Fights in EVE, when they happen, are not “fair”. They are not supposed to be fair. When the shooting starts, the fight is over—the guy with best numbers, ships/modules, and discipline wins. The game is not about who can actually shoot the best. The game is not about spaceships and pretty explosions. The real game is about who can scheme, plan, co-ordinate and maneuver themselves into a position where the unfairness is on their side. It is about forcing or tricking your opponent to commit to a fight they cannot win.
I do believe there is room for sportsmanship in EVE, however. It is just not about the tricks you use in a fight. As far as I am concerned, once you are in the game and the game is on, any trick you can pull (apart from abusing bugs that the game devs say not to abuse) goes. Some tricks are more stylish than others, granted, but still, if you score a kill you score a kill and your enemy calling you lame because they do not like your style is just them being—unsportsmanlike.
Sportsmanship is about attitude. It is not about what you do to win or lose within the game, it is about how you behave once you have.
If you pull a particularly neat trick and win, it is ok to rejoice and gloat a little. It is fine to feel good about yourself if your game is at the level where you are clearly on the top of most of the people you meet in your region. It is great to take pride in your achievements—even if this is just a game, it is a game that takes very real intelligence, dedication, and co-operation to be good at. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to jeer at your opponent who just lost, to put them down, to call them names, to question their worth as human beings and to wish they go to bed sobbing over how mean you are. It is not sportsmanlike to tell someone you just made explode how they are useless and will never amount to anything. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight” salute on the local chat, and (where you can safely do so) to offer them advice on how to get better.
If you get royally screwed, or royally screw up, or a trick is pulled on you, and you lose, it is ok to feel pissed off and to kick and throw your toys a bit—as long as you do this in the privacy of your own home. It is, however, not sportsmanlike to kick and scream where others hear. It is not sportsmanlike to make excuses or to blame your opponent of “cheating” or “cowardly tricks” (or “blobbing”, to give an example of an in-game pejorative). While I do believe in PR and publicity as parts of warfare in EVE, I still think it is not sportsmanlike to engage in a smear campaign against your opponents simply because you are upset that you cannot win them on the field. It is sportsmanlike to offer the customary “good fight”, and to congratulate your opponent on a trap nicely sprung, and to express a wish to meet them on the field again another day. Be gracious – and then lick your wounds, analyze why you lost, learn from it, plot and scheme and gather allies, and then go spring a trap on them and watch those towers burn.
Sportsmanship is about the wish and ability to respect your opponent regardless of whether you win or lose, even when you pull a crazy trick at them, even when you have an inside man working on their morale or stealing their assets, even when you are doing your best to make the game not-fun for them in order to force them out of some plan they are trying to execute. There are ways of making things not-fun for the opponent and more fun for your guys that rely on disrespecting, dehumanizing, demeaning and humiliating the other guys, on robbing them of their value as a respected opponent and as a human being, and those ways are used in EVE, both in the hearing of those opponents and in internal pep talks and propaganda.
Personally, I just think those ways are lame. Not sure about “wrong”, and definitely not “against the letter of the rules”—but certainly lame. If I cannot win with sportsmanship, with respect to those who play with me, I’ll rather not win at all.
Not sure what is respectful? Here’s a rule of thumb: if you would not talk that way to/about the 12-year-old sister of your best friend, don’t talk like it to or about another player in the game, unless you know for a certain fact that the player is a friend and does not mind. (For all you know that stranger is the 12-yo little sister of your buddy – or your own grandfather, or you professor at college, or the next-door neighbor. Not that it should matter; all other players are humans and deserve courtesy, regardless of whether you personally know them or not.)
(This post is for Queneva, who first asked me the question “Do you think there is a place for sportsmanship in EVE?” in a discussion following her post about a rather disturbing subculture in the game.)
Posted in Plain English | Tags EVE online, MMOG, sportsmanship | no comments
