Heartless Wanderer wrote:Huh. Who needs an excuse? All I need's a good pair of headphones and my middle finger, the first of which to listen with and the latter of which to brandish shamelessly at anyone shameless enough to get on my case about it. (On that note, I actually AM about to start learning Japanese. Pimsleur Approach. Hopefully it's all it's cracked up to be but I suppose I'll only be $10 or so out if it doesn't, the expensive stuff has a nice, long trial period attached to it.)
I like this. I have a habit of refusing to tell people what I'm listening to, just as a boilerplate policy. I've also taken to using the British highway salute over the American one, for no legitimate reason, and if that slaps Anglophilia next to Japanophilia on my list of interests, so be it. I also considered the Pimsleur approach to learning Japanese, but the main stumbling block is not having anyone to practice with.
Never made sense to me while people get on other people's cases for liking different things. It's not as if I'm beaming the music I listen to directly into their brains or something. Or blasting it at 50,000 times the necessary volume as I drive down the road like some other people I know.
The only answer I can come up with is "people suck." And that depresses me. But it also makes it easy not to give a damn what people think of me.
Never made sense to me either, and I try really hard to be that guy. And people do suck, and that's the number-one cause of my self-depressing downward spirals. Being prone to depression and people constantly demonstrating their suckishness is a poor combination.
I'd say I don't discuss these things with people offline, too, but that's more because I don't usually strike up much conversation with offline people in the first place, aside from the occasional odd dude I meet who happens to share my interests. Since I'm perfectly happy just skimming the Internet on my laptop instead of striking out into the "real world" to talk to people, it's more a consequence of being introverted than it is intentional avoidance of the topic.
Case in point: there is a Katawa Shoujo shortcut icon in full view on my desktop and if anyone asked me about it on the public bus I would most likely explain what the game is in great detail, consequences be damned.
And yeah, I try not to care what people think. On the whole I do a pretty good job, I guess. I also mostly don't talk to offline people about such things, but that's again more for lack of anyone with an interest in the subject. And while I understand your introversion point of view, in my mind, nothing excuses the presence of actual icons on your desktop.
But this is an excellent springboard into a point I want to make. So far the only people I've known who would know about KS are people online, and some of the friends I used to have but no longer speak to in person much because of physical distances. Playing KS put me into a pretty depressed, self-analytical mood, and I tried to make some changes in my life. Part of that was the concern that I was settling for someone it was convenient to be, rather than being the person I wanted to be, and so I struck out to try to make some new friends. A few weeks later, that endeavour paid off, and I've been brought pretty cleanly into a circle of friends that I can only describe as being conciderably more otaku. (It's amazing it didn't happen earlier, as I was already familiar with a third of them).
A guy I met last week from this group of friends is an alright dude. Today I was talking with him and another friend and I bring up a Katawa Shoujo reference. Because I'm in a crowd that wouldn't question it's origin, I drop the name (instead of my usual shuffle of "a game I was playing" where I'm extraordinarily vague about the origins or circumstance of a scene because it's not interesting to the person I'm talking to) and the dude is just like "YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT!?" and, for some reason, our immediate reaction is to embrace one-another in a brohug. We spent the rest of the period and lunch talking mostly about KS, and partially about some related interests that we share.
The ability to be this open with someone about something I really like is truly liberating, and I think everyone should try to find that sort of a relation. But in order for me to manage that, I had to make a conscious effort towards associating with a different type of people, people who would be interested and more prone to knowing about the subject matter. It's incredibly full circle that the subject material is what led me to having someone to talk to about it, but that doesn't detract from the life lesson here.
