mad4u689

I'm not sure if you'll find this relevant, but my philosophy is largely nihilist, and I also don't hold science/rationalism as an end-all. In fact, I think that most modern day nihilism stems from quite the opposite; there is a sense of "meaninglessness" of everything and everyone in the universe precisely because we don't feel there is any all-encompassing theory that defines it. Science and rationalism, like religion & faith, does begin to provide some kind of meaning for an individual. It's when people start realizing that their faith in the scientific method is just as arbitrary as faith in God, that there are no absolutes or objective truths even in methodology, that people begin to feel lost and truly nihilist. (Though some, myself included, find this idea somewhat freeing)

Then .. become preppy? That's what I did. Now I have a hot preppy girlfriend. Yay? All you have to do is dress preppy, play sports, and get people to know who you are. Driving a nice car is a plus and not doing anything overly nerdy like LARPing (for anyone who's into that) will definitly help you out.. Err. Alternatively, you could be yourself, and find a girl who you can actually connect with. Personally, I could never see myself dating a guy who dresses preppy and plays sports. But I could (and have) gone out with LARPers :P Trust me, there are plenty of girls like me who are just looking for the right geek!

I hope you go to the basketball games.. Michael Beasley is a freakin BEAST. He's fun to watch. Btw App. State Mountaineers 3-peat national champs =P Sad to say, but I completely don't do sports :P :D This is why I love you and we're friends :D

Yeah... but at least I'm not a teenager :P Sigh :D

rebdragon - congrats!! Cornell Engineering is tough to get into :D wtg :D jak, I didn't realize you were at Carleton. I know a bunch of people there and at St. Olaf (mostly people who are doing the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program). kelem, I got to visit Vienna earlier this year. it's a beautiful city! I imagine it'd be a great place to be a student.

When I was 16, I'd never been kissed. My friends definitely played Spin The Bottle when I was 12, but I always sat the game out because I wanted my first kiss to be special :oops: . By the time I was 16, though, I was an angsty teenager who felt like everyone in the world was so much more experienced than I was. I felt pathetic for being 16 and never having been kissed! But then I met a nice guy at camp, and we hit it off, and we did the whole awkward-crushing-on-each-other thing, and then we were told the other was interested in the other, then we decided to "date" (for the remaining two weeks of camp... lol :P) and immediately walked around the green and kissed. My first kiss was a French kiss, which surprised me! But it feels much more natural than you would expect. Not that you're going to be a great kisser your first time, but it will definitely just make sense when it happens. (BTW, you do definitely want to at least move your tongue around... don't just stick it in and leave it there :P ) For the record, my head is a lot clearer now, and I'm 20 and still have plenty of good friends (who are my age) who have still never been kissed. They're good-looking wonderful really intelligent all-around fantastic people - but it just hasn't happened yet. But I'm sure it will. So all you younger folk worrying you'll never be kissed, don't worry :D It will happen. :) And in my opinion, it's worth waiting for it to mean a little something extra.

Wow, topaz, I *love* the dress you made! Really, wow :D That's so pretty. I wish I could do that!

I actually wouldn't know what to do with my life and much of my time. It's incredibly sad... but true :x

I know my opinion is controversial, but... If someone wants to be dead so badly, I think it's a personal decision, and while one should give their opinion ("I really would miss you" or "I love you" or "Please please don't commit suicide" or "I think you are making a rash decision and should take more time to think about this; I know someone who promised that if she decided to kill herself, she would only let herself do it one month after she made the decision to make sure she still felt the same way, since it's such a permanent one" or "I think you should get professional help; here is a therapist a friend of mine goes to and says is really helpful" etc.), as an ultimately personal decision, they should get to make it, and we shouldn't interfere and not let them make the final decision for themselves. If someone wants to not exist so much, why are we stopping them? Why are we forcing them to suffer? Only because of our own selfish desire to not fee guilty and have them around.

My thoughts exactly. I've read the His Dark Materials series, and I would say I'm a fan of the books. Movies and books have symbolism. It's a fact. It's not surprising. Often they have underlying themes - for example, both "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up", marketed as comedies, had strong underlying conservative messages about sex and marriage. That's just how stories work - literature isn't even considered good literature if it's just supposed to be taken at face value. Good literature and film should have an underlying message, symbolism, etc. Go boycott Lord of the Flies, or The Shawshank Redemption, or American Beauty, or American History X - or the Chronicles of Narnia. If you don't boycott those, too, then you're lying about it not being a religious thing.

Thanks for the compliments, various folk :oops: Mmm. An interesting question - I do believe that nudity in theory can be very freeing, and also completely desexualized. In fact, I think it's a shame that so many people do sexualize the human body in its naturalness, creating a sense of shame where none need exist. Unfortunately, that IS the case, and so I wouldn't feel comfortable posting such pictures on a public forum like this. Not to mention, I'm sure it would be against Tip.It rules. I know you were kidding, but just, it's an interesting topic :) Also I'm not as much as a hippie as I just made myself sound there, really. Hehe! It still amazes me how long I've been around :/ Like I said, I'm 20 now, and I guess I first showed my RL pic to people from RS when I was 13... this was the pic I used to send out :P I was 12 in it! Totes ridic. Hehe! Yeah, Europe's the place to be for meeting up with fellow RSers. I go back to the US in less than two weeks though. Weird! But I'm looking forward to being home :D

I trust that the jury knows more about the case than I do.

Hehehe :D Here's a pic of me and Matt in London, with another of our ex-RSer friends, from... wow, almost two years ago now! Last last january. I don't think he'll mind, since he posted a pic already, but let me know if you do, and I'll remove it :D

I'd say tip.it's a good looking bunch of folk :D EYOWAREYA, you are gorgeous :D And Nadril, it might comfort you to know that you look like I expected ya to. Good looking, though! Trapical's looking pretty good, too :P Azurechaos, your hair is beautiful when it's long! And Fook, you look good in a suit :P waf1le, your hedgehog is adorable! Aww, I love hedgehogs. I'm sorry it passed away :( Landon, your hair makes me happy every time I see it. And now I'm really curious what hippo's pic was - it's been removed before I could see it. Apparently it caused a lot of reaction from you all! Meziko, you're also mighty attractive. Okay, I'm going to post a lot of pictures :x Even though a lot of you have probably seen me before. I'm 20 right now, and I'm 19-20 in all these pics. Me at a minigolf place in Texas: Me getting out of some natural caves in Budapest... I'm the one in the pink in the middle-ish. Last year in the spring someone set up a slip'n'slide on the main hill on campus, which resulted in kinda landing in a splash of mud... :P Here is the result, I'm on the right :D Here's me dressed up as a chamentaschen (a delicious Jewish pastry) for last Purim (it's a Jewish holiday) :D This is me on a piggyback ride with my not-exactly-boyfriend:

- sunny beautiful weather, especially if you're wearing a skirt and can twirl around - cuddling with people I love (not necessarily romantically - cuddling with my mommy or with my best friend is great, too!) - puppies - delicious food (ie. cheesecake, baklava, mmm :D) - the bravia bouncing balls video: http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviaextcommhigh.html

I will attest to Necro's cooking skills. Yum!! I'm not sure if a woman can be considered a bachelor, but let's pretend she can. (A bachelorette?) My tips: - don't stay alone cooped up in your apartment for too long. Even if you feel like you want to just sit curled up in a blanket all day without showering, in reality, if you go outside, you will feel (and smell) much better. - when you cook, whatever you cook will taste ten times better if you throw in some herbs and spices. - have some kind of fast microwavable or edible-straight-out-of-the-box meal around at all times - just in case it's 2 am and you realize you've forgotten to eat dinner. - whenever you have reached the point at which there is NO POSSIBLE WAY you can go any longer without doing your laundry, you can still go another week.

Without God, I find it hard to justify any sort of objective reality; thus, God is real, to many people, and I accept that. God is not real to me.

1. In your opinion, what is truth? Truth is the socially constructed set of statements about the world that have been explicitly or implicitly agreed upon as facts about the world, by some given society or set of conscious individuals. That is, truth is subjective [there is not necessarily any one objective truth], and must be consciously experienced, but relies upon a social body consisting of many conscious individuals, not just one person. Thus it takes on an existence outside of any one person's subjective experience. 2. Do you believe in God or Allah or Buddha or any other deity or higher force, power, or being? No. I do not believe in God, Allah, or any other deity or higher force, power, or being. However, I am culturally Jewish. 3. Can you give any reasons for why you believe/disbelieve in the above? That there is no higher power is simply a belief I have always held, and a belief I take on faith. I have seen no reason to believe otherwise.

And what has he exactly done to earn your condemnation? :lol: (Note to kids: Iran hasn't, does not, and will not have capacity to make nuclear warhead-level enriched uranium for many decades) I'd like to hear... in four words: I, Am, From, Israel. You may not like him, but you can't deny he's been important.

I can't believe people think JK Rowling is more important this year than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

NYU is one of the most expensive colleges out there; I can see how free tuition might be pretty darn tempting... (I'm struggling just to pay for room and board this semester, my parents are paying my tuition)

I go to school in CT and live near NYC, so I know a little bit about the area. It's a pretty well-off area :o. I might have heard something about it being the richest in the country? That may be incorrect, though. But it's up there. New Haven and New York City have a bit more going on that's fun to do, though :D And the MetroNorth commuter railway goes right to Greenwich from NYC, so that's a really easy trip into the city. Have fun :D

Aw man. This isn't technically a TIF memory, but on the old original official RS boards, things used to be pretty lax. The RS Trivia Team had a great thing going where we'd hold games and things on the forums and in-game, and give away a lot of prizes. It was a ton of fun, and Paul showed up a few times to our events to hang out. That would never happen nowadays. And he went to someone's RS wedding... maybe it was Jenstarr and Pugxsi's? I can't remember now. Aww! And now they're married IRL. I wonder how they're doing. And Manager had extreme moderating powers in-game and out-of-game, and would always kind of abuse them... in a funny way, of course. One time Manager and Paul teleported to an unreachable island in the Wilderness and battled there :D Lol. I remember once Paul posted publicly on TIF (when he still had a TIF account that he used) that he thought he remembered hearing I was only 14 years old, and thought I was incredibly mature for my age. I was really really into RS at the time, and that basically made my lifetime. Hehe. Wow, that was so long ago. I'm 20 now. :( I met my first RS friend IRL on my 15th birthday. That's absurd! And when I was a mod for tip.it (back when I was still active on forums other than OT...) that was really fun :D Tip.it staff are good folk. Ooh, and when I decided I wanted to get into clans, and started beign really big in the tip.it clan community, and formed an alliance with BlackKnights and supposedly others... but really they were our best clan, and our alliance pretty much failed. And THE... and the Sabres... (who were dying at the time... much respect for King Sabre though)... It's posts like these that make me wonder what I'm still doing hanging around here. Oh well. There are a couple of others, too. Blue Tear and ixfd64... thanks for not making me feel too pathetic still being around :D I'm also impressed people still remember the Underground Farm incident. the legends live on :)

Aww, looks like you guys had a great time :D That's awesome! Hope you guys meet up again soon! :) And... I'm 5'3", I don't know about Suzi :P

Oh, they did not just do that :| :( :( Hug and spread the love!! :D