The Secret Life of Introverts - My American Life

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/141/invisible-worlds

The problem about trying to make something invisible, is that to you, while you're in the middle of it, is totally visible. If you're in the world of  radio or whatever else, while you're in it, it is exactly what you know and there's nothing new or exciting to it in any way. The tricky part to deciding about the invisible world I'm part of, is trying to guess of what other people think are invisible that I'm part of. To me, it's just another day at the office, something that I already know, but to everyone else, it's something new and elusive that no one else is part of.

The thing that I think is invisible to most that are outside of the world I'm part of, but they think is invisible, is the weird world of being an introvert. For some reason this seems like some secret world that those outside of it just can't seem to crack. It's a world of mystery and wonder, one where people do weird things for weird reasons, and seem to contradict themselves in the weirdest of ways.

Typically introverts are people that work best in smaller one on one situations. Where others feel power and a sense of belonging in a group, an introvert loves smaller, individualized, or even solo adventures. For example, tonight I was at a party/get together with a few of my old roommates. It was a mess of people and conversations bouncing around all at the same time. The kick to all of this is that I wanted to see my old friends and catch up with them - but I didn't want to do it all at once.

I hated the get together tonight.

The moments I loved from the get together weren't the massive group all talking at once, or even being the center of attention when one of my old roommates asked me a question and everyone else in the room started to listen in to my life about what I was doing with my career. The best moments to me were when I was in a corner talking to one friend, and no one else was listening in and I could say whatever I wanted to him and it was our conversation. All of the other noise that came with the party was just something to suffer through in hopes that I'd be able to find more of those moments of thought.

This only escalates when  I'm doing things that I love or that are hobbies. I like my company. I like to be in my mind doing my own thing, which means that I don't play well with others because when I want to escape, I escape with the best company that I know - me. Just look at my hobbies and what I enjoy doing, none of them require another person. Even with the games that I play where it's supposed to be at least a two player thing (warhammer, D&D, even back in the day with MtG) I don't enjoy the actual game, I enjoy everything else around it that I get to do by myself. I enjoy D&D because I get to spend time alone with books and my brain, and occasionally suffer through a campaign game or two so I can spend more time plotting out the next story arc or what else might hook my players in.

Glowsticking - solo adventure.
Swimming - solo time, even though you're in a team, you never have to actual deal with anyone outside of occasionally passing them in the lane.
Tennis - at very most it was one other person on the court with me.
Writing - all me. It's just a glorified story time where I get to make whatever I like.

I enjoy time with myself dealing with what I love, but nothing in the world can make me feel anxious quite like being the center of attention in a social setting.

Tonight was prime time for that. Sitting along side the wall and listening into everyone else, and allowing time to just sit and listen, I sort of enjoyed. I could get all dark and sad saying that I was being overlooked or whatever else, but let's be honest no one can talk to everyone all the time. I enjoyed not having to talk to other people and just be there. The weird part came when I became the center of attention. When eyes were focused on me, I didn't like it. My answers became very short, I didn't talk in any form of sentences that made sense, and I just didn't feel right having people's eyes on me.

I don't like to stand out. I don't like it when eyes are on me. I certainly don't like public praise, and I don't like it when someone throws me under the bus with something like, 'I think Adam has something he'd like to say' in front of everyone.

Even in one on one situations there are times that I don't like it about me. Alicia and I were driving home from Las Vegas and she tried to turn the topic in on me and asked me what I was thinking about and tried her best to help me in writing. She was coming from a good place, but it only got more and more awkward, first because she kept talking about writing as if she was breaking out a secret that I had never thought about, but mainly because it was about me. She was making me sit in the spotlight, and it didn't feel right.

I don't like being the center of attention, I don't like all eyes on me, and I certainly do not like it when people are focused on me. I don't like large group settings, I don't like having a massive group infront or around me, and I hate the idea of small talk.

This is when introverts get crazy hard and people don't understand us because although I'm a total introvert and would live the hermit life if I had that option, I love teaching. I love talking in church. I love standing up and sharing my ideas about something that I'm passionate about.

That's the weird part about introverts. If you're talking to us about the weather, about whatever else is going on, or some weird small talk thing tht we could care less about, we'llchat, we'll play nice, but it's going to be painful for us. However, the moment you're talking about somethign that we enjoy, good luck shutting us up.

This is really confusing, especially to students of introverts. In the class my students see that I'm bouncing around talking about what I love the most, but as soon as I get outside of the classroom I shut down and don't keep to myself. One of my students actually found me in a Walmart once. They said hi to me, I said hi back, and then they had a serious issue because neither of us knew what to say after that. I wasn't going to go into a lesson about grammar in the middle of Walmart, and they weren't going to try to talk about their homework in the middle of Walmart, and we were stuck. They were used to me guiding lessons and discussions, and being the person who makes everyone around them talk more, but outside of the classroom, that's not me.

That's the trick to me, as well as most introverts. We will try to run and hide from you if you're talking about something that we don't care about o are simply not interested in. However, if you talk to us about something that we're passionate about and don't judge us in that passion, we're nuts. If you ever want to make friends with an introvert, talk to them about what they love. Let them show you that soft squishy side of them that they protect at all costs. You'll see a new side to them. A new person will break out of a cold hard shell that they've been practicing for years to build up. Tread carefully when you do break into that realm, because one wrong move and anything that you have been building up with that introvert will be ruined in seconds, and then you're stuck back at building that trust all over again.

Something I've Realized

Google is easy to screw around with. If you know what you're doing, and even try just a little bit, you can get pictures of Warhammer that you have painted to pop up in the top rows of things fairly quickly.

It scares me that I can google my army name (Thousand Sons army) and sure enough, on that list I have a picture. What's even spookier is when I can search for one of my first models painted in my life, and he shows up multiple times (Mannfred Von Carstien Mortarch).

I'm actually going to play around with this a bit after Thanksgiving break. I want to see just how I can play around with this, and I want to show off my army a bit as there's a big release of thousand sons models and information, so it's going to get interesting.

The only thing that I'm going off of on is the simple fact that although there are 'views' on this blog, I don't think I have any faithful readers, so I'm going to do whatever I want with this blog just to have fun and see what stuff I can do. I'm bored, this is my playground, and so I'm going to do it. I'm sorry if there is anyone who does actually show up to read my ramblings.

Christmas

I'm impossible to shop for. I know this. So, in honor of keeping things super secret with no one that I know reading this - this is what I want for Christmas, my birthday, or any other reason that you want to buy me stuff.

No restrictions. No limitations. Until further notice, feel free to buy as many of any of these. This is updated, new models, and rules for the army that I play. FINALLY they're getting an update, so yeah, feel free to buy to your heart's content. I'll use them all.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2016/11/40k-the-thousand-sons-officially-unveiled.html

and for what the boxes will most likely look like -

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2016/11/40k-new-thousand-sons-releases-spotted.html

Officially, the big ones that I'm looking at and loving every second are the rubric marines, then the terminators, then the sorcerers, then Ahriman, then possibly the tzaangors, but that's mainly because I know nothing about them. Either way, go ahead, buy away, I'm going to use them no matter how many or what mix you get.

Never Would I Ever - My American Life

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/140/family-business

There is never a chance in the world that I would ever work in a business with anyone from my family; this includes my wife.

Let's start with blood relatives - my parents and sisters. Nope, never would I think it a good idea to put my family int eh same room with me and create a business with them. We don't play well with each other. We don't communicate, we don't share, and we all think that we should be the person in charge and that everyone else has horrible ideas. Just look at our family gatherings. They're always a mess. It's always a great idea to bring all of us together, but in practice, it's a mess of families that have little in common with each other, people that don't talk to each other except for occasional phone calls to each other about birthdays, and generations of people that don't know or deal with each other.

Doing something as easy as playing a board game can't end with good vibes between each other, so there's never a chance in the world that we'd be able to do a for profit business together with each other. The business would go under.

As for my wife, I love her to death, but we wouldn't be able to agree on much with the business setting, and neither of us would be able to leave work at work. No matter which of us was the person in charge, the other person wouldn't be happy with it. No matter how great the choices one of us would make the other one would doubt or second guess them, and we'd totally bring it home with us and talk to them about their choices.

We love each other. We can deal with each other outside of work quite a bit, but we're also both very opinionated, and have very different approaches towards problems. It's part of life. Just because we're married to each other does not mean that we have to agree on everything all of the time, and that's what I love about it. We don't agree on everything, but the things that are important we totally agree on. Unfortunately, business practices is not one of the things that we agree on.

I love my family, but there's never a chance that I'd willingly go into business with them.

Be Different - Paint a Solid Color

In case you don't know, I have an Eldar army.

Now before you boo me off the internet and make me feel shame for having the super cheese army, I'm going to try to do what any good high school student caught with a stash of undesirables does - IT'S FOR MY FRIEND!

Seriously, it's not my army. It's an army that I just happen to be holding for my friend Josh. What's even better than that, I made slight conscious ideas while picking up pieces from Ebay, to avoid some of the more cheesy aspects of the army.

But the problem comes when I'm trying to create an army color. I've been looking around on google images, cool mini or not, imgur, and just about any other place I can to see what other armies are looking like, and I've noticed one very interesting thing - no one paints solid, bold, bright, vibrant colors.

The reason that my Thousand Sons army seems so weird is that I have rich, bright, yellows, oranges, and reds without being ashamed of it. It's not muted, it's not covered in 'mud or whatever else that is happening.  There's something that makes them stand out, because everything else is dark muted colors.

Think about it just about every single Warhammer 40k game that is ever played is played on a 'ruined city' deal. If it's not a ruined city, it's some sort of dark black/grey/brown mat, that is dark colors on it.

For some odd reason, most people play within that dark color palate. Even when someone paints a yellow army, they never go full bright florescent yellow, they go a muddy mustard yellow, and then throw on even more mud and dirt onto it to hide it from being yellow.  There is the occasional Tau army that's white, but even that white blends in as a neutral color against the black and greys that are going on, and you don't really see what's going on. The closest army that does anything that's anywhere close to breaking out of the darkness is Eldar, with their typical yellow or red armies, but even their red army is washed out with browns and blacks over a stark red and never comes through as a bright candy red.

There's one possible chance to save this, and that's with the harlequin army. They're clowns. They're supposed to be bright and over the top. Too bad that they base everything with black and dulled down colors too and have only pin pricks of brightness within their schemes.

 The entire game is like this. Nothing is vibrant. Nothing focuses mainly on full, rich, colors, but instead tries to mute everything that they run into. There are no armies that when you look at the expected color schemes of them, that you get something that's going to stand out on a 40k game table. They might look impressive close up, but when you put them next to a large city that's falling apart that little tiny tinge of silver or red isn't enough color pop to really get anyone's attention from anywhere further than a foot away.

Even within space marines, look at all of the different color options you have with this. For a rainbow of color options, you have reds, yellows, blues, white, grey, black, and the occasional dull green.  You've got an entire rainbow of color to play around with, and those pretty much get every single one of these, with the exception of the stand alone purple, or dull muted orange.

Chaos isn't much better. Khorne you have the options of blood red, or blood red on everything. If it's not red, you're doing something wrong. Nurgle, make it look like dull vomit green. Tzeentch you have blue and yellow. Slanesh you do get pink, too bad that it's a tertiary accent color and your primary color past that is black on black. Even the non-diety chaos are just as boring. I mean, just think about it, there's an entire legion of the game called the black legion. Guess how easy that one is to paint?

Orks, aren't free from this. You've got either mustard yellow orks, or dull red orks. Sure you've got some dull forest green skin in there, but other than that, you've only got reds, yellows, or greens to look at, and none of them are vibrant colors but rather dull muted ones with the excuse that they're orks so they should look like they just got done being in a mud bath.

Tyranids - same problem. It basically comes down to do you want light bugs that blend into the light stuff, or do you want dark bugs that blend into the dark stuff. You're never catching a vibrant color anywhere near that army. There's a few that have tried to have red armies, but it's the dull muted magenta that you see everywhere else. No chance for these to ever look bright unless you go well outside of tradition.

Tau - welcome to boring mech suits. Default colors? Sand tan and white. It's depressing really, because out of all of the armies that I thought would have a huge following of choices onto them, I thought this would be where it would shine. Just look at all of the big blocks of flat surfaces that these have on them! You don't have to worry about curves, you don't have to do anything crazy, you just have big wide open flat spots to play with, and the best people can come up with for those spots are boring tan/orange or white. Seriously, if it wasn't such a bad idea to do it both gaming as well as my budget, or anything else like that. I'd love to get my hands on a fresh Tau army, and have permission to do whatever I wanted with them. There's a lot of options for chaos and color all over their bodies, and yet no one ever does an entire army with it. If anyone ever wants to bank roll that one, I'm all in. I'll drop whatever I'm working on to work on a Tau army that I'd be proud of calling my own. Vibrant, florescent, glowing, pastel, I don't care, just as long as it was something other than tan orange or white I'd love to give it a shot and I'd be totally open for suggestions too.

Eldar - red, yellow, or blue. Those are your options, and none of them are exactly bright. The yellow is the closest you're going to get because MOST people don't muddy that one down too much, but it's the only exception to the rule and even then, you are still working with a hyper limited palate.

Dark Eldar - DARK eldar, 'nuf said.


I could keep going through the armies, but it's really not going to be worth it. Every single one runs into the same exact problem - limited color options to pick from and dark. If you want to stand out, if you want an army that doesn't look like anyone else, and if you want something that people will pause and take a second look at and notice your hard work in painting - go bold. Paint a solid, vibrant, color as your main color. Stop muting it, stop trying to dull it down, but instead swing for the fences and do a truly unique thing. Just think about all of the colors you can see at a Home Depot or any other paint store. You have thousands of options for colors, so stop using the same boring limited ones.

Correspondence Warhammer 40

I was thinking, which is always a bad thing, abs what came to my mind was correspondence chess.

Yes, my brain is that random.

For those people that don't know what this is, once upon a time when people were nice and bored, they would play long distance chess. How they would do this is by working off the grid system and then moving the pieces to the appropriate grid location, one painful step at a time. For chess, this was a long process because quite simply the game could last for hundreds of moves, which means hundreds of letters.

As for my idea, I'm thinking that possibly a distance game of warhammer could be done with email (or even the blog). Take pictures of the table, and then go through the sections of the the game. It might not be every single minor thing, because some things can be clumped together. For example movement can be done in bulk, and even shooting, can be done in smaller groups or bunches depending on the complexity of the fight.

It's just a thought, but with the option of having two armies, and bugging Josh constantly for an army list, I might be able to do this.

Stay tuned, and we'll see what happens.