Experience, Perspective, Comfort (aka Chicken Soup for the Soul)

[FairEmma]

Wall o' text ahead.

 

I'm 59. I've been a gamer since I was 16. I know nothing about PC gaming; I've used Apple since the product designs were truly ugly  I've been a university lecturer, a conversion rate marketing specialist and a writer (business books, 2 bestsellers). Off-scene, I'm an Early Music musician.

 

You folks have been so patient with me, helpful, and pricked my interest in learning more, despite I'm an in-the-blood console player. When I read the crapton of garbage this group's work is subject to, my ire rises and I want to lash out at the idiots (even myself, if I qualify). Of course, that's useless, so I tell myself these things, which I write with no intention of sounding patronizing, because I figure most of you have been around the block, too. When I'm about to explode, these help. They're just reminders ... chicken soup for my soul.

 

1. If you are able to capture the interest, imagination and positive engagement of 2% of your class, especially in one of those amphitheater lecture halls, you've performed magic and should pay attention to Delvin's advice about walking tall. 2% sounds like nothing, but these days, only 2% actually benefit from traditional university anyway. And that 2% represents the people who will eventually make differences in others' lives, whether or not for profit.

 

2. It's much easier (perhaps comfortable in a weird way) to be a complainer than a praiser. For every one person who complains, 10-20 are perfectly happy and never say anything. Feedback is always going to look screwed.

 

3. My mom worked as a school psychologist with severely disadvantaged students. At most, 5% of the population deals with this sort of disability, but when I got pregnant, she was certain I was going to have a disabled child because there are so many disabled children out there (he turned out fine). We think of our personal world as representative of the wide, woolly world and everyone in it.

 

4. 1-2% of direct mail campaigns generate buyers. Appallingly amazing, this rate is still profitable. The top converting websites (think Amazon) convert only 7% of their daily site traffic. Very, very few online businesses see conversion rates in the low double digits. And these companies, while they could do better, are doing very nicely, thank you very much.

 

5. I moderated a large, international "hobby" board. Something like that gives you a crash course in what "the entitlement generation" actually means. You do what you do for one special snowflake, the most deserving person on the planet. You can tell them what they get is a privilege, not a right. It does no good.  Anger, reprimands, condescension ... nothing works. They don't want to do the learning (or even to read the rules), they just want answers and me-based attention. Don't give them 7 information links. If they click anything at all, it will be only one link. I gave up modding because burnout was killing me. But I was younger then. Now I'm more like a duck.

 

6. I'm a professional writer. If I tell you I will never need to buy wallpaper, you'll know what I mean, right?   Somebody once told me, "Leave your ego at the door." I've had such a hard time doing that, but it's some of the wisest advice anyone gave me.

 

You guys have over 9k downloads of the most popular mod for Skyrim SE. That's just on Xbox1; I don't know the number for PCs. You are doing fabulously. You've given from passion. A small portion of your audience (my audiences throughout my life) has decided to exercise their right to complain unproductively. A far larger portion is grateful for your passion, the fruits of your passion, the humanity of the passion.

 

The small portion will never understand how little they benefit from access to the air/ink/bandwidth their negatively consumes.

 

Those are my rants and my reminders. Now, you rant. Share your reminders. Then we'll sit like ducks wearing dragonbone skin, drink tea/coffee/bubbly beverages from machines/somthing-harder and laugh and face the next seemingly huge wave of self-focused, ignorant griping.

 

 

 

[lmstearn]

@FairEmma: Welcome to the Bughausen!   

1: The key to a fulfilling life at university is Architecture.

2: Complainers? Something like the Socratic method makes it more appealing.

3: A disadvantage is nothing more than a traffic cone: Django Reinhardt played most of his stuff with two fingers.

4: Ah, market research! is it possible for it to determine by means of statistics if the attraction of a horker life has a bind on a significant section of the community? 

5: Being a successful Moderator is the art of cheerfully, but compassionately spooning out less for those who clamour for more.

6: How about this: If I ever tell you what I mean, will you then want to go out and buy wallpaper?

 

Interesting you say that you had modded before- would you care to share what games, and would you be interested in taking up the mantle once more?

[FairEmma]

Hello, Imstearn. Thank you.

 

1. So, Architecture works for you. Is this where the students sit at desks in the lobby and the lecturer hangs out poolside on the roof?

2. I think complaints should be kept as internal signals that something is disjunctive between you and the world, and you need to figure it out and solve it (internally is preferable) if the problem is more about your behavior than the world's.

3. Ha! And Christy Brown painted with his only mobile limb ... his left foot. And then there's Temple Grandin, professor at Colorado State (I think there). Love those stories of determination. But I wasn't thinking about disabled folks at all, really ... much more about how we each tend to see our individual world of experience as representative of the combined world of experience.

4. Ah, well here, we can't really turn to marketing. You'd need a top rate biostatistician (very few of those around) accomplished in working with natural environments (maybe digital ones) and control groups and careful design of experiments and knowledge that meaningful conclusions are valid only if they are replicable. I'd have to say, you may be equating this to sun spot activity and mini skirts. Understandable.

5. Certain substances can also be helpful.

6. What? And lose a source capable of producing wondrous belly laughs? The last one began: Dear [first name last name]. The only sane response is laughter. I haven't found wallpaper to compare.

 

Well, no, and if I misled you to think that, apologies. I meant I grew up with Mac computers, and moddable video games rarely, rarely (virtually never) got ported to that platform, so I was always a console gamer (weird terminology, really). Sadly, manufacturers have clever ways of keeping console users' spoons out of the soup. I was, however, in the day, a whiz at Fortran.

 

I'd dearly love to help, but I've no technical skills that make me an appealing resource. My primary reason for being here is to learn and ask the occasional irritating question.