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Okay...an explanation: I used to have an extensive rambling autobiography of myself on my user page that made it really long and unwieldy. As I now have my own blog, I no longer require the services of my user page to expose my own insanity and abnormalities to the world, with my blogging and forumming doing that well enough already. So, without further ado...
Personal stuff edit
I hold strong (and oddly enough, generally fence-sitting) positions on politics and economics, and enjoy debating them. I'm also a proficient user of Linux, and a web developer who works with LAMP. I dislike the education in Malaysia and the Malaysian New Economic Policy. Every Myers Briggs Type Indicator test says I'm an INTP (here's a link to even more information), that is, an introverted intuitive thinking perceiver. I enjoy black comedy and think of myself as an extremely introverted intellectual.
Random weirdness sample: My two heroes are Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates, in no particular order. I think I'll save more on this for later.
In my spare time, I frequent the forums at HeavenGames and Interestingnonetheless. I also like monitoring urban legends on Snopes.com. I occasionally submit IRC quotes to bash.org and frantically monitor the latest quotes everyday. I'm currently working on a message board and news-posting/blogging software.
Turning to entertainment, I love sarcasm and humour, especially satires and parodies. Doonesbury and Calvin & Hobbes rock.
In music, I like oldies, in particular the Beatles (about half of my 361-song XMMS/Winamp playlist consists of their songs alone). Therefore, I will use this opportunity to express gratitude to my cousin Aileen who gave me The Beatles 1 for Christmas 2004; the album's digital remaster of "A Hard Day's Night" is simply brilliant. The only musicals I've seen are Cats (which in my opinion is seriously overrated) and Les Misérables which I think is a work of genius.
I prefer intellectual movies; prime examples include A Beautiful Mind, Dead Poets' Society, Gattaca and The Truman Show. I am still looking for a rational explanation as to why the latter two are not in the iMDB top 250, because they're frickin' good. They're so frickin' good, it's impossible to overstate how good these movies are.
I'm a very theoretical and abstract person; I dislike practical work. Naturally, my favourite sciences are computer science and physics, because neither involve getting one's hands dirty or memorising too much. I enjoy economics, politics and philosophy as well. I can just lie in bed all day reading and thinking.
Due to my rabid hatred of the way students are taught in Malaysia, I took the SAT in June 2005, and am taking the General Certificate of Education 'O' Levels in October/November of the same year. I hope to obtain a place in a local private college to conduct my pre-university A level studies. I plan to further my education somewhere in America (maybe Harvard, Princeton since I have an aunt there, or MIT, which my father always wanted to attend but never got to) instead of enduring more of this torture here they call "learning". (If you're a Malaysian and offended by this, please Google about our local universities and "akujanji" or the controversial varsity elections.)
Socially, I'm a quiet person. I dislike interacting with people and have an unexplained phobia of girls. If I'm shy around ordinary people, I'm practically invisible when it comes to members of the other sex. I'm definitely not homosexual, however. I just don't like talking to other people. That's not to say I don't like public speaking; I think I'd be a good public speaker because it's basically a monologue. As long as the interaction is one-way, I'm game for it. This is why I love message boards and despise instant messaging (there, now all of you have an explanation for why I never say anything to you).
I dislike emoting. A lot. I'm very stoic emotionally, and you can't bet on knowing my true emotions at any one time. Most of the time I don't actually feel any particular emotion, so when I display visible anger/euphoria, you'd better take a picture, because it'll last longer. For this same reason, I strongly dislike reading prose that expresses emotion strongly; I commonly use the glurges on snopes.com for humour purposes, and i do the same with a lot of the "pass this on" crap there because 99% of the literature in this genre is written emotionally. Likewise, when I write, I rarely display emotion. As such, you can't count on me to write good fiction (with great apologies to my family members).
Speaking of writing, I've discovered I have a talent for writing. I like writing. I love writing. That's probably the best emoting you're going to get out of me on this page for now. I can't express emotion well in writing, so like I said, fiction or even non-fiction with a tinge of emotion (i.e., the sort of thing you'd see in Reader's Digest) is going to turn out very very badly from me). I can write factually, though. I think this trait of mine has been greatly enhanced by the years I've spent on message boards. They've played a great influence in my life from 2000 onwards, so it's not surprising.
I guess you could say I'm a nerd. Well, yes, I believe I am. I'm busy studying for a college entrance examination, aren't I? I'm developing a PHPNuke-like software, aren't I? I've read Why Nerds are Unpopular, and I strongly agree with it. However, I'm different from the nerds mentioned there, in that I have realised that I don't want to be popular and I don't care about it. I realise I'm an adult (at least mentally) compared to my peers. So am I an advanced nerd? I don't know...
I find that I resemble my father in many ways, but I lack his organisation (my desks are always cluttered) and handyman skills (I can't saw or hammer straight to save my life; this is not a joke; it's the literal truth). Otherwise my father and I are almost alike; we're both introverted intellectuals who deal with abstract instead of practical matters. I think my writing side comes from my mother's family, though, since there are a lot of writers there. I think I'm quite fortunate to have inherited such excellent (intellectually at least) genetic material, though perhaps I should be surprised I'm the exception rather than the rule among my siblings (considering my father holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo and my mother holds a Masters from the Asian Institute of Technology); my younger sister's an average shallow Malaysian preteen, my younger brother has dyslexia (actually, my father seems to have a mild form of it himself) but has a knack with numbers, and my youngest sister has global developmental delay. Wee.
P.S. Mozilla Firefox rocks. Get it now!
P.P.S. I think the following quote by one Ultima_Knight from Heavengames' forums is an apt description of its subject: Love is when a someone you like tries to murder you in a most painful manner, and you still like them more than everyone else.
P.P.P.S. I run a website with its own message board. Visit, if you want.
Political and philosophical leanings edit
My political philosophy is very difficult to classify; if you insist on pigeonholing it somewhere, I guess I'm a libertarian, but I don't believe we need to destroy welfare or public services entirely as most US Libertarian Party presidential candidates do. Rather, I think they need to be heavily restructured. There needs to be a new sector, neither wholly private or public. It will be the one that operates "public" healthcare, education and welfare; although privately-run by NGOs, it will receive government funding. The reason why so much money is being chucked at welfare and nothing is achieved is because bureaucracy is naturally inefficient.
I hate discrimination, even if it's "positive", such as affirmative action. It's one of the few things left in the world that arouse any passion in me at all. I've become extremely cynical in recent years, but I think discrimination is one of the very few things left in the world that I feel strongly about. I can't stand it when people discriminate against other people for reasons out of their control — you can't change where you were born, or who your parents were, can you?
I best identified with candidates Wesley Clark and Howard Dean in the US 2004 Presidential election, but I endorsed the Libertarian candidate when they lost the Democrat nomination (after some thinking, I have however decided that I'm more a libertarian instead of a Libertarian). However, I don't think there's a single political party in the world today that fully encompasses my political leanings; many online political tests either classify me as libertarian or left-leaning centrist. I strongly believe in separation of religion and state.
Although I think the Malaysian government is doing a horrible job and a lot of the ruling politicians suck, if anything, all the opposition knows how to do is blow hot air. The problem is, the government needs to be checked in certain areas, but the opposition politicians are seeking self-glorification instead of helping the common people. If I could, I'd vote against the government, but why bother when:
- Anwar Ibrahim is just the other side of the Mahathir coin;
- PAS wants to turn Malaysia into a second Afghanistan (hurrah for the Taliban!);
- Lim Kit Siang is an impotent politician who can only talk about how the government sucks completely (which incidentally is what everyone else who isn't sucking on the government's nepotic tits is doing).
So, yeah, I see no reason to support the Opposition as it is considering they oppose for the sake of opposing instead of seeking to better Malaysia. The same could be said for the government, but I see no indicators that a DAP government would be better until Karpal Singh and Lim Kit Siang go; they're really holding the party back as it is. Change and diversity are the lifeblood of any organisation, association or collective. This is why, for example, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore are so advanced and developed — the continuous influx of immigrants is making these countries the better for it. Likewise with political parties, etc., there must be diversity of views. You cannot hold down those who think differently, because as long as there is a common goal, a common purpose, it is far more advantageous to work out a compromise. This is a major flaw in the policies of both the government and opposition of Malaysia.
I believe that right now in Malaysia, the best option for most voters is to cast a spoilt vote in the general elections. We're not going to have local council elections any time soon, and the government is doing such a terrible job (basically 99.9% of public servants are just in it for their own gain, especially the elected officials) that voting for it is a terrible proposition. The opposition, especially PAS is hard to vote for (although I wouldn't find it too hard to vote for the DAP). So, just scribble something like "I think both the government and opposition should go to hell" and spoil your vote. You won't be ensuring an opposition government any time soon (the worst fear of many average Malaysians) but you're bound to topple some useless MPs here and there, and hopefully that ought to send the government a message. It's a stop-gap solution, but until something better comes along, it's all the average man has (you'll never get him to vote for PAS or PKR and probably not the DAP).
I consider myself a World citizen, but being practical, I don't foresee the collapse of national governments any time soon, and as such would prefer to work within their existing framework. As such, I am a strong internationalist.
As for religion, I view myself as a non-denominational Christian. However, as I'm a strong introvert, I've stopped attending church as I see little benefit; all you do is get dressed nicely and sit in an air-conditioned room for a few hours listening to some preacher blow hot air. I take a moderate view of my religion, and do not interpret the Bible literally. My mother is a fundamentalist, but my father is an agnostic; I find myself more in agreement with him than my mother.
Surprisingly, I subscribe to most fundamentalist beliefs that can be verified by the Bible; as such, I consider homosexuality and sexual intercourse before marriage to be sins. However, I'm not the kind of person who will picket at anti-gay rallies; I view homosexuality as a sin no lesser or greater than adultery or even robbery. I also believe abortion to be murder.
However, in yet another example of my complete disorientation in my philosophical beliefs, I believe there's nothing wrong with legalising homosexuality and that the government can choose to do it if they wish. Likewise with abortion (though I would support banning it after the first trimester; what kind of retard waits till the last minute to abort?). Separation of religion and state is an important concept. The state could legalise murder for all I care. That wouldn't make it right morally, but I'd really rather have that than have religion influence lawmaking. Or would I? I think both would be equally bad, but you get my point (I hope).
Geek code edit
(with thanks to Reene on whose user page I stumbled upon this)
–––––BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK–––––
Version: 3.1
GCS/H/SS/O d s+:++>++:+ a---- C++>$ UL>$ P-->+$ L++>+++$ !E W+++>$ !N !o? K--?
w>$ !O !M-- !V? PS+()>$ PE++(+)>$ Y? !PGP t>$ !5 !X !R tv>$ b++++>$ DI
!D G>$ e->+++++$ h-->++$ !r>+++ y>+++
–––––END GEEK CODE BLOCK–––––