futurology | VIDEO. UN: LOKI

[ the sound of the wind storm hollows dully against the cave walls. Loki's squidge, Bacon, can half be seen crawling in the confines of his tacky green jacket and over his knee from where he sits, sometimes ducking and squeaking when a particularly large gust hits. to keep it from screaming, Loki offers his fingers absently, which the little squidge pulls on with its pudgy arms before ducking low again. ]

Hello there, it seems like we'll be waiting this out for some time considering the weather-type circumstances. While we're all rotting away, etcetera etcetera, I thought we could amuse ourselves with a game. A little bit of team bonding funtimes, so to say. [ he twists a dark nailed hand in the air, gesturing. ]

Soo—oo ... it's called Two Truths and a Lie. How do you play? Glad you asked, it's simple! Give two true statements about yourself and add a lie to the mix, shake it up then toss it out there and see if your team members know you well enough to spot the lie.

Usually this is done with copious amounts of alcohol, but we're lacking at the moment. [ pause. ] But—ah—you could always enjoy the satisfaction of being right. It's not like we're doing much else.

NOTE | Feel free to threadjack if that's your thing!! :****

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Lucky guess!

I almost was. I tied average test scores with this other guy, but he got the official title because they asked him to do the speech. Which apparently was the technical definition they were using of 'valedictorian'.

Oh, good! Seems like I haven't lost my touch.

[He smiles.]

That's too bad. Though I guess you saved yourself some stage fright, I suppose.

Yeah, you bet. I've got no interest in getting up in front of a bunch of bored high schoolers and talking about our vaunted future opportunities now, and I certainly didn't then, either.

Public speaking. Ugh.

I certainly feel you on that. I can write any day, but speaking to a crowd...?

Also, this is related, but did you know more people fear public speaking than they fear death? Fascinating, really.

Now there's a statistic I hadn't heard before.

I suppose it doesn't shock me, but it makes a person think, doesn't it? Why do we fear mockery more than we fear the cessation of existence?

....er. [He thinks of the like, several teammates they've had that've come back from the dead, are undead, etc, etc...] That is, the cessation of existence for most people.

It's a strange fact, and I guess there's something about the fear of instant reaction, perhaps? Of experiencing shame and instant judgement, while death is just that. It's an end.

[A shrug.]

You won't have to worry about instant judgement after something like that.

Unless you subscribe to one of any number of religions who propose that there's a very judgey creator waiting for everyone after death.

Now there's a survey for you: are the particularly religious statistically more likely to be afraid of dying than afraid of public speaking?

True, true. I don't believe in such a thing, but...hm. That's a good question. I don't suppose a study has ever been done on the correlation between those two things.

I wish I knew some statistician or other. I'm sure there are plenty out there who'd get a kick out of the subject.

Although I feel like maybe anyone who makes a career out of statistics must get their kicks rather oddly.

Alas, I don't know such a person either. Clearly I need to get a better group of friends.

But you have a point. I don't see how anyone can just devote their life to figures and numbers. It's just ridiculous, to me.

Oh, no no, I mean -- I get devoting one's life to math. I have no problem with numbers in general. Shit, I'm training to be a network security engineer, or something along those lines.

But statistics is a soft science at best. You don't even get the benefits of hard math, where there's always a concrete way to check your work. Stats is just... high-level counting and soft sociology most of the time. That sounds awful.

[He does take a moment to consider that. Honestly, he really hadn't given much thought to statistics. It had always seemed a dreadfully boring subject, in his opinion.]

So, you think it's awful because it's more vague than other subjects are? In a sense. As in, it's sort of it's own beast instead of strictly a science or a more abstract field. That's an interesting way of putting it.

It's awful because it's wishy-washy. [Evan scoffs, a man with Opinions.] I mean, vagueness is fine in subjects that rely on subjectivity to communicate. But stats -- really, they pretend to be objective but it's a total crapshoot as to whether they actually are.

I mean, there are some branches of statistics that deal with hard data, I guess. But anything involving humans? Or even other animals? Anything with fuzzy categorization? Stats are a soft science.

[Sorry, Keats. You got him talking about math.]

[That's fine. He'd talk about math any day, this kind of logical stuff is his bread and butter.]

You have some good points. The fact it relies on so much ambiguity doesn't make it very reliable. Plus, stats can do more harm than good - they have the ability to sway public opinion, and that's dangerous if used in the wrong way.

You know, yeah, that's true, but just to play devil's advocate, that's true about much of what comes out of even the hard sciences. Every tool can be a weapon if you use it wrong, right?

[Yeah, the saying usually goes the other way, but Evan doesn't really approve all that much of turning perfectly good tools into weapons.]

VIDEO. UN: LOKI

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