You Should Know This.
 

Ever have one of those moments where you realise something you should have figured out years ago? I just had one. 5 minutes ago the joke about Vaarsuvius' and Pompey's names from Order of the Stick clicked.

So anyone want to share any particularly good moments like this they've had?

I realized I have the same birthday as H.P. Lovecraft a few days ago. That was interesting. I feel entitled to find some of his books to read now, though it'll have to wait 'till I'm done going through Discworld.

... goddamn.

I just realized what "Lazy Sunday" is about. :(

It's pretty often I just stop and realize my age. I know it sounds silly, but I look in the mirror and see the same face I had in high school, so it's just like, "Holy shit! I'm 22 now!" It's actually pulling the rug out from under me now, because this is my last semester at the tech, and then I'll have my Associate's, and possibly enough credit outright for my Bachelor's of Science, depending on what it requires, due to my having gotten a ton of gen-eds in first. This meaning that I'll have to get a job in my actual field and work and be an adult for the rest of my life. I've essentially been living the life of a kid up to now, dressing like one, going to school like one, living at home like one, and not bearing much responsibility like one. The idea that even my mom is expecting I start looking for a potential wife at this point seems crazy to me, but there it is. Among other things, I'm going to be off her insurance next April, she's giving me a year to get my own place after I become gainfully employed (not actually kicking me out so much as strongly suggesting I don't become a 40-year-old virgin who still lives with his mom), and my brother and cousins are all aging at the same rate I am, which completely blows my mind, because Phantom is going to be 20 in a couple months and lives even more like a kid than I do (specifically a rotten teenager with the maturity level of a child of four). It's crazy, but time essentially stopped for me and everyone I know when I was in high school, which was over four years ago, so while all the adults I know are still adults and thus haven't changed, all the kids I knew at that time have changed very little, if at all, and now are suddenly supposed to be adults, too. It's just like, "when did somebody flip the switch?"

I know I'll settle into it eventually, but at the moment, I have to measure everything about myself and decide what I can wear and how I can wear it, what I can and can't say to whom, what kinds of things I should and shouldn't have on my computer, what activities are appropriate, and all sorts of other stuff.

Yeah, I know what you mean. It scares me sometimes just thinking about how much time has passed since the good old HS days.

It still keeps hitting me every once in a while that I won't be going to school this Septemeber for the first time since I was four. I heard a back to school commercial the other day, and it BLEW. MY. MIND.

In the same vein that enlightenment is 'nothing special', being aware that I exist is usually taken for granted. Sometimes, encountering the I-am experience cues me in to the radical proposition of being a living being. It's an amazing experience, and yet, it's nothing special.

You probably won't really settle into it, it's more like you become accustomed to being unsettled.

Not just you personally, that's just sort of the nature of being an adult as far as I can tell.

I just came to realize last night that the SNES controller and the Xbox controllers both use the A, B, X, Y buttons. I don't know why, but it hit me hard. And then I thought of this thread.

I only just realized two days ago that sawyer the cleaner's name is a pun.

Guys, you're looking at being an adult all wrong.

You don't have to decide what's ok to wear for you or what's ok to have on your computer or whatever else.

That was for when you were a kid, and there were other people who could tell you what to do.

Now you are an adult, there's no one to tell you what is or isn't ok to do as an adult. That's the whole point. YOU get to decide what being an adult means for the next generation.

Does it mean wearing conservative clothes, having conservative haircuts, not playing games, watching the news at the exclusion of all else, and being boring as piss?

Does it mean watching old saturday morning cartoons in your underwear while eating chocolate chip cookie dough inside of a giant ball pen?

Or, more likely, does it mean some sort of happy medium between those two extremes?

Really--wondering if you're 'mature' enough or 'adult' enough is just allowing the preconceived notions that your parents' generation had about society to continue to shape you. It's just being a slave to the same forces that wouldn't let you do what you wanted as a kid.

Time to be free, I say! Time to throw off the shackles of societal expectation and make this generation's adulthood be about doing whatever the fuck we want, while dressing however the fuck we like, eating whatever the fuck we want, watching whatever the fuck we want, and to hell with anyone who says that it's for kids.

Agreed! I think it is incredibly annoying how some people seem to think that I spend too much time on my computer and playing video games, when I should be going out and getting a girlfriend and going to college. I'll do those things when, or if, I feel like it. For now, I'm a do what I want. The point of life is to be happy, so I'm just gonna focus on that and see how that turns out.

Here's something fun for you all to chew on!

Take V's symbol. Y'know, from V for Vendetta. Yeah, it's simple, but you'll need it.

Now over that symbol, put a Joker smile. Without exceeding the edges of the circle. That is very important.

Now. Turn it 180 degrees.

Is your mind blown?!

For those of you too lazy to do so, it's basically the Anarchy insignia. Fun, eh?

So... your big revelation is that if you put a sloppy rounded line through the letter V and turn it upside down it becomes the anarchy A?

Ball pens are the greatest achievment of the human species
 

Hell

Fuck

YEAH!

It was pretty stunning when I first realized that two symbols of fictional characters that stood for chaos and anarchy could be combined and then rotated to form yet another symbol of chaos and anarchy.

Well, I should say I realize all that, and I'm not going to suddenly get all stale and boring just because I aged. My free time is mine. What I'm more worried about is my not-free time, such as school, and soon, actual work. Like, I'm supposed to be getting an internship this semester, which means I'll be getting on-the-job IT training and will be expected to dress and act professionally, meaning conservatively. Actually, it's right on the syllabus USING conservative in the description. Aside from that, I tend to use my laptop for both school and personal use, and while I'm not planning on using it for work, too, being in IT, I know just how much they can dig out of you if they can pin down your IP address. I don't know how to do any of that stuff, myself, but they made sure I knew other people could.

On my own time, hell if anyone's going to tell me how to dress or what to do.

Unless you're shooting for a really, really high-profile job you're not going to have to worry about that. That, or you don't want to work for the company anyway, because that's a blatant breech of your privacy.

Getting a job is good. But there's always jobs out there where you don't have to work for crazies.

I didn't realize Austin Powers was a parody of James Bond until I was 12.

In my defense, I hadn't ever actually seen a James Bond film at that point.

Yeah, unless you are in a more business oriented and client facing environment or as MoM says in a company that enforces formal dress, this is something you probably won't have to worry about. A smart-ish top and a set of jeans and you're good to go.

I know developers who go to work in their Shorts, T-shirts and Sandals (Someone has turned up in their sleeping attire I've heard) and crack open a beer at around 2ish on a Friday and steadily become more and more merry as the day goes by whilst happily working from their bean bags. Some companies have got the right idea in that a happy engineer = a productive and creative engineer.

On the other hand the exact opposite exsits, but still!

I just realized I am the first of my siblings to get married and have a kid yet till I was 22 I was the one who said "I will never marry and never have kids because relationships are for sissies" fand my brother and sister wanted to get married and have kids........yet I am starting a family first....I seriously got sidetracked on that eh

Wait wait wait... that's an extreme?

I'm fucked. :( Especially since my giant ball pen consists of wadded up fast food wrappers.

EDIT: I killed the thread with my joke. :(