Art of Manliness: How to Help a Friend with a Problem

Note: This article, sadly, isn’t on the Art of Manliness website. It’s great, though, and relevant to a discussion I was having earlier. Is it wrong to post one of the few book-exclusive Art of Manliness articles? Maybe, but I think it’ll be alright. If anything it should convince you to buy the book yourself.

One last thing - you’d be silly to think this only applies to men. It’s all good advice, though the relative usefulness depends on your situation - which includes the gender of your friend. Some people don’t like being grilled for information, others will be more than happy to talk. Go with what works, and recognize when you’ve stopped being helpful.

        If you see your buddy going through a rough patch in life, it’s only natural to want to offer some advice on how to remedy the situation. But helping a man friend with a problem can be a sticky situation; men don’t like heart-to-hearts, they’re often too prideful to ask for help and a marathon of watching Sex and the City reruns and eating pints of Ben and Jerry’s won’t soothe their troubles. So when helping your friend with a problem, you must walk softly and carry a fishing pole.

        Go do something together. Men tend to be uncomfortable with baring their souls. So instead of sitting your friend down and gazing into his eyes, go jogging, take him fishing or bowling, or play some pool. It’s easier to unburden yourself when you’re sitting looking outward, instead of face-to-face. In between fishing casts, ask your friend about his problem.

        Get the facts. Before you can successfully help someone, you need to know all the facts about the problem. Harness your inner news report by asking who, what, when, where and why questions. And make sure you listen attentively while your friend speaks.

        Enable your friend to discover the solution himself. Men are most likely to follow through with something if they feel like they thought of the idea themselves. And oftentimes a man simply needs to be able to think out loud to come up with the answer to his troubles. Therefore your job as a friend is to act as a facilitator. After you hear your friend’s problem, ask him very nonchalantly, “So what do you think you can do to fix your situation?” Usually he’ll start listening some things. When he says something that you think would be particularly effective, let him know and explore the idea further.

        Ask him if he wants your advice. If helping them figure out their own solution isn’t going anywhere, ask your friend if he would like some advice. By asking before you jump into the ray, you respect your friend’s manly pride. If they say no, then it’s no great shakes. Just keep fishing or bowling and let your friend know you’re always willing to talk about it in the future. Don’t bug him about it; that’s the man code.

        Don’t preach. Men hate being preached to. Don’t put off a smug vibe that makes your friend feel you think you’re better than him for being in this pickle. Skip the patronizing sermon of “shoulds” and “musts”; instead offer suggestions. Say, “This is what I would do if I were in your situation,” “You could try doing X,” or “I once had a similar problem and here’s how I handled it.”

        Give ‘em some straight talk. Men don’t like to be preached to, but they do appreciate a justified kick in the pants. If your friend’s been a dunderhead, then you need to call him on the carpet. Talk to him respectfully and honestly, man to man. Sometimes you have to tear a man down to bring him back up.

        Naturally the specific situation should determine your approach. If the problem is more sensitive, like his girlfriend cheating on him, be more sympathetic.

Exciting research opportunities abound!

I went to a lab fair for Cognitive Science, which means various lab directors from Carleton sat down to chat about their projects and where they needed assistants and things like that. So aside from learning a few names and getting my name out there, I’ve also gotten a position as a volunteer research assistant (i.e. no benefit for me unless we get published), and names of a few people with research grants with which to pay people like me to do things. I’ll go through those in order.

        First, the volunteer stuff. Met a man named Jim Davies, who carries five notebooks with him to write down his research ideas. He has also given a TEDx talk at my school. I haven’t watched it yet, though I will, but first I have some stuff to do. But anyway! So he’s doing research on building a computer that can imagine the way humans do. The ultimate goal is to construct a massive database of images, with various parts labelled, and have the computer construct images based on keywords. So, for example, based on its experience of “car” images, if you say “car” to the computer it will make a car and perhaps put it on a road or driveway. If you say “puppy” it might put it near some grass or flowers.

        So my help with this is to create a Python program (note: I don’t yet know Python, so that’s step 1) that will submit queries to the Oracle of Objects, and so if I say (on the proximity page) “dog” it tells me there’s a 10% chance a picture of a dog will include a man. So that’s the basic “AI” of the imagination-bot, to go through its database of images and calculate these percentages and use them to generate its images. Now, one caveat is that it will be creating a kind of collage out of the images in its database - it isn’t going to spontaneously create these images like a human being might. So someone else needs to work on its ability to do photo-stitching, i.e. super-powered photoshopping.

        So yeah! That’s something to do in my spare time. I have to report back on my progress January 4th.

        Also? Jim Davies had two widescreen monitors set up in his office, except one was vertical (portrait orientation) and it was pretty cool seeing him manage them. Still kinda toying with the idea of more monitors. Also the main method of co-ordination with him and his assistants is shared google calendars. Thanks, Google!

        Now the paid work, which is… well, much more interesting to my wallet. Carleton has a Language and Brain Lab, as well as a Logic, Language, and Information Lab. Both of these labs have acquired research grants, allowing them to pay undergraduate students to do work as research assistants for them during the summer. So, essentially, summer jobs doing interesting research. This is far better than my planned summer jobs working for the government. I have to send out a few e-mails to the people I spoke to today, but one in particular mentioned that he would be looking for applications soon. Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect.

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        In unrelated news, I did a cool thing in Echo Bazaar, but it’s pretty spoilerrific. This is the culmination of a long series of silk hunting/spider extermination expeditions at The Silken Chapel near the Wolfstack Docks. Something that was immensely boring, unrewarding, and unsatisfying. Until this happened! Now it’s kinda cool. Image is here, if you want to see it.

Cotton candy perfume

Here’s a bit of psychology for you. There’s a structure in the brain, called the limbic system, which is (as far as my first year course is concerned) the basic location of emotions. Completely unrelated to the limbic system is the thalamus, a central station for your senses that passes information on to the other part of your brain. So, the signals processed by your eye go to the thalamus, which sends them to your primary visual cortex. However, your sense of smell DOESN’T go through the thalamus - it goes straight to your limbic system, creating a pretty close association between scents and emotions.

        So I was going into my psychology lecture, and a girl in front of me was wearing a lot of cotton candy perfume. I was pretty confused for half a second (as in, where am I, what am I doing here), and then I came back and started to wonder why anyone would wear cotton candy perfume - would you be attracted to someone who smelled like a carnival? When we got into the class and I walked past her to find a seat, I was starting to enjoy the cotton candy smell in a weird kind of way. Still kind of confused about it, trying to form a proper sentence to explain my confusion, and yet there was a kind of attraction to it.

        I got to my seat, sat down, and while I was waiting for the lecture to start I worked on sending Britt a text about how cotton candy perfume confuses me. I settled on “you know what I hate? People who wear cotton candy perfume. It’s so confusing when they walk by :(” She replied and asked me why it was confusing, which I had to think about, and ended up saying “because it’s like wtf, cotton candy!? And I’m able to be confused for half a second by perfume.” Her response: “I used cotton candy stuff all the time. I always sprayed my room with cotton candy perfume.”

        I don’t want to beat you over the head with the significance of that and go into too much detail, but it’s so cool! As I told her, I didn’t remember that she always sprayed her room with cotton candy perfume. I couldn’t have told you that, if you’d asked what her room smelled like. But my brain knew it, and obviously I have a pretty strong emotional association with her room, because we hung out there a lot. So I smell someone wearing cotton candy perfume, and for half a second I’m just bewildered because cotton candy perfume = her room, as far as my nose is concerned. Then I lash out, questioning the reaction, and then it’s kinda pleasant and attractive.

        So now you know how to make yourself strangely alluring to me. Though if you’re actually going to try that, go with vanilla instead. So now you know that psychology is legit! I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. And this is in no way a plug for my excellent repository of notes.

GodVille

I don’t think I’ve made a tumblr post about GodVille, so this is my post about my entire experience with the game.

        I failed to be engaged by this game at every level.

        Maybe playing it as a Google Chrome extension would have been more fun, but I don’t use Chrome that much and I wasn’t engaged enough to want to open a browser to play it. That is, I wouldn’t open my browser solely to play it. I would, absolutely, open my browser and do nothing but play BvS. I open my browser just to play EchoBazaar multiple times per day. If I remembered GodVille at all, it was as “well I’ve got five seconds to waste.”

        After the first few days I stopped reading those amazing journal entries. I just checked my hero’s equipment, healed him if he needed it, then went off. Even generic facebook games engage me - for whatever brief period of time - more than GodVille did. I just felt absolutely no reason to “play”. As an iPhone app - something I would have instant access to, anywhere, any time - it might be perfectly acceptable. Tolerable for a few minutes per day. But when I try to go for a PvP fight - the most involving part of the game - and it takes half an hour, with no signs of stopping (both the other player and I had stocked up on healing power), that’s bullshit. You don’t spend half an hour in a single PvP fight in a real game, and you shouldn’t spend half an hour in a PvP fight in a game that otherwise involves no real “gameplay.” I wasn’t sitting there watching the stupid fight, namely because it is stupid, but I tabbed over every once in a while to click heal.

        I think there’s some kind of passive bonus if you’ve on the page (“watching your hero”) during a PvP fight? But essentially what it amounts to is a big waste of time for two people, when the fight could move 2-5x faster and nobody would be hurt.

        So I quit before the fight was over and decided I didn’t care who won, but I went back a few minutes ago to tick the “pure Zero Player Game” button. For the record, I did not check to see who won the fight. But what the pure ZPG button means is that my hero will revive himself and continue doing the exact same thing he had been, until their servers go down or they implement inactivity deletion.

        The true lesson is that a game needs to be engaging, as opposed to “immersive” or “good” or any of these other things. Vael said it in a post about Echo Bazaar - it’s not like the gameplay is very “good”, it’s just so damn interesting that you can’t give it up. Its interactive story, unique to it as a game, makes it engaging. In Billy vs Snakeman, the basic form of engagement is character progress - get more shiny stuffs to power up your character, do more content, get more stuff. I’ve reached the very tip of the shiny stuff iceberg, and I’ve stopped playing my daily stamina. I go on the weekends for BillyCon (in-game conventions, which are amazing) but aside from that I’m just not engaged anymore. I was more engaged in the game while grinding stats than I am with my current stage of “throw stamina at monster, hopefully get reward.”

        So, engagement. Something browser based games have to work really hard to create. I’ll also note that I haven’t logged into MurCity or MonBre for months, even though I would only need to go on for thirty seconds. Again, no engagement anymore. I’ve tried a few skill builds and that’s that, unless I were to try a different race.

        I’m not really going anywhere with this, but there you go. Stay tuned next time for similar ramblings about the current “console generation,” which will likely become an outdated term in a few years when the Wii 2 comes out!