Are you comfortable in front of people, or does the idea of public speaking make you want to hide in the bathroom? Why?

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/daily-prompt-public/

Although I’m an introvert and prefer to be alone or in small groups, I am still comfortable in front of people, and like public speaking.

When most people think of introverts, they think of shy people who run away from big crowds and hide in the back corner until they can leave. Although some introverts are like this, this is a better description of someone who is socially shy, rather than someone who is introverted. An easier way to describe the difference between introverts and extroverts is how they like to spend their relaxation time – alone, or with others. This shows how they recover their energy; introverts recharge alone, while extraverts recharge with others.

Thus, especially in my situation, introversion or extraversion can have very little to do with someone’s desire to speak in front of crowds. In my case, I enjoy speaking and performing in front of large audiences. Often times, I seek out opportunities to do so, and even speak online in the form of shout­casting during live stream broadcasts, if no person-to-person chances are available.

I think the easiest way to describe why I enjoy public performance is because the presence of others places pressure on me to push myself to the limit to make my performance as entertaining as possible. Trying my best in something and reaching new levels of achievement gives me a thrill that may generally not be possible if others weren’t there to push me forward. My introversion comes into play here at the end of the performance; when everything is done and over, I like to go home and rest by myself.

Note: After finishing writing this post, I looked back at the prompt and realized that it mentioned nothing about introversion or extraversion. Thus, I have no idea why I spent so much time talking about it and clearing up the nuances. So, in case you were wondering why I keep mentioning introverts and extra­verts, it’s because I apparently don’t know how to read and understand prompts on the first try.

If you were forced to give up one sense, but gain super-sensitivity in another, which senses would you choose?

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/daily-prompt-sensitive/

To decide which sense to give up, the easiest method seems to be to go through process of elimination.

I feel like the most important sense is vision, so that is immediately removed from consideration. It’s a little obvious that knowing where you are relative to other things is pretty important. Hearing is also important, as not only does it act as warning signs and feedback from the environment, but it is also vital for easy communication with others.

Touch and feeling can be the difference between realizing something bad is happening to your body, and having no idea that you are about to be, or have been, severely injured. It’s also nice to have some sensation to your body.

That leaves smell and taste. As we all know from when we have a cold, taste becomes nearly useless when our sense of smell is handicapped. Thus, if we were to eliminate our smell, we would effectively be removing our taste with it as well. So, that brings me to the decision of giving up taste.

One may argue that taste is important for ensuring that we don’t consume toxic or poisonous substances. Although that is a valid statement, there are two points that make it less important. First, we’re no longer living in ancient times when we need to go hunting for our own food. We’re not going to randomly go out into the woods and find potentially dangerous berries, when instead we can just go to the fruit section of our local supermarket. Second, if we were to ever encounter harmful foods, our sense of smell would be able to alert us to a potential problem. Our nasal passage and our mouths are connected, so we would be able to smell the food in our mouths.

Remember, even though we’re going to lose the luxury of tasting delicious foods, we’re being forced to eliminate one of our senses. Thus, we’re going to lose something anyway, so we want to minimize our losses, and mitigate potential effects on our future survival and comfort.

In return, we get to be super-sensitive in one sense, for which I pick vision. I’ve had poor vision for a majority of my life, so I think it would be nice to have incredible vision. Some of the things I would hope comes with super sensitivity is increased clarity, improved rate of focal depth adjustment, greater range of peripheral vision, night vision, and maybe even x-ray vision and the ability to shoot lasers from my eyes.

If my choice was not limited to the five basic senses and I was able to be a bit clever, I would pick super sensitivity in my common sense, or mental sensibility in general. That way, I would be able to look at a particular situation and pick up subtle clues that I might normally miss, in order to better analyze what’s going on. Although it’s not as exciting as having night vision or shooting lasers from my eyes, I feel it would be the most realistically useful in terms of everyday life.

But, bringing this back full circle, if I wasn’t forced to do this and was instead offered a choice, I would probably decline. I would prefer to keep my taste over having super vision.

What was your favorite plaything as a child? Do you see any connection between your life now, and your favorite childhood toy?

Source: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/12/daily-prompt-memento/

My favorite toy when I was a child was my Game Boy Color, the first handheld portable gaming system I had. More specifically, my favorite game was Pokémon – I owned the Yellow and Gold versions.

During my generation’s childhood, not only were Pokémon games considered companions that kids could take with them where ever they wanted to never get bored, but they were also a way to demonstrate social status. Having the strongest and widest variety of Pokémon was how you earned the respect of your peers, and you settled disputes by linking up your Game Boys and having Pokémon battles.

Since then, I haven’t actually purchased more Pokémon games. However, I did do competitive Pokémon battling for a while during the fourth generation of games, and have played some of the newer games using emulators on my computer.

I feel like having Pokémon as my favorite game as a child has affected my current life because it has shaped what I enjoy doing for entertainment. I am still more of an indoors person, and would prefer to play computer games or read books rather than do stuff outside.

It has also affected the type of games I enjoy playing. I prefer not to play games that are instance-based (where you start fresh each round), or one-time play through games where you can “beat” the game. Instead, I like to play games where you can continue to build upon your past work, and can continue to work towards a seemingly impossible goal, finding pleasure and satisfaction simply from making progress.

This is apparent from the other games I play. During middle school, I played Neopets, which is a very open-ended game that can’t exactly be “beaten.” Starting from seventh grade, I played RuneScape, also a very open-ended game where your progress is permanently saved and there’s always something dynamic to do.

Outside the realm of games, my approach to real life has become similar. I don’t like to do things that are momentary, and provide enjoyment or pleasure just for the duration of the act. Instead, I like to do things that will ultimately improve me in the long run, and help enhance my life in a larger scale.

For example, rather than traveling, I would prefer to spend that money on something like a high-end computer, that will last for years, rather than just the duration of the vacation.

This is also why I never discard anything I do. I keep archives of all the work and content I produce, and save it. If it’s contained on paper, I always scan everything and save it as electronic files before discarding any paper. This way, I am able to look back at everything I’ve accomplished in the past, and have remains of what I invested my time into doing.

What’s one luxury you can’t live without?

Source: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/daily-prompt-luxury/

A handful of days ago, I mentioned in a previous blog post that my laptop was broken. You might already think you know where this is going, but no, the lack of a laptop did not make me realize that it is a luxury I can’t live without. Instead, it helped me realized what exactly about my laptop it is that keeps me so attached to it.

A lot of people have social networking addictions, shopping addictions, or gaming addictions, but I don’t fall under any of those categories.

I rarely use Facebook, and only sign on when I get an email notification letting me know that someone sent me a message or tagged me in something. I like browsing Twitter, but I usually look only two or three times a day, and sometimes forget to tweet for several days at a time.

I like browsing for new products, but I tend to only do that when there is a new item out and I want to compare. As for the actual purchasing process, I’m really good with only buying things I feel like I really need, so I don’t go on shopping sprees where I impulsively spend hundreds of dollars over a span of a few hours.

Although I like playing games, I never really actually got that addicted to it, and feel as if I’m sort of resistant to it. On days when I have time and feel like I have nothing to do, I’m able to play games for several hours at a time, and even all day if I literally have nowhere to go. On the other hand, when I’m extremely busy or have important deadlines coming up for large projects, I can stop playing games all together for over a week at a time without hesitation.

So what exactly did I find out about my computer usage when my laptop was taken away from me due to it being broken?

How much I rely on the Internet for communication with friends.

I’m not really much of a person who enjoys meeting up with people in real life. I tend to like seeing my friends in person when the situation naturally occurs, but otherwise, I like to keep in touch online because it lets me expand my ability to converse with many more people at the same time.

Of course, I can talk through texting and can instant message on my mobile device, but I realized how much I miss my laptop when I realized I can’t keep up with talking with 10-20 people at the same time because I can’t type quickly enough on a touchscreen.

If I get frustrated with my slow typing and choose to just stop communicating, I start feeling separated from the rest of the world because my lines of communication have essentially been temporarily severed.

So, going back to the original question, what’s one luxury I can’t live without? I’m going to have to say the convenience of online communication through a laptop.

As a result of my broken laptop, I’m not able to release any fancy content, or even really add much multimedia at all to my posts. Yes, the old desktop computer I’m using while my laptop is being repaired is literally so old that it will take me about four minutes to finish opening, editing, and exporting a single photograph to upload to my website.

I decided that this would be a good idea to focus more on text-based blog posts, seeing as I don’t really have much of a choice. To get some ideas, I went back on WordPress’ Daily Post blog.

Is it easy for you to ask for help when you need it, or do you prefer to rely only on yourself? Why?

Source: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/daily-prompt-self/

The way this prompt is written makes it seem as if you can only be one or the other – communicative or independent. I’m actually both – it’s very easy for me to ask for help when I need it, but I will generally always prefer to rely on myself.

Most people don’t like to ask for help from others because they feel awkward. Fortunately, I have some strange inability to feel awkwardness, and tend to take more of a logical, reasonable, and analytic approach to situations (rather than avoiding situations just because I feel “weird” about it). As a result, if I think the social setting is supportive of communication, I have no problem going up to someone and asking for help.

However, I tend to only do this in one of two situations – either as a last resort, or if the thing I need help with is something I don’t have to learn. For example, if I tried something for hours that should only take a few minutes, I will probably ask someone for help. On a related note, in the second scenario, if I need to spend hours doing something that I will only ever do once in my entire life (during that instance), I’ll probably ask someone with more experience for help, and/or ask them to do it for me.

The reason I like to do things independently is because figuring things out yourself through research, trial, and error helps you learn things more completely and lastingly due to the integrated experience you have while learning. Basically, figuring something out on your own and doing it yourself will set you up for an increased chance of future success upon repeating the task, rather than getting shortcut in­struc­tions from someone and cheating your way through to the end.

Some people might argue that if it’s something you really need to learn, you can finish the task now as quickly as possible and learn it later. However, I’m very supportive of taking opportunities as they come. To me, people are better off taking the opportunity of learning how to do something by actually doing it, rather than putting it off. If I was in that situation and I put off learning something, I probably won’t end up even learning it later anyway, because in the future, I’ll be too busy pursuing other opportunities that come up at that time.

Overall, my suggestion is to find a good balance of both asking for help and being independent. Someone is not always going to be there for you to help you through tough times, and practicing your problem-solving skills is definitely going to benefit you in the long run.

Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find. What were you doing that year?

Source: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/daily-prompt-this-year/

I conveniently found a dime sitting on the upper ledge of my desk, so I grabbed it and looked at the date.

It was 1978.

I was not even alive in 1978, so that makes this response quite easy – I wasn’t doing anything in 1978, because I wasn’t even born.

But that would be a pretty boring end to this blog post, so I also took a picture of the shiny dime.

… And that’s it.