I never once said that. I think scientific reasoning is the path to that destination, but I would be a moron to claim that we already know everything.
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Maybe I need to think a little more when I post I've been kind of unfocused recently and what I'm typing doesn't seem to be 1:1 corresponding to what I am trying to say and I should take more efforts to make it so. I'm not sleeping enough and spending way too much time on computers; perhaps it's time I go read a book or something.
Basically this is like director's commentary on my posts and honestly the fact that I have to do this shows I fail at communicating in the first place, which is not good.
OK Beldaran I know you are not guilty of saying that, it was a hyperbole and I have this problem where I can't properly discern the "things other people know" and "things I internally know" information so I apologize for my poor execution of the sarcasm. I still am kind of bothered by the original "religious people are inferior" statements but I am starting to see that what I feel like is a running gag is actually closer to trolling and I kind of need to stop bringing it up.
This led to Amaster's confusion and maybe I have covered that now.
And Glenn you laugh but there is a somewhat related story to your threat let me go throw away this plate that I ate my dinner on and I will tell it to you.
OK now that the old tuna fish smell is gone there is actually supposedly a ghost in my life. If there really is then he is really rude and totally missing out on some good times. See the people who lived in our house before had a son named Herb, or at least something that abbreviates to that. He died in a car accident. We learned about this from a friend that used to know the old occupants and claims she would see someone peeking through the blinds of his room when no one was supposed to be at home.
I sleep in Herb's room.
Now my mother has this really strange natural talent in that if her eldest son makes a movement in the night she can hear it through eight feet of acoustic foam. Over the course of the past two decades I have developed heightened stealth abilities because heaven forbid I get thirsty in the night and have to go get a drink of water. Several times in my youth I was grounded for making too much noise in the night, leading to an amazing capacity for bladder control and also keeping stashes of water in my room out of fear.
That was when I had sweet sweet carpet and flat floors to work with. The house we live in now has hardwood floors (even under carpeted areas) that announce each movement with a loud creak. I've given up on navigating my room silently, it just cannot be done. But the hallway and staircase are different. There are just enough quiet places in the hall that I can get onto the staircase or into the bathroom without making a big red exclamation point appear over my mom's head. I have perfected the art of opening doors by first turning the knob, lifting via the knob to avoid hinge creak, holding the latch with a finger while slowly releasing the knob to avoid loud noises, then reversing the process to close a door. The staircase is a beast in itself; it was easier to creep silently up and down the stairs when it was carpeted, but several events involving the loss of traction on the stairs prompted the removal of the carpet. Now it is bare wood and the downwards trip is impossible to make without triggering at least 3 creaks. Strangely enough the upward journey is easily made without a noise, though I am usually carrying a drink with ice in it so that is a separate challenge.
Anyway the point of that was not to showcase how every night is a real-life board game in my house. Once mom heard about Herb, she suddenly remembered she always heard someone going up and down the stairs at odd times when she was alone in the house. She says she always figured it was me, but then realized I was in a dorm room 160 miles away. I have tried to explain it is my little brother, but somehow she never hears him as he simulates the noises that a bulldozer would make as it attempts to scale our stairs on a pogo stick. Then he proceeds to enter the bathroom door using the noisiest method possible (push door until latch slams against the door frame, turn knob quickly, release knob after door opens, turn on light, slam door). Supposedly she never hears this and I don't get it.
Also she claims one time she was changing clothes with her door open and she heard noises as if someone stomped up the stairs and slammed my door. I explain this easily, as the way our air conditioning is set up moves air out of my room into the hallway which causes my door to have a natural tendency to want to shut. The force of the photons of sunlight coming through my window provide ample force to cause that door to slam. She interprets it as it is possible Herb is gay.
By now even dad is starting to accept the theory. He claims he clearly felt someone pat him on the back while in the basement when no one was around, and also claims he hears the staircase noises. Now I admit that certain parts of the house give me the creeps, and the places where she claims the noises come from are among the creepiest parts of the house, but I live in the room that this dude supposedly lived in and outside of the normal bizarre life events everyone experiences I have never had any encounter with Herb. I never hear anyone on the stairs but my brother at night. When I'm home alone the strangest noises I tend to hear are made by the woodpecker that has been trying for 8 years now to find bugs in the metal hood of our chimney (let me tell you that one was CREEPY the first time!).
Mom insists that Herb is the source of the disappearance and reappearance of several items in my room over the past few years. I concede that the events are strange but cannot fathom why a ghost would go to the trouble of insuring it only manifests itself when no one is around and selects a specific method of manifestation based on the identity of the person. I believe that the noises mom hears and attributes to Herb are in fact the results of her strange ability and she is actually hearing me go up the stairs in my dorm. Since she doesn't realize she has super-eldest-son-hearing yet she gets confused and interprets the noise as a stranger coming up the stairs.
If I were to attribute the disappearance of the items to a supernatural phenomenon, I'm much more happy with the concept of some kind of mental ability to shift an object to some manner of storage that can only be accessed by my mind. Unfortunately it is an ability controlled by my subconscious and is only triggered accidentally by a strong desire to keep something safe. The return of the item is accidentally triggered as well. Basically I like this theory because I had this Captain N comic book one time where Captain N and Samus Aran were working together, and Samus had this device that opened a portal to a special "storage dimension" in which she kept all her stuff. I have lived my life wishing for such a thing.
In reality, I'm a fairly absentminded person who likes to do a lot of tasks at once and this leads to me placing objects in weird places or places where they do not belong. Later I rearrange things in that area and again place the important item somewhere wrong because it is not important at the moment. After this happens several times I have little hope of remembering where the item is and by then it is likely that the house cleaner has come and further disturbed the position of the item. The necklace was not in an unexpected location, I am just intrigued by the fact that I managed to overlook it so many times. My old digital camera has been missing since October and I have this bad feeling that while I was packing I tossed it into a pocket of a bag that did not get zipped, and then it fell out. Of course if I go home this weekend and find the stupid thing sitting on my counter I am going to call ghosts because I have cleaned and reorganized that thing 8 times in the past 2 months.
And if a poltergeist had followed me to my dorm then I'd welcome him because I fail to see how it could do anything to my room that would make it worse, so it would in fact be limited to cleaning my dorm room to a certain extent.
You are the most verbose person on AGN. :p
Herb did all of these things, making sure never to bring himself to your attention, as part of a clever plan to get you to make this thread. It's behind you right now, reading the screen.
I have always wished there was an "average characters per post" or a "total characters posted" statistic because I believe the number would be large and no one would have the tenacity to challenge my e-peen.
*Edit* Except maybe that time that Zaph was protesting the "no limit on sig size" rule and had at least the book of Genesis as his signature it might have been the first few books of The Bible
I don't know, ShadowTiger might have more total characters, and maybe even more average characters per post. :shrug:
Atma's posts are usually interesting enough for a full read-through. Even if that takes a significant portion of my sparse computer time these days. If more people put as much effort as he does into their posts the internet would be more full of decent information (read: Wikipedia).