What’s the difference between lying and make believe?

I say a lot of things that aren’t true. For example, I wouldn’t really prefer drinking laundry detergent to Diet Pepsi. But recently, a friend of mine introduced me as “Jez, the source of all lies,” and that got me thinking. Where is the line between a joke and a lie?

Why are you even thinking about this?

Once upon a time, when I were just a lad, I was in the next door neighbor’ s back garden. They had a climbing frame which they were giving us, and I was there for a test drive. As I climbed up on it, the neighbor lady (who was a child psychologist) was chatting to me about something or other. On my way down, she waited until I was on the bottom rung of the ladder, and then asked me the question in the title of the post. I lost myself in thought so rapidly that I fell off the frame and broke my arm, which then took my mind off lying fairly rapidly.

Nowadays there are three kinds of falsehoods I enjoy sharing, but I never considered lies. I’ve been including common-or-garden sarcasm into my repertoire for a while now, and it always makes me feel a bit smug that I saw the opportunity. I also enjoy exaggeration for comic effect, which I think I probably learned from the television.

More recently, I’ve been trying out statements that have no relation to the truth, like claiming that some bottles had spiders living in them, or that I taught Ron Paul to read. I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of humor, but it’s a way for me to entertain myself using the power of make believe.

Is it really lying?

As I see it, a lie has to have two properties:

1. It is false.
2. The intent is for the listener to believe that it’s true – usually in order to give some advantage to the liar.

Sarcasm is clearly marked as falsehood by tone of voice and its absurdity, so I don’t think it meets the second criterion. Similarly for the exaggeration – no-one really believes that Midori has so many shoes we needed to build an extension to the house for more than a second.

But the absurd statements? I’m not expecting to convince anyone, but I am amused by the thought that someone might believe that I’m from Tennessee, or that I was a mail-order groom, or that I first met my friends by selling them illicit substances. Those few seconds of watching facial expressions as they parse the sentence and think “could he be… no, that’s not possible” make me giggle on the inside. So I suppose those really are lies. Sort of.

What do you think? What is it that pushes an untruth into the realm of lies? Am I missing something? Did a philosopher that I’ve heard of but never read have a theory about this?

Third life crisis

I am 28 years old.

I own a house and a car. I pay bills for electricity, water and sewer, sewer capacity charge*, cable internet and television, voice over IP phone, mobile phone, rubbish collection, mortgage, property tax, and homeowner’s association dues. They are all automated except for the water bill and the capacity charge. If I forget to pay the water bill, the city will cut off my water. I don’t know what they will do if I forget to pay the capacity charge.
I have been in the workforce for longer than I was at university. I have been a Subject Matter Expert in three technical areas. I have presented on one of those subjects to an audience of 200. I have trained my colleagues in my areas of expertise.
I have been in the same relationship for 2/3 of the time since I became sexually active, and married for half of that time. In the past 6 years, the longest we have spent without seeing each other is 2 days. I cannot imagine how I would live without her.

I am 28 years old.

Most of the “books” I read are comics about wizards. Many of the non-comic books feature people who believe they have been abducted by aliens, or pan-dimensional spiders.
Today I spent 4 hours virtually positioning guns to shoot aliens, preventing them from stealing my stuff. After the first 3 hours, I discovered a sneaky trick which made it a whole lot harder for the aliens to steal my stuff. This made me feel inordinately pleased with myself.
I spend an obscene amount of time watching television. I wish I could tell myself that it’s some form of high art, but 90% of what I watch is crud. I wish I could tell myself that it’s a social tool, giving me something to talk with my friends about, but I watch far more TV than any of my friends. I wish I could tell myself that it fulfills a critical role in my relaxation process, but I don’t have a relaxation process.

I am 28 years old.

When Seth MacFarlane was my age, Family Guy had been cancelled and renewed. Twice. When Freddie Mercury was my age, he wrote Killer Queen. When Johnny Depp was my age, he had played Edward Scissorhands. When Morgan Freeman was my age, he was an extra. When Jim Morrison was my age, he had been dead for a year.
I don’t have a clue what I want to be doing in 5 years’ time. I’m iffy on what I want to be doing in one year’s time. Not being entirely sure on where the apostrophes were supposed to go in that sentence made me feel uneasy.
I thought of myself as being 15-and-a-bit for years. Then I was 22-and-a-bit. I don’t think I can be 22-and-a-bit any longer. Midori says I’m 40-minus-a-bit.

I am 28 years old. I am an adult. And I have no idea what that means.


*My house is in a new development, so the city had to lay a new sewer pipe. To cover their costs, they charge a fee to residents for the first 10 years.

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Well, do you like the Muppets?

I love the Muppets. Most of my humour is based on the work of Fozzie Bear. So of course, I went to see the new film about them. And I really enjoyed it. It started a bit slow, but then once they got to the bits with actual Muppets, it was great. In the process of sharing the pleasure with people I’ve met, I’ve had the following conversation about a dozen times:

I: Have you seen the new Muppet film?

They: No. Is it any good?

I: It starts a bit slow, but then… well, do you like the Muppets?

OK geeks, stop it.

Something I’ve seen a lot of from geeks recently is this sentiment:


It’s often more aggressive than that, and used to bring adult non-geeks down rather than lift teen geeks up. I'd like to use all of my internet geek community clout (currently measured at 0.3 microwheatons) to stop this. When you see someone who was mean to you at school and now isn't doing so well, just wish them good luck and be on your way.

The attitude is based on the belief that there are two fundamental kinds of people: geeks and non-geeks. In this model of society, geeks are smart, compassionate, funny, have diverse interests, are a bit physically weedy, and just want to be friends with everyone; non-geeks are dumb, tough, only interested in sports and cigarettes, and bully the geeks mercilessly because we're different. The non-geeks made school miserable for the geeks, but due to their superior brains, the geeks have had success in college and the workplace, leading to money and power. This gives them confidence, which is all they need to make lots of friends, some of whom they may get to see naked. The non-geeks, on the other hand, are relegated to manual labor, or even selling organs. They have fewer friends, and only get to see the less attractive ones naked. Eventually, the geeks will die happy on a pile of Nobel prizes at 90, while the non-geeks perish under a pile of rubble when the shacks they live in collapse.

When I exaggerate it, it's clearly ridiculous, but the core belief that geeks lost at high school but are righteously winning at adulthood is held fairly broadly. And it's wrong. Here's why:

• Geeks aren't uniformly smarter than non-geeks. We like to tell ourselves that we are, because it makes us feel better. But it's not true. Want some evidence? Think of a geeky subject, find a web forum on it, and observe the idiocy of geeks.
• Geeks don't necessarily have better jobs than non-geeks. Sure, the unemployment rate is much lower for people with college degrees than it is for those who only graduated high school. But the majority of people who go to college aren't geeks - there just aren't enough geeks for that. The ratio's a bit more tilted than high school, but not a whole lot. It only feels like there are more geeks because you're not being bullied anymore. But then... 
• Unless you went to a really small school, chances are most of the kids didn't actively bully you there either. A handful of them did, but most of the population had no idea who you were. This isn't because they considered geeks unworthy of their attention, it's just that most people don't really know anyone outside of their immediate circle. They might be able to put a name to a face, maybe they know that you're co-Treasurer of the Action Figure Collecting Club, but they don't really know anything about you. And it's not personal. So when you say things like "haha, now I lay off people like you for fun," you're stepping on a lot of folks who did NOTHING to you. [Disclaimer: I'm not saying that bullying is OK. What I am saying is that as a teenager, a dozen bullies can feel like hundreds. And that in hindsight, we should be able to recognize that.]
• Geeks aren't as compassionate as we like to think we are. I can only speak for myself, but I've been thinking back to my school days and I wasn't always as pleasant and charming as I am now. I was frequently oblivious to the people around me, which led to about 90% of the grief I got from my classmates. I wasn't any worse than most of them, but I wasn't much better either. [There's a 30 Rock clip where Liz goes to her high school reunion, and discovers that while she saw her snark as a defense against bullies, the rest of the school were terrified of her saying mean things to them. I would link it but I can't find it anywhere.]

And even when you're talking to someone who really did bully you throughout high school and is now in hard times, while you're much more successful - that should be its own reward, and if you can't be happy without rubbing their noses in it, maybe you haven't come as far since high school as you thought.

So then what do you say to despondent teen geeks? Just tell them how good your adult geek life is, without bringing up anyone else. If they ask, you tell them that when you're happy with your own life, what happens to someone else doesn't matter.

Introductory posts, part 3. And maybe some content.

So, one motivating factor in starting this blog was the purchase of bucketloads of games as part of Steam's big giant summer sale thing. I put down about $185 and got a bunch of games. Some of which I wanted to get anyway, some of which were bundled, and some of which were super cheap and looked cool. What I'm thinking I'll do is alternate posts about WoW with those about other games I am playing or have played. Then you'll be sorry.

So far the biggest hit of the sale has been Borderlands, which has the RPG-lite feel of Diablo II in a first-person shooter package. It's set on a distant planet called Pandora - no relation to the Pandora of Avatar - which is mostly deserted with a lot of garbage dumps and other post-occupation debris. The range of enemies isn't huge - I'd estimate fewer than a dozen creature types, which is small enough that I really SHOULD be counting them rather than estimating.

The range of guns, on the other hand, is massive. They come in various styles, shapes and sizes, with different enhancements - collecting more damaging, more accurate, and cooler guns is a major part of the game from the beginning on. There are four character classes, each of which has available bonuses to different weapon types - as well as other differences. I've only been playing one class all the way through, and solo at that.

I liked Borderlands on the PC so much that I bought a copy for the xbox - I wanted to play with Midori and having it on the xbox made that more likely. Since cross-platform is an impossible problem to solve, we tried playing split-screen and... it kind of sucked. There just didn't seem to be enough screen space to see the world clearly, or to navigate the character pages. It was massively awkward.

The NPCs are full of personality, and the game is full of the little references that make me giggle so. For example, one of the enemy types is a batlike creature called a Rakk. One of the rakk bosses is called Rakkinishu - which is the name of a Carver boss from Diablo II. (The other little Carvers run around shouting "Rakkinishu!" so you know he's coming. They'd be cute if they weren't trying to cut off your elbows.) In Borderlands, Rakkinishu drops a piece of armor called a "Cracked Sash", which was the name of the WORST item in DII. Just thinking about it brings back memories of looking at the clock to see that it was 3 am and I was still only halfway to Kurast.

I'm going to give Borderlands a rating of 4 bobbleheads out of 5. It gains points for the good things I mentioned in this post, and loses points for the bad things I mentioned. Do I have to write everything twice for you people?

One day I may go back and put some links into this post. I hear that links are good things to have in a blogs.

Ciao,
Dolbia