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@Rui haha that's so true. I have disappointed many a Japanese person with my lack of knowledge/interest about football. Though it's mainly the guys. Actually now that I'm thinking about it I pretty much do a similar thing, as many of the guys have 'football' listed as an interest or a picture of a football as their profile pic so if I message them I usually disclose the fact that I'm not know nothing about footy.

@ayase you do meet plenty of them that are into anime/manga or outright otaku too. Especially if you use a website to language exchange with people from over there, as it's more so the anglophiles who come over here. I used to be pen pals with a cool woman who wrote manga, but unfortunately I ended up getting busy/depressed and forgot to keep up our budding friendship. That's a serious regret of mine actually, she was well cool.
 
Just to add: I like most of the anglo-maniacs I've met. Didn't mean to suggest they weren't worth getting to know, they totally are usually. As most of you may know, I don't actually actively seek out people that have similar interests to me, it's the heart that matters. That's why I even give the footy lovers a chance, despite their predilection for the worst sport in the world.
 
I find in life it's just about good enough to know the football table so you can nod your head a bit and sound interested when people bang on about it *smile*
But then i'm not really a sport man in general, other than the darts, and I only really watch that once a year at christmas

And on another note, got a job interview for next week now. It's only slightly less money than i was on before, so the difference wouldn't be that noticable. It's also within walking distance of the house which is nice. So fingers crossed for that one, i still have plenty of my redundancy left, but if i had some cash coming in i could treat myself to some stuff i've been struggling to justify *smile*
 
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It's not so hard not being into football really, even for a guy, even in this football loving nation. I somehow often forget that half of the population actually loves it, and am surprised to realise that everyone isn't as unenthused by it as me.

Not to bring up this old chessnut again, but after my recent heartbreak, I felt like I'd reached the point where physical looks where no longer important to me in love, where I could fall in love with someone just due to personality alone. The kind of thing that Rui and Owly have talked about. I mean I know I'm at the point where physicality alone can no longer get me hot under my collar. However, I don't think I'm able to fall in love with someone without a decent degree of physical attraction too. Like I met this woman recently, who is literally like the loveliest person one could imagine. And it's just friendship, it wasn't like a date or anything, but I also realised that that's all it would ever be, I'm just not physically attracted to her enough to want a romance. I know that's a random thought to have when there's no romantic context anyway, but still, I just felt so horrible after I realised this. Is this normal? To the ladies on here, can you fall in love with a guy just for his personality, and become attracted to him in a way that has nothing to do with his physical being?

Then there's this other girl I know at my university, every bit as lovely, but I'm also ridiculously attracted to her physical form too. And so I'm incredibly hot under the collar, and I would almost be happy to marry her tomorrow if I could. I mean, it is her personality that's doing it for me, but it's also taking that physical attraction too

Am I horribly shallow? I don't know how to reconcile this with a belief that I'm not a shallow douche.
 
No, vash, it doesn't make you shallow. Beauty is, and has always been, in the eye of the beholder. The idea that you should find any and all people of the gender you're attracted to attractive (and if you don't that means you're somehow brainwashed or deficient) is one of these insane modern notions. And no amount of banning fashion models or posters featuring women who are apparently so attractive that they attract negative attention and so should be hidden from public view (maybe in a burkha? That seems appropriate) is ever going to make people attracted to things they aren't attracted to.

That doesn't of course mean everybody should be attracted to the same things, but everybody is attracted to the things they're personally attracted to. Preferring certain looks whether that's thin, fat, short, tall, dark, fair, is no different in my opinion to preferring certain genders, and people have yet to complain that it's shallow or discriminatory for gay people not to be attracted the opposite sex. People like what they like, screw anyone who says they're wrong for following their own biological impulses.

I've been in the exact situation you describe a couple of times and it's goddamn heartbreaking for all concerned. You can meet lovely and interesting people who you get along with really well, but there's no physical attraction there from one side it's never going to work. It's hardly as though I think I'm hot stuff or anything physically, but if it's not there it's just not there. I'm just as willing to accept the same result from the other side, I've had to because me being attracted to people who weren't attracted to me and people being attracted to me who I wasn't attracted to makes up a good 90% of my "relationship" experience.
 
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Thanks man, yeah I feel what you're saying.
Preferring certain looks whether that's thin, fat, short, tall, dark, fair, is no different in my opinion to preferring certain genders
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Yeah this is true, I was thinking the same thing actually. Because if you could fall in love with any nice woman, than surely by extension you could fall in love with any nice guy, but yeah we all have certain things we like.
With that said, I'm certainly not prescriptive in what I find attractive, and it's definitely not (limited to, at the very least anyway) a mainstream form of beauty. It's just a certain Je ne sais quoi, that's very much in my eye as you mentioned. And maybe that attraction transcends the merely physical in a way. But yeah it's never just the physical that could get me excited though. I just can't get hot with that alone anymore
 
I like guys and girls, but I do like chubby guys and girls - I couldn't say why, I can say what I like about them, but not why I prefer that vs slimmer/skinnier people. It's just taste and it's something I can't change. Same goes for others I guess.
 
There's nothing wrong with having a taste in people's physical features. My flatmate and I joke that we're an old married couple because we get on so well, but I've never been physically attracted to them in the slightest. We've always been nothing but very good friends and neither of us have any desire for it to be anything else. As long as you aren't horrible to someone because of their looks, which I'm sure you've the sense not to be, then don't beat yourself up about it for not being attracted to people.

I was in a relationship for 3+ years, and I did notice that as it came towards the end when we started feeling more like friends to each other, my attraction to him physically also diminished. I still think he's a good looking guy, but I'm definitely not physically attracted to him any more.
 
We're all different so please don't feel like a bad person for realising your brain treats attraction the way it naturally does!

In my case I'm not all that bothered about specific physical traits at all (including gender) but I do have a generally tough time finding real people attractive because for me everything comes from their personality. I have never thought anyone I had a relationship was amazing looking until after I'd fallen in love with them; I have also experienced what st_owly describes where someone I originally thought was physically attractive ended up seeming less so after my feelings towards them had soured. The vast majority of people are not attractive to me at all even if I get on with them fine as friends or think they look objectively pretty, however, because having a generally great personality still doesn't necessarily mean they click with me romantically.

But you are you and I am me. The fact you analyse your emotions so deeply, vash, shows that you are a sensitive person and I doubt anyone here thinks you're anything other than lovely.

R
 
I think physical attraction is very important at the beginning of a relationship but not later on, maybe. It does depend on the person though.

Personally I am a very physical person and I certainly fell for my partner based on looks, and maybe if I was no longer physically attracted to him then that would cause issues. I like kisses and cuddling and other things enough where if I wasn't attracted to him I'd perhaps struggle, but then I believe love is built on more than physical attraction in the end and so even if you fall for someone due to looks the true feelings will be due to their personality. We've been in a relationship for enough years that although I am very attracted to said partner, but if his personality didn't work with me then we almost certainly wouldn't be together now and in some ways it's more important than the fact one look at him makes me melt.

Love is a weird thing and I think the building blocks for it change vastly depending on an individuals values. Like I said earlier, I'm a very physical person but I think to my partner personality is more important and I'm sure there are others like that or those who make up a bit of both. I think you can certainly fall in love with someone and then find yourself attracted to them physically later as well!

That's just my thoughts though. :)
 
Personality for me is for sure the most important thing. I've dated people in the past who it would be kind to say are not conventionally attractive, but because I've found their personality attractive, I've then found them physically attractive because of that. It doesn't work the other way around for me. Someone could be an 11/10 in the looks department but if I don't gel with their personality (this is a spectrum; it can range from outright loathing to getting on very well as friends), then the physical attraction just won't happen. I've never understood how people can have serious crushes on celebrities they've never met.
 
wow guys thanks for all the responses, all very interesting! I really felt I gained an enlightenment after reading @Rui 's post. But you're right, I shouldn't compare the way attraction works in my brain to the way it works anyone else's. It's an impossible thing to quantify anyway. I definitely not a super physical person though, I really could never fall for someone based on looks alone, and I've definitely felt the kind of turn off due to sour feelings that owly and Rui mention, as well as the opposite. But yeah there's no reason for any of us to beat ourselves for being attracted or unattracted to certain things. Sometimes I've gone as far as to feel guilty about simply being attracted to fairly conventionally good looking people, even if they have lovely personalities. Like, I've thought "well, they'll probably have a good life and get a hunk regardless, what good am I doing the world by fancying someone who already has so many people fancying them , I'd be doing a better deed by fancying someone down and out" even though I know that's a pretty crazy and stupid way of thinking! You just fall in love with who you fall in love with.
 
I've had an odd 24 hours at least:

19:00 - Met up with a friend on the same team working on our Mobile game, we decided to get food at KFC. We both got the Zimmer Boneless Banquet. Nice but very hot.
20:00 - Went to the library to work on the Mobile game. My other friend arrived, so everyone was here. We ran into some issues with the program but I got it sorted.
23:30 - The friend I met first bailed due to the late night, but he was able to do this week's task.
00:00 - Flatmate texts me saying he needs me to post off his ID for Saturday. I decided to accept his request considering it had to be done in the morning and was pretty simple.
02:30 - I finished my task finally with the teammate left standing. Satisfying results.
03:00 - Went to sleep.

05:00 - My stomach was acking and I couldn't sleep, ended up vomitting the KFC Zimmer food. My throat was bloody hot due to the spice.
08:40 - Woke up. Notices the marks below my eyes are red as mad. I'm essentially death at this point.
09:00 - Went down to the reception, as my flatmate tells me it opens at 9am. It doesn't open until 10:30am.
10:00 - Arrived at my Mobile lesson.
10:30 - Went through the scrum meeting. I got 3/3 marks and the person who stayed with me until late also got 3/3 marks. The person who bailed, despite being able to do the task, didn't turn up and had no evidence to back it up, so he got 0/3 again.
11:00 - I finish a little bit of Mobile work and leave the session (we're allowed after sorting out scrum), to get back to my accommodation.

11:10 - The reception was open, explained the situation and got the whole 'flatmate ID sorted'.
11:30 - Went to McD because food. Flatmate actually phoned reception just after I left but he said I was a legend anyway.
13:00 - Arrived at my Project Management lesson. Despite these tasks being a group project I was the only one there in my team. Awkward.
14:00 - One person from my team arrived and we got some progress done for the assessment.
14:15 - Get a text from my mobile teammate who missed the session, he got pissed and went on a rant.
15:00 - Had a quick chat with a few friends about progress with various assignments.
15:30 - Back at the flat. Typing this now.

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Long story short - I'm dedicated to get something done.
 
I was on holiday for the last week, and found myself simply too rested to try to remember my AUKN password! Has anything of note happened during my absence?
 
Was reading this article “Japan is Great” | The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus

I was thinking "wow nationalists are totally crazy, why on earth would you like something just because it came from your country or makes it seem greater than it really is??". But then it dawned on me that I have a plethora of nationalistic tendencies too! I always thought I was completely non nationalistic due to all my "hey dude I'm like a citizen of the world, down with borders" rhetoric and also because I slag off London to every subsequently disappointed foreigner I meet. But actually I do things that aren't a million miles away from buying a book called "the world hankers for Nippon" or whatever. For example I'm eating a packet of crisps and drinking a cup of coffee as I type this, and I specifically bought the crisps because I felt that eating a packet of crisps with my coffee would help connect me to an imaginary (my parents aren't English) English ancestory. Wtf. It's also the reason (along with depression) I sometimes go to a pub by myself at lunchtime and drink a pint. I actually quite dislike pubs in general, the atmosphere, the rude patrons ect, but I persist in going due to some feeling of cultural contiguity. I pretty much draw the line there, I don't talk in (too much) mockney or like the queen does, nor do I drink tea. But still, I'm quite perturbed at the moment.

I'm also very depressed. I've not managed to enjoy one single day since my heart broke at the end of last year, and I dream about my ex girlfriend nearly nightly. The mornings are terrible. What's makes it all worse is going out with my brother and cousins and re-realising that they are ignorant, often inconsiderate geezers with whom I have zero in common with. It only makes the pain of losing one of the very, very few people I have genuinely connected with all the more stark. I'm trying to find the answers to my unhappiness within myself, but all I do is aimless wander from coffee shop to coffee shop drinking coffee and just ticking the days by without doing anything productive at all. My life is steadily falling apart just as my teeth also are, and I've discovered I need so much dental work done that I've had to cancel the two months bunraku puppet theatre summer course in japan that I was all geared up to do, because I can no longer afford it. That was literally the only thing I was looking forward to.

Love
 
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Nationalism has returned as a political force whether we like it or not I'm afraid Vash. These things tend to go in cycles, every generation or so people eventually react against the values of the previous generations, I think people naively expected that reaction would always be in the direction of becoming more liberal. Because it's not like the liberal democratic Weimar Republic led to... oh no, wait. It's kinda surreal to see someone like Steve Bannon talking about nationalism so openly and it slowly becomes apparent this is the new normal. I'm not sure where it's all going to lead.

But despite what a lot of nationalists might think, our values aren't genetic, they're cultural, and you're exactly as bloody English as I am. Would certainly join you for a pint and a packet of crisps or a coffee if I was closer (I'm not a big fan of tea either, fun fact: coffee was our favoured national drink before tea was, it was mainly erm, our colonies where people grew tea and made fine china that led to the change. So if anything we're more old school English). Maybe in the summer I will. Are you still at Uni? I am now, I find the workload gives me less time to even think about much else, which is both good and bad. It helps keep me from dwelling on anything too depressing but it's also not good to just ignore things which are bothering you.

Good luck with the dentists, I dread even going after leaving it so long. One of my fillings fell out taking a chunk of my tooth with it and I never got it fixed, so I'll probably be in an even worse situation when I get round to it...
 
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Oh 100%, it is absolutely all totally cultural, and I do indeed consider myself every bit as English as our Queen. Wow, I didn't know that about coffee! Good to know that that's also connecting me to my antecedents.

Would indeed love to join you for crisps and coffee/pint too, ayase! I know how demanding university is though, and yep I'm still at it myself and have an overwhelming mission ahead of me if I'm to catch up, as I've been AWOL for the last two months really. So no rush, but when the time is right just hit me up.
 
So uh, I have a strange question that I hope someone can help me with here. Basically I've sold my Full Metal Panic UE on eBay (replacing it with the artbox version from the AL store) and of course now someone has bought it I'm looking at it wondering how the hell I'm gonna package it. So, with that in mind I've been messing around with an amazon box and bubble wrap/airbag things I had laying around and I'm curious how y'all would feel should you receive something packed like this......

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The bottom is lifted from the bottom of the box by where the sheet of bubble wrap folds over the ends of the boxset so it's not sitting directly on the bottom of the box and the top will have the bubble wrap you see sticking up over the top folded over the top.....

So, you think it will be okay? Would you personally be okay with it? Should I scrap it and try find a bigger box? I've never sent something this size so a bit clueless about the whole thing lol any tips appreciated.
 
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