A few personal questions for the Oracle

[germs]

In no particular order...

1. What are your top 5 favorite bands?
2. What are your top 5 favorite movies?
3. What are your top 5 favorite television shows?
4. What are your top 5 favorite computer/console games besides alter aeon?
5. Which character from Star Trek: the next generation do you identify with and why?
6. Please name at least 5 historical people(dead or alive) that you consider to be your heroes and why.

[Dentin]

In large part, I don't have favorites or strong feelings toward things, so many of these questions are problematic.

1) I like primarily death metal, heavy metal, and classical music.  My current favorite band is still dragonforce, but that will change.  I am fickle and my favorites are very transient.

2) Movies seem like such a passing thing that I can't really use that word with them.  The closest I come is probably The Matrix.

3) Again, very passing interest.  I haven't had a TV for so long I couldn't tell you.  I used to watch both DBZ and Babylon 5, but both would probably piss me off if I watched them now.

4) Starcraft, Diablo II, Starflight, Demon's Winter

5) Data, as his thought processes seem to be most similar to my own.  He seems to lack abstraction and meta skills however.

6) I don't have heroes in this way, sorry.

[germs]

Do you think you have a mild form of Asperger's syndrome?

[Dentin]

Having just read through a bunch of material on it, I can say with a pretty high level of confidence that I don't have Aspergers's in any meaningful way or any way that might have impacted my life as a child.  Looking back, I can see how nearly all of my dominant traits (except self confidence, which appears to be at least partially genetic) were environmentally produced.

That said, while I may not be affected by it, I believe my father might be.  I recall clearly several incidents where his behavior in a social situation had many of the hallmarks of Asperger's; even as a child (6-10 years old) I clearly knew that it would cause problems, and further, could predict accurately the responses when they did happen.

(Incidental note - while I could model and predict male behavior, I did not do nearly as well when dealing with females.  This is what made game and pickup such a life-changing chunk of information to me:  it didn't give me patterns, or NLP, or pickup lines - it gave me a model by which I could understand and predict female behavior.  It's like the old 'teach a man to fish' saying.)

Regarding the lists and favorites, it's not that I don't or can't have strong feelings and emotion.  It's that generally, that module is off-line or quiescent, largely because its applications are limited.  In that sense, it's similar to the modules that know how to play guitar or solve sudoku puzzles.  You don't just power it up because you saw a movie.