I'll Scratch Your Back
(The pictures below have nothing to do with the post. I just go on solo walks or longboard trips in the middle of the night sometimes and then take pictures. This was a 2 hour trip was to Harvard Square (and back) that I went on like 30 minutes before writing this post.)
This morning I made bacon pancakes. They were delicious. I had been planning on making them for a couple weeks now. I just needed to find the right morning to do it I guess. I made pancakes for 7 other people. I enjoy making other people happy. It seems to be a theme in my life.
Around the age of 14 I use to frequent a web gaming site called InstantAction. Instead of shitty flash games they had games like Marble Blast and Legions. During my time on the site I wrote an 11 page document on how to get around the site. The main reason I wrote it is because I wanted to become a VIP on the site. Being a VIP gave you some special privileges on the site and it also indicated that you were a helpful person on the site. When the site died a couple years later I moved on to playing Minecraft.
I logged way too many hours in Minecraft when I first bought the game. I liked singleplayer but enjoyed multiplayer much more. Once I found a server I could call home I helped people there as well. A couple months after I started playing on the servers (Reddit Public Servers) I became a moderator on the servers. Being a moderator gave me power to kick people from the servers and also place special items in the world. I helped people with requests they had and helped with events. At one point I became an admin on the PvE (player vs environment) server and I had a really nice house right next to spawn. After a while I stopped playing Minecraft and moved to League of Legends.
For my senior project in high school I decided to write a mini textbook on how to create a pong game in C# and XNA and it ended up being 51 pages. I don’t think I actually got anybody to read it and I didn’t post it anywhere. When I was writing it I tried to go through the same process that I went through when I was learning how to program. The first thing I made in C# and XNA was pong so I thought that was the best first game somebody should learn how to create.
A little over a month after I graduated from high school I was hired at Northeaster’s ResNet Resource Center. Again this gave me an opportunity to help other people. I answer peoples questions and fix computers. When there is nothing to do in the office it gets boring but I enjoy seeing people smile after I magically get NUwave working on their Macbook again.
Helping other people is great but there are times where I think I don’t help myself enough. There are times where I try to make everyone happy but then I remember it’s really hard to please everybody. There are some people who just won’t like you and that’s OK. There are some people that will like you and you will have no idea why. I think the most important thing I try to remember is that I have no idea what anybody else is going though and what they are dealing with. At the bare minimum I hope my existence does not hinder anybody else’s happiness and hopefully my interactions with another person can brighten their day.
