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Rxanadu

Who are your personal heroes?

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I've recently been thinking about it, and realized I've never had a hero to speak of. The closest person I could think of is my father, but, to put it plainly, he's disappointed me to such a degree that I can't see anyone looking up to him now. 

 

I've always tended to visualized an idealized version of myself as someone to aspire to be. Technically, I guess I've always been my own hero. I never looked up to anyone in the game industry, as I either didn't know enough about the industry to have a reference or never saw someone like myself in a position of power. I still don't, mostly because I still don't see anyone like me in a position of power or importance (e.g. a lead developer, head of a game studio). I can't decide if that's weird or not. To rectify that, I want to start a small discussion about our personal heroes. 

 

Did any of you have heroes when growing up? Just anyone you looked up to or wished to be?

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I wouldn't say I wish to be anyone else, but I certainly have heroes. 

-Buckminster Fuller, who decided not to commit suicide because he felt that he had a idiosyncratic knowledges that could help humanity.

-Björk guðmundsdóttir, who took classical training and punk-rock love to reinvest both into emphasizing the lust within simplicity and accessibility.

-Dr. Cornel West, who either has a impossible clarity in his views or a highly developed sense of the intersection of culture and compassion.

Those are the first three that come to mind. Of course if one of them poured motor-oil into someone's water-supply while laughing about it, I wouldn't think it was great. My heroes are largely my images of their actions and motives rather than their reality of existing.

 

-Major Bill Steuber, who appears to be struggling with the dissonance any compassionate nationalist faces in this documentary, exhibits heroic posture in this documentary

 

-For similar reasons, I admire James P. Berghaier for his efforts in risking his own safety to save Birdie Africa while in the midst of a bunch of racists who were shooting guns in the name of the law. 

-Whisteblowers in general like Edward Snowden, Diane Roark,  William Binney, Edward Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, and Daniel Ellsberg who all defied one of the most powerful governments in existence because they had a clear sense of justice.

 

It's kind of like the way the writing professor explains things to Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. Heroic acts happen every day, we just don't know about them.

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Osamu Tezuka.

 

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Apart from being an incredible innovator who tried a lot of crazy experimental shit that helped evolve and impact what comics would become both thematically and visually for the next fifty years, he had an incredible work ethic. He published his first work when he was in elementary school and averaged four completed pages of work for every day of his life. I wish I could be half that dedicated.

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Malcolm X and Socrates are the only people who fit into the "personal hero" category for me, I think. Personal heroes have to be people I find not just inspiring but also charismatic, because I find plenty of people inspiring but for whatever reason I don't think the hero tag works for them. Like, someone who cooks a really good pot of soup would be inspiring but that wouldn't make them a personal hero for me, I feel like. I dunno. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about personal heroes.

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I don't know if I have a hero but this guy is definitely my idol. I've had a lot of "favourite drummers" for as long as I've been playing, but none have ever exhibited a style that I've been so persistently enamoured by, which has influenced my own playing so much, and encouraged me to improve just by virtue of how he's constantly raising the bar, technically and creatively, every time I hear him, run on sentence.

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I thought about this before, and I don't really have heroes in the sense of a personal idol to look up to or strive to be like. I have plenty of people I admire, like David Bowie, but no one that really stands out as exemplifying the thing I want to be or reach in my life.

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(What synth said).

 

I know a lot of good people, but there are only three men I've met who are genuinely kind, compassionate, unselfish, empathetic and sociable to the degrees I'd like to be. None of them are famous, and they're sometimes very visibly imperfect. They're each strong leaders in their own way, but without any macho bullshit; their focus is usually on serving people. Not in a following orders kind of way, but by intuiting the needs of those around them and arranging things for the good of everyone. Those are the people I genuinely look up to and try to emulate.

 

One is a bike journalist. Regardless of weather, mechanical failures or exhaustion, he always remains stoic, understatedly upbeat, and instantly ready to help others. For him, the ride is about people spending time together, not personal bests. He considers it unethical for a journalist to sell freebies, so whenever he has too much stuff, he shares it out among whoever he knows and thinks might need it.

 

One is an IT consultant. He lives a comfortable existence, has a modest home, and travels quite a lot. I'm friends with his children, who both work at the Edinburgh Fringe every August. On going to visit them one year, both of my friends were going to be working when I arrived. I said "It's okay, I'll just hang out in a bar and read until you're done", and on the bus from the airport I got a text saying "My dad says nonsense and he'll meet you at the bus stop". He was waiting for me as I arrived, took me back to the house to drop my luggage off, made sure I didn't need anything to eat, then took me on a two hour walking tour of Edinburgh, finishing up with meeting his kids just as they finished work. A few mornings later I got up to find he'd done my laundry and made everyone breakfast. This wasn't special treatment, he's like this with almost everyone. He's rarely stressed and always seems to have time to treat the people around him well.

 

One is a game developer, who kind of reinvented himself after working in AAA for a very long time. I don't know him well, but he's universally well regarded, and talented at forming fairly large groups of people into a body of people who feel good and are doing a thing together. I've seen him make really marginalised people feel good and included, and he seems to genuinely understand what it's like to be an outsider. He's good at ironing those kind of kinks and divisions out of groups. Everyone who has worked or hung out with him expresses amazement at how lovely he is.

 

All three act in these ways without seeming to expect much back, and without dialling it up to the point where it's creepy or intense or trying too hard. I don't fully understand how they do that, and that's a worthwhile puzzle to have. Public figures are just media-filtered personas, inherently feeding fantasy and parasocial relationships, which is why they're often a letdown. Even the ones who are genuinely good/heroic/brilliant people are so exhaustingly, continuously confronted with so many hundreds of other people that meeting them will tend to be disappointing. They don't really get to relax or live a normal life in public. I think very few of us can cope with that sort of existence while remaining sane or gracious.

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That sounds like a bunch of fantastic rolemodels at the least, Nach. I have come to value these small, social interchanges much more than sweeping, dramatic gestures. Being there for someone when they need it, not desiring anything in reciprocation, making others feel good without putting a spotlight on yourself.

 

That and christ jesus of course

 

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To give a less joking answer and follow up on you guys, it's just everyone is flawed and a hero is someone you look up to and (possibly) strive to be. However, if the person is famous, you probably don't know about their flaws. Those usually get spilled at some point by tabloids or people they work with and then you think there's a lot to dislike about the person. The bigger disconnect comes when you realize they are someone you don't even know and all you had to work with is the idealized version of them.

 

Although I don't even believe in personal heroes, because you'll see their flaws even more closely and not necessarily ever begin to idealize them as more than just your friend. But maybe I've never met anyone amazing so I don't know.

 

I can always try to be my own hero but I just fuck that up too. Next time I'll be Jesus Rodi.

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I don't know if I'd call anyone my hero, but there are definitely people I look up to a lot. If the criteria is "someone you want to be like," well, like Rxanadu I really just want to be a better version of myself. I guess the closest thing would be those people who helped shape my idea of what that ideal self would be. The first name that comes up for me is Kurt Vonnegut, who was a huge influence on my overall worldview. I respect my parents a lot. The lectures of Jon Blow and discussion of Idle Thumbs really solidified my idea of approaching games critically, analytically, and emotionally. I don't know, there are so many small but vital influences that make up a world view, it feels almost insulting to pull out a few of them as though they're fundamentally different, but yeah.

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Like some others have said here, I don't have any particular heroes. There are people I respect the work of and am interested to see what they do and will no doubt be shaped by what it teaches me about creating things, but that's about it.

 

For the people who do have particular heroes, exactly how do they influence you? Do you specifically seek out their thoughts to learn from them, do you learn about their life to decide what's applicable to yours? Are there particular events or times you'd point to and say "my hero helped me out with this, I don't know what I'd have done without what I learned from them"?

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For the people who do have particular heroes, exactly how do they influence you? Do you specifically seek out their thoughts to learn from them, do you learn about their life to decide what's applicable to yours? Are there particular events or times you'd point to and say "my hero helped me out with this, I don't know what I'd have done without what I learned from them"?

I'd say that I seek out their work and interviews and such. Mostly they provide evidence to me that people exist that can act in ways that I would like to want to act, which otherwise I would feel are unrealistic. I'm way more interested in my own survival and the survival of those I have a personal loving relationship with than I am motivated by creating a just world or helping others. But whenever I am convincing myself with internal dialogue that no one else would leave their comfort zone in order to confront an exclusionary practice, I can think of people who have done so in far more extreme circumstances than my own. Trying to get clues of how they manage to act selflessly in either a single heroic act or in an effort that they endure over a long period of time, is one of the enjoyments I gain by examining their foot-prints.

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I dunno about heroes. Hero is such a loaded word, too heavy, lofty and kinda by definition impossible to truly relate to on a direct, human level. I meet a lot of people who I'd like to be like when I grow up—old punks and salty cowboy artists—but it happens in bits and pieces and there is no one person who embodies entirety of my aspirations comprehensively.

I tend to have a lot of pop idols. The barrier to entry is lower and it can fit a lot of people I'm infatuated with, usually those who make things or can cook up a good jeremiad. Like, Ursula Le Guin, RuPaul, David Graeber, Slavoj Žižek, Sarah Kenzior, Ken Layne, Andrew Hussie, Evan Dahm, Tim Schafer, etc... ¬¬¬

It is interesting that I don't have the same tic to put on a pedestal your regular, garden variety kind, virtuous people like most of you do. I dunno what that tells about me. It's not that I don't value or respect them, I just don't find myself readily adopting their priorities on the MY HERO level? I dunno. Maybe I should try getting less enamored by cleverness.

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I don't remember ever having a strong sense of someone being a hero to me, but there are definitely people I respected a lot. I used to kind of idolize John Peel, but I later read some quotes that revealed some troubling attitudes to women earlier in his career, so that soured things somewhat.

I guess I admire artists that produce things I like and who seem also to be nice people. I wouldn't call it heroism, really. Just people I respect. It's probably a failing of mine that I'm not more inspired by people who achieve truly great things.

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No one but there are people which I highly respect and they're mostly writers, cartoonists and directors.

Heroes will fail you and it makes it easier on you that you see the people you respect without the hero glasses; allows you to internalize their failings better and see they're human too.

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Never really changed the world, but without his beats, I feel I'd be totally lost. RIP.

 

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I'm pretty much in awe of anyone who's really good at what they do. Just seeing experience form intimate knowledge makes me respect that person immensely. No particular person though.

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My hero is a woman who's so undeniably happy to be alive. She falls passionately in-love with everyone and everything, places, music, colours, sunshine.

She's never late, she always gives a hundred percent, unstoppably helpful, relentlessly grateful, a thirst for adventure that always wins over a fear of the unknown, she always forgives, and is always a strong example of how to march through tragedy gracefully. She's Disneyland-excited about everything on Earth and every little moment, and wants to radiate that beautiful disease outward to everyone.

 

Coming from sitting in my parent's house working all day, feeling sinkingly miserable that I was just gathering dust in my early 20s, she taught me that the world is giving you all it has if you open up and look for it; that the human condition is psychosomatic, and that happiness is a choice.

I think people feel like that when they spend time with children or get a puppy, but it was meeting a capable adult with this attitude that broke my hopeless trajectory, and re-built it as something with the potential to be so much happier, and to have such a more positive effect on the world.

 

This person is imperfect aswel, by the way, I know that. That doesn't make the sentiment any less inspiring.

There are animators and designers who I think are cool, but I have too much levity in myself to call them heroes any more. I think it's nice that people do, though, and I support it.

Nachimir's was a very nice read :)

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She's Disneyland-excited about everything on Earth and every little moment, and wants to radiate that beautiful disease outward to everyone.

 

I enjoyed this description in particular :tup:

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I'm somewhat surprised at the antipathy, or apathy at least, in regards to heroes.  As an adult, I've generally recognized anyone who fights for the rights and equality of others, particularly those who are marginalized by society, as a hero.  Those that I've learned enough about I might consider a personal hero.  I don't think of it as idolizing or putting someone on a pedestal, more just, "That guy/gal is a fucking hero, and I should try to be more like them."

 

An example would be a friend of mine's father.  He's a retired Episcopal priest in a very conservative Midwestern city.  He and his wife could have moved anywhere in the world in retirement, they have friends and family all over the place and have lived a lot of different places.  But they've stayed, and he continues to fight for gay rights, minority rights, women's rights, etc.  And he does so in a place that is decidedly antagonistic towards all those beliefs.  He's one of the persistent reminders for me that being a devout Christian is not synonymous with being a bigoted, ignorant shithead (which is sometimes hard to remember in my neck of the woods). 

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I think people feel a bit leery around the term hero for the same reason reviewers don't like to give anything 100%. Being a hero is something to be aspired to and never really achieved, perhaps... But it's really just what the word means to you, and I think that varies from person to person.

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Yeah I didn't have anything I'd call a hero for a while, because speaking academically, or creatively, I think just admiring and respecting someone feels complimentary enough.

 

I heard one person describe someone who boosted their career, and helped them out a lot in the beginning, saying "He is my sensei", which I found a bit silly, but a nicely endearing way to describe someone.

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