Interview with Tangerine

This will be...

Fun.

Haha. Despite my name, there is food, even fruits, I would prefer to eat other than tangerines or similar fruits.

Specifically, my favorite "food" would have to be kimchi—particularly because it's one food I will have a hard time getting by without. It's what you get for being Korean.

It's a gimmick from another IRC channel I used to frequent. A friend and I would change nicknames without notice and we would mimic each other—he went by the name of Mandarin and Clementine for a while, so I chose Tangerine to confuse people, and the name stuck. My other IRC handle, Milkis, also came from this.

After the channel died, I just stuck with the name Tangerine because I thought it was the most amusing name. Apparently people thought the same since there seemed to be a lot of interesting word play that went with the name. And I'm sure you all remember "Serene Grace."

Sure. I'm currently a student at a university studying Economics. I'm not a terrific student mostly because I get distracted too easily by things like Smogon, but I do my best nonetheless.

My hobbies would be trying to apply what I learn to everything. I get them wrong a lot, but that's how you learn! While I tend to be conservative physically, I try out a lot of random things mentally, whether it be engaging new ideas or just applying things as much as possible.

Haha, not much to mention. I'm Korean, as in I was only born there since my parents left the country when I was three. I got my U.S. citizenship two years ago.

I don't think my parents were "Asian parents," although they definitely had some traits of being one. Even then, it's sort of weird since everyone from the States would tell me that I'm way too Asian for my own good (since I'm more familiar with Korean pop culture than American, amongst other things), while when I was in Korea everyone noticed that how I think and speak is strictly American.

Haha, what tennisace said is patently false. I think it's mostly the fact that Korea overshadows all other countries due to its organized Proleagues. I know for a fact that many people have started getting back into StarCraft recently, especially since StarCraft 2 is coming out "soon."

As for what I do with my free time, I read—from random books to blogs centered on economics. Although, when school starts, I tend to stop reading books and just read textbooks and academic papers instead.

I also play MMORPGs with a small group of friends—although I usually enjoy the game for other reasons than they do, since I mostly sit around looking at the markets in those games and they compete with one another. I think I spent a lot of time just playing these games as breaks from studying. :(

I also started writing, something I've been telling myself I would do for months, although it's turning out to be a lot more difficult than I expected, not just the challenges of writing but just picking up another habit.

I enjoy economics because it's strictly a set of tools that lets you analyze how people behave. In terms of those set of tools, it's fascinating, and there are many books that will get you to think in the same way.

The people who think economics are boring are the people who were never properly introduced to these tools, from what I have experienced (I could easily be wrong, of course). This effect is worsened by the preconception that economics is strictly about money and the stock markets, but the tools can be applied everywhere. It's a very useful and easy-to-apply set of tools that gets you thinking for the most part.

One of the reasons I'm still around Smogon is because nowadays, I'm attempting to apply such tools on various games. Applying the tools on Pokémon has been rather interesting, although I still need to finish writing them down and creating an overall picture of how the game works.

I actually found Smogon through Firestorm, so you can blame him for everything.

Basically, I was looking forward to the release of Diamond and Pearl for a while, and so I began to do a little research, and Firestorm told me about Smogon. I lurked around Smogon for a long time before I started posting, and at first I didn't like it very much because of how snide the moderators were (Synre/Teifu's rather elegant Mr. Peanuts avatar didn't help his case). It took a while for me to "integrate," mostly because I had to do a lot of reading before I knew where the moderators were coming from and understanding how the place worked.

I was apparently a generally helpful poster, and got a Ladybug, only to spend about six months away from the Internet when I went on my trip to Korea. When I came back, Phuquoph noticed that I was active in WiFi, and, along with a few other users, recommended us for moderators, because at that point no one moderated WiFi and it was a complete utter shitfest (this is where a lot of the preconception of "terrible wifiers" come from). I accepted, and I'm sure what came after is etched in everyone's heads by now.

I'm pretty well known to be a very critical person, and I think that's one of the reasons why I have so many ideas, particularly because I'm never satisfied with things the way they are. So I always look for ways to improve them. I would say this attitude is the "fuel" behind everything I did on Smogon. In terms of things up my sleeve, I still have a lot of ideas, but nothing I will reveal at this point, because I tend not to start projects I know I will not be a part of. It's one of the issues I ran across when I started In-Game Expansion—I had to delegate it to mingot (and thankfully, he stepped up and took over) because I really did not have the energy to keep up with it during my school year.

The biggest thing I think was frustration. I hold extremely high standards, as many people would know by now, and if they are not met, I get very frustrated, which leads to rather rash actions. This is probably worsened by how arrogant I am, because if things were just so far away from my expectations I had a tendency to lash out, and get into conflicts with other users, even administrators.

My end goal for Smogon was to have it be an intelligent forum, beyond what it is now. I think in the end I just realized that it's probably never going to be at such a level due to many factors, and I should be satisfied with the forums for the way it is now. So, recently I stopped trying and giving the "let the forums be" a shot and seeing how it goes.

I didn't learn anywhere—it's something I just picked up from years of arguing with others on Internet forums. although some of those were closer to straight out fights over the Internet, if you can imagine that.

I do think my first year Calculus course I took (it's really real analysis) at university definitely helped. The course was an "Inquiry Based Learning" course, where the professor just handed you a sheet with axioms, definitions, and theorems, and we had to prove all of them by ourselves, and present the proofs in class. In such a setting I would imagine it wouldn't be difficult to pick up a lot of the skills and intuition that goes into putting together an argument.

We'd sell your organs to the Chinese underground organ market, and sell off whatever meat we can use to a store that makes dumplings (the latter bit is actually a common theme in old Chinese tales). And then we'd take all the fat and sell it off for oil and be millionaires.

In all seriousness, probably just lunch or coffee. There would have been tar and feathering involved but I think that's illegal now, sadly. What kind of question is this...?

I'd like to think that most of my reputation comes from my rather sharp wit when it comes to thinking of quick amusing insults. The other bit coming from when I argue with users I dislike, as I tend to integrate snide shots at them.

In general though, I tend to be mean to users who tend to object or speak without making any sort of point. It is an utter waste of time, and they tend to have this authoritative tone that give off a false impression that they're saying something important but in reality they're saying nothing. Because I think criticism is good, I tend to make my targets users who talk or criticize without anything to back up their talk other than etiquette or pedantic logic.

Quite a bit actually, since I tend not to care about Pokémon I like the least to make a coherent ordering. I'm not a fan of Bidoofs and Mudkips particuarly because of all the stupid memes that spawned off of them. I probably wouldn't like Bidoofs either way, but I think the memes put it over the edge. I dislike Dragonite because it's a terrible evolution from Dragonair. The evolution just does not make sense...

Finally, while I like Rotom as a Pokémon, it's the Pokémon I hated seeing the most when I played competitively, although I probably would have gotten used to it if I kept on playing. I think it was mostly the fact that it stopped all of the Pokémon I liked. :(

It's been a pleasure.