Perceptual blindness

This is an interesting article that shows how most of us wouldn’t notice if a gorilla came on the floor during a basketball game, if we’d otherwise been given the task of counting the number of pass plays during the game. It is based on a scientific study that aimed to show that memory isn’t reliable.

I’m not explaining it well – just go read the article and you’ll see what I mean.

Friday Five

1. What was the last song you heard?

-Shut Up song by black eyed peas [grrrr]

2. What were the last two movies you saw?

-Down with Love + Finding Nemo

3. What were the last three things you purchased?

-Vase for my bamboo [the bay], Latte [javaU], Oven ready Silocon muffin tray [Loblaws]

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?

-Dig through articles for course content – re:Game Studies

-Help Kiana with Science Fair project (with two other kids coming over – saturday)

-Write a Fiche de Lecture for my Enthnolinguistics Class

-Write a reply for the critique on my paper for Contemporary social theory

-Laundry if we are lucky

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?

-Stephanie (in person)

-EQ friend – Durgin[Allan] – MSN

-Anton – MSN

-EQ friend – Murgao[Keith] – MSN

-Nerrissa (in person)

Friday five

I’m going to start a new thing here. I’m going to start answering regularly the Friday Five blog questions? We just won’t bother letting the blogger who runs the blog with the questions know that we’re participating privately.

Kell/others: Go ahead and create a new post, copy and paste the questions and answer them yourself. Or just answer below my answers.

Today’s questions?

1. What was the last song you heard?

Sashay: “A little less conversation” from Jon Peter Lewis on American Idol *sigh*

2. What were the last two movies you saw?

Sashay: “Adaptation” and “Shrek”. Preferred “Shrek”.

3. What were the last three things you purchased?

Sashay: A pedometer from eBay; A pumice stone from Pharmaprix (due to Kell’s influence!) and a box of frozen chicken breasts from M&M Meat Shops in Laval.

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?

Sashay: See a play at Centaur Theatre; Go for dinner at my in-laws; Read further in my Weber book; try to get one room in my house painted and therefore start the more serious cosmetic overhauls upstairs.

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?

Sashay: Hubby; Boss at work; Two co-workers; A barrista at Brulerie St-Denis in Laval

:: Youth culture ::

Found this excellent article in The Weekly Standard about youth culture. Seems a fairly balanced view and it really makes me want to take that 400 level sociology course on youth culture during fall term this year.

Fun with Google

Via one of my soci mailing lists, found out about a neat beta service available at Google called News Alerts. Basically, you enter in the keywords of anything you want to track that might happen in the world (i.e. “video games”) and Google will mail you a daily summary of news on that keyword topic.

Digital Memory

Was talking to a friend of mine recently about this blog, and it’s contents.

/log on

Killkell: it is essentially its my brain digitalized

(a)Mark(6): umm, ok

(a)Mark(6): guess backups are easier if you do that

(a)Mark(6): can go out and get ratasred and if you wipe no matter, you can reload all data from a webpage 🙂

(a)Mark(6): sweet

Killkell: hahha… hmmmmm

Killkell: makes me wonder … would i want this stuff put back into my head

Killkell: the whole point is to get it out…..

(a)Mark(6): well thats the beauty of backups, you can selectively reinstall

I have to say, after i had this conversation, i had to think… would i really want all this put back into my head? How much of this blog is “me”? Is what i say here essentially who i am or rather a quest of the potential me? What if i took this thought process and continued to blog in terms of what i would want to be “reinstalled” … I wonder how different it would be.

Happy Birthday!!

My brother gets one year older today – looking at the symmetrical face of 33 I believe. Three cheers a more beers to you jelloman =)

I miss you tons!

Moving this blog

A college student has created a whole new way to blog that actually looks like it might be easier than Blogger. Want to try this out with me?

Fun in games

While bopping around Ludology.org and following some of the links in the blogroll, I came across this post and the following quote really struck me as interesting:

“Games are pleasurable because they are rule-based, because they are well-defined (and definable). It is the formal nature of games that makes them fun.”

What do you think about that?

Also, just what is ludology? I’ve noticed a lot of references to it.

:: Defining the post-modern ::

While meandering the net, I came across this page that encapsulates a whole bunch of facts and concepts within postmodernism. Seemed pretty good overall.