by Josh Delman
I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"
If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.
This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.
2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September
© 2009 and beyond
Contact me.
May 2009
The Tetris Effect #
I have recently got back into playing Tetris and Tetris DX1 on my Game Boy. I play with the original Game Boy -- there's something very satisfying about its weight and size, like it's perfectly made for my hands, and about the simplicity of the game itself; it requires just the directional pad and one button.
I'm reading now about the Tetris Effect, which is basically the tendency to mentally rearrange objects in real life so that they fit together nicely. What I'm experiencing now though, after about a solid week of playing every day, is that my mind is idly playing Tetris games in my head2. I'm seeing falling blocks and rotating them as they fall. All of scenarios I "see" with my third eye are very satisfying in a puzzle-solving type way, i.e. a 4-block line falling in for a Tetris. I seem to find it more satisfying, though, when an L-shaped piece drops in somewhere for a triple (3 lines cleared).
See also Bastard Tetris which uses a super-evil algorithm to take a look at your current block situation and give you the worst possible piece.
1. The difference between the main gameplay mode ("Marathon," in which the blocks keep falling until you run out of room) with regard to Tetris vs. Tetris DX is that in DX, you have a an extra couple hundred milliseconds to move and or rotate a piece once it touches the ground. This amounts to two advantages: one is that you're able to move a piece if you dropped it quick and made a mistake, as I am prone to do, and two is that you have a little bit more time to think about where you'll put the next piece. I average about 100 lines on Tetris and 200 on Tetris DX, so the change is significant.↩
2. Though I'm not experiencing the Tetris Effect, I have experienced something similar for Grand Theft Auto -- as in seeing cars and trying to find their videogame counterparts, as well as thinking about the quickest way I can get somewhere by driving over pedestrians and over medians and on grass. But I don't devote as much time to video game playing as I used to, for the benefit of society.↩
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Reverse Psychology FICTION #
So, I go to my therapist. He says his current methods aren't working, so he's going to try something else. He lays down on the couch, and asks me to ask him about his mother. So I say, "What technique is this, doc?" And he says, "Reverse psychology."
So I say, "No, no, doc, I think you have that wrong."
"Do I?" he says. "I think you're right."
So then I think about it. "Wait. Maybe you're right." ♦
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Lost season finale tonight #
The two part season finale for Lost airs tonight at 9pm EST. I'm a huge fan of the show, and there's a lot at stake in tonight's episode. It's called "The Incident" -- and most fans of Lost will remember the first mentioning of The Incident during the early part of season 2, when Jack and Locke first entered the Swan (known previously as 'the hatch') and watched the Orientation Video.
I have some predictions for tonight's episode, and I'll throw them down here for posterity, but I'm not making any guarantees: I'm just a fan, and I didn't come up with some crazy theory to explain every event on the show. I'm just going off what I know to be true regarding tonight's episodes. That said: in the official LOST Podcast, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the two head writers1 remarked that the season 5 ending would be reminiscent of the season 1 ending/cliffhanger, which if you don't remember was the opening of the hatch – but they don't go in until the following season. So my guess is we're either gonna be left hanging regarding what/who Jacob is, or we're going to see some new base on the island but not enter it.
Another awful prediction: The Incident is going to result in the death of the Losties who time traveled to 1977. (Yikes!) Certain characters seem to have the ability to change the past, while others do not; my guess is that Desmond is going to play a much bigger role in season 6 than he did in season 5.
1. A lot of people think J.J. Abrams is still head honcho at Lost - turns out he stopped working on the show sometime during the early part of Season 2. All the best episodes were written by Damon Lindelof (the showrunner) and Carlton Cuse. ↩
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Relentless Raining FICTION #
It had been raining relentlessly, maybe five days straight, and the whole thing had a very palpable air of expectancy. It all seemed to be building up to something. Most people sat in their homes, afraid to go outside, fearful that the rain would make their cars slide around freely, randomly, like a slick ice cube on a table. Or maybe the rain would make their kids ill, or worse yet, completely transform them; the children would go outside wearing some kind of brand new, shiny outfit, and when they came back in they’d be dirty and there would be grime underneath their fingernails and their hair would be tussled and unkempt, and they’d speak foreign tongues and hack all the living room furniture to bits with axes. Plus, there was the lightning and thunder – the kind of thunder that rattles your brain in your skull, the kind that wakes you up in the middle of the night, all hot and wet, and makes you pray for forgiveness. Even the telephone poles were freaking out. ♦
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Review: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience #
The book: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience by Jamie Ward1.
A review of any cognitive neuroscience textbook is likely to use a lot of esoteric or unfamiliar terminology – there is, of course, some requisite background knowledge required for devouring such a book. You will be surprised to find that none of that language will find its way into this review. There will be no talk of Ramon y Cajal's neuron doctrine, nor the center-surround structure of ganglion and lateral geniculate nucleus cells; no mention of parietal neglect, nor a discussion of early-attention vs. late-attention models. This is because I was unable to read a single damn page of this thing.
I want to focus on one thing only, and that is the olfactory nightmare in which the pages of this book are absolutely drenched. The book smells like shit.
Not actual "shit," per se - "shit" in this context (and often in a similar context, i.e. one where a person refers to the smell of something as "like shit," or "like ass," etc.) simply means awful, terrible, cringe-worthy, vomit-inducing -- smelling so bad that if you smelled the smell all the time, even the most persuasive crisis hotline operator would have a hard time convincing you not to kill yourself.
The book smells like used fryer grease. Have you ever smelled the back of McDonald's? I mean like, you drive around to the back, where the vents shoot out a noxious, airborne form of the thick yellowy grease that your french fries were cooked in. Have you ever gone to the McDonald's on the U.S.S. Intrepid2? Well, that's exactly what this book smells like. Every page. The smell is practically baked in. And it's totally inappropriate.
My score: Zero out of Eighty-Seven (0/87).
1. This will be the first of many book reviews to come -- so stay tuned. ↩
2. U.S.S. Intrepid: An Essex-class aircraft carrier built during World War II, now open for tourism, permanently parked in the Hudson River. A climactic scene in "National Treasure" occurs here, but I'll spare you a full description and just tell you that it involves Nicholas Cage. ↩
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