cshell

Let's see if this post

Let's see if this post works... I have an idea for something - how does your perception about a person change as you get to know more about them? I learned some info recently about someone I had known a while, and it changed (a bit) how I think about that person - not in a bad way, merely a different way of looking at the person. Sometimes it's good if it helps explain stuff about the person that you sort of knew but hadn't articulated in your head. Like finding out someone I know is bi-polar - suddenly all the pieces click - the pieces were all there, but they hadn't connected. It'didn't change how I felt about my friend, but let me cut her some slack in different ways, and gave me better ways of dealing with her. Seems like there'd be a cool way to represent that thru a movie (something akin to Sliding Doors).

Many, many random thoughts today...

-Since High Fidelity showed up on my Tivo today (thanks to my almost slavish devotion to John Cusack), I had a thought about the idea of him being a "professional appreciator", which then got me thinking that I am a tweaker of others' ideas. I'm not creative enough to come up with brilliant ideas for myself, but I'm moderately good at taking other people's ideas and making them better. No, I do not have examples off the top of my head, because they'd mostly be boringly work-related anyway. I'll come up with some examples later.


Serendipity


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-Evangelizing Tivo - See, I thought I was just being ironic when talking about the cult of Tivo, but apparently it wasn't merely irony... Besides, I'm afraid they'll come take it away if I mention its mind controlling powers. There are also an amazing number of articles (or whatever) if you google for "tivo addiction" - my favorite is the link to Scientific American... The interesting bit:
"In 1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of television--cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises--activate the orienting response, thereby keeping attention on the screen. By watching how brain waves were affected by formal features, the researchers concluded that these stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses and "derive their attentional value through the evolutionary significance of detecting movement.... It is the form, not the content, of television that is unique."

-Body Image - was trying to find serious stuff about body image, but found this instead. Is it somehow mysoginistic to throw food at the model to make her gain weight? An article on the site had info about my question about body image and race. The interview isn't actually very revealing, but did raise an issue I hadn't thought of - body image issues as a result of trauma. Of course the connection makes sense, but I didn't put it together.

Bitchmagazine.com - oddly, my surfing for body image stuff led me to an add for this magazine. There's not much content online, but just the premise makes me want to find a copy. Now that I have long hair again, I'm not worried about being labeled a lesbian (not that there's anything wrong with that) for picking up this magazine. Ok, I lied - there is some content I like - like the article about the current trend in books - the "singleton" woman: are women nothing without men? (Apparently I can't link, but go to the archives and look for Marketing Miss Right.)

-Geek by association - I had found a geek web site of some sort, and it had an article by a girl geek. She talked about how she was one of the few women in her classes, blah, blah, blah. That wasn't particularly interesting (as I now can't even find the site). However, it got me wondering - I don't think I could really be called a geek. I don't think I'm technical enough - I understand most stuff, and I can fake my way through most conversations, but I don't have a real LOVE for techno crap. But the fact that I like to have geek artifacts (PDA, Tivo, iPod, specific cell phones, etc.) around doesn't really make me a geek, right? So I think I'm a geek by association - I hang out with geeks, and if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, so here I am. (See... I can't be a real geek because I went to a site and then left because I couldn't stand the colors/fonts.) I can't decide if I'm trying to rationalize the fact that I'm not a geek so I can still fit in with my geek friends, or trying to be "normal" and disclaim my geek tendencies. Hmmm...

Posted by cshell at July 15, 2003 01:47 PM