Chris Barna’s Weblog

Lately, I’ve gotten into the habit of taking screens of movies that i find particularly beautiful. Can any of my three readers figure out what movie these are from?

Starting to study philosophy is a lot like falling in love (which makes sense, given the literal meaning of the word, right?). When a person falls in love, it’s normal to be so enthralled with the beloved that nothing and no one else seems worth a thought. Every conversation eventually turns back toward the beloved. Time spent apart is considered wasted. Other, ordinary folk throw up their hands in exasperation — and the lover cares naught. (AskPhilosophers.org)

For tourists, it seems like the adventure of a lifetime — riding in a jeep through the snake-infested jungle to see the exotic “long-neck women” of the Kayan tribe. But now Zember has removed her coil — in protest of her captivity. She no longer wants to keep Thailand’s shameful secret: that the long-neck women are Burmese refugees who are being prevented by Thai authorities from taking up asylum overseas. As a lucrative tourist attraction, the women are forced to live in a virtual human zoo. (Marie Claire)

My ideal woman would be reasonably hot and have a full time job and issues that keep her from trusting, loving, again etc. If she could be irrationally terrified of commitment, so much the better! If you have kids and/or elderly family that can distract you from me further, great! (craigslist)

Via Anthologies of Awesome.

If you know me in real life or inferred from the previous entry, I enjoy the idea of road trips. That is not to say I don’t like going on road trips, I actually thoroughly enjoy them, but I find the idea of a road trip to be so much more fun. Imagining driving into the “great unknown” and finding the “something” that you didn’t know you were looking for has such a romantic appeal. I realize this is idealistic but it’s always fun to dream.

As I was browsing through news yesterday, I stumbled upon an interesting yet pointless website with many different covers from Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road“. It is interesting to see how the culture of book marketing has changed while the original text has remained the same. Older American editions have drawings and watercolor paintings, then the trend progressed to photographs and finally, overcame representative, in general, art and focused more on the title.

I assume the hypothetical Road Movie I was not involved with would have been built on the most elementary of Road Movie clichés: where you’re going doesn’t matter as much as how you get there. But that philosophy raises at least three questions, some of which are equally cliché but all of which are hard to answer: What is a Road Movie, really? Why do so many directors (from so many different eras) long to make them? And what makes movement any more inherently interesting than—or even all that different from—staying in one place?

From The Believer.

The Tetris effect is the ability of any activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention to begin to dominate their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the video game Tetris. (From Tetris effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Going to a school that is dominated by technology, it is easy for my classmates and I to be distracted by the twenty-four hour entertainment that can be had on the World Wide Web. For the first few years, we heard stories about people getting their accounts revoked for going on Myspace or describing to their parents (with visuals) exactly what was going on at the “mature” websites they chose to browse during humanities class. By senior year, the fear pretty much wore off. The school proxies have been tightened down and people are figuring out that if a site isn’t already blocked, there is not a very likely chance of them getting in trouble looking at it.

These were the set of circumstances that brought on the Tetris craze that is still going on at my school. A few months ago, all anybody would do when they got on a computer would be play Tetris. Rumors were going around of who had the top score and a mental scoreboard was kept of who the top three Tetris players in the school were. Teachers were having discussions in the hallways about how Tetris needed to be blocked and about how they wished they could partake in the fun.

It was at this peak of 8-bit popularity that some of the students in the senior class realized that there were some unexpected side effects of playing Tetris. I was among them. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see the blocks falling. I would play out different scenarios in my head, always thinking about how my brain could not randomize the blocks enough for the game to be fair. Then I would mentally clear the board and then start all over again. I had trouble sleeping and woke up with the desire to top my high score.

I had to kick my habit. A group of us joked that we start a self help group like Alcoholics Anonymous, accept that we were powerless against our addiction and help others who had similar struggles. Then, I just lost the desire to play. It took so long to get a high score and I didn’t have the patience to try over and over. I didn’t quite go cold turkey, I occasionally play to help myself refocus but that is about it. I no longer dream in arrangements of four squares, no longer think about clearing rows and I hope my senioritis is more productive because of it.