All posts by drJ

Update Announcement

Adding some oddball stuff…

Seems time to add some new things:

I’ve decided to add a couple pieces of “writing” that differ from the rest of my blook in that they make no attempt whatsoever to unravel the mysteries and frustrations of the so-called “real” world.

First, “Imaginary-world Game Notes”: I’m a big fan of a kind of computer game that’s rarely played these days: Imaginary-world puzzle games. The starting point for all these games is Myst. Video games seem to be almost exclusively of the shoot-em-up and blow-em-up these days, not worlds one can wander through at one’s own pace, trying to solve a visual (and occasionally auditory) puzzle. When these games first came out, I’m sure lots of folks solved them as a sort of “community,” sharing what they found out. I’ve worked on them on my own, resorting to on-line hints only when desperate. Few people apparently play these games very much, though I think Myst was a decent “hit” on the iPhone a couple years back. That’s where I found it. I’ve looked for ways to play games like this on the Mac and found that Myst, Myst II (Riven), and Myst III (Exile) can be made to work relatively easily on a Mac. I also found a fascinating game called Alida.
These are games for a particular kind of person: one with a fair amount of time and not in any big hurry to “solve” something. They create visual worlds that I’ve found engaging. If you’re into this kind of game, you might find it interesting to follow my journey. The trick is to learn just enough to get oneself “unstuck” without learning so much that there’s nothing left to solve. I make no guarantees. One person’s hint is another’s spoiler.
If you like Myst, though, I strongly recommend these games. They provided my with hours of useless amusement.

And this venture into the world of the purely fantastical wouldn’t be complete without my adding a couple of my attempts at Sci-Fi stories. The sad part of writing Sci-Fi is that one quickly learns that there are a thousand-and-one stories that follow the exact same idea and do a better job of it. Oh, well, here are my attempts. Hopefully you may find them entertaining.

At the same time, I figured I might as well start blogging my own NYT (New York Times) Crossword experience. I’m well aware that Rex Parker pretty much has this market cornered, but I personally tire of the combination of his occasionally bragging about how good he is (He’ll throw in, just often enough to make sure you know, how it took him extra-long –  say, 5 whole minutes – to solve a puzzle most of us spend half a day on). Nor do I care much for his “critiques” of the puzzles. (Well, except when I found a puzzle particularly miserably hard and so did he!) But thought there might be some folks who’d like to hear some more or less random comments from a more down-to-earth solver like themselves. I’ll try to “cover” the Thursday through Saturday puzzles for a while and see what happens. This blog starts with this Saturday. Entries will generally be quick and dirty.

These categories, Sci-Fi, Imaginary-world Puzzle Game Notes, and NYT Xword notes make no pretense of being anything but what they are: diversions that amuse me.

Event

Check out Flat St. Rising!

If you’re in southern Vermont, this coming Gallery Walk (first Friday each month) will feature a street fair we’re calling Flat St. Rising! to commemorate the one year anniversary since Tropical Storm Irene devastated our area. Samirah Evans will sing a song she wrote about her home town, New Orleans, and it’s recovery from Katrina with proceeds going to flood relief in Vermont. The group I’m in the Buzzards Brass Band will make our usual racket.

The purpose is to draw attention of youth to cool after-school stuff available to them. Like the one I’m involved with In-Sight Photography Project, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Brattleboro, the New England Youth Theatre, the Open Music Collective, and the Brattleboro Music Center, and many more.

This is the first time in my life I tried organizing something on this scale and hopefully I will have learned my lesson and not try it again, though there’s talk of making it an annual event. Sounds great! But next time I don’t have to coordinate it!

 

 

Thought

A thought on the value of the hint in learning

1 Comment

the hint is very underrated

 

Like a lot of people, I like to solve puzzles. I prefer word puzzles or highly visual puzzles like Myst and Alida. I like puzzles that allow you to set your own pace.  The best are puzzles that you love to solve, but also kinda sad to see that’s over, that you’re done.

 

But ya sometimes reach a point in a word or audiovisual puzzle where there is more frustration than it feels worth and where a small hint can let your mind go, while a large hint would utterly ruin the experience, take all the fun out of it.

 

Hints give us a way of learning the way forward.  They can tell us whether we’re on the right track or wandering aimlessly.

 

This a piece of what needs to happen in teaching.  It’s not a new idea, but it’s easily forgotten.  A early twentieth century Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, called it the fancy name  Zone of Proximal Development, but it was probably understood by good teachers when our forebears still walked on four legs:  A good teacher helps us learn the step today that tomorrow we will be able to do on our own.

 

What a simple idea.  But how easily it is forgotten.  We need hints to move forward.  We neither need to be clobbered over the head or nor to be given more than a reasonable amount of encouragement.  This is the constant challenge for the teacher: to find that point and to move it gently forward.

 

For more about the adult learning of creativity, check out this essay.

 

Thought

NORC?

I wonder if where I live in southern Vermont is a NORC (a naturally occurring retirement community).  If so, it ain’t a bad one.  It doesn’t have that feeling that you might as well not exist anymore, that what you try to do doesn’t really matter.  Nice place in the world, this is.  It has it’s own harshness, from flooding rivers to mean-spirited people, that’s for sure. but that also reminds you, like to bugs do, that you’re here on earth.  I guess it really isn’t a NORC, ’cause only a minority are actually retired.

I have been busy writing.  I’ve thought a lot about why it matters that people think about what socialism really means.  We — meaning people who knows that something’s very wrong in our world and that wealth and power have a hell of a lot to do with what’s wrong — we need to be able to conceive of an alternative to the way things are.  That will be coming here soon if you’re interested.

 

 

 

Thought

?:

Ran into a punctuation thing today stopped me in my tracks.  How do you say, well, something like this?:  Like this?

Or perhaps you should say it like this:  “A whale is a mammal not a fish”?

Or even “A whale is the greatest fish of all.”?

Which is the right way to do it:  To use a colon and a question mark together?

But I saw little point to pursue it.  But couldn’t rid myself of it.

So of course I asked the great god Google, oh, tell me please do, what is the right way to do it?

 

 

 

I always feel saddened when I see Dr. Seuss used, now that he’s gone.  What a wonderful mind!  NYT crossword had him today.  Nice.

I didn’t realize the title didn’t have the word “who” in it.

 

 

 

Update Announcement

Added “Welcome to the Monolith!” & Really Horrible Bosses and another short item

This is a topic I’ve worked over several times in the past.  Most were long diatribes inspired by such notable miseries of being stuck in airport for hours on end because of inexplicable vagaries of flights and/or luggage, or spending 45 minutes trying (usually unsuccessfully) to resolve some customer service snafu.  I decided to drop my personal tales of woe since I’m sure everyone can provide their own.   Welcome to the Monolith!

And something I’ve been playing around with for a long time and thought it was time it saw the light of day.  My attempt at a typology of horrible bosses.

A little thought on struggling with our character flaws:  Imperfect, to say the least

 

Reflections

Ain’t it the truth

“If you’re over 50 and you wake up in the morning with no aches or pains, that’s how you know your dead.” — Old joke

“If I woke up and didn’t have angst one morning, I wouldn’t recognize myself.” — I said that.

“You can be in my dream, if I can be in yours.” — a patient and shrink, both dreaming they’re the only person left alive after WW III, in Bob Dylan’s 115th dream.

Rutchik Rides Again

Reflections

Thoughts, Wednesday night, May 16

[Note] This is the first time I’ve used the blog to post thoughts. An experiment.

We are at an odd point in history where knowledge from the past is actively being forgotten. I find this when I think of author’s I’ve read that many intelligent people have never heard of, but whose ideas are unique, not incorporated into our normal day-to-day thinking.

Erich Fromm for one. I asked college students to read his books but they couldn’t. They didn’t. It wasn’t like they read a little and couldn’t continue. They got nowhere at all.

Karl Marx is another. Seeing Jerry Levy do Marx in Soho I see that he is a man on a mission and that there is nothing like him in the world. Perhaps there is, but I truly can’t imagine that there could be yet another person walking the planet who so embodies Karl Marx. My closet of an office at Marlboro College was next to his and I always had to check myself before I called him “Karl,” when I said hello to him in the afternoon.

Last of a dying breed, we are, though I’m sure the next couple generations have just as much spunk in them. But they have a different flavor and something very different is going on. The Occupy concept is still very much alive even though it as a tactic, per se, seems to have been counteracted by greater force. Anything to do with correlations of forces is scary shit. But Arab Spring was both essentially Occupy taken a step further: to the point of inciting open fear in those who held power, fear strong enough to let loose of their power and run for the hills.

This has always been the power struggle in demonstrations: there may be a point where ordinary controls fail. But we know, or should know, our own limitations and we must know that there are those who would rather murder than give up power.

We have forgotten or are trying to forget the 1960’s. We do not want to conceive of a post-nuclear war world — something that felt close then, but remains just as close if not closer today. Who can blame us for this piece of repression? But there are other things we learned that we have forgotten. Like seeing “making it,” nearly however defined, as irrelevant. That’s just one thing. There a lot of things a lot of people figured out that shouldn’t be forgotten.

Does every generation think this? Does every generation have to figure it all out for themselves all over again? Apparently. As a kid, I used to sneer at geezers who thought they knew better than their young’uns. Guess the joke’s on me.

We’re a strange race, we homo sapiens.    We always think we know more than our ancestors.  Perhaps we do.  But we sure do leave a lot of good ideas along the wayside .

 

Reflections

Added article published in local Vermont paper

After the Tropic Storm devastated the village I live in (specifically South Newfane, but calling ourselves a “village” is a bit of a stretch.  The small area of three villages — South Newfane, Williamsville, and Brookside — were really clobbered by the storm.  The rivers filled to overflowing to the point that trickling brooks became roaring torrents with tens to hundreds of full-grown pines, firs, spruces, and maples came roaring down them.  One house was washed from one side of the road to the other, completely destroying it.  In another place, not only the house but the land under it was taken by the river, leaving nothing but rocks and sand.  A man two houses downriver from me lost a couple acres of wooded land as the river veered right where it used to go straight.  Two bridges were completely destroyed and a third had one end six feet lower than it was before the floods.

 

Other towns got hit even worse, I’m told.  Some towns were underwater and others were completely isolated from the rest of the world as the only access roads and bridges were destroyed.

 

The process of responding to all this was an intense community effort.  I’ve just added the online version of the an article I wrote  for the Commons, a weekly free newspaper published in Brattleboro. You’ll find it under the title “A Vermont community struggles to recover from Tropical Storm Irene” in the Community section of the blook.


 

Reflections

Release Day Cometh!

Today’s the day – I’ve added my essays on the cult/community (Dreaming of Community), God or Not (Stuck in Reverse), on being lost (Lost in Orleans), and, more importantly, sent emails to my friends telling that the site exists and where to find it.

(If you’re new to my site, this blog is currently solely for where I post info on additions and updates, rather than an ongoing gutter of consciousness.)