Aug. 24th, 2015

TV Pow!

Aug. 24th, 2015 12:37 am
eve_prime: (Default)
I was rereading Stephen Pepper’s World-Hypotheses, the chapter on contextualism, and he starts talking about novelty and breaks in our expectations, the qualities that make a new event seem different from even very similar previous events. Then he mentions breaks in our expectations in the other direction, when we’ve been aware of something and then lose that awareness.

This evening I came across a vivid example. I was sitting there with J. playing Columns or something while he was getting ready to play some other arcade game on his computer, and for some reason I can’t now remember, I said “pow! pow!” aloud in a child-like voice, and suddenly I remembered the long-ago existence of something called “TV Pow.” But what was it? I could remember that it involved Bay Area television, and people age 10 or so saying “pow! pow! pow!” in a certain way, but that’s about it.

So I looked it up. Yeah, I used to know all about it! It was a sort of interactive TV game show, where someone would call in on the phone at the right time, and then they’d get to play TV Pow, on channel 2 in Oakland, and this involved saying “pow!” at the right time to play a shooting arcade game, shooting at space ships or whatever. I also learned that in some places, the video game play was voice-activated and automated, but in other places a person on the other end of the phone had to push a button to convey the “pow!” to the game. Funny. And funny that we can know something for quite a while, and then not know it, or even remember that we knew it.

(It came up today in the Vlad book we’re reading too, come to think of it!)
eve_prime: (Default)
Our air quality is back to “moderate,” thankfully, although we all have colds and can’t enjoy the weather by going for walks or working in the yard. I’ve been revising the manuscript for our latest qualitative paper; now I need to work on the cover letter. Earlier, I visited the ESYO office and picked up a couple of sweatshirts with Brahms on them, and a couple of umbrellas. And a few minutes ago, I started rereading Whose Body?, the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery with a body in some random fellow’s bathtub.

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