Blog Post #2

We played pictionary in class on thursday. It was a fun game, but at the same time, showed us how humans can communicate using only images. I was actually surprised with how hard it can be to communicate an idea with only words and have your teammates see what you want them to see. They may see the image as something different than what you actually intended it to be. This demonstrated how difficult it can be for an artist to create a piece of art with their intended message and for the viewer to fully understand the meaning of the work. 

We have also begun to watch a movie called “Memento,” which follows a man who has short term memory loss and is trying to piece together the murder of his wife and how he lost his memory. The only details he remembers are from before the accident so he has to leave photos and notes everywhere for himself. But the more important information he tattoos on himself. The scenes have been growing more and more fragmented and short, much like his memory, and the order of scenes does not follow the sequence of events in the order that they occur. Instead, new scenes will jump into the middle of an event but then they end at the beginning of a previous scene, so they always lead up to what has happened and we find out how he got where he is. There is something not right with Teddy. For one, we don’t know his real name because he is called Teddy but his license says John G. It is still unclear whether he is the actual murderer or not. So far, thats what we’ve been led to believe but its questionable. Before he’s shot, he tells Leonard to look in the basement of the abandoned building but we haven’t yet seen whats down there. There is also a subplot going on with Natalie and her character is still unclear. She was bruised up and had lost someone too so somehow she fits into the main plot. But as of yet, it is really difficult to determine how the story will end up but I feel that there will be some interesting plot twists.

This week we read a second passage from “What is Time?” I found it difficult to get through because I’m not philosophical but I did find some interesting points made. It dealt a lot with memory and how our sense of time and memory fit together. The passage touched on the relativity of time: when we are young, time goes by so slow but it speeds up as we get older. When we are young, there is all of the time in the world and we are more focused on the present rather than planning ahead for the future but that changes as we get older. I think that a reason why time goes by faster as we get older is because we are much more aware of time and the lack of it, but for children, they are more carefree. Another point made about time is that when we are unoccupied or bored, time seems to go by so much slower than when our time is filled with events. This I found to be very interesting because time cannot actually be going slower or faster, its just our perception of it. When our time is not filled with events, we are waiting for something to happen, for something to do, so we are much more aware of the time, making it seem like its going by slower. But when we are occupied with something, we are not paying attention to time and so we lose track of it and it seems faster.