Saturday, October 3, 2009

Tetris Dreams

For a while in undergrad--and who am I kidding, most of law school--my in-class internet distraction of choice was online Tetris. My brother had the same affliction but he was a lot better at the game: his hand would hum over the arrow keys like Data piloting the Enterprise.

It got pretty bad. I had to get a Firefox add-on called LeechBlock to prevent me from accessing certain sites (see also: Websudoku, if you dare!)--and then a whole other program called Website Block to prevent me from switching to Internet Explorer to thwart the Firefox add-on. That I had installed myself. To make me more productive.1

My Tetris-playing ended one night when I closed my eyes and found myself seeing irregular bricks raining down behind my eyelids. I imagined them piling up at the bottom of my vision. Frantically arranging falling blocks is no replacement for counting sheep.

All this to say that yesterday I spent all day, from 9:00 a.m. (at which point the dog is up, so I am up) until midnight, reading notes on Immigration Law, and cross-referencing them with the appropriate provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and accompanying Regulations. And last night I dreamed in numbered paragraphs and sub-paragraphs.

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1 Unrelated: Clearly I am not one of the majority of people who doesn't know what a browser is. I have a lot invested in the browser war. I've now switched to Chrome because I have a small laptop monitor and the Chrome browser takes up the least screen real estate--and not a little because it doesn't have LeechBlock on it.

4 comments:

Ken said...

Dennis: "I hate listening to people's dreams. It's like flipping through a stack of photographs. If I'm not in any of them, and nobody's having sex, I just ... don't care."
-- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, S01E01

I had a dream about vampire hunting the other night.

Nick Haffie-Emslie said...

You are not alone:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/05/25

Will said...

I like how Ken's citation is in torrent-tag format. I'm pretty sure that quotation is not from the pilot though.

Ken said...

The iMDB's quotation section for that episode begs to differ with you.

Anyway, speaking of this phenomenon, today after a marathon Arkham Asylum session in which I beat all of Riddler's puzzles (days after having defeated Joker, and thus the meat of the game), I went outside and had the urge to grapple onto every balcony and rooftop in sight. Not to mention the desire to perform a silent takedown on every unsuspecting person walking down the sidewalk.