{"id":123,"date":"2007-01-06T20:49:29","date_gmt":"2007-01-07T01:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/?p=123"},"modified":"2007-01-11T20:33:16","modified_gmt":"2007-01-12T01:33:16","slug":"what-is-this-a-freak-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/06\/what-is-this-a-freak-out\/","title":{"rendered":"what is this, a freak out?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I read that book Everything Bad Is Good For You<\/a>. You know the one: its subtitle is “How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”. I’d heard about it last year and resisted reading it because I figured it wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already implicitly know and agree with.* But a few weeks ago Jonathan brought it home from the library and it taunted me with its saucy red cover and its can-be-read-in-three-days-ness so I had to read it.<\/p>\n

* Sometimes I think that I am just surrounding myself with people\/places\/ideas that are exactly like the ones I already have. And sometimes I think that I shouldn’t do that anymore, and I should branch out more into the realm of stuff I may<\/i> not altogether<\/i> agree with. And sometimes<\/i> I even do it.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I liked it. I mean, one of the goals of the book seems to be to make people feel good about the amount of time they spend watching TV and playing video games (watching movies, too, but less so). So of course anyone who does any of those things would be all “hell, yeah, I’m getting smarter with each episode of BSG, pass the cheetos!”<\/p>\n

What really tickled me\/was interesting is that one of the video games he uses to make his point is Wind Waker<\/a>, the very game that Gus adores. And it’s made me think even more on the fact that Gus has continued to play this game even though we won it 2 months ago<\/a><\/i>. It is a really huge and rich environment. The world is a grid of 49 islands that you sail between, and has about a zillion side quests (that we didn’t do when we were “winning” the game). So thus far there are still lots of new things for Gus (and us, still, if it gets too hard) to do. He’s definitely learned and memorized a lot about the game, much more than we have.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this. Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better that this afternoon when he said, “I don’t want to ride my bike anymore, I just want to play video games,” we went home and played video games. But when he grows up to be a genius THEN you’ll see! Yeah!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I read that book Everything Bad Is Good For You. You know the one: its subtitle is “How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”. I’d heard about it last year and resisted reading it because I figured it wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already implicitly know and agree […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}