I heard about synaesthesia on a podcast this morning. For the full explanation, check out the Wikipedia article here. From Wikipedia:
Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek (syn), “together,” and (aisth?sis), “sensation“—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.
In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme ? color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Yet another recently identified type, visual motion ? sound synesthesia, involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion and flicker.
Pretty fascinating, right? And sounds really cool. Which is why I would be immediately skeptical of anyone who claims to be a synesthete – it sounds like one of those cool brain things that’s easy to delude yourself into, and will make you feel all special for having it. I guess a lot of my cynicism comes from my initial reaction which was “wow, maybe that’s what I have?” I’ve always associated numbers, letters and days of the week with colours, and I’ve talked to other people who do as well, so it seems like it might be pretty common to me. But I certainly don’t associate it to the extent where I can pass the test with all the 5’s and 2’s.
Anyway, here’s how I scored in this online test for synaesthesia.
Now, before you get too excited, I do have an explanation for this. When I was a kid, I’m pretty sure that’s what colours the days of the week were on my underpants. Yeah, I had underpants with days of the week written on them. It was cool! Anyway looking at those every day made me associate the weekdays with those words. Does this still make me a synaesthete? Frankly I have no idea. Nice score though, I love doing well on tests.
And here’s the other one I did. It was heaps longer and way more boring.
Notice how I changed my mind on some of those letters? Yeah I was pretty unsure with some of those. Not all of them have strong colour associations I guess. But with M once I saw it next to blue I realised yeah it was definitely blue. Hm anyway, the test notes said: “In this battery, a score below 1.0 is ranked as synesthetic. Non-synethetes asked to use memory or free association typically score in the range of a 2.0. A perfect score of 0.0 would mean that there was no difference in the colors selected on each successive presentation of the same letter.” So yeah, that means I’m synesthetic I guess. But wait, there’s more!
Woohoo, 93%! I love high test scores. Anyway it’s way easier to tell if they’re right or wrong, than trying to pick their exact colour shade from some colour chart thing.
And I aced the days of the week again, although it didn’t really recognise my awesomeness and only gave me 0.79 because I got pretty lazy with getting the exact colour shadings every time. Come on, there were like 80 of these tests to do, I have to go to bed sometime.
So I guess I’m a synaesthete? Does anyone else think this is not very unusual? I guess if researchers are interested enough to look into it there must be something in it.
Trish
Bro, check it out, I found the ending to that bloody Gameboy game.
WTF was that? Freaking weird game.
Anthony
Wow,
how disappointing.
As i remember, and i don’t remember much well at all, about anything…
Dragon slayer was intriguing and challenging as it was hard and infuriating.
One of the most frustrating elements was that as you upgraded yourself, the monsters also upgraded and harder more lethal demons spawned. Unfortunately the monsters levelled up way faster than I ever did.
I can’t foro the life of me figure out how the dragon actually figured into anything now that iv’e seen the ending.
It makes even less sense. I can honestly say that dragon slayer wasted a portion of my life. But I can honestly say that it was no less boring/frustrating/challenging/addictive than any other RPG or even MORPG say for instance, Guild wars.
jesus christ nothing has changed.
Trish
Lol, I think the difference is that most games give you small, achievable bosses so you feel like you’re progressing, rather than showing you the end boss right at the start and saying “just get better until you can kill this guy”. It’s like if in guild wars, you’d just been dropped on noob island with Shiro and a heap of piddly monsters spawning out of a headstone, and that was the entire game.
Maybe you kill the dragon in phase 1, and in phase 2 you just need to get back home for tea? Where you are rewarded with an epileptic fit.
Anthony
that sounds about right, probably trying to teach you lessons in life as a medieval dictator: when you start your conquering, never let your enemies get a breath, run them out of batteries. It would be when you’re on noob island Shiro is hanging out, a few grawls kickin about. You kill the first mob of grawl and you head home with your loot. You come back out and there’s mursaat and you’re not infused. Shit, you think:”time for a cuppa” and leg it back home for tea and bikkies. When you emerge, the charr horde is outside behind the mursaat and some fucking ghost comes and steals all your pants. Insult to Injury.
Slayer was a game for old-school Gameboy. In it, you play the part of a heavy knight with arthritis intent on killing an unkillable dragon. You control the knight through a series of simple brick mazes from a top-down view, as you march around killing bad guys. And when I say march, I mean this guy walks the same way that brides walk down the aisle on their wedding days – foot forward, feet together, foot forward, feet together. It’s not fast, and it’s hellishly infuriating when you’re trying to escape from things, like the never-ending flood of skeletons that pour out of gravestones.
As a YouTube commentor called RussianTraitor explains:
“You get more magic spells when you get more experience, which you get from killing monsters – the stronger they are the more exp you get. So, you have to walk around killing monsters, listening to that? boring music hoping you don’t trap yourself or kill yourself until you get enough experience… over time you’ll get more and more magic spells appearing in the menu”
I’m a bit vague on the details, but as I remember you had to go around getting power up item things, which you brought back to your house for more damage and armour points. So you build up a bit of a stash and finally you meet the dragon. The dragon is a 3-headed giant beastie with brick walls covering anything that’s not a head or a tail. When you meet the dragon, you discover that each head deals about a million damage and about a million shield power. The tail zaps you into some random location before you can take a swing at it.
So then it dawns on you – the challenge of this game is to get enough of these items to kill the dragon before your goddamn gameboy battery ran out. Back then it was practically unheard of to be able to save your game, so every time you played it, you had to start right from the beginning again. And if collecting these items isn’t difficult enough with skeletons all over the goddamn place, every now and again some kind of ghost flies past, picks up the item you’re marching furiously towards, and drops it in some other random spot that you can’t see because your gameboy screen is so tiny.
To add insult to injury, every time your guy died, the game would gleefully announce to you that “YOU ARE DEAD!” Also – multiple lives don’t exist in this game. When you’re dead, YOU ARE DEAD! Looks like those 20,000 items you spent hours collecting are gone now, time to buy some new AA batteries and start again.
About the only saving grace for this game was that the music was really, really catchy – a Slavonic Dance, beautifully realised in MIDI. Otherwise, this was a horrible game.
Needless to say, I never came close to finishing this game. What really boggles the mind is that at the beginning of the game, it declares this to be “PHASE 1”. I’m pretty sure my AA batteries would give out long before I ever came close to getting to phase 2. How many “phases” could this game possibly have? Are they all the same, but with bigger dragons?
Luckily I found the answer to this question in the YouTube video below – there are two phases, and judging by the comments on the video, I’m not the only one who never got to see phase 2.
If I had to rate this, I guess I’d give it 2 stars, because the music was okay and for some reason my brother and I used to play it a fair bit, so it must have had something going for it. It was kind of like Legend of Zelda, if it only had one dungeon, was slowed down to half the speed, had no storyline and….okay it was nothing like Zelda. It was a rubbish game and I’m glad I’ve seen the ending of it.
I showed this to my brother, and he had this to say about it: http://hogfish.net/?p=318
I went to Jones the Grocer in Paddington (Sydney) with my friend Annie yesterday. They have a FROMAGERIE – a cheese room! Feast your eyes on this, ladies and gentlemen. And click the pictures for BIGGER pictures.
Oh yes.
Many diet plans such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig let you have virtually unlimited amounts of “free” vegetables – vegetables free from fat or carbohydrates. The rules are, that you can have these “free” veges but any extra delicious stuff like cheese, creamy or oily dressings, nuts, meats or croutons are just not allowed unless you sacrifice “points” or whatever from your other meals.
Surprisingly, even though these diet plans encourage dieters to eat huge amounts of these “free” vegetables, they provide hardly any recipes for meals made entirely of these “free” foods (with the exception of Weight Watchers’ “free soup”).
I’ve never been a fan of salads. I dislike lettuce, and am discontent with munching on other leaves such as rocket, mesculin and baby spinach. I’m alright with them combined with more delicious things, but on their own they’re just not right.
So my Mum helped me come up with a “free” salad that still manages to taste alright, without drowning it in vinegar-based dressing. The herbs add flavour and the finely chopped vegetables help to combine different flavours so you’re not just eating one vegetable at a time. Dieters, enjoy.
Makes 1 large single serve.
- 6 cherry tomatoes, quartered
- 1/2 red capsicum, seeds and stalk removed, chopped into small pieces (about 2cm x 2cm)
- 1 handful cos lettuce leaves, sliced
- 1tbs finely chopped dill
- 2tbs finely chopped mint leaves
- 1/2 cup finely chopped snow pea sprouts
- 2tbs crunchy bean sprouts (such as mung beans)
- 1 shallot, white part only, finely chopped
Once everything’s chopped, put it in a bowl and squeeze over 1/4 of a fresh lime, and grind over plenty of salt and cracked pepper. Toss to combine and serve.
This sandwich is inspired by the delicious chicken and walnut sandwiches you can get from Santos Wholefoods at Sydney airport. Most airport food is awful, but the stuff at Santos is great. I’m a sucker for these sandwiches but I don’t go to the airport all that often, so this is my attempt to recreate it at home. If you don’t own a food processor, just chop all the dry ingredients really finely (except the sprouts and bread) before mixing it in a bowl with the mayo and mustard.
- 500g cooked chicken breast (you can boil some raw chicken breasts from the supermarket, or take all the meat off a BBQ chook)
- ½ cup walnuts (without the shells of course)
- 3 tbs mayonnaise
- 1 tbs mustard
- Salt and pepper, to taste
- Soft white bread
- Snow pea sprouts, cut in half
Place all ingredients in a food processor and blend for 5 – 10 seconds. Don’t overblend – it doesn’t need to be a paste, it just needs to be chopped finely. Transfer mixture to a bowl and taste it. Add more mayo, mustard and/or salt and pepper if necessary. Stir until combined.
On a slice of bread, spread a large tablespoon of chicken mixture and add just enough snow pea sprouts to cover. Top with another slice of bread. Cut into three equal sized sandwich fingers. Repeat for as many sandwiches as you desire or until you run out of chicken mixture. Serve.
I figured this site needed a makeover. It just wasn’t *inspiring* me. So you might notice it looking different while I play around with different WP themes. Let me know if any take your fancy.
I’ve made a new blog – CakeBlog. As if I didn’t have enough already, right? Anyway you’ll like it, it’s all about cakes. Tell all your friends about it, I’m hoping it’ll become mega popular and then one day I’ll be a super famous cake blogger and my job will be to write about cakes all the time. Ah, dreams.
Apparently there are already a lot of cake bloggers out there. But that doesn’t matter, because I am the best one. Trust me.
You know those diets where they give you a list of foods that you go crazy on, and eat as much as you want? You know how those lists are always just full of vegetables? And not the fun kind of vegetables like corn and potatoes, only the non-starchy kinds of vegetables like carrots and celery. Well, I have been on a heap of these diets and I hate these lists of vegetables because the diet planners never tell you anything interesting to do with them. For some reason, they expect people who clearly have a passionate love affair with food, to start eating carrot sticks and “garden salads” with every meal for the rest of their lives. Fat chance!
Anyway, good news everyone, I found something tasty. Most of these diets let you have chicken stock, so here’s what you do.
Chop up 1 leek (white part only) and slice a heap of mushrooms. Better yet, buy them already sliced from the supermarket. Get some baby spinach leaves while you’re there. Put a half a teaspoon of chicken stock powder into half a cup of boiling water and stir well.
Spray oil into a frying pan on medium heat. Add your veges, then pour over the chicken stock. Cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the stock has been absorbed by the mushrooms. Serve immediately.
The mushrooms soak up the flavour from the chicken stock and become delicious, while the baby spinach wilts so it’s smaller and the leek bulks it out to keep you more full. Serve as a side dish, or stir into your diet pasta.
All good recipes evolve, this one does too. Try out my famous corn and bacon chowder recipe and keep your belly warm this winter.
For Americans and other people in the Northern hemisphere who are currently in Summer, not Winter, this soup is so delicious that you should just brave the heat and eat it anyway.
