DDR at hand

So, as some of you may know, me and Casey go play DDR just about every Friday afternoon.  As some of you might not know, Casey is insanely good at DDR.

It was funny last Friday, though… There were a couple of new interactions that happened.  First, we gave the Pump it Up machine a try… It has 5 buttons instead of 4 like DDR.  Later on, Casey gave Doubles on DDR a try.  Doubles is where you use both pads and have to dance across the whole machine.

Now, Casey is insanely good at singles/versus DDR but I noticed that he was having trouble with the other two.  So, we got into a short discussion…

Normally, Casey doesn’t even think about the DDR pad when he’s playing, but it was obvious that on the 5 button game and on the doubles he was having to look at his feet sometimes and and think about what he was doing.

This seems like a good example of going from Ready-at-hand and Present-at-hand.  We disagreed on what it was that was becoming Present-at-hand though…

Was it his mindset/DDR knowlege?  Or was it the pad?  Or was it his feet?  I argued that it was the pad because it was the tool he was using to play the game.  Especially on the 5 button machine, he had to consciously focus on the buttons because he wasn’t used to where they were.  But in the end, we weren’t too sure.

Anyway, that is all for today.

I Totally Kicked Chad’s @$$ at Driveway Hockey

It was awesome. I haven’t seen this kind of domination since Michael Jordan went to the Olympics.

We are all critics – living in the gray area and loving it!

Sorry I am so late to the party folks. I have been working a ton the past two weeks. Quite honestly, I was rather overwhelmed when I opened Google Reader and saw all the posts that you have added. Part of me felt an obligation to read everything else before I got started in order to make sure I wasn’t overlapping things that have already been stated. I finally got to spend a bunch of time last night reading through your insightful posts and comments. Really good stuff and I am rather sad that I wasn’t engaged in some of the conversations that have already gone on. I did not feel that there was much more that I could say on many of the discussions so I will start with this general brain dump of my thoughts and feelings from the past two weeks or so.

I know we all process the things we are learning in different ways. I am seeing some of you go very deep into some topics. Personally, I tend to focus on the macro quite a bit, especially when we are getting hit with words and subjects that I do not know much about yet.

The title of this post is influenced by an excerpt from Kael’s article “The Idea of Film Criticism”:

He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work than they could see for themselves: he is a great critic, if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized….He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others. [Emphasis is mine.]