![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Regaining work equilibrium...
Dec. 5th, 2013 10:50 pmThe way I see it, there are two basic types of work equilibrium. There's where you're ahead of the game and hit a quiet patch, and there's where you've been having a quiet patch and suddenly get an explosion of work.
The former occurred over the Thanksgiving weekend. Not enough to save November, but enough to keep me ahead of the game for now. But I will well and truly need to see come work show up soon so as not to "fall behind."
* * * In other news, I've been exercising my memorization skills on a regular basis and have begun to note some subtle changes in the way I do this. Mostly, it is to overcome a kind of stasis that has set in, due to a failing ability to recall "conventional" images of my mnemonics (e.g., a chimpanzee playing hockey, which is just not tickling the ol' synapses).
This phenomenon had resulted in a gradual and irreversible degradation of the ability to memorize a deck of cards, at least until I tried a new way of using my mnemonic aids. (Why memorize a deck of cards, you might ask? Well, one might ask the same thing about shooting thousands of baskets or solving bunches of differential equations? The activity constitutes exercise, resulting in more accurate and consistently usable outcomes.)
Anyway, today, just as I was 48 cards through a memorization session, I recalled something that I used to do back when I did close-up at the Forks Hotel (even if, occasionally, my performances stepped outside the format of close-up). I only did the effect a couple of times, mostly because I didn't have the talent to figure out how (or ask others to help me figure out how) to make it entertaining.
What I am talking about is an effect in which one (honestly) removes a small number of cards from a deck, puts them off to the side, and then rapidly turns the rest of the cards over, finishing by naming the missing cards.
I don't recall exactly where I read how to do this, but the idea was pretty simple: as each f the cards remaining in the deck is turned over, one mentally disfigures the corresponding mnemonic. Once all the cards have been turned over, a rapid review of the mnemonics will reveal some number that were never disfigured, and these are the cards that were kept off to the side.
In any event, today I paused after getting 48 cards of the way through the deck and then simply reviewed my mnemonics (who happen to be people) to find people who I hadn't yet "met" in the course of memorizing the first 48 cards.
These turned out to be Vivian Vance (5C), Marylin Monroe (QC), Roy Rogers (4D), and Harry Lorayne (AH), which first, turned out to be correct, and second, something I still remember about 15 hours later.
I still cannot figure out a way to create something performable out of this (nor do I really have any motivation to do so), but "finding" these "people" seemed to go a lot faster today than any such session I performed with my old mnemonics (which were not person-based) back in the day.
Cheers...
The former occurred over the Thanksgiving weekend. Not enough to save November, but enough to keep me ahead of the game for now. But I will well and truly need to see come work show up soon so as not to "fall behind."
This phenomenon had resulted in a gradual and irreversible degradation of the ability to memorize a deck of cards, at least until I tried a new way of using my mnemonic aids. (Why memorize a deck of cards, you might ask? Well, one might ask the same thing about shooting thousands of baskets or solving bunches of differential equations? The activity constitutes exercise, resulting in more accurate and consistently usable outcomes.)
Anyway, today, just as I was 48 cards through a memorization session, I recalled something that I used to do back when I did close-up at the Forks Hotel (even if, occasionally, my performances stepped outside the format of close-up). I only did the effect a couple of times, mostly because I didn't have the talent to figure out how (or ask others to help me figure out how) to make it entertaining.
What I am talking about is an effect in which one (honestly) removes a small number of cards from a deck, puts them off to the side, and then rapidly turns the rest of the cards over, finishing by naming the missing cards.
I don't recall exactly where I read how to do this, but the idea was pretty simple: as each f the cards remaining in the deck is turned over, one mentally disfigures the corresponding mnemonic. Once all the cards have been turned over, a rapid review of the mnemonics will reveal some number that were never disfigured, and these are the cards that were kept off to the side.
In any event, today I paused after getting 48 cards of the way through the deck and then simply reviewed my mnemonics (who happen to be people) to find people who I hadn't yet "met" in the course of memorizing the first 48 cards.
These turned out to be Vivian Vance (5C), Marylin Monroe (QC), Roy Rogers (4D), and Harry Lorayne (AH), which first, turned out to be correct, and second, something I still remember about 15 hours later.
I still cannot figure out a way to create something performable out of this (nor do I really have any motivation to do so), but "finding" these "people" seemed to go a lot faster today than any such session I performed with my old mnemonics (which were not person-based) back in the day.
Cheers...
