#playtoplay

[detroityoga]

View this post on Instagram

For everyone who worked on #astavakrasana in class this morning. Excellent job! Here are some entrance options in order of difficulty. #playtoplay #seriousplay #staygold #ashtanga #ashtangayoga #vinyasa #vinyasayoga #yoga #armbalance #detroityoga #michiganyoga #payattention #focus #concentrate #beherenow #tostillthemindisyoga (at Detroit Yoga)

[luciangraywriting-blog]

Day 4 of 59

Today I was able to watch Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” and I was just amazed at the director’s ability to keep the message of the story intact and coherent while changing much of the actual finer details in the plot from the original novel. Having seen both, for me the book was better, with the meat and richness of the characters of the novel overshadowing their film counterpart, as was Ernest Cline’s excellent mystery writing slowly unraveling itself all but spoon-fed in the movie adaptation. Even with this, the movie definitely did not disappoint.

The real point of this though was the near end part of the movie. 

SPOILERS WARNING. (Non spoiler: I enjoyed the movie and I want to make the most out of every moment I’m here. Even if I fail and even if I don’t “win”.)

Towards the end of the movie, the goal to get the final key was to play one of the games Halladay liked on his Atari 2600 system. You had to choose the correct game and play it the correct way in order to get the final key, otherwise you would get a game over. Wade, the main protagonist, sees one of the IOI scrubs (mooks from the villain company) win the game, Adventure, to which the ice below him breaks and he falls down and his avatar dies. Wade states that the reason he failed wasn’t because he got the wrong game, it was because he wasn’t supposed to win the game. Adventure by Warren Robinett was the first game with an Easter Egg. IGN sums it up pretty well here:

“Robinett’s solution was to create a hidden chamber in his sprawling map. The tiny room was secreted in a maze and only accessible with a special item. Concealed within the room was a minuscule object, a single invisible pixel. By carrying that pixel into another area of the world and stacking two other items on the same screen, the player could render a certain wall passable. Stepping through the barrier led to yet another secret room. inside, the player would find the words ‘Created by Warren Robinett.’” (Retrieved from: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/05/gamings-first-easter-egg-adventure-lets-play-with-creator-warren-robinett) 

To find the Easter Egg wasn’t for the player to win the game, it was for the player to explore every nook and cranny – and maybe find something that might as well not have been significant, only for the player to find its significance in the most unusual way possible at the time. That scene in the movie hit me in a way that I didn’t realize it would. I’ve been so focused, counting the number of days until I’m finally done with the academic, extracurricular, social, and class blockhead workload I put myself through this year... that I had forgotten how fun it was to just actually be here. To learn more about myself, the world around me, the systems that are in place, and the people who are just as a part of the system as they are systems themselves. It’s needlessly complicated, and yet it’s beautiful the just same. 

The world has always been beautiful. Medicine has always been beautiful. Being there for people has always been beautiful. Walk one step and a time, Lucian, and see the wonder of the world again. 

[detroityoga]

Getting there. Entering and exiting whatever it was that I pictured in my previous post. Half pretzel pose. #ardhabadhapretzasana #playtoplay #ashtanga #vinyasa #yoga (at Detroit Yoga)

[detroityoga]

And sometimes you flop. #failyourwaytosuccess #falldownseventimesstandupeight #repetitionisthemotheroflearning #playtoplay (at Detroit Yoga)