A Leg Up

This blog is a lot of things, but I never expected that it would become what it has. This post is about just that: the unexpected creation of reality.

A few months ago, I posted about Tetris, one of my favorite games. Now, I'm not one for re-runs, but that post got me thinking about the viability of writing about Tetris in an academic setting. Due to the connections I drew to Confucian ideology of ritual and instinct, I pitched it to my philosophy professor and in the end wrote about this very issue for my final research paper in Confucianism and Virtue Ethics this past semester.

This is as much about the willingness of my professor to allow such a discussion take place, but because of the time I had spent composing my thoughts into writing on this blog, it made it easy to pitch this as a meaningful analogy and literal example of Confucian ritual. Because it was about something I care about deeply, the paper was engrossing to write and I think it turned out pretty well. There has actually been some scientific studies on the effects of Tetris linking it to brain development, specifically thickening the cerebral cortex. It's even been intimated as a "cognitive vaccine" for post-traumatic stress disorder. I would never have discovered this had I not been able to dip my toes in the waters of this blog.

Now, there's a lot of writing going on here at LegLeg, much of it is incredibly relevant to what's going on in popular culture, and it could very well serve as a jumping off point for further more "legitimate" forms of written work. This is the proof. What began one night as a kind of jest has become a consistent launching pad and work space for thoughts rendered from the impenetrable granite that is the internet. It makes me think about what a blog is for, really. College students spend so much time thinking about what other people think, getting trained to think quicker, more broadly, more specifically, and with confidence. Is a blog in this context about escaping from the framework of imposed subjects in order to apply our new cerebral methodologies to what we want to think about?

Or maybe we're learning more from this forum than we think, and it's fueling thoughts that might not have coalesced had we not taken this opportunity to say whats up. In any case, I'm just expressing my gratitude to the series of tubes that we call home, it's given me a leg up.