Dinner for Five

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I found this kinda neat TV show on YouTube earlier today, and it helped to pass the time while I was trying to get some work done. Basically it’s just five celebrities sitting around a table having dinner, talking about show business and sharing stories – it actually reminded me a lot of the early gigs in Kevin Smith’s speaking career, and there were even a handful of episodes featuring Kevin and his friends, which ended up getting me hooked going through all of the rest!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAYwQIERib4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4bpPpnkBd8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnTwsKWqsTk

Unfortunately, it looks like the show is pretty much canceled now, but you can still find a ton of the old episodes on the show’s YouTube channel.

Oddly enough, one of the other things I got out of listening to episodes of this all day was a pleasant reminder not to judge people by the fictional characters that they play on TV and in the movies! Case in point – I’ve never really liked Jon Favreau … he just always seemed to end up playing the prick in every movie that I see him in, and yet when I watched him hosting Dinner for Five, he seems like he’s probably a perfectly nice guy after all!

It’s also neat to see other celebrities not in character like that, too, again because I’ve really grown to love hearing Kevin Smith be so open in his life these days with a million podcasts and whatnot, and yet most other celebs really don’t open themselves up nearly to that level, so it was neat listening to a legend like George Carlin talking about wanting to get into acting, but then having to put it on hold because it wasn’t in the cards … and then hearing him talk about really being able to stretch in a movie like Jersey Girl, which we watched the other night and the man just about had me in tears when he went through the scene at the very end about not wanting to die alone.

Good show, and I think there are a lot of hidden gems in there no matter who your favorite actors are. 😉

Final Fantasy IV DS

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Because it seemed like I needed yet another reason to put off the things that I’m actually supposed to be doing, I used some leftover Best Buy rewards points to pick up an old copy of the Final Fantasy IV port for Nintendo DS after Christmas. As previously noted on this blog, I love this game and have been eager to give a go of the DS version – whose cut scenes I’ve been ogling via YouTube for quite some time! – but after a few hours of actual game time, it saddens me that I think I’m actually up in the air as to whether I’ll be playing this version all the way through or not…

My Likes:

  • The new rewards screen after each battle does a much better job of summarizing your loot, and also showing how much XP each character still needs to level. Same with leveling up – the breakdown of how your stats are improving is great.
  • The auto-mapping feature in dungeons is neat, although more than once I’ve actually caught myself just playing off the map and not even looking at the regular game screen with the real graphics. The bonuses for completing each map are kinda cool, too, though having played through the game so many times, I’m not sure why exploring every nook and cranny is worth 5 potions or whatever! Maybe it’s the unknown that it could be something even better…
  • The cut scenes, obviously, are great, even though I think by now I’ve probably watched nearly all of them on YouTube. Also, is it just me or do some of the videos look a little grainy, even on the DS’s paltry 256×192 pixel display???

My Dislikes:

  • The battle screen doesn’t show max HP and MP – this seems like a HUGE flaw to me!!! Am I just supposed to remember that Cecil has 550 HP so that I don’t start panicking until he falls below 200?! Same with magic – I’m typically more conservative with magic users because I like to save their spells up until I really need them, but A) they feel even more useless than usual in this version without them, and B) there’s no good way to know how many uses I have left at this point anyways. Seriously, this one point alone is almost a deal-breaker for me because it just seems mind-bogglingly stupid to not show 453 / 550 HP on one of the two screens.
  • Likewise, the battle screen also doesn’t make it real clear who we’re fighting when we jump into battle, either! I’m used to a nice stat bar on the bottom that shows them on one side and us on the other side, and instead the DS version gives me loads of sort of pretty graphics on top and crap on the bottom. Sure, it tells me who they are when I select them, but I feel like they could be using the dual-screens a lot better during combat than they currently do with this game.
  • Warp – the spell – is really dumb. And granted, maybe I didn’t use it that much in the other versions to know if it performed this exact same way, but the way I always understood it – Exit (white magic) takes you all the way out of a dungeon, whereas Warp (black magic) takes you up a floor … meaning if I’m on the 3rd floor of the Antlion’s den, I should be back at the surface after 3 uses of warp. NOPE – TRY 15 USES!!! Because now warp takes you to the previous floor you were on, meaning if I duck back and forth between floors grabbing treasure, warp has me bouncing back and forth just the same. It’s stupid.
  • Quick Save isn’t really quick. I guess I’m just spoiled with how they implemented this for the original Final Fantasy on the iPhone port because you can literally save anywhere at anytime because that’s really important on mobile devices today, and the iPhone app does it very fast and efficient. For FFIV on the DS, though, Quick Save actually expects me to be quitting the game, as opposed to maybe I just want to put the game down for a second, or save before the big boss because this version is so much harder than it used to be! And granted, FFIV/DS came out in 2008 whereas FF/iPhone was released in 2011, but it’s still frustrating…

I find it interesting that they up’ed the difficulty on this game without any added incentives on the positive side – I mean, I never thought that the game was overly challenging, but as a budding 12 year-old playing RPGs for the first time I certainly didn’t think that the game was a pushover, either! Of the handful of hours that I’ve put into the DS version the last couple of nights, I’ve had to restart from a save point twice because the entire party had gotten killed … and we were just leveling. Maybe I’d expect that sort of thing if I was powering through because I’ve played it a thousand times and just want to experience the graphics in each area, but that certainly wasn’t the case – both times I was just wandering around the desert or the waterfall cave trying to boost my numbers, both times with just Cecil and Rydia, and we just got absolutely flattened because everyone took out Rydia in, like, 3 hits and then just dog-piled on Cecil after that.

I’m admittedly also not quite as excited about the graphics as I was from watching the cut scenes – ultimately I think I enjoyed the 16-bit graphics that they lent to the original on the iPhone for that port a lot more than the 3D effects that are in the everyday gameplay here. I’m sure the screen doesn’t help – I mean, 640×960 (iPhone 4) vs. 256×192 (Nintendo DSi) is a huge difference and there’s only so much you can expect from that tiny screen, but the more I get into it, kind of the less I’m getting into it with all of these types of limitations.

I’m sure I’ll give it a little more time, at least until arguably my favorite part where Cecil fights to become a paladin, but it’s really going to have to pick up if it wants to take me all the way to the moon and back this time around…  🙁

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Weight Loss 8.0 – A New Hope

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Of course I’m starting a new weight loss program – it’s a new year!!!

😳

So I don’t even know where we left off anymore and frankly, I don’t care.

That’s part of my new philosophy for 2013 in general, but particularly in trying to get back on track with moving my health in the right direction – if/when I have a bad day, I don’t dwell and beat myself up over it … I just do my best to learn from it and move forward.

I think a lot of people fall off the horse with diets and exercise because they build up unrealistic goals for themselves and then when they have the slightest slip up, the whole thing ends up falling apart like a house of cards. I know that I’ve done that in the past – I can remember being super proud of myself for having exercised consistently for several weeks in a row, but the very first time I missed a day, it was all downhill from there because instead of having exercised “for 23 days straight,” I was back to “2 or 3 days in a row” which didn’t sound anywhere near as impressive.

I guess it sounds kind of weird, but in a way I’m trying to be less hard on myself with this latest weight loss iteration because I’ve tried so many different approaches over the years and none of them have quite worked out, it’s something new and when I think about it long term in my head, it kinda makes sense. You see, I know that there are about a million different things that I could be doing to maximize my weight loss, from exercise to diets to sleep, but I’ve also got a lot of other things going on and in the past, it’s always been quite the struggle to juggle the two. I could either excel in weight loss or I could maintain my writing schedule, but I never had enough time to do both.

Eventually I’d sacrifice one for the other, which was great in the short-term because I’d lose 10 pounds or get a bunch of writing done, but then I’d want to swap and sacrifice the other to play catch-up, and all of my hard work would get erased while I switched focus away to the other thing.

So I don’t want to repeat that again in 2013. Instead, I want to try making little changes here and there that I can really absorb into my daily routine before moving on to other things. Right now my focus has been on the following:

  • I’ve been cleaning up my diet and trying to get my daily calories down from all of the bingeing that I did throughout the holidays, although ironically I think being sick last week kinda helped with that!
  • At the advice of my wife, I started taking a multi-vitamin each morning. I had jokingly asked if I could get them shaped like the Flintstone characters that I had growing up, but she surprised me with these gummie ones that don’t really feel like I’m taking pills at all! Why doesn’t every kind of pill come in gummy bear format?!
  • I’m trying to do one exercise-y thing each day, whether it’s walking the dog, spending some time on the elliptical, doing some yoga and playing games on WiiFit, or just a few rounds of push-ups.

At this point I’m trying not to even think about weight loss goals because it’s too easy for me to extrapolate out the math and say, “Well, if I can lose 2 pounds a week, that’s 50 pounds in 25 weeks, so I should be all done by the end of May!” Of course, I’d like to lose a couple of pounds a week and WiiFit insists on tracking my progress every time I turn the thing on, but more important to me at this point is these little baby steps. Besides, I know that if I’m doing these things right, the pounds will start to come off on their own, so it’s really just a different way of looking at things.

Who knows – maybe this time it’ll be the approach that actually works.  😐

an 8-Bit Lego Mosaic to strive for!

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So a long time ago I had declared that I wanted to make one of those awesome Lego mosaics.

Today I found this incredible feat of geek ingenuity…

awesome_8bit_lego_mosaic

(more images over at imgur)

Mind you, my original plan had been simply to start off with a couple of simple 8-bit mosaics of Mario and Link to get the ball rolling, and then later after posing the idea to my wife, she mentioned that she wouldn’t mind doing a Disney one if we can find a suitable picture to convert. But this is definitely a fantastic long-term goal to strive for in my eyes because good god, is that a whole lot of nostalgia and Legos wrapped up into one amazing collage!

If you click through the link, you can see that this thing takes up the better part of the guy’s living room wall, and coincidentally *I* have a rather blank office wall right now that I think would make a great area to display something like this! At first I didn’t think that I’d really be capable of designing it all, but after some mulling it over, I realized that by using 8-bit characters they’re pretty much already pixelated for you, so from there it should simply be a matter of picking characters and organizing them. Looking through this guy’s choices, I think we’d have a lot of similar ones, but not entirely … not sure if I’d want to mix 8-bit and 16-bit yet or just stick to the NES.

Also, what I think would be really cool is if I could do the layout in a way where it could actually grow over time, meaning that instead of dropping thousands of dollars on bricks all at once, it’d be neat if I could do a few panels at a time and arrange to hang the piece on the wall as its being built.

Lotta variables here, and really, I do need to try my hand at something just a bit smaller before diving into a 518,400 brick monstrosity (he used 15 48×48 base plates – do the math!!!).

Somebody ask me where those little mosaic starters are in a couple of months when I totally forget about this… 😉

Putting Away Christmas, 2012 Edition

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So it’s officially all done for another year – yesterday I took down the tree and packed up other decorations inside while Sara was at work, and tonight I took advantage of a particularly nice day outside to put away all of the lights.

And admittedly it’s been a little sad, not seeing flickering lights in the family room or gazing out over our increasingly expansive Lego Holiday Village. I still left all of the little scented fan thingys out – figured we might as well use them up because they won’t really store for next year, but Christmas gifts are for the most part mixed in with our regular stuff at this point, pretty much all of the holiday snacks are gone from the fridge, and even the TV seems to have returned to its normal, boring schedule with no offerings of Home Alone or A Christmas Story in sight…

I guess I’ve been a little mellow about it as I’ve put stuff away over the last two days. I always hate to see it go because I absolutely love Christmastime. And 2012 was a pretty good one – got to spend a little more time with Sara than work has let me in the past, put together a ton of Legos, even went to Disney World on Christmas Eve, which was certainly a highlight! And it’s one of those cases where I know that it can’t last forever because then it just wouldn’t be as special anymore, but every year for as much fun as I have with this season, it just seems to go by so quick and there’s always something more that I look back saying I wish I could’ve done.

  • Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights – This probably one of my favorite holiday things to do over at Disney, but I don’t think we’ve made it the last couple of years. Well, truth be told almost all of it is “my favorite,” so it’s really hard to choose … I think this year we were over there for two days and made it to Epcot (Candlelight Processional) and the Magic Kingdom (Christmas Eve). There’s just so much to see and do over there that I think the only times we’ve truly done everything was when we’d spend the night and make a weekend out of it. Maybe in 2013!
  • Baking Christmas Cookies – We actually didn’t do any this year because Sara had just started a new diet and it was really important for her to not have any bad influences around the house that could deter her progress, but I always really enjoy baking and mailing cookies out to friends and family as a way to spread a little holiday cheer.
  • REALLY Getting Into Christmas Shopping – We honestly dialed back a lot on gifts this year, too, because we’ve got some big expenses coming up in 2013 that require our complete and undivided attention … which was kind of a bummer because I have a lot of fun picking out gifts for people and since I grew up extraordinarily spoiled, needless to say I kind of enjoy receiving them, too!

So there’s a part of me that wishes we could celebrate Christmas just a little longer – maybe until the end of January or so? I could go and buy another ham, roll out the DVDs to watch some of the Christmas specials that we missed, and just spend a bit more time vegging out on the couch in my underwear, building Lego spaceships with no particular place to go unless it’s to tour Christmas decorations around the neighborhood! I suppose Mom would have to send down another batch of Santa cookies, too, and as for the big guy himself and another round of presents…

Ok, ok, so maybe it’s not very realistic, and to be honest, I’ve got plenty of big things to look forward to in 2013, too. I still can’t wait ’til Christmas is here again only 11 months from now, but I suppose in the meantime if I can get some of this other stuff done over the next year, it’ll just make celebrating from Thanksgiving to New Years all the more special.

Only 352 more days to go…

:santa:

“I’m not homophobic, but…”

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So I came across this little gem on some random Internet site earlier today:

“I’m not homophobic, but I just believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.”

It took me a while to ponder that one because my gut reaction was pretty much, “No, no, you’re definitely homophobic!” but then I looked up the actual definition of the word…

ho·mo·pho·bi·a
unreasoning fear of or antipathy toward homosexuals and homosexuality.

Origin: 
1955–60; homo(sexual) + -phobia

Related forms:
ho·mo·pho·bic, adjective.

…and the more I analyze it, I suppose you’re not technically homophobic if you “don’t have a problem with gays, but just don’t think they should marry” … in fact, you’re actually something much worse. Because a fear is something that people get over all the time, and it’s typically centered around the unknown … figure out how to put things in perspective and you can work through a fear of heights or the dark or whatever.

But a belief is different because at that point there’s not really an unknown anymore – you’ve made up your mind, and all that’s left is to pass judgement … in this case, by denying other people the same right to marry that you enjoy yourself as a heterosexual simply because they’re different than you. It’s alright to be afraid of things that you don’t understand because eventually if those things become significant enough in our lives, we’re forced with facing our fears and working through those hang-ups like human beings. But to just blatantly proclaim that someone else doesn’t deserve certain rights because of a personal choice of your own beliefs … well, that’s just not very nice and it doesn’t say a whole lot about your character, in my opinion.

And it’s because of this very reason why the Separation of Church and State is so important in our country, and why we need to keep pushing to get gay rights sorted out around here once and for all, because what sense does it make to have laws on our books based on religious beliefs when not everyone in the nation shares those beliefs??? It really baffles me – here, I don’t even believe in God, and yet I’m allowed to get married because I happen to have been born straight, and yet there are plenty of spiritually oriented gay people out there who are denied that same right strictly because of their sexual orientation.

From my perspective it’s pretty simple – you have marriage in the eyes of the government, and you have marriage in the eyes of the church. The first becomes an umbrella for 1,138 rights and privileges that are extended to married citizens by the United States government, and the second can have a variety of definitions, benefits, and responsibilities depending on one’s own personal beliefs. That they happen to share the term marriage is unfortunate simply on account of the constant conflict pitting one against the other, but considering that our constitution guarantees that no national religion will be established, it makes only common sense that the government would have its own definition that would legally stand on its own from the individual interpretations of over 310 different religious denominations throughout the country.

I suppose in the long run I’m not going to lose a whole lot of sleep if you insist on harboring beliefs that just make you not a very nice person, but as long as there are still laws based on your mean-spirited, though admittedly non-homophobic beliefs, then that’s something that needs to change.

Dream Journal : Burrito Battle Dog

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So admittedly this one was pretty weird…

A crowd of people were gathered around a snowy field, watching and waiting for a fight.

I was close to the front – apparently I was maybe a “competitor” somehow – and so I had a good view of what was about to take place. Two corners, divided by some kind of track dug into the snow, and at each end were two robots … robot dogs.

And what made it really weird was when I realized that my side only had one robot dog, and the other position was taken by my actual dog, Cleo!

I was worried for a few minutes – why was my dog going to be fighting robots??? Surely she didn’t stand a chance against these metal beasts, right?!

Then I saw the thing that changed everything – for whatever reason, one of the opposing robot dogs had a giant burrito strapped to its back, and a moment later when Cleo noticed it, too, she just went ABSOLUTELY FREAKING NUTS!!! 

I’d seen her bark incessantly at the neighbors in their driveway, or do all but tear through the front door to get at the squirrel hanging out in our tree in the front yard, but this was much, much different! It was like she turned into a rabid, frenzied version of Sonic the Hedgehog, and when the bell rang to start the fight that also consequently woke me up, I knew that Cleo wasn’t the one to be worried about in this battle… 😉

A Simple Walk Into Mordor…

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I just finished watching the final installment of this 4-part series that I discovered sometime before Christmas – the premise is basically that three guys flew to New Zealand and decided to walk the full distance between the filming locations for Hobbiton and Mount Doom from the movies, or about 120 miles in 6 days.

Pretty cool adventure, though I certainly don’t envy the condition of their hobbit feet by the time the trip is over…  😕