I remember seeing the clip about Battlestar addiction a few months and thinking it was funny (and so, so true…), but I just stumbled back across a few new clips today and it makes me wonder … why have I not sought this show out to actually watch on TV yet?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5haDL78AJE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2LBICPEK6w
Whew. Well, June was fun!
…not…
(Is it just me or did that line lose a lot of its awesomeness after the whole Borat scene??? Wayne’s World did it first, and they did it best… 🙂 )
Anyways…
I think stress management is going to be the name of the game for July. June problems won’t be going away just yet and I’ve got a veritable ton of creative stuffs to knock out over the next 30 days, so the way I see it, the best I can really do is figure out a way to manage the chaos so that I can make it through the month and actually have a few things to show for it! That was really my problem for June, anyways – the stress just kept on building and building all month, and I really didn’t have a good way to deal with it, so often times it ended up impacting the things that I wanted to do in a negative way – diet & exercise, writing, spending time with Sara – and so going into July, I’d like to find a better way to work through all of that crap so that I don’t lose as many nights to passing out early from sheer exhaustion and so on and so forth!
Above all, I think that sleep is going to be a big one because over the last month, I’ve watched my already erratic sleep schedule just take a nose dive for the worst and it pretty much always ends up screwing me in the long run, so in July I’d like to try to normalize a more reasonable bedtime, with the hopes that over time it’ll make me more productive during the day as well.
I’m also trying to make sure that I spend a little time with my wife each week, as it’s really easy to get lost in everything else and see our time fall to the wayside … which also can hurt in the long run because so much of my creative work really does need down time in order for me to write at my best. It’s just not one of those things where I can push push push and get exponentially better results the more time I put into it – sometimes less time and more breaks really can lead to better results.
I’m kind of just rambling now, so I suppose I’ll wrap it up, but that’s whatever “plan” I’ve been able to develop, anyways – we’ll check in a few weeks from now and see how things are coming!
Believe it or not, I think I would actually watch this movie.
Maybe not in the theater as a paying customer or anything, but late night on cable or digital download? Seems like it might be a neat concept…
Unfortunately I don’t see myself getting either of these systems anytime soon – the 3DS because I think the 3D is a stupid gimmick and the WiiU because, well, I guess pretty much the same – but these new Mario games look kinda cool. It impresses me that they can still come up with original ideas to make the 27-year franchise fun, and the whole Golden Fireball Mario concept definitely seems intriguing! 🙂
I need to try this the next time that we grill out…
It’s really disappointing to see so much venom floating around on places like Facebook after the Affordable Care Act was upheld by the Supreme Court earlier today. In a lot of ways, they’re the same nasty comments that I see from so many people about welfare and unemployment, and frankly, I guess I don’t know how to describe it other than this subset of people wanting to look down upon anyone who’s less fortunate than themselves.
Everybody flails and screams about how, “We can’t afford this!” and “I can’t even pay my own bills!” without realizing the irony that really, we’re all already paying for it anyways when uninsured or under-insured go into the ER for something that could’ve been remedied weeks prior through conventional doctors … because regular doctors expect payment upfront, but the ER has to treat everybody and will send you a bill that you can’t afford later.
So it’s not really about the money, despite whatever numbers conservatives will parrot to support how healthcare for all will bankrupt our otherwise perfect nation. And even if it does cost me a few more bucks each week in taxes, you know what – it’s worth it to me to know that other random people just like me around the country won’t ever find themselves faced with the question of whether they can afford to go see the doctor or not…
The thing is, when I suggest this in those discussions, the shocking response I get back is simply that not everyone wants to help their neighbors because from their perspective, they’ve got enough problems of their own without paying for somebody else to go see a doctor when they’re sick.
If I had to go out and work hard to find a job with health insurance, so can they!
And that’s where I start to lose a little of my faith in humanity here in the United States because really, what are we if not a community here to help each other? Everyone at any income level has their problems, whether it’s paying the rent each month or deciding which kind of sports car to buy next, but when we’ve lost touch so badly that we fail to recognize that no matter where we are in our lives, there are still other people out there who genuinely need some help, in my mind that doesn’t make us any better than all of the 3rd world countries that we pity on the nightly news…
There’s a reason why we have public servants like police and firemen – because whether we actually ever end up needing them or not, we all like to know that they would be there if we did – and the same should hold true for healthcare just the same. And while the Affordable Care Act may not be the best solution for what the general public as a whole deserves from the healthcare industry, at least it’s a step in the right direction towards assuring that rich or poor, a person’s health isn’t decided by whether or not they currently have a job or had a pre-existing condition before you got coverage.
We have to stop looking down on the less fortunate simply because we don’t think that they’re working as hard as we’ve had to – it’s ugly, in most cases it’s ill-informed, and it’s not the kind of judgmental society that any of us would be proud to live in. We ought to take care of our worst off because in this fickle economy, it could happen to you or I just as easily as it’s happened to so many of them, and would you really want somebody saying, “He doesn’t deserve it – he should just work harder!” if you were at the end of your own rope after having the rug pulled out from underneath your feet?
Americans are better than all of this bickering, or at least we should be.
It seems a little crazy that it’s already over for another year, but just as equally impressive when you look at the stats like that cumulatively since the Mario Marathon gang first started playing back in 2008! Hopefully it’s mostly just hyperbole due to mass sleep deprivation when the jokes inevitably start to fly about maybe doing it again the next year, though, because even though I didn’t really tune in this year quite as much as I had planned on doing after last year’s event, it’s getting to the point where I think it might be kind of weird not to watch these guys take on days upon days of Mario mania past and present as June rolls around each summer…
The last couple of weeks have been kind of insane for reasons not yet revealed, but as the weekend progressed I tried to at least keep the Marathon on at time in the background, even going s0 far as to put the Twitch.tv app on my phone and listen along in the final hours last night when I went out to walk the dog to make sure that I didn’t miss anything! As I read back through some old blog posts from previous years, I realized that I didn’t actually get the chance to kick back, pull up a controller, and enjoy some of the games for myself alongside the show this year … maybe next time … but in the same vein of wanting to do more when (hopefully!) Mario Marathon 6 rolls around in 2013, I’ve been trying to come up with some other ways to get involved simply past donating more, and I think I may have stumbled onto something.
I want to make a Lego mosaic of Mario, and then see if they want to give it away as a contest prize sometime during the marathon.
I wrote a few months ago about an interest in making a mosaic after stumbling upon a Kickstarter (that eventually failed) for someone trying to do a mural of the entire 1-1 level of Super Mario Bros.! Now I certainly have no desire to do that much, namely because $15 grand worth of bricks (and 90 feet of wall space) might be a little hard to come by … but something I could fit on one or two base boards with a few hundred bricks? Granted, I haven’t yet done one myself, but I’ve done some research on the how and the how much, and that’s definitely doable.
It helps that the 8-bit style of Nintendo games is pretty simple to re-create with basic blocks … there were actually a handful of photos submitted by viewers as Fan Art where they made images from Mario games out of those beads that you arrange on a board and then fuse together with the iron and those looked pretty neat. It’s basically the same concept – I’d just like to make something a little bit bigger that might look nice enough framed that someone would consider hanging on their wall.
I actually already have the mapping figured out for a simple 1-panel version of Mario (non-Super version) – I just haven’t ordered any of the bricks yet – so maybe I’ll give that a try later on this summer and then we’ll see where it goes from there. I just think it might be a neat way to participate if I can come up with something that people like, and people tend to like Legos, so it seemed like it might be a cool fit amongst some of the other prizes that other fans donated this year!
Besides, I can’t for the life of me seem to win or buy one of their awesome t-shirts, so maybe if I donate something cool I’d have a better chance at snagging one??? 😉
Today was a very lazy, lay around the house kind of day, but ultimately I think we both really needed it.
We ended up going over to the Magic Kingdom for dinner & fireworks last night and were up pretty late, and I honestly didn’t even realize until I started seeing the posts on Facebook that apparently there was a tropical storm hovering over us, just waiting to dump buckets upon buckets of rain on our heads at any given moment… 😯
Luckily, we were able to make it to the store and back for food without getting too ridiculously soaked (although my umbrella did get quite the workout!), and after that we pretty much spent the rest of the day just laying about, eating junk food and watching bad movies to pass the time. My choice of film was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which I had thought I remembered someone had said that it “wasn’t that bad,” but clearly they only stayed for the first half of the movie if that was their takeaway opinion of the flick. Sara’s choice was I Don’t Know How She Does It, which was just fucking terrible really from start to finish.
During a brief intermission so that I could make brownies and do some dishes, we also watched the episode of The Simpsons where Bart and the other superstars get sent away to Capital City in an attempt to avoid them dragging down the school’s standardized testing scores, so at least that was quality entertainment. 😀
Also, throughout the course of the day we got a veritable crap-ton of rain, to the point where the pool was overflowing and there was a good couple of inches of standing water out on our covered patio in the back! Cleo wasn’t at all happy about still being forced outside in the rain to go pee. Rumor has it other parts of town closer to the water got hit a lot worse, so she should be happy she didn’t need to wear a life jacket while she was out there… 😛
Mario Marathon kicks off for its fifth year today – don’t forget to tune in and drop some coin to help support Child’s Play! 
