Wreck-It-Ralph trailer (and playable game!)

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I remember seeing a pretty vague poster for this movie at the theater last month and didn’t really even know what it was supposed to be about, but now that I actually saw the trailer (and saw some familiar faces in it!), my interest is definitely piqued! 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHDQHVkYq4g

Disney also has a neat, playable Flash version of the game that’s featured in the movie on their site – pretty simple, but I think it’s a cool concept that seems to be executed fairly well. It held my interest for a good 5 minutes, anyways…  😛

Blogging vs. Privacy

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I’ve always maintained a policy that there are certain things that I personally won’t blog about.

  • Relationship stuff that could come back to bite me later.
  • Work stuff that could come back to bite me later.
  • Family stuff that could come back to bite me later.

See a bit of a trend here?

As much as I enjoy blogging as a personal outlet for getting my ideas out in the open, and venting, and just thinking through things on paper (screen), it’s also no secret that people sometimes get themselves in a lot of trouble by posting about something online that they should really just be discussing directly with the other person who’s involved. Sure, it’s easy to assume that the other person might not ever even see your post, and that’s all well and good right up until the point when they actually do, and then what?! Good luck digging yourself out of that hole… 🙁

The reason that I bring this up today, of all days, is actually because inversely right now I’m trying to argue down the opposite side of that equation because for a lot of people, myself included, blogging really is sometimes the best way to organize our thoughts, much in the same way you would’ve done with a journal or diary 20 years ago that you kept under the corner of your mattress! Only difference here, everybody in the world has access to your mattress and your diary is automatically indexed by keywords, making it infinitely easier to find out who’s been bitching about you online than it was back in the day of spiral bound notebooks with cheap, little $2 padlocks built into the cover.

Trouble is, I have something that I’d very much like to go off on a rant about right, but ultimately I know that it’s in my best interests to keep it private and deal with it in a non-public setting. And I don’t say this in a vague manner to leave you guessing, wondering if it’s marital problems or work problems or some funky rash that I recently found (I can tell you for sure that it’s none of these three reasons!) … but more so just to vent that it’s a little frustrating for somebody whose passion is words to not actually be able to use them to address a particular stumbling block in my life. I know that I could easily pound out a couple of thousand words and get some of the weight off my chest … but the aftermath of such is what’s instead driving me to write around the subject in this pseudo attempt to release a little energy without also welcoming a whole new dimension of fuck into my life!

For what it’s worth, I’m sure you’re even more confused than ever by this point, but I actually think that I feel a little better, so … thanks? 😉

June is Here, Let’s Get It Back in Gear!

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You like how I rhymed that and everything for ya?

I still can’t believe that summer’s here already – it honestly feels like we were just getting over the Christmas hump yesterday, so you mean to tell me that in another six months it’ll be time to do it all over again?! Well, I do love me some Christmas, so as long as I can manage to get a few … well, a lot of things done by then!

Even though I’m still a day or two away from finally closing the book on that gigantic, ridiculously demanding project that managed to derail the first part of 2012 for me, in a way I’m already looking ahead to the weeks to come and trying to plot out what I’m going to focus on next once this thing is finally in the books. It’s something that I normally try to avoid because I have a bad tendency to hop around between projects a lot and as a result, I might get 50% through three or four things instead of just all-out finishing one or two…

…but this time I’m feeling a little better about it, I think because the next few things on my list are orders of magnitude more manageable than this last one was, so when I put down a few tasks to do each day, that’s literally the entire project as opposed to being part #37 of section C of BIG PROJECT X that just seems to have really no end in sight! Which I’m hoping will be a nice change because I should see things start to pick up just a bit and getting more things out the door as opposed to simply churning the same over and over is definitely preferable.

I’ve also got several things in the pipeline that are relatively new for me, whether it’s something completely new that I’ve never even dabbled in before or even something that I’ve been away from for so long that I guess it just feels like a fresh face. It can be tough when you work on one single thing for such a long time that you kinda start to get sick of it and just yearn for anything else in the world to focus on instead of that thing that you’re supposed to be doing! Hopefully there won’t be too much of that vibe as I launch this new site in the next couple of days because I do still need to write for it on a weekly basis, though not having the huge list of article backlogs and features to develop will be a welcome change!

So anyways, I really wish that I could say more about specifically what I’m looking forward to working on in the next couple of months, but at least know that I’m pretty excited about each of them and that more importantly, their development cycles should all be a lot shorter so you’ll actually get to start seeing stuff that I’m creating throughout the summer instead of waiting 18 months like has been the case as of late…  😳

Busy busy summer, but let’s bring it on!

a Super Nintendo emulator, and what’s inside!

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So this is kind of neat – this guy made a PC built inside of a Super Nintendo chassis for running emulators of classic systems…

The thing is:

  1. I’ve always wanted something like this – a box I could plug into the TV to play my old school favorites via emulation because half the cartridges I still have don’t work anymore – but I don’t necessarily care if it even looks like an old console like this … just a PC with a small form-factor would do just fine.
  2. I probably don’t have the skills to solder and dremmel together something to this degree anyways.

That said, I’d be happy with a regular mini-PC, but I’ve always been held back by the interactivity because even when you get the whole thing put together, you still don’t want to have to boot into Windows and click icons and sort through menus to load whatever game you want to play. Thus, my real takeaway from this video is simply that this exists!

Seriously – how sweet does that interface look?! I love all of the big-style graphics not only for the systems, but even game logos, too, plus game play footage and even some little animations. Who knows when I’ll actually have enough free time (and money) to mess around with it, but until then, isn’t it kind of cool even just knowing that something like this exists?! 😉

NYC vs. The Super Big Gulp

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I thought about writing up a little rant about the ridiculous ban on ginormous sodas that Bloomberg announced as his latest crusade in New York City, but then I watched Jon Stewart’s clip from The Daily Show the other night and I think he covered it pretty well… 😉

Really, it’s silly that this is even being proposed, although government has a nasty habit of regulating what some consider to be bad for people. Sure, I remember seeing the documentary years ago about a couple who would literally fill up a shopping cart with nothing but 2 & 3 liter bottles of soda once a week and they had horrible weight & diabetes problems … but what do you do??? If smoking is still legal, and drinking alcohol is still legal, then banning snack foods in certain quantities seems kind of like a moot point, now doesn’t it?

Thin Post : Crunch Time

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I’ve been so fixated on creative work lately that I’ve been having a real hard time keeping my focus, and I’m afraid that it’s only going to get worse before it actually gets better…

Right now I’m literally inches away from finishing up a huge project that has been on my plate for the last year and a half … I actually wanted to knock it out over the extended Memorial Day weekend, but it ended up being a little too big for that … but in the resulting scramble of trying to wrap everything up now, I’ve found myself on more than a few occasions giving in to not exercising or lots of extra snacking in the name of creative productivity, and although I’m certainly happy that big project is almost behind me, I don’t want to see myself sacrifice the hard work I’ve put into diet & exercise as of late just to get there.

It’s tough for exercise because when I only have so many hours in the day, I see 80 minutes for walking as, “Well, that’s 80 minutes that I could have another article written towards my goal…”

As far as food is concerned, I’m a horrible stress eater anyways, and I tend to gobble when I’m up super late because it helps me stay awake to get more work done, so … I think that one’s pretty clear!

The real question is, do I keep pushing for just one more week to finally end this thing and be done with it, or do I suck it up and try to stay focused on weight loss, add a few more days to my goal creatively, and then go from there? I already know what the answer is here because that date has been pushed back so many times, we’re in a new year now … I guess I just wish that I had more time in the day so that I didn’t have to make choices like this.

TL;DR – Health is paramount, so make that your #0 priority and let everything else fight over whatever’s left … that way, you’ll get the creative stuff done and be able to celebrate accordingly instead of just being pissed at yourself for letting everything else go to shit in the meantime. 😯

A Veritable Treasure Trove of Internet Humor!

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I’ve never really been very big into memes before, but they come up occasionally … ok, a lot … amongst my circle of D&D friends, and so I came across this amazing website on a whim when I wanted to whip up a quick image to include in one of my replies.

Needless to say, I spent a lot of time on this website today! Here are some of the categories I liked the best…


Futurama Fry


Philosoraptor


The Most Interesting Man in the World


Successful Black Man


Lame Pun Coon


Jimmy McMillan (remember him?!)


Ordinary Muslim Man


Condescending Wonka


Conspiracy Keanu


Unhelpful High School Teacher

(the full directory can be found here…)

Where has this stuff been all my life?!?!?! 😯

I want to learn how to shoot HDR photography.

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Other than just wanting to visit as much as humanly possible, another thing I’ve found to come out of buckling down on finishing up this Disney project recently is that it’s sort of renewed my interests in trying to improve my own photography skills.

More specifically, it reminded me how I really, really want to learn how to shoot HDR photography.

One of the blogs that I’ve been scouring religiously to help keep me motivated through all of this is the Disney Tourist Blog, not only because Tom’s trip reports are really fun to read (especially the one about his engagement proposal, which reminded me a lot of my own), but also because his photography pretty much throughout the entire site is absolutely gorgeous! It turns out that he does tons and tons of HDR photography, and the work simply speaks for itself. I wish the photos on my site looked like that! 😉

Cinderella Castle: Through The Eyes Of A Child

Tranquility

Disney's Contemporary Resort

(all photos by Tom Bricker – check out more at DisneyTouristBlog.com)

As far as I can tell, I have a couple of barriers standing in my way right now – the first of which simply being, I need a better camera! My current one is pushing almost 5 years old now, and to boot is just a simple point & shoot, so it doesn’t really even have the features needed for taking the kind of pictures that I’d like to be taking. Granted, it’s a bit of a conundrum because I’ve gotten rather attached to these small, point & shoot cameras that I can easily fit in a pocket right alongside my phone and I’m not entirely crazy about having to lug something considerably bigger around, but … the verdict is still out on that one.

My other big concern is simply that of time because really, I have no idea how much post processing goes into producing images like that, and it’d kind of suck to drop $1,000+ on a fancy camera setup, only then to find that it’s another hour’s worth of tweaking in Photoshop for each image to get them looking just right. 🙁 Plus, for that matter I might not actually have the Photoshop skills if it comes down to that! I mean, I can do the basic adjustments and apply filters and whatnot, but if it involves manipulating different parts of the image in different ways or something, I don’t know. From what I’ve been able to gather about the newer cameras themselves, it sounds like the kind that I would want sort of manage the multiple exposures needed for an HDR image for you by allowing you to just set the dimensions of your bracket and then having it take and combine all 3 (or whatever) images internally … but is there still even more to it than that???

I guess maybe I need to pick up a book and read some more about it to get a better idea of what I’m considering getting into … I love the idea of having prettier images to go alongside the stuff that I write, but I don’t want to find myself diving into a full-time job just for processing photos when I also eventually have to have the time to actually write about them, too! And I’ll be honest – some days it even seems tedious to do brightness and color correction on my photos before I upload them, so I just want to make sure I’m not getting in over my head thinking that it’ll be easier than it realistically is… 😯

Still – it’s hard to deny just how cool those pictures look, isn’t it?! 😉

Memorial Dog Weekend

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So we’ve been watching Jake again for the last couple of days while his owner went out of town…

The first night was ­ear-riffic as usual – I tried to referee as best I could, but Cleo kept trying to bite her brother’s ear off and in return, he’d try to force himself upon her sexually, so seriously … would YOU intervene at that point?! 😯

Thankfully things seemed to settle down a bit the following day.  We were going to try and take them to the beach again this weekend, but it’s been kind of rainy and I’m not really getting as much done as I’d wanted to, so instead we’ve just been staying around the house and I’ve been hiding away in my office focused on big old project #1.

Nonetheless, here are some new puppy pictures for your enjoyment… 😉

Also, I REALLY WANT TO GO TO DISNEY WORLD RIGHT NOW!!!

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I think I’ve already casually leaked out that the big thing I’m working on right now is a new website dedicated to my time spent at Walt Disney World, and so it’s probably not a huge surprise to hear that after slaving away at this computer for weeks on end, constantly surrounded not only by all of my own Disney content for the new site but also other people’s podcasts and blogs and whatnot to help keep me in the right frame of mind, I’m just really in a place where I want to go over there right now … even though my weekends are pretty much dedicated to being glued to this chair until the site is officially up and running!  😛

I am happy that already it seems like we’ve been visiting a little more often this year than we did in 2011. We’ve been over to Orlando, on average, once a month in 2012 and now that we’ve splurged to upgrade our annual passes this year, I can see a lot of new opportunities to go over this summer (whereas normally we’d be on blackout with Florida resident passes). In a way, I’m kind of glad that I’m so excited because hopefully it will just make it that much easier for me to stay on top of all the new articles that I’m committing to once the site is actually up and running. Some of them are admittedly a little more easy-going and shouldn’t be overly tedious to write anyways, but I could still see how after working on something for soooo long, the gut reaction might be to want to post it and forget about it, so in a way I’m glad that it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

At the same time, though, I can’t tell you how much I’d rather be there right now as opposed to sitting here typing in this chair…  😮