The trailer for the next Legend of Zelda game (on the Wii U) looks gorgeous – it’s really amazing how far that franchise has come in 30 years…
If I’m being completely honest, even though I’ve swooned over all of the artwork and game play from Skyward Sword, despite having that game sitting on my shelf for years now, I’ve yet to actually crack it open and play it for myself! I think it’s just because I hardly have any time to play video games anymore – I spent a bit of time with Hyrule Warriors when we first got our Wii U and really enjoyed that, but I also liked how I could pick up and just play for a little while whereas it literally feels like starting a quest when I sit down with a traditional Zelda game.
Maybe I’ll have to find some time around the upcoming holidays … in the evenings after the house has gone to bed … to get myself caught up on the franchise a bit so that I can justify picking up a copy of this whenever it comes out next year!
What do you do if you’ve got two kids that for the life of them just can’t seem to get along and only want to FIGHT any chance they’re near each other???
No, no – this isn’t a parenting post about my newborn twins, who are still in the NICU and thus separated by a good five feet as well as a partition at all times anyways!
In fact, we’re talking about adults … who argue … on Facebook, specifically, because not to defend the other quadrants of social media or anything, but I’ve never seen half the arguments on Twitter that I see boil over on my Facebook posts. I’d like to say that I don’t know what it is about Facebook that makes it different from other platforms, but I actually know exactly what it is because honestly it’s the same thing that makes Facebook attractive to me for entirely different reasons…
Simply put, Facebook is where I have friends and family from over the years; Twitter is where I have the people who are most like me.
And so whereas from one angle I love Facebook because it connects me with relatives and distant friends who otherwise aren’t really online people so they can still see family photos and the goofy humor stuff that I write, but in a way it’s also a bane because when we start to get into messier topics like, oh say, POLITICS, we often don’t share remotely the same opinions and sometimes people aren’t very civil about it.
…which I hate.
I shouldn’t have to apologize for what one of my Facebook friends says to another, nor should I have to play referee between people that have taken political passions to an entirely unhealthy level.
I’ve also found very recently that it’s stressful/painful/whatever you want to call it when close friends and/or family make comments about your beliefs that you once would’ve thought above the types of conversations that you’ve had with them.
I don’t want to go into anymore detail for fear of outing anybody, so instead let’s just say enough is enough and I’ve finally decided to do something about it. And luckily, Facebook actually makes that pretty easy…
Up until this week, all of my Facebook posts have always been public because I’ve been publishing to the Internet since back when it was text only and I don’t really believe in walled gardens. Still, my own sanity is worth twisting that perspective just a bit, so I made me a list and checked it twice … and ultimately came up with about 20 people on Facebook who I’m flat-out just tired of arguing about politics with during my time spent there.
I’ll still set most of my Facebook posts to public, but now when I have something I want to share that I just know is going to elicit undesirable comments from these same people who always get into the same arguments, I can set those posts to be Friends only – excluding those on my No Politics list – and BAM!
Peace and quiet on Facebook at last.
Now a couple of points to close on:
As to whether you’re on this list if you find yourself reading this on my blog! Let’s be honest with ourselves – you’ll probably know it if you are, and if my Facebook posts have seemed less controversial to you lately … no, I haven’t gone conservative – I’m just tired of arguing about it with YOU.
If bullet #1 there raises the argument that I only want to discuss things with people who agree with me, I’ve actually already written a fine editorial about this so feel free to go read that if you’d like.
At the end of the day, I’ve only got so many hours and though I welcome a good discussion, it does either of us little good to keep having the same ceaseless comment threads over and over again. So maybe you can just gush over my latest family photos or that funny thing that I wrote about farting at the library instead.
But if you take offense to farting, too, so help me god if you don’t wind up on an entirely new list altogether!
So the other day I got an email from Google AdSense that was frustrating, to say the least…
…frustrating because admittedly until earlier this week, I haven’t even posted anything to Just Laugh for a good six months, so for the most part it’s barely even on my radar. Yet I use the same Google AdSense account for all of my sites and I don’t really want to get the thing suspended … what, for the whopping $100 in ad revenues that I somehow collect every year orso at a couple of bucks in random visitors each month!
Now I just use simple text widgets to insert AdSense blocks around Just Laugh and being a WordPress site, it’s all done through templates so it wasn’t easy to just “remove ads from the violating pages.” I looked around, but surprisingly didn’t find any plugins that would allow you to omit specific URLs from receiving ad code, and apparently AdSense itself doesn’t have anything either – you can block advertisers, but not specific content on your site.
This seems weird and dumb because no doubt there are plenty of sites that publish “adult content” with “adult” meaning 18+ … not for kids and not here’s where you can buy vibrators and inflatable sex toys!
…I wonder if just mentioning those words will get this blog post flagged … in a year and a half…
Anyways, I found this simple write-up that basically has you create a new custom field and then uses an if/else condition in PHP to determine whether or not to display the ad code that you choose…
It’s not perfect – at least not in my layout – because I suppose if I really cared that much I wouldn’t want the Sponsors widget to display at all if it’s going to be empty anyways. An alternative would be for me to insert a house ad or something into that block so that it isn’t empty for that one post, but honestly according to my stats this specific post has gotten viewed a total of39 times since it was published last spring, and 8 times this year … so I really don’t care right this second as long as it prevents Google from suspending my account whenever they get around to rescanning the page!
One note – if you use a widget-based solution like I do, you’ll need a widget that can parse PHP because the regular Text widget in WordPress doesn’t and I made that mistake the first time around, not noticing it until I reloaded the page and saw the actual code everywhere. Fortunately I already had the Enhanced Text Widget plugin installed and it works great.
I suppose if I get more notices down the road about other inappropriate content, I can go back and add alternate ads to load as I flag the new posts, but if you just need something quick and dirty because Google randomly crawled an old post and is complaining about it, this works just fine in about 10 minutes time.
It may be a day late, but Samantha Bee’s entire show addressing Trump’s pussy-grabbin’ antics is absolutely fabulous. I don’t think I’ve ever watched her standalone show before, but after this I may have to set my DVR or whatever to watch…
No punches pulled, which is what any presidential candidate deserves … much less Donald Trump.
I’ve always fantasized about making Just Laugh real by having an actual office and employees and whatnot, so this was a surprisingly fun dream to find that I had not only found an office to work out of, but also someone to share it with in our humor writing adventures!
Apparently the “space” that we had found was more of a spare room or two that we’d found in the unused wing of a local hospital that we’d somehow convinced them to let us use for cheap.
VERY CHEAP!
For the most part we had the place to ourselves, though occasionally we’d hear doctors and nurses walking by our hallway late at night on their way out to the parking lot.
This became noticeable after being awoken one night overhearing them outside … because apparently I was single, so why wouldn’t I just sleep in this awesome place where I worked into the wee hours of the night to make humor for the masses, anyways?!
Well, the next day i came in to find plastic draped everywhere because our wing was now under construction, and upon confronting the lady with the clipboard in charge, she made it clear that they were ready for us to go so that they could start using our space for actual hospital business again…
I argued that we had a lease, even though it literally had us paying something like $5/month or $50/month whereas the lady claimed that something closer to $5,000/month was what was fair for the space! Eventually the guy who our agreement was with showed up and sided with her, but said that if we really wanted to stay we should make a realistic offer for the space.
At one point he snickered that if we didn’t like the $5,000/month, maybe we could give them a percentage of our gross income, which even he knew sounded ridiculous … but that’s when my co-worker pulled me aside to point something out…
They didn’t actually know what our gross was – they just assumed that it was big because they saw us as this Internet company mooching off of them and not a couple of guys writing humor on the Internet and sleeping in our offices.
So I went back and told him that we’d do it for 1% of our gross, but there had to be some guarantees. Namely, we wanted it locked in for several years and if they wanted to reclaim our current space, they had to find us a better one – possibly over where they had some unused offices that had direct access and didn’t require walking through the hospital to get to them.
The guy snickered again because he thought he was pulling one over on us, whereas in reality we were just barely making enough money to pay for Hot Pockets and server fees and that was about it! We figured that 1% would actually be a decrease from the rent we were already paying, and if things really took off we could still handle it for a couple of years…
So in the end they fell for it and we got to move to an even better office that we stayed in until we were able to bring on two more people full-time. And even though the construction lady was being kind of a bitch, even she admitted that she read our site and thought we were really funny, so that was pretty satisfying, too.
I honestly didn’t realize until going to type this up that literally I did the exact same concept last year for my 8th wedding anniversary, but for the most part we came up with a list of memories that was a little different than last year’s … and not for nothing but life has kind of been more than a little crazy lately! … so let’s just enjoy this little stroll down memory lane for what it is and leave it at that…
October 2008 (St. Pete Beach) – This was one of the last photos we took out on the beach with the sunset to our backs before heading aside to join our wedding guests in song and dance and good eats, save for the Swedish meatballs that I’m still bitter about almost a decade later because I never actually got one at my own wedding and they were delicious at the tasting! Still, it was a pretty magical night … even if we had technically already been married for a year because we’d snuck off and eloped on the exact same day a year prior for the insurance benefits…
September 2016 (Tampa) – Barely three weeks ago, just before we welcomed our twin sons into the world! This was after Sara had spent nearly a month in the hospital, so tensions were at an all-time high to say the least, but a few hours later once the boys were all nestled snug in their incubators in the NICU and we all had a chance to catch our collective breath, it still ended up being a pretty swell day!
May 2015 (Walt Disney World) – This is arguably one of my favorite family pictures that we have right now, taken the weekend we went over for 24 hours at the Magic Kingdom during a period when we, err, weren’t at the Magic Kingdom. We were actually just killing some time outside of Fantasia Gardens Mini-Golf waiting for our tee time here, and at one point we decided it would be fun to take a little family selfie … and here is the result!
December 2014 (Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort) – Christopher’s very first Christmas!!! We celebrated with a trip over to Disney with Lori, James, and Madelyn for Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, and of course we had to spend at least a couple of hours the next day taking in all of the fun decorations elsewhere around WDW, including a visit to the biggest gingerbread house you’ve ever seen! Little baby Christopher (~9 months?) seemed to have a pretty good time, and this was even before I slipped him a tiny bite of gingerbread…
October 2011 (Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge) – A quick, overnight celebration for anniversary #4 took us over to one of our favorite Disney resorts, which though it pretty much rained the entire time did end up featuring what was pretty much the best dinner we’ve ever had. And honestly I think that’s probably still true – Jiko: The Cooking Place at AKL is amazing – we got a nice, secluded table in the corner of the wine room that was nice and intimate, we got to splurge on a fancy bottle of wine from South Africa, and the food … so good!!!
May 2011 (Home) – Can you imagine our crazy dog laying peacefully on a float in the pool these days?! Neither can I, but back when she was a sweet, although admittedly destructive puppy she was pretty easy to toss around like this and so one afternoon while I was at work Sara sent me this pic of the two of them lounging out in the pool just like any good dog and wife duo should be accustomed…
May 2007 (Discovery Cove) – One of Sara’s dreams has always been to swim with the dolphins, so the day after I proposed to her, we went and did that, too! As if she couldn’t have gotten any giddier after I somehow managed to surprise her with the same ring that she had all but picked out herself something like a month or two earlier, waiting around to pet and pose and even swim alongside of one of these 800-lb beasts was pretty amazing and needless to say, she seemed to be in a pretty good mood for the rest of the vacation.
October 2006 (Epcot) – And here we are celebrating our six-month DATING anniversary, together at Epcot – which was coincidentally also the site of our second date! Believe it or not, by this point we had actually already moved in together and met each other’s parents, so you could say that things were moving pretty fast … but just look at those two happy kids!!! Skinny and surrounded by tropical drinks, with their entire lives ahead of them…
June 2006 (Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort) – And finally for this particular trip down memory lane, here we see our first overnight trip to Disney World together, and in fact this was actually when I first met Sara’s younger sister … who five years later would end up living with us for a few years when she finally moved to Florida! In this picture we’d probably been dating for about a month and a half, not counting the weeks that we’d chatted online before working our way up to meeting in person. AND THEY DIDN’T SPEND ANOTHER VACATION NOT AT DISNEY WORLD SINCE…
So that’s all for anniversary #9 – it’s kind of crazy to think that next year will be the big NUMBER 10 … hopefully we’ll be able to do something extra special for that, though with a three year-old and two one year-olds on the docket … I sincerely have no idea what to expect! But maybe one could argue that surprise can be part of the fun, too, because I certainly could’ve never expected how things played out thus far over the last nine years and that seemed to turn out quite well.
Onward and upward, to bigger and even better anniversaries in the years and decades to come!
When I saw this particular ad from Hillary earlier this summary, I couldn’t help but agree with it … though admittedly she’s already had my vote for a thousand other reasons, so I didn’t really give it a whole lot of thought beyond that…
I feel like this is an important topic worth discussing because despite my oldest son only being 2.5, we’re already desperately making changes in how we talk around our house to try to prevent one of his favorite words from being “Shit!” It’s no secret that children’s minds are impressionable and even if they don’t understand the complicated subject matters at hand, they still pick up on keywords and heated emotions that you might not necessarily want parroted back at you in the grocery store or when your relatives are over for a visit.
One particular example specific to politics sticks out in my mind from the last election cycle after President Obama defeated Mitt Romney and got re-elected for his second term. The child, who will go unnamed, was absolutely devastated that Romney lost and spent god knows how long bawling about how “our country was doomed” because Obama had won his re-election.
It’s worth noting that his parents were both clearly Republicans, though I haven’t a clue just how vocal they were about their political choices in front of their child, but regardless, I think it’s safe to say that ten year-olds shouldn’t have a political affiliation whatsoever!!!
I was only vaguely aware of politics even though most of high school when we started taking classes about government, and it probably wasn’t until the Monica Lewinsky scandal was everywhere in 1998 during my senior year that I even partially began paying attention … most likely at that point just for the giggles – I couldn’t have told you about any of Clinton’s actual policies to save my life…
Granted, I grew up in a household where politics wasn’t really on the forefront of anybody’s minds, whereas now thanks to social media we have the opportunity to get all riled up about politics pretty much 24×7. And that’s a problem for all sorts of other reasons, too, but with regards to parenting I think we might need a reminder not only that our kids are always listening, but also learning from how we debate and discuss our political beliefs…
…and if you’re the kind of person who tends to get most of their information from Facebook posts and soundbites – that might not be the kind of learning that you really want your child to be exposed to!
Now it goes without saying that I think Donald Trump is a horrible choice for president and any number of things that he’s said would get any of my kids’ mouths washed out with soap if I ever heard about them getting said out on the playground at school, but I also think that we need to be aware of the things we say because our kids are listening to those words, too, and who does a child learn to emulate first but his own Mom and Dad?
When you rave about how Obama is ruining the country and how these libtards don’t know freedom from the hole in their asses … that’s an example of respect, or lack thereof, for your children to learn.
When you polarize your views based only on a candidate’s failings and ignore the legitimate things that they’ve accomplished in their career … that’s an example of blind politics and a failure to find the good in other people.
And when you brush off racist and sexist remarks because you think that political correctness is a blight on our nation’s future … you’re giving a pass to your own kids to treat other people the same way, and maybe they don’t see it like just a joke as you claim to view such behavior yourself.
Parenting over the last couple of years has taught me that we have to be more aware of our surroundings because it’s never quite as cute and hilarious when it’s your own kid running around the living room shouting, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!!!” when you’ve got company over, and heaven forbid it becomes a habit that resurfaces sometime when they’re in church or school!
So not only do we have to watch our own behavior, but seeing that we can’t exactly control the behavior of the politicians that we follow and support, it does beg the question of why they deserve our support if they can’t serve as good role models while running for the highest office in the land.
Food for Thought – 20% of the US population is under the age of 15 – which candidate would you rather they learn how to treat their peers from???
I have no problem admitting that I was one of the original haters who thought that this movie was going to be terrible … because it is.
However despite the spin that tried to make it out to be merely a sexist objection to the all-female cast, I’ve come to believe that at least for most of us, it didn’t have anything to do with the cast … sort of.
Overall, what failed this year’s Ghostbusters reboot wasn’t the cast, but unequivocally without a doubt the script because frankly it was uncreative and undoubtedly unoriginal, to the point where it felt like it expected the weight of the beloved Ghostbusters franchise to support it no matter what … and it just didn’t.
The thing about reboots is that they still need to bring something fresh and new to the franchise – something more than just girl power, in this case – but the story itself was kind of boring and in many places just seemed to borrow from the original movie when the writers couldn’t be bothered to come up with a new story device. To that point, things that were probably meant to seem like nods to the franchise – like crossing the streams and fighting with the mayor and bringing the old logo to life – just felt like weak writing instead of proper tributes that the original Ghostbusters deserved.
Even the cameos from the original cast were kind of meh with no real acknowledgement of how they served in the original story.
And so I can’t really blame the cast itself for what ultimately seemed to be a case of bad, uninspired writing because I sincerely think that another version of this movie could’ve been just fine, female cast and all. The story isn’t that hard to write…
30 years after the original events in New York, the original cast has long since been retired as heroes when a new threat appears and these women who grew up on their paranormal tales attempt to dust off the old legends to take over the reins. The story contains plenty of nods to the original movies because they’re shared as anecdotes by the original cast, and in the end the new Ghostbusters save the day and the retired Ghostbusters – along with the crabby mayor – are the first in line to applaud their successors.
The whole stink when the original rumors of this all-female reboot came about wasn’t that girls can’t be Ghostbusters, but that’s all we were given and fans of the franchise demanded more than that. I’m sure that some were sexist, but not all, with many folks like myself just wanting to see more effort put forth than, “It’s Ghostbusters, but with women!” because a simple gender swap is no basis for any story, and it shows in the final product because they didn’t put crap into the writing and the movie fell on its face.
If anything, it did a disservice to the women who were cast because to take on a franchise as beloved like the Ghostbusters, they needed a good script to do their legacy justice. Instead they were given throwaway gags and re-used plot devices that didn’t add anything new to the franchise and just left the rest of us saying, “I told you so.”
All this movie needed to be great was someone who cared enough to write a new Ghostbusters story and then weave elements from the past into it. You can’t just swap out the actors and redo the same story and expect fans to rave about a new Ghostbusters story because it really wasn’t, and that’s a shame because if Sony had really been committed to doing a new Ghostbusters movie, they could’ve done it.
But instead we got this and it got overblown into this big gender war when it really was all just a case of bad writing.
P.S. Also, I get that it was intended to be a summer blockbuster and all because that’s how the first two were presented, but why not hold off and put them out in October to piggyback on the whole promotional season for Halloween instead???
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but last night we watched the latest Ninja Turtles movie and it … wasn’t actually that bad???
Looking back, I guess I didn’t even bother writing about the first Michael Bay reboot – that’s how little I cared for it, but after watching Out of the Shadows last night with almost ZERO expectations … it’s almost as if somebody cared enough to set out and make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie this time!
I still think that the turtles themselves look kind of weird, and all I hear is Antonio Scarpachi whenever Splinter speaks, but for the rest, they actually did a really good job of tapping the classic turtles mythos by bringing in more of the bad guys and vehicles and even the Technodrome!
When I heard that Krang was trying to transport the Technodrome to Earth, I was just waiting on the edge of my seat for the turtle blimp to make an appearance … maybe in TMNT 3.
I feel like a big difference between this movie and its predecessor was simply that this one was a lot more fun and didn’t nearly try to take itself as serious as the first one seemed to. I mean, let’s be honest – Bebop and Rocksteady looked kind of funny, much in the same way that the turtles themselves do in this version – but they ran with it anyways and didn’t try to make the characters something that they weren’t, and it worked.
We got to see a little Casey Jones, and even a little Baxter Stockman … though casting Tyler Perry did seem a bit odd … on top of a recasting of Shredder that just seemed to work a lot better, with armor that was a bit more relaxed than the band-aid-warranting monstrosity that they had him running around in for the previous movie!
I’m still not crazy on Megan Fox as April because both movies seemed to make her a bit more central to the plot than she really needs to be in a movie about mutant ninja turtles, but all in all it was a fun movie and it was actually enjoyable from beginning to end – something that you couldn’t exactly claim about the first Michael Bay concoction.
