Star Fox Zero trailer

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

This looks like it could be fun! I still have quite fond memories of when the original Star Fox came out for the Super Nintendo … for whatever reason, my Dad had to go to some sales conference downstate for a week and the family came with him, and they brought my SNES with us to help keep me entertained. The first day we made a trip over to Toys ‘R Us because we didn’t have one up north and I got my copy of the hottest new polygon-based game to hit the system!

As one may have suspected, I didn’t really have much desire to even leave the hotel room the rest of the week while we were there… 😉

It’s kind of crazy to look back at the graphics that were really pushing the 16-bit SNES to its limits and then see this new game that will be released in full HD this fall for the Wii U. I honestly never played Star Fox 64 or any of the other games beyond the original, but this might be a fun one to pop in come Christmastime to see how it continues on with the tradition!

Aside from that weird chicken robot that apparently your ship can turn into on land, it looks pretty cool so far!

What do I want out of life???

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ve been kind of musing on this topic in my head for the last couple of weeks, so it seemed only fair to finally let some of it out here on digital paper in a more fluid form. I’m about to turn 35 in a couple of months, and my kid is already a year old and starting to walk, and I kind of feel like I’m coming to a crossroads of sorts in my life that I’m not entirely sure what to make of just yet.

…so this is me trying to figure that out… 😉

So anyways, what do I want out of life???

I want to live a life in which I feel generally happy … one where stress is a minor influence rather than a dominating force … one where I can look back at a given period of time and feel good about the work/life balance that exists and how I’ve been able to spend my time doing the things that I like to do as compared with the things that I have to do.

I want creativity to be a driving force in my days … where I spend a significant part of my time creating things that other people enjoy and get something positive out of … something that can build over several decades to a career catalog that I can look back at and be proud of the things that I’ve made … and I’d like to derive the wealth that I need throughout my life from this body of creative work.

I want family time to be a regular part of my everyday … not something that I have to sacrifice to attain the other goals that I’ve set for myself … and not something that I feel guilty about indulging in because there was work to be done instead … and certainly not something that I look back at much later in life, regretting how much I sacrificed it for anything else.

I want my home to be a place of sanctuary … where I can relax at the end of a long day with my feet up and a tropical drink in my hand … where child and beast can roam (relatively) free until every last drop of energy has been thoroughly spent … where I can look up at the stars or out at the water or nature or whatever and find myself surrounded by something that’s infinitely more peaceful than more houses within a stone’s throw away.

I want to travel … to places around town that we’ve never been … and across the country … and across the world … to see strange and amazing things that we’ve only read in books … and to rekindle time with family that is often lost when living on far corners of the nation.

I want to have free time … to revisit old habits like playing the guitar and SCUBA diving and reading … and to explore new ones like hiking and boating and actually being physically fit … and occasionally I want to be able to stay up all night playing video games and eating pizza, too.

I want to enjoy every month of every year for what it offers … and I want less of that “Where does the time go?” feeling that seems to rear its head more and more.

I want more good days than less than good days … as defined by feeling good about the various situations and decisions and facets that make up each one of them at the end of the day.

I want a lot of things out of life. Some would probably say that I’m being greedy and should learn to just love life as it’s been dealt to me, but that’s not good enough for me. I think that too many people in our world settle for things just being the way they are instead of pushing those seemingly immovable forces in their lives to do better, whereas if I look back throughout history it was the people who did the impossible things that inspire me to strive for more.

I read a great quote the other day that went something like – “Don’t be afraid to dream bigger – nobody else is going to do it for you.”

Of course, dreaming is only half the equation – the other half of the challenge lies in actually following your dreams to go out and make them a reality. And I guess you could say that’s the crossroads where I find myself at today, which is weird because I feel like I’ve already been on this road for a long time, but at the same time I’d hate to change course now when the good stuff could be right around the next bend. Still, I can’t help but wondering at this juncture just how long the road goes, or at the very least just how long this particular metaphor goes…

Just keep on truckin’?

Sure, I think we can go ahead and end it there for now… 😛

movie thoughts … Draft Day

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

MV5BMjAyOTMxMjA3Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMTMwNjQ4MDE@._V1_SX214_AL_This is one of those movies that I stumbled across at 2am when I really should’ve just been going to bed, but I didn’t … and despite not really caring a lick about sports, it actually ended up being pretty entertaining.

The whole story follows about a 12-hour period leading up until NFL Draft Day when all of the managers are fighting over who’s going to pick who, and it was almost surprising how exciting they made the story flow from one conflict to another until everything all got wrapped up neatly with a nice, little bow at the end.

The only casting that I didn’t really care for was Jennifer Garner as Costner’s wife … when I first saw her appear on the screen with “news,” I honestly thought she was going to say he was going to be a grandpa. Which is funny if you consider just the other day there was a news story about a 37 year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal being told that she’s too old to play the lover of a 55 year-old man … in this movie Kevin Costner is 60 compared to Garner’s 43 and I thought that she looked way too young for him!

Plus the whole baby arc admittedly kind of felt like a forced plot for the sake of having one, but whatever.

The rest of the movie was enjoyable, or at least 2am enjoyable. I kind of liked Denis Leary’s role just because it didn’t plug him into the loud and ever-boisterous character that he usually becomes, and everyone else frankly just kind of stayed out of Kevin Costner’s way and let him deal with his issues.

In a way it sort of reminded me of Sports Night, which was one of my favorite comedies because despite being about sports, more so it was really about the characters and their relationships and interactions, and the sports themselves were more of a backdrop than a focal point. I didn’t need to understand plays and strategies and how trading works to enjoy this movie – it was just kind of fun to watch how the chaos all unfolded…

Thoughts of Our Dream House…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I won’t go into the actual dream because it was admittedly kind of boring, but last night I had one about our dream house … which is admittedly both a dream and a conversation that comes up around here quite a bit.

Even though we’ve only been in the house we own now for about three years, truth be told we’ve always kind of thought of it as a starter house. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a nice house and we happened across it at a pretty good price at a time when we desperately needed to get out of renting, but even only having one kid we’re starting to feel some limitations and it gets rapidly worse when we think about having more! 😯

Worst at this particular moment in time is probably the lack of a backyard, both because it leaves Cleo almost nowhere to run around, but also as Christopher starts to get bigger, it doesn’t give us any room if we wanted to put in a play set or a sandbox or even just chase each other around the yard! And yeah, the pool is nice … though its position behind the house keeps it too cold to swim more often than I like … and I don’t think from here on out I’d have a house in Florida without a pool, but it’s hard to deny the HUGE chunk of backyard real estate that the thing takes up…

I think that’s probably our biggest draw at this point, in simply finding a place that has a decent amount of property attached to it, which is also a bit of a challenge in an area that’s predominantly subdivisions with predetermined lots. At this point I’m not entirely opposed to living out in the country, but it’s going to have to be the right chunk of land to really sell it … and it doesn’t help that every time we go to the beach, I still come home and look at real estate prices to see if there’s some magical beachfront gem out there that has gone undiscovered! 😉

We actually thought we found one of these a month ago, but it turned out the reason why the land was undeveloped was because it was mostly conservation area and COULDN’T BE BUILT ON, so … oops.

As for the house itself, we’ve pretty much settled on knowing that we’re going to have to build to get what we really want because with it being the dream house that we want to spend the rest of our lives in, at this stage we can’t really bring it on ourselves to settle! Granted, we’re probably still several years out from being able to really take action on anything, but it’s still fun to think about all of the options and having something built to our exact specifications, every nook and cranny … and game room!

So if anybody has a couple of acres of prime waterfront real estate in the Tampa Bay area that they want to unload cheap, do drop me a line so that we can get this dog and baby a proper backyard, and more importantly get started on my own personal arcade… 😛

The Dream

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Ever since I moved to Florida back in 2003, I occasionally have this dream where inexplicably everything is reversed and I’m back in my job at the warehouse in Michigan where I worked for six years before moving away.

Last night I had the same dream again.

What was strange is that it wasn’t as panicky as it normally is … when I first moved, it was honestly more of a nightmare where I was back up north pulling orders for auto parts and when the thought of Florida would come up, someone would explain that it just didn’t work out and I was back now, and that was it.

But this time it was almost more of a temporary visit, and things were different from how I remember them in reality. We had just gotten bought by our competitor – which did happen in reality – and a bunch of new employees had been brought in from another branch who were presumably going to be replacing many of us who already worked there … something that also happened, but not nearly to the extent that it did in my dream.

And so what was different this time was that abruptly I just made the decision that I was going to quit and go back to Florida – that was going to be my last day – and I told my friends and my boss, and everyone understood.

I don’t know what made things different that time, and it was hard to piece together within the dream what/where/who I had memories of that I was going back to, but unlike most of the other times I’ve had this dream as a nightmare indicative of failure where the one thing I had wanted so much for years had fallen through my fingers and was just gone, this time I suddenly had some control of my own and it was no longer an absolute that I just had to accept.

An interesting evolution after 12 years of living in Florida, indeed, though it does beg one other question – will I ever find myself at a point where I don’t have the dream at all anymore???

Or then again, if I finally do have some control into my own fate, maybe having this dream just isn’t such a nightmare anymore after all…

The Technology Around Us

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ve found myself taking notice over the last couple of days – especially with the purchase of our new car – just how seamless some of my favorite technologies are becoming around us, and I kind of like it.

For example in the car – the brand new car that we got just before going on vacation last week is the first car I’ve had with Bluetooth, plus it came with those cool keyless entry key fobs so the car can be started with the push of a button as long as the key is present, meaning that all I have to do is toss my phone and keys in the center console and when I start the car, it automatically re-pairs my phone and connects to Pandora or whatever music I was playing before.

Or with my media collection, now spanning music, movies, and TV Shows – not only can everything play on any device around the house via a simple Plex app, even when we’re out and about I can placate the child with Fraggle Rock or Mickey Mouse Clubhouse that streams to my laptop from our media server back home – all with just a wifi connection.

Even simply with my working space on my computer – a decade ago I had my laptop, and then I had a separate desktop that had some of my beefier apps that wouldn’t run on my laptop, and I would keep my writing and other critical files on a flash drive that I’d shuffle between wherever I was working at the time. Now I just have a MacBook Air that serves as both, and for the first time in forever all of my stuff is properly backed up multiple times to the cloud and my own personal server automatically.

Despite occasional reminders of how dependent we’re becoming on connectivity – such as when I was sitting in iHOP just outside of Disney yesterday and Verizon couldn’t feed me a signal to tweet to save their skulls – I love to see the direction that some of my favorite tech is coming where it’s more and more a common, integrated part of our daily lives without the struggle that came from playing computers a decade ago … building servers that kind of worked, directories of mp3s being a media server, and who can forget those god awful CD-to-cassette adapters that we used to use to pump our brand new CDs into our cars on the go?!

It makes me feel more optimistic for something like NFC, which I didn’t really see the appeal of a few years ago, now that I’ve been using Apple Pay more actively to the point where I get frustrated with retailers that are stubbornly refusing to accept it. Back then when they talked about paying things with just my cell phone, it sounded like a stupid idea that would never take off, and then I got an iPhone and slowly our phones grew more and more from just personal communicators into the ultimate portable computer that we know today.

It makes me wonder if 10 years from now I’ll be ready to truly embrace the automated home that’s been preached at us for years to give us the ability to turn our lights on and off from anywhere in the world, if there was ever a reason that we might actually need to do that. I can already see the appeal for the same keyless entry that my car has extending to my front door, and you can buy a new doorknob that does that today! I think the next steps to continue bridging our devices – cameras, phones, tablets, PCs – are going to warm even more people up to the idea, so who knows what’ll be available in a few years when I’m ready to build my brand new dream house of my own – it’s starting to make that home of the future from the Carousel of Progress sound not just more attainable than ever, but more importantly more desirable than ever, too.

Hey, it’s a great big beautiful tomorrow! 😀

24 Photos from 24 Hours at Disney

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Having triumphantly returned from the vacation that included spending (almost) 24 hours at the Magic Kingdom, it seemed only fitting that I share 24 photos from those 24 hours of fun!

Going into this we wondered how the little guy would take to being up and about for such an extended period, but between taking his own impromptu naps whenever he desired as well as a quite reasonable amount of mild crankiness, overall we both thought that he did pretty well. Probably his most amusing moment was when we rode the carousel with him at around 3:30am – you can see below in the pic right before the one of him trying to pull the sword from the stone, he found himself overcome with this very bizarre sense of euphoria which we weren’t sure it was joy or being overwhelmed or what, but it sure was crazy to stand there and watch… 😉

Anyways, check out my post for more commentary on the 24-hour event itself … given a proper night of sleep myself, I do say that I’d probably try it again, but ooof, is it becoming painfully apparent that I’m certainly not 22 anymore!!!

Grand Theft Whale

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I have not yet played GTA5 yet and typically I would play it on a console rather than PC anyways, however the ability to mod the game to drop whales on your unsuspecting victims is certainly a compelling reason to download a copy for the PC!!! 😯

Everything seems to sing, everywhere I go…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I found myself reminded of this old tune circa 1983 from the episode of Fraggle Rock that Christopher got to watch after eating lunch today, and it amuses me how whenever I watch these older Muppet works like Fraggle Rock or The Muppet Show or even the classic episodes of Sesame Street just how much Jim Henson himself bled through the characters that he played – with this one, it’s almost hard not to picture Jim himself playing that magical flute down in the Fraggle caves, singing his song of songs to anyone who cared to listen.

In fact, you can actually see some fun pictures of Jim posing and performing this character (Cantus the Minstrel) over on the Muppet Wiki!

The other day I was posed with the challenge of naming who my creative mentors would be if I were to gather them all around a table for their advice and wisdom, and though I’m probably going to write about the exercise later in greater detail because I really found it to be pretty interesting, I’ve got to say that at the time the very first person to pop into my mind was none other than Jim Henson. And I’m not entirely sure why, but what I’ve pieced together so far is that even though I’m not necessarily precisely where I’d like to be in my writing career at this point in my life, I can say that I’m trying to get there by embracing in these things that I’m the most passionate about and you don’t have to watch more than a couple of minutes of any Muppet act to know without a shadow of a doubt that Jim Henson lived creatively by doing exactly that.

It’s also interesting – and admittedly a bit relieving – to note that as epic as those regrettably short, last twenty years of his life were, looking at Jim Henson’s career, some of my absolute favorite things to come from the legend actually didn’t come to be until later on in his life:

  • Sesame Street first aired in 1969, when Jim was 33 years old
  • The Muppet Show first took roots in 1976 (40 years old)
  • The Muppet Movie hit theaters in 1979 (43 years old)
  • Fraggle Rock first aired on HBO in 1983 (47 years old)
  • And probably my personal favorite – A Muppet Family Christmas – was released in 1987 when Jim was 51 years old (only two years before his death)

I bring this up simply because lately it’s been easy to sort of look around and panic when I see that I’m 34 years old and I’m not exactly where I want to be in life, but I try to think of a guy like Jim Henson – one of my creative mentors – and not only acknowledge that some of his best works came far later in his life, but also – and more importantly – that frankly it’s hard not to look back at any of these moments in his career and not see just a happy, bubbly guy having the time of his life creating these bizarrely charming stories about wandering minstrels and strange, little creatures living just out of sight, and it kind of makes me stop and question my priorities and whether I should really be beating myself up for not being farther in life than I would like instead of simply living in the moment and enjoying every last step of the process along the way.

Hmmm. 🙂