Thin Blog : Past & Future

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Last night my wife and I walked 8 miles, and frankly, I’m pretty proud of that! 😀

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about exercise & dieting … or at least blogged positively, anyways … life has been particularly chaotic lately. But really, it’s been doing that for almost a year now because it was only a month shy of 1 year since life last got crazy and we were forced to start looking for the house that we ended up buying three months later.

Anywho, the point is – I want to get back into some better habits, particularly with regards to all of this because it’s just been too long. Over the month of April I’ve slowly been getting better at taking Cleo out for our nightly walks again, so out of curiosity, after finishing the walk that felt like it would never end last night, I pulled up the stats on my good, old-fashioned Fitocracy profile…

miles

On one hand, it’s a little bit of a downer to see how I built up such a great start at the beginning of 2012 and then watched it come crashing down in the months to follow … but at the same time, I didn’t think that I’d already been doing that good in April, either, so I think that’s gotta count for something.

Sara and I are really trying to go at this together this time because we both really need to up our game and the time together to chat about life, the universe, and everything certainly couldn’t hurt, either! I’m not really near a point where I’m ready to start setting goals again or anything – I think things are still a little too busy for that, but if I have to set only one, I think a good start would be trying to break my totals for April and if we can keep up with doing the big one once a week, that actually leaves a pretty reasonable gap for me to fill in with shorter walks the rest of the week.

Let’s check back in a month and see what happened! 😉

finding my place on reddit…

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For a long time I guess you could say that I’ve sort of enjoyed reddit from a distance. I’m a big fan of their AMA series and occasionally I’ll get caught up in a random comment thread that just sucks down ridiculous amounts of my time, but I never really posted much myself.

Really only one post – I officially created an account last fall during my whole Sears customer service fiasco – but even then I was really nervous about the whole thing because from what I can tell, they’re typically not too keen on you posting links to your own works. Which sucks because the result ends up being a lot of imgur posts that fail to cite the original source, meaning whoever first created that photo/blog post/whatever doesn’t get any reciprocal traffic from the posting.

Anyways, I guess it’s a little ironic that I circled back to reddit a couple of weeks ago when I finished my Lego NES Mosaic and wanted to share it with people. Considering that reddit was where I came across that huge video game mosaic a few months ago, I ended up doing a little digging and finding a Lego sub-reddit that seemed like it would be a good fit … but I didn’t want to be that guy who just does nothing but post his own links (anymore), so after spending a little time exploring I commented on a handful of posts myself, and it was kinda fun! 😉

I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me earlier, but there are a lot of subjects these days that have their own dedicated sub-reddits, and before long I had amassed a little collection worth following myself…

  • /r/lego – lots of random custom builds, but also some pretty impressive large-scale models as well, which are my own personal favorites (like the ones all around Legoland)
  • /r/legotrade – a group of people looking to trade Lego minifigs, which already has proven to be a lot more productive than selling my duplicates on BrickLink and then having to still search for the ones that *I* need!
  • /r/waltdisneyworld – duh!
  • /r/dvcmember – I’m not a member yet, but this is something that my wife and I definitely want to do when we find a spare $18,000 laying around the house, so in the meantime it’s nice to find someplace to hear feedback from actual members.

I still don’t necessarily see myself being a huge poster – I’ve mostly been commenting and upvoting other people’s posts that I like, but it’s still a neat, little community (LOL – “little”) and I’m curious to see what other sub-reddits I come across that might be worth subscribing to.

Got any suggestions??? 😀

movie thoughts … Oblivion

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MV5BMTQwMDY0MTA4MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzI3MDgxOQ@@._V1_SX214_[1]So I saw this with the wife this evening … I was actually looking forward to it since I first saw the trailer months ago, and ultimately I would still argue that roughly half of the movie was still pretty good. Without getting into spoilers, I guess it just hit a point about halfway through the movie where I literally said out loud in the theater, “What? Oh, come on…” and it was downhill from there…

I did like all of the post-apocalyptic landscape – I think they did that well, and I thought their tower in the sky that Jack & Victoria lived on was a neat concept to distance themselves from the crazy back down on the surface. I’m kind of a fan of the whole post-apocalyptic thing in general, so it’s always interesting to me to see how different filmmakers envision life on Earth after an end of the world-type event.

It’s really just the story itself that took an unexpected twist that I thought felt kind of cheap and overdone, like I was expecting something monumental and instead, it was like, “Really? That’s the big mystery behind this whole thing? Oh…” By the end of the movie, it just kept spiraling for me to the point where it almost felt like the finale from another movie had been dropped at the end of Oblivion by mistake … it was that underhanded that I was surprised to be watching it on screen … it was like everyone just clocked out in the last act of the movie, which is too bad because like I said, up until about the halfway point it was really a pretty decent movie until it turned into a nosedive!

Even just walking out of the theater, I already had an alternate plot line for the second half of the movie that at least didn’t buy into the same overused “twists” that ended up being the downfall of this one. Seeing Tom Cruise shooting guns and jumping through explosions was fun and all … it just would’ve been nice if Hollywood had asked me about their script before calling it a day so that they could get the ending right on this one… 😉

Where Is Mr. Gold, Indeed?!

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LEGO-Minifigures-Series-10-Where-Is-Mr-Gold-Insert[1]

Apparently on eBay going for between $600-900, if you really want to find him… 🙁

This kinda bugs me, and not just because Series 10 technically isn’t even supposed to be on sale for another week and apparently the stores in my area are the only ones actually following that rule! It’s a really neat idea, somewhat reminiscent of a certain golden ticket contest from Hollywood yesteryear, but just as we saw in the fictitious Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, as soon as adults and their money get involved, it kind of starts to ruin the fun for everybody. People buying up cases of minifigs at a time, store employees feeling through lots in the warehouse before even putting them out for customers, all with the hopes of turning up this rare golden chap of whom only 5,000 were made, not with the intent of showcasing him at the helm of their Collectible Minifigures display that’s now been several years in the making, but simply to flip him online for a quick profit.

It always rubs me the wrong way when the same thing happens around the holidays for new video game consoles, too, so instead of picking up a new PS3 or X-Box 360 for $600 … which is already a steep price as it is … now they’ll only find their way into the homes of kids whose parents were willing to plunk down double or triple that just to make sure that their kids have the latest and greatest on Christmas Day. Sure, that’s technically how good, old-fashioned capitalism works and all, but when I pull up eBay and am already seeing over a dozen listings for this exclusive minifig that technically isn’t even supposed to be available yet, I just wish that they were sitting proud on somebody’s dresser instead of just a quick way to make a buck.

Dream Journal : Me and My Cleo

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So Cleo and I were just roaming the land, not particularly sure where exactly we were going … as a man and his dog are wont to do, a la the title reference… 😉

Also, every now and then she would just randomly be without her leash, so I suppose you could say that she was surprisingly behaved in this dream because I’m still nowhere near trusting her outside without a leash in real life yet! 😯

Anyways, we eventually wandered into a warehouse … a warehouse that was oddly enough, filled with people … they seemed to be some kind of soldiers or something. I’m not sure exactly what I did next, but somehow I confronted and offended one of them and they all kind of went crazy! I punched one repeatedly in the face, to little result, but luckily we were able to sneak away through a hole in one of the walls before they were able to mob us.

The next thing we knew, we were walking on the outskirts of a city and came across a field of people marching in orange jumpsuits. We weren’t sure if maybe they were prisoners somehow associated with the army we had just encountered, but they didn’t spot us … though  we kept walking and eventually we did find ourselves in an altercation with some police officers, which resulted in our running again until we found ourselves in a different scene entirely…

New warehouse, and this time I was interviewing people for a job … the old job that I used to hold when I worked in a warehouse more than a decade ago, in fact. Most of the applicants were pretty forgettable, but the one face that I recognized – oddly enough – was none other than Joe Bereta of SourceFed, and although I remember being pretty impressed just to be sitting across the table from him, I almost didn’t want to hire him for the job simply because it would’ve prevented him from going on to do SourceFed later and I just couldn’t live with that.

Flash forward to yet another warehouse and this time I found myself being probed to “hurry up for the bachelor party” … which in retrospect seems odd because I’ve never attended a single bachelor party in my entire life! I couldn’t quite tell who it was even for, or if it was supposed to be mine, for that matter, but my friend really wanted us to go to Canada, even though I didn’t have a passport.

Ultimately it didn’t matter because in the end, I couldn’t go because I had to work, anyways … presumably at one of the many warehouses that I’d visited recently!

When I woke up, even though you’ll note that Cleo was notably absent during the last half of the dream, I couldn’t help but recall the entire thing as an adventure that the both of us took together, with our own very special soundtrack… 😉

Kid Privacy, Revisited

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“I have been very clear in making sure my children have never even gotten the idea that they have a right to privacy in my home.”

I hope I never end up being a parent with an attitude like this.

I stumbled across this post the other day and it reminded me of an editorial that I wrote a whopping eight years ago when a similar discussion topic had come up with regards to what level of “privacy” kids deserve. As you might expect, the original author’s perspective on this one is pretty much “none” and I couldn’t be more the opposite because frankly, I think that everyone has a right to privacy throughout their lives.

“Only entitled assholes demand a right to privacy.”

I don’t know what it is, if people who think like this are letting a fear of technology rule their parenting or a fear of modern society because kids are so much worse today than they were when they were growing up, but it just seems to be like a really bad road to start down so young, teaching kids not to have a basic level of respect and trust for other people. And it’s not about wanting to be the cool parent for me – I just think that giving someone a little personal freedom at a young age is a lot better than teaching them that it’s ok to snoop if you’ve got good intentions.

Besides, some things are just meant to be private and diaries, in this case, are especially one of those cases. I remember having a journal when I was in the 5th grade for about a week, and I would write about how school was and that time when the girl I liked was nice to me. Considering that over the last decade I’ve sort of taken to blogging quite a bit, it’s intriguing to me to look back at when I first started, and yet it’s also a little disappointing because after that week in the 5th grade, it was almost 12 years until I started documenting bits of my life in a similar fashion once again.

And for me it honestly wasn’t even an elusive violation of privacy that ended my 10 year-old self’s diary, but instead, in a very innocent manner, I remember my Mom asking one day if she could read what I had written, and I told her she could. She was curious, and I wasn’t too embarrassed, but I also didn’t really feel as driven to write after that because I didn’t feel as unrestricted now that she’d seen a glimpse into my private thoughts.

Mind you, I don’t exactly hold it against her these days or anything, but I bring this up nonetheless because I’m a firm believer that people need to be able to find the outlet for expression that serves them the best, and over the years since I’ve clearly found that mine is writing. And sure, these days I do most of my “journaling” online and accessible to just about everyone because the medium of blogging itself is special to me, but at the same time I can still respect the idea of someone wanting to jot down a few thoughts on paper to work through them without sharing them with anybody else, either.

Privacy is important in our daily lives. We don’t share our bank passwords with anyone else, most of us even have private e-mail and social media accounts that are kept private from our spouses without our worlds caving in, and we get nervous about the idea of our government snooping in on these things, even if it’s said to be done with the best of intentions. Those foundations of trust and respect for other people are ones that need to start young, and kids are taught to respect their parents over anyone else in their lives, so what sense does it make that those figures in their lives wouldn’t show them the same respect back?

I’m not talking about just tossing your kid onto the Internet and letting him fend for himself. I’m talking about dipping your toes into this great big world of global communications together and then as they get to those points where it’s time to let ’em kick a bit on their own, letting them do it without logging in behind their back every 10 minutes to make sure that they don’t see a dirty word or show any sign that their lives are anything less than amazing.

Or if you’re just dying to know every last detail, why not encourage them to start their own blog so that you, their friends, and anyone else can read and share ideas about the things that they write … seems fair, considering that you’re probably doing the same thing on your mommy blog anyways…

I’m sure it’s got to be very scary raising kids at times, but give them a chance to figure out who they are without rooting around in what little privacy they have out of your own insecurities.

And for fuck’s sake, DON’T READ YOUR 5 YEAR-OLD’S DIARY BEHIND HER BACK AND THEN WRITE A GODDAMN COLUMN ABOUT IT – COMPLETE WITH PICTURES – FOR THE HUFFINGTON FUCKING POST!!!

What I Found in My 5 Year-Old Daughter’s Diary
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-bongiorno/what-i-found-in-my-daughters-diary_b_3088908.html

NES Lego Mosaic #2 Begins!

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mosaic2_progress

Didn’t feel much like writing last night, so I started revisiting my concepts for my next NES Lego Mosaic, and low and behold I actually already had a fair number of the bricks that I need for it! I used up pretty much everything that I had and now need to order what’s left, as well as figure out a background color because I don’t think that black is going to go as well with the characters themselves being outlined in black for this one.

I’ve also got some new ideas that I’m entertaining for how to hang these things once they’re done that might look a little better than my original plan of just gluing a picture frame hanger to the back of the plate, so I’ll let you know how that goes once I get a chance to buy some stuff and do a little experimenting.

Can you make out what this one’s going to be yet??? I kinda spoiled it in my last post, though you’d probably have to have actually played the game to be able to make anything out at this point… 😉

DuckTales … REMASTERED?!?!?!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N0PzqF9gWY

I just discovered that this is happening in only a few short months.

I loved this game as a kid, although it took me a very, very, very long time to figure out how to beat The Moon.

Here are some more screenshots, including side-by-sides with the original NES version! Woo-hoo!!!

P.S. While we’re on the subject, here’s a fun DuckTales-related tune via the likes of BrentalFloss to help tide you over until summer… 😉