Wow, I'm actually posting on LJ and not just defaulting to Twitter summaries. Go fig.

So, anyway, stream of consciousness shizz.....

LOVE the new Jack White project, The Dead Weather. CD comes out tomorrow, but you can listen to the whole thing on Facebook. He's on drums this time. Also diggin' this new iphone app, TuneWiki, which accesses your itunes library and subtitles lyrics as songs play, video links, and GPS goodies. The lyrics don't display on songs not directly ripped from legit sources.....heheh, fair enough. But I love seeing the words pop up as the singer gets to them, kinda like follow the bouncing ball. I'm learning I've been quite wrong about what I THOUGHT were the lyrics to endless songs. Which reminds me of this book that came out in the 90s that compiled misheard lyrics. Funny stuff. :)

I may be the ONLY person on the planet who just really doesn't care about Harry Potter. I've never read the books (I'm so A.D.D. I'm lucky to make it through website articles). All the movies seem the same, Harry's the chosen one, yadda yadda, Voldemort shows up at the end for a big showdown, yadda yadda. Inevitably, everybody who goes into the theater all enthusiastic, come out complaining about what was changed or cut out. Everybody forgets Hollywood's job is to make things palpable for the masses. If you're TOO faithful to the source material, you get a situation like Watchmen, where everyone said it was too long, or its not exciting like Dark Knight, etc etc. Though personally, I thought Watchmen was brilliant.

Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern. Meh. I've never been interested in Green Lantern. I was psyched for Reynolds in the Deadpool movie. I HIGHLY doubt DC Comics would allow their movie star to go ahead and be ANOTHER super hero, and for the direct competition, Marvel. So far, everyone is just speculating Deadpool will just be delayed. Reynolds would have been perfect for Deadpool and I had high hopes that the movie would right the extreme wrongs from X-Men Origins. Fingers crossed a miracle will happen and he will still keep the role. Meanwhile, Green Lantern actually DOES have promise in the hands of Martin Campbell, who directed Casino Royale.

Gotta reorder my promotional postcards that I give out as autographs at cons, since I'm headed to Alabama for Persacon in a couple weeks. I've updated some links for the backside. I'm shocked I went through 1000 of these things in under 6 months.

That's pretty much it. I've got a recording session tomorrow and waiting on a bunch of paychecks from past gigs. Oops....I really should crack open the shrink wrap on the Ghostbusters game, heheh.

Hey hey. Just wondering... My first race was last July and I know about training from a swimming point of view (I swam competitively for two years a looooooong time ago) but I'm curious about it from a running perspective. Do you taper? My half marathon last year was done without tapering...all I did was skip my run the day before. I'm thinking of maybe doing the Maya Marathon at the beginning of October but I suspect you can't fake one of those like you can fake a half or a 10k. Any tips? My runs mostly take place in the morning at 6am because it's brutally hot (35C or 45C with the humidity) in the afternoon and I can't run after dark because it's not a safe thing to do in my town (I live in a town near the Caribbean in Guatemala). The town itself is almost as flat as the prairies but I go once a week to Volcancha (a local "mountain"...it's not the Rockies or anything, but it's definitely bigger than a hill). Sometimes at recess I run around with the kids, but lately it's been way too hot and I just sit and watch. I have no idea how many kilometers I run in a week because I have no way to measure distances because GoogleMaps doesn't show the details of my town (if you look at it on GM, it looks like we're not even on a road!). I do, however, know that I run 70min 6 days a week and that my half-marathon half-drunk time is 1.53 and my 10k is 43. Help? Please?

This is a pretty easy week for me. Today I'm in the office. Tomorrow I'm driving down to south Jersey to film / interview / etc. Wednesday I'm coming into the office early to record a couple podcasts, then going home to edit the rest of the day. Thursday I'm working a half-day from home in the morning to do some more editing, then heading down to Baltimore to rock a fun weekend with y'allz.

It's tough doing podcast and video stuff for work and not sharing it with the entire outside world. I could easily bring in exponentially larger numbers and attention to all of our great work that we do here... but it wouldn't be genuine, and it would be far from the right/target audience. I can't express how frustrating it is to do fun and interesting work... and compare the numbers to my hobby stuff. But that's the point... my expertise is in creating original and engaging content to develop sticky audiences. I excel at it, and I know it takes time. I just hate that it takes time :P.

On the nerdy front, last night meritot and I watched all of Macross Plus. I saw it 9-10 years ago, and didn't remember a single thing about it. She'd never seen it. The woman's also been burned out on less-than-mediocre anime (and I just don't ever feel like watching any), so checking out a genuinely good OVA sounded like a good idea. I didn't intend on watching all four episodes (and we did take a break between parts two and three), but it was so good that we just kept plugging away. It helped that they were only ~30 minute episodes. My only previous Macross familiarity was a few months back when I watched Do You Remember Love? for the first time, which I feel like re-watching. Never saw any Robotech or dived into any other portion of the show. I commented how I love robot shows that aren't actually about the robots, so I really think I want to just go ahead and watch the entire/actual, original Macross TV series... :/ Drama! And music! Yay!

I think I've given up hope that I'll ever complete my current run of Final Fantasy VI. I checked vgconvos and it looks like I started it about a year ago. I only have ~20 hours logged, too. After re-watching all of Game Trailers' FF retrospective(s), I realized I didn't even remember what the greater story was in the game, nevermind all the tiny things here and there. If I'm ever going to see it through to the end, I'm going to need to re-start it. I don't have too much of a problem doing so, either, but it can't be right now. I'd much rather dig into a different type of portable RPG. Chrono Trigger is still waiting for me! Toriyama goodness, c'mon!

I'm sorta still playing FFIV: The After Years. I think I'm closing in on the default-purchase portion of the story. I doubt I'll continue it any further after that. Maybe I'll pick up the final chapter just so I can see the end, but that's about it.

Still in the same place in Punch-Out!!, 'cuz I haven't played in a couple days. Looking forward to completing it, though!

One last challenge to beat in Star Prince in Retro Game Challenge! I just spoiled it for myself by looking at the Wikipedia article and seeing the rest of the games. Oh, snapz! I had no idea I'd get some of those! I just figured the RPG was next and that would be it! It's weird that I'm excited for fake-sequels to fake-games :P.

I (finally) got in my JP Donkey Konga 3. Looking forward to playing all the fun songs on there. I'll probably do a quick video showcasing the game and its "CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA" inclusion for the Daizenshuu EX Facebook Fan Page (which just crossed 200 folks!), a la the one I did for the Playdia system.

And... that's really it. If you can't tell, life is pretty decent right now. Lots of good hanging-outs with the good folks of New Jersey the past few weekends, saw my family for a little bit, got a haircut last week, car just hit 60,000 miles, no-one took my ticket on the local train to work this morning for the first time ever, passing Rush songs on "Hard" drums like it's nothing, back to listening to lots of new music instead of podcasts taking full control of my ears, DDR is set up in the basement...

OK, so I think the Shuttle is dead and we need to get a new computer, but that's just a "whatever".

A couple weekends ago I went to visit family in South Jersey, down in the Stone Harbor/Wildwood/Cape May neck of the woods.  Allllllll the way down the bottom.

While I was there I thought it would be just delightful to run on one of the islands, along the beach or on the boardwalk or somewhere.  I kept worrying that whatever path I took would involve stopping-starting-dodging tourists-stopping-starting-running out of boardwalk-watching the tram car please...Finally I gave up worrying about it and chose a straight out and back on a boring road in the neighborhood, miles from the sand.  It was a good run and a beautiful day, but next time I'm down there I would like to take advantage of the scenery.

Anybody know of any good routes in Cape May County?  Or have experience finding them in touristy beach towns?

I have several Naruto ficlets over at my journal. (Pairings: Anko/Iruka, Itachi/Sakura, Sakura/Kakashi, Sakura/Sai). Ratings go up to NC-17.

Good morning runners! Here's the daily training thread to start off another week!

The goal for this week is to build on a very successful previous week. I wound up logging 31 miles on my feet (of course ~10 of those were hiking a mountain, but I have always counted it because my HR is still up and I was definitely not taking it easy). To start the week off, I'm gonna head to the school and get 6-7 easy miles in around the grounds with probably a mile or so barefoot.

So what is everyone else up to today, training and otherwise?

And as the title of the post suggests, today is a big day in the ultrarunning community. The first wave of the Badwater Ultramarathon started about fifteen minutes ago. The next wave will start at 8am You can follow the race live on the Badwater website here and also via the Adventurcorps twitter. For those unaware of what it is, Badwater is a 135 mile race run through the 120+ degree heat of Death Valley from Badwater, NV (the lowest point in North America, elev. -282') to Whitney Portal in California (elev. 8,360').

Discuss... and HAPPY RUNNING!

If you ever have a respiratory illness *cough*bronchitis*cough* and your clinic doctor who looks at you for 3 minutes and leaves tells you to take 4-5 days off running and you'll be fine.... DO NOT BELIEVE HER. Or else you will spend a month tearfully wondering what in the world is wrong with you and feeling like crap.

I took another week off running last week and came back at it this morning with way more energy than I've had all summer. It was 76 degrees and 94% humidity and I still managed to pace 8:03 for two miles. It would have been sub-8:00 if I hadn't walked after the first mile. And given that up til now I've been pacing between 8:30 and 8:40 with a struggle... an easy(ish) 8:03 is fantastic.

Still taking it slow, because I feel like my lungs are only about 90% up to par, but WAY better than they were the entire month of June. I'm feeling pretty optimistic for the remainder of my summer training. :)

So please, if any of you get bronchitis or something similar, take two weeks off, not 5 days. It will help. A lot.

was after swimming 1.2 miles and biking 56 yesterday.

You know how sometimes running can suck? Like, you usually find it enjoyable, but every once in a while on a long run you're not really feeling it?

Well, half-ironman's make me HATE running and I hate that. Running's a good friend of mine, triathlon.

But I finished in a pretty decent time (I thought), especially for my "first" one. 6:07:35

This post is merely to get people to say "YAY GOOD JOB YAY" because my entire body hurts, I want coddling, and I'm feeling very emotional right now, ok?

(I'm signed up to do a full ironman distance tri in September and I don't know if I've got the nuts to do it now.)

♠Music:
[20]2NE1
[12]BIG BANG
[07]Michael Jackson
♠Movies & Series:
[12]Harry Potter {5-6}
[09]Boys Over Flowers
[20]Nearly Famous
[20]Skins {1,2,3}
♠Stock:
[10]Red & Blue

Teaser:

01	02	03

HERE! @ chokolatita21

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/~r/pa-mainsite/~3/steAHEGWsjg/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/7/13/his-supposed-nemesis/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic//his-supposed-nemesis/

Um, hi guys -waves-

Okay, well, I hope this is okay to post here.

I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but the ship_manifesto community is having a "Survival of the Hottest Ship" poll, and this round has the Kabuto/Shizune pairing in it.

So, because I know this pairing has closet fans, and no comm of it's own, I'm posting it here to ask if you guys wouldn't mind voting for one of my OTP's.

If you go here, it's matchup #34.

Other Naruto ships in this poll include:

Sasuke/Sakura - matchup #40

Sakura/Naruto - matchup #45

Neji/Tenten - matchup #47

and, um, that's it.

So...yeah. The polls close on Tuesday, so please hurry and vote!

I've been looking all over for a particular manga cover page, and I just can't remember where it is. Like what chapter. It's the one with Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke, Nahiko, Konan, and Pein both when they were younger then again when they were older. Does anyone know where I could find it?

tomokoninomiya.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2009/07/post-8c7d.html

Tofu Boy

[PICTURE OF BABY AS TOFU BOY]

Do you see it everyone? He really looks like him
doesn't he? I decided to try giving him some tofu.
(BTW: It's my interpretation of the cover of Natsuhiko
Kyogoku's book about Tofu Boy.)

This is the first time in my kid's life to try tofu.

I'm the middle of deadline hell. What am I gonna do.
Wah----

----------------------

July 13, 2009, 10:59 AM


[Context by Musotaku:]

Natsuhiko Kyogoku is a Japanese sci-fi writer. Web searches turn up various sites about
him and his work. They seem to be several books about monsters called "yokai" that are
fighting amongst each other, and Tofu Boy must be one of them. It looks to be something
like a Japanese equivalent of X-Men.

Here is the most interesting site I could find in English:

www.scifijapan.com/articles/2006/10/18/the-great-yokai-war/

I wish I could find the cover of the book she's talking about, since Kyogoku is very particular
about the covers of his books. If anyone finds an image, please post a link in the comments.

What would you pick for your first marathon?

#1:
14th annual Indianapolis Marathon (indianapolismarathon.com)
On October 17th
About 100 feet of elevation variance.
Ends on an uphill
Described as "very hilly or very flat; depends on your frame of reference"
Doesn't have pace groups (as far as I can tell)
The timing fits in perfectly with my training
I don't know anyone else doing it

#2:
2nd annual Monumental Marathon (monumentalmarathon.com; also in Indianapolis)
On November 7th
about 100 feet of elevation variance
Finishes on a downhill
Described as "flat"
Has pace groups
The timing fits pretty well with my training
I have 2 friends doing it, but neither of them are my pace.