Extra Life roundup

Extra Life was really, really fun.  And exhausting.  And now it's over, which is sad.  And a relief.

If you somehow don't know what I am talking about, congratulations on your recent awakening from your month-long coma!  If (and this is much more likely) you are sick of me talking about it all the time and filling your Facebook timeline with it, know that I'm almost done.  I just wanted to record some thoughts and memories so I don't lose them, and I thought people might be interested in knowing about the experience.

First, the facts.  Over the course of about a month, Kate and I solicited donations in anticipation of the game marathon.  Our goal was to raise $154 to give to the Children's Miracle Network.  That's one dollar for every day we've been blessed with a healthy, happy baby.  Thanks to our very generous friends and family, we obliterated that goal, and ended up raising $230.  Which was a small but important part of the five million dollars that Extra Life raised this year.

On game day, we tag-teamed games for 24 hours (actually 27, because we had to stop a few times to be parents).  We worked together on a puzzle that we received as a gift a few Christmases ago.  I generally don't like puzzles that much, but it was a really nice break when we were sick of looking at screens.

Kate played Super Mario World for SNES.  It is way harder than we expected.

I played two different FPSs: F.E.A.R (which I've heard good things about, but didn't really get into) and Modern Warfare (which was super fun).

Hakon played peek-a-boo for about an hour and a half, which he really enjoyed.

We played a very simple tabletop RPG with John and JaNae over Google Hangouts (since they live in Texas).  John was GM, JaNae was a doctor-turned-sniper/medic/mercinary (full disclosure: I zoned out when she told her backstory and was too embarrassed to ask her to repeat it), Kate was a telepathic circus bear, and I was a former Boy Scout leader who hated bears.  It was exactly as nerdy as it sounds, and it was perfect.  

We wanted to play more games with our other donors, but by the time we thought of it, it was just a little late to get our act together.  But that's something we'd like to do more of next year.  We are also trying to think of other ways to make the experience more rewarding and interactive for donors for next year.  Maybe a raffle for something game-related or something like that.  We are very open to ideas, so leave them in the comments or drop us an email.

To wrap things up, I just want to express my gratitude again to the people who donated to make this happen.  We are so happy to have contributed to such a good cause, and we are thankful to those of you who supported us.

Sticky Post: Extra Life

Just a brief post that will stay on the top of my blog for a couple weeks.  Kate and I are participating in Extra Life, a charity that befits several children's hospitals through the Children's Miracle Network.  There is more detail on our page (click through!), but the basics are here:

• Kate and I will be playing a 24 hour game marathon to benefit Extra Life on October 24th-Oct 25th
• All donations will go to benefit University of Iowa Children's Hospital
• Donations go to research and toward treatment for families that can't afford treatment for their kids

We would appreciate any donations, big or small.  Our goal is to raise $154, which is one dollar for every day we have been out of the hospital with Sam Hakon.  

How I met your terrible final season

Kate and I have enjoyed How I Met Your Mother for the last few years.  If you haven't seen it, it's a fun sitcom about a group of young people living in New York.  It was never exactly high art, but it was a fun TV show.  Then, on the homestretch, everyone involved with the show apparently forgot what they had been doing for 8 years.  The final season was just awful, and I need to dissect it to figure out why.  It's who I am; it's what I do.

This post will be full of spoilers.  I would normally say "don't read this if you haven't watched it," but to be honest, my recommendation is that no one watch the final season.  This season should be buried beneath Yucca Mountain so that no human accidentally stumbles into it.  So I don't mind spoiling it.

First, some background and some speculation.  Jason Segel, one of the five main actors on the show, decided to quit after season 8 so that he could focus on his film career.  All the other actors wanted to stay on for a 9th season, and eventually convinced Jason Segel to stay along as well.  I'm guessing that convincing him looked something like this:

This conflict and its resolution lead to one of the major problems with the 9th season (and this is where I am speculating): lack of funds.  The production value of the season is just absurdly low.  Distractingly bad greenscreens are omnipresent, even for settings where previous seasons used sets.  Did they lose those sets over summer break or something?  The entire season is shot like a bottle episode, with probably 80% of the non-greenscreened screentime taking place at one location. What little money they had was apparently thrown at guest stars.  Pretty much anyone who had ever appeared in the series made a guest appearance in the final season.  Big, expensive names like Bryan Cranston popped in for cameos that didn't add much.  Even people with no connection to the show, like a random song by Boyz II Men.  It just looks like they had no idea how to allocate their money wisely.

The show was contracted to end with season 8, but then halfway through that season, they negotiated to make a 9th.  This lead to some major problems with pacing in the 9th season.  We learned earlier in the show that Ted met The Mother at Barney and Robin's wedding.  The entire 8th season built up to the wedding, and ended with all the main characters on their way to a bed and breakfast for a 3 day weekend leading up to the wedding itself.  There were two choices of how to handle season 9 with that setup:

1. Have the wedding take up the first episode (or even the first few, since a lot is going on).  Ted meets The Mother, and the rest of the season is them falling in love, courting, etc.
2. Stretch the wedding over 22 excruciating episodes, culminating in Ted meeting The Mother

They, sadly, opted for the latter.  They changed the format of the show by making the entire season a single serialized story, rather than a mostly episodic array of stories with longer arcs buried in subplots, as in previous seasons.  I'm not opposed to serial story telling, but this team was not used to telling stories that way, and their inexperience shows.  The episodes are padded to the point where they feel about 20 minutes too long.

Not only does the pacing problem mean we spend too much time being bored at the wedding (which, granted, adds some realism), but it necessarily means that we don't spend that time elsewhere.  So we drag through that awful wedding and then gloss over some really interesting things in the last two or three episodes.  I said this before, but now I mean it.  Major spoilers lie ahead.

Robin and Barney end up getting divorced (after we invested literally hours of our lives watching them get married).  I don't mind that they did, but I hate the way the writers made it happen.  They got in one fight (over the availability of WiFi, no less) and the next scene they're telling everyone they got divorced.  

The same happens when The Mother dies.  We see a 3 second shot of her in a hospital bed and I must have missed the narrator telling us she died, because I wasn't sure of it until a few minutes later.  Again, I don't mind that she died.  This show handles serious topics like death semi-regularly, but it's the glossing over it that I mind.  We wasted hours learning that the room that Marshall and Lilly stayed in was haunted, but we can't spare a few moments when The Mother - one of two characters named in the title of the show - dies?

Related to that last point, I have one more gripe about pacing and time allocation.  They did a huge disservice to the character of The Mother with all of this.  She was in the show so little that we didn't care about her.  I know that this was intentional (because Ted was really in love with Robin).  But the fact that it was intentional doesn't make it good story telling.  When Marshall's Dad died, it was poignant and heartbreaking.  When The Mother died, I was only sad that she didn't take Ted out with her.  They didn't give us a chance to care about that character, and that is really a shame.

In the end, my big problem with this season was that they tried for a mix of touching and funny (again, like when Marshall's dad died) but ended up just being depressing.  Barney gets married but loses his wife and ends up grasping for meaning in his bastard child.  Ted and The Mother look bored and depressed any time they're on screen.  I'm not sure if that's because the life choices Ted has made have left him in a miserable marriage or because the actors are sick of the bad writing.  After years of pretending to love his wife, Ted hooks up with his best friend's ex wife and thinks that will make him happy.  What a great end to such a fun romp!

Blech.  After we watched it, Kate and I were so depressed that we had to chase with the Venture Brothers.  I recommend you do the same.

 

How I used my smart phone to get into running

Technology is kind of amazing.  Everybody carries a computer in their pocket that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers that put men on the moon.  And we use that technology to play stupid timewaster games.  I've tried to use my phone to get into shape, and I feel like it's been tremendously helpful.  I started writing a post about all the different apps I used to do this, and it was getting way too long.  I decided to cut it down to just two apps, and if people are interested, I can write more posts about the others.  These two apps that I am talking about today are both for running.

The first is Runkeeper.  Runkeeper is a GPS enabled app for running or walking.  It tracks your runs and tells you distance, time, speed, etc.  While you run, it can play music from your phone to keep you entertained.  It also gives you a pretty good web interface to look at old runs to track progress.  There is a way to have it post automatically to Facebook, but I am too dumb.  So, whenever I go on a run I am proud of, I screencap it and post it to let everyone know how great I am.

Not that you would be proud of this, but I was.

The big problem with Runkeeper is that running is boring.  I know that's not really a problem with the app, but Runkeeper doesn't help much.  Playing music just doesn't cut it for me.  A better app for making running fun is Zombies, Run!  It's kind of hard to describe, but the takehome is that it is awesome.

Zombies, Run! is like runkeeper, in that it is a GPS enabled running app that keeps track of your runs for you.  But what sets it apart is the story.  Rather than just listening to music while you run, it plays a story.  So, over your headphones comes what is essentially an audiobook about the zombie apocalypse.  You take the role of Runner 5, a runner for a small group of survivors.  Every run is a "mission" for the town, where you have to run for supplies, rescue other survivors, or do other important things to keep the town alive.  It's really fun.



And if you're not much of a runner (as I am not), you can start with the Zombies, Run! 5k trainer, which is an 8 week training course that takes you from "can't run at all" to "can run more than not at all."  I just finished that (which is what made me want to write this post), and it was a very good, gentle teacher to get me started.  In the 5k trainer, you have a completely self-encapsulated story about (shock!) a new person coming to town and being trained as a runner.  You have 3 workouts a week for 8 weeks, starting with very easy ones (run for 15 seconds, walk for a minute) and ending with much more intense ones.

If you think you might want to try getting into running, go drop $1.99 on the 5k trainer.  It is great, and it really helped me make running enjoyable.

I don't have a good way to end this post.  Go try these apps!