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!

The post where I am in Iowa now

Moving sucks.

There's really no two ways about it.  Moving is a huge pain.  And it's not just the "putting everything you own in boxes, lifting those boxes into a truck, driving that truck, lifting the boxes out of the truck and then taking everything you own out of boxes" part of moving that is hard.  You spend a day changing your mailing address at all the places that have your mailing address.  You spend a day driving around trying to figure out where to buy milk.  You're crazy poor because everything about moving costs money.  It's just a headache.

But, now that Kate and I are settling in Coralville, I thought I would gather some of my thoughts of things I learned about moving.  My more charitable readers will think that this is for their benefit: so that they can learn from my experience and not repeat my mistakes.  My less charitable readers will think I am doing this for my own benefit, so that I can easily find this later since I don't keep a journal.  You're all right.

First, boxes.  Every move I've made in the past has involved scrounging boxes from wherever I could find them, usually work, and packing my stuff in them.  I save boxes from Amazon and anywhere else I can think of.  I did some of that this time, but I also just bought boxes.



Those boxes were awesome.  They were about $20 for a 10-pack at Sam's club (or $40 for a 12 pack anywhere else - not hard to do that math).  What I like about buying boxes instead of scavenging boxes is that they are all exactly the same size, which makes stacking them super-easy and efficient.  No problems trying to tetris these guys around when I am putting them in the truck or unloading them in the new apartment.  A- to buying boxes.  I can't give it a higher score because it was pretty expensive, which makes me sad.

Next, something that I did not believe in despite the suggestion of my lovely wife and my handsome brother (You know which one you are): Packing wrap.  It's basically seran wrap, but for packing.



This stuff was AWESOME.  And, more importantly, super cheap.  For $5, I got 1000 feet of it at the Uhaul place.  I'm guessing you could find it cheaper on Amazon or somewhere if you look.  I used this to wrap lots of awkwardly shaped things into bundles.  All our curtain rods, bundled and wrapped so they stick together.  Shelves from a big storage unit thingy, wrapped so that they are all in one place and easier to carry.  Seriously, if you learn nothing else from this post, buy some dang wrap for your next move.  A+ to this stuff.

Another thing we thought would make our lives easier was space bags.  These are supposed to be magical, and they kind of are, but they're also pretty unreliable.  The idea is that you have a big bag that you put stuff in (clothes, blankets, etc), then vacuum out the air, making the bag way smaller.



The problem is, if they are not 100% air tight, you might as well be using garbage bags.  Once the air leaks out, they plump back up to their original size.  In our experience, about 30% had leaks when they were brand new, and another 30% sprung leaks between the time they got packed and the time they got unpacked.  So, not a super-great batting average (though, I guess 400 is actually a super-great batting average, but baseball is another question entirely).  We paired these with big plastic storage bins, which helped a bit.  Vacuum out the air from a space bag, throw it in a storage bin, pack stuff around it, and tape it shut.  That way, when it starts to leak, the clothes have no room to expand into.  But between the price and the not-as-magical-as-advertised problem, I have to give space bags a D.  We threw them all away when we got here and are not planning on ever buying them again.

The last couple things are not products, but rather things I would do differently.  When we were packing, we tried to label things as specifically as we could (rather than just labeling the box with the room it would go to).  We thought this would make it easier to find stuff when we unpacked.  The problem was that while we knew that yarn goes in the baby's bedroom, the people who helped us move didn't.  So all the boxes just got put down wherever, and it took about a day of me moving boxes around the apartment just to get everything in the right room so we could start unpacking.  If I were moving again, I would put a big, generic label on every box that fell into one of maybe 8 or 10 categories (Bathroom, kitchen, books, etc), and then a smaller, more specific label of what exactly is in that box.  The big label will help direct things to the right general area, and the small label will help you organize and unpack.

I would also pack a few boxes or suitcases or something as if we were going on a week's vacation.  Everything I need to live for a week: underwear, phone charger, toothbrush, pillow, all that good stuff.  These need to be clearly marked and kept separate from everything else.  We tried to do this, but didn't do very well, so the first night was a mess of "I've been in the car all day and I just want to brush my dang teeth."  The first few days will be like that, so pack accordingly.

Before you move (far enough before that you are not a crazy stress-ball), plan a few days of easy meals with a few simple ingredients.  We ended up eating out a whole lot that first week because we were too tired and stressed to think about how adults feed themselves.  Make a meal plan (in advance), make a shopping list (in advance), and you'll be able to go for a quick run to the store the first day.

All in all, a successful move, in that my family is now successfully in a new place, all our stuff is here, and we are happy.  And, importantly, now that we're settling in, I'll get back to the Blog.  Harry Potter, beware.  I'm coming for you, boy...

Welcome, Cyborg Overlords!

Now they just need to make a robot that does my old job from McDonald's: stand in the drive through window and get yelled at for the order being wrong.  I guess they could have just replaced me with a cardboard cutout of a pimply faced teenager with a voice bubble that said "I'm very sorry, sir"

Review: The Long Halloween

Batman: The Long Halloween is a followup to the Haunted Knight stories I reviewed a couple weeks ago.  Where Haunted Knight was a collection of unrelated short stories, The Long Halloween was a monthly special that ran for one year, from October 1996 to October 1997.  It follows the same continuity as Haunted Knight, but it stands mostly alone as its own story.  The main story is that Batman, Gordon, and Dent are all working to find a serial killer in Gotham who kills on holidays.

The Long Halloween is often praised as one of the greatest Batman comics of all time, and with good reason.  The themes of the story (though not much of the plot itself) are very strongly felt in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies.  I wanted to link somebody else describing all the similarities, but shockingly, I can't find anyone who has gone through and done that.  Come on, internet, get your act together.  I may come back and do that one of these days.   But not today.  Today I'm just going to talk about what I liked, what I didn't like, and how the book fares overall.  I will avoid major spoilers for this story, but I will mention plot points that are common in the Batman universe (ie, Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face, etc)

I feel like the art is even better than in Haunted Knight, even though it is the same artist.  I guess a few years of practice makes a difference.  The uses of shadow and blocks of solid color that I liked so much in Haunted Knight are more pronounced here.

I love beleaguered, haggard Gordon in his dark office

And they are used well for foreshadowing.  For example, Harvey Dent's face is often shown in half-shadow, hinting at his later transformation into Two-Face.

The book has some very interesting themes, both for the good guys and the bad guys.  On the bad-guy side, it talks about the transformation of Gotham from a mob-run town to a super-villain-run town.  The old mobsters are shown trying to deal with the influx of "freaks" into Gotham, and trying to hold on to their power and influence in a changing world.

On the good-guy side, we see the unsteady alliance between Gotham's police force (Captain Jim Gordon), prosecutor (District Attorney Harvey Dent) and Batman (Batman).  Each of them suspects the other two of being the villain (for reasons that are believable and well written, I might add), but has to rely on them anyway.  This theme of unsteady, forced trust makes for a surprisingly thought provoking read.

Now, for some of the bad.  One problem stems from the way this story was told (13 "chapters" released as 13 separate comic books over the course of a year).  There is a single story running through the whole thing (an unknown serial killer in Gotham), but each chapter has its own story as well.  And each chapter's individual story is about a different villain from Batman's Rogues' Gallery.  The first time I read this, it didn't bother me, but this time through it felt a bit forced.  In January, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Joker.  In March, Batman investigates the Holiday Killer and faces off with Poison Ivy.  Every month could be summed up that way.

Though this does lead to some pretty cool cover art for the different months

This could be explained away as "Batman is crazy busy, and even when he is in a long, drawn-out investigation there are always other fires to put out," but it just didn't feel that way to me.  Like I said, not bad, but a little forced.  I don't like when I can see what's going on backstage in the author's head.

Another problem is with the story itself.  I enjoyed it right up to the end, when it felt like Jeph Loeb traveled 15 years into the future, watched the LOST finale, and said "man, what a great way to end things!"

What if the whole thing was just a dream the polar bear had?

The big surprise ending was kind of dumb.  Like the villain-of-the-month problem, it just felt forced, like the publisher really really wanted a surprise, but the writers hadn't planned on one.

The last criticism I have will be a bigger problem for some than others.  That is that this book is not as accessible as it might me.  There were a few times reading it when I thought "if I didn't know a lot of Batman mythos, I'd be lost here."  So, not a bad book by any means, but probably not the one I'd recommend as someone's first book to read.

All in all, a very satisfying read (even if the ending was marred with a dumb, dumb twist), with beautiful art and a good story.