Thursday afternoon I took a ride down to Shoreline Lake to have a nice walk and listen to some of the audiobook. I sat down at one of the benches in the shade and several squirrels came up to me. One even climbed up my leg and sat on my knee.
This book was nice, but completely ignored several of my favorite characters. Nothing in the two rivers was mentioned in the least. Perrin and Loial are my favorite two characters and the seem like the most regular guys in the story now. The others have started going off the deep end in power and ability. The setup continues for the later books, but there was some really nice action in this one. I’m not sure all of what happened with the forsaken, but most of it seems to be going well for the good guys.
This morning Steph and I went by the Milk Pail Market. It was a nice bike ride and we filled up both of our backpacks for $25. I got some interesting lemon cucumbers, that I’m looking forward to trying. We got some Stilton for Steph, and I got a piece of jalapeno cheese, both of which were fantastic. We looked up how to harvest olives and walnuts as we have both growing in my backyard and they will be ready to harvest in a month or so. The walnuts are already falling of the tree and I’ll start grabbing them each morning and getting them starting to dry. I’ll brine a good number of olives once they start falling off the tree. Steph wants to try making olive oil, but I think I’ll stick to brining some jars of olives as that is much easier.
This was a pretty and bad movie. The visuals were good, but everything else was mediocre at best. This movie had a large number of gratuitous 3D scenes, and nonsensical action sequences. The characters were amazingly shallow, and the character development was done poorly in the few characters it was attempted. The acting was very sub par by all the major actors, and the dialog was wholly unbelievable. The green screen scenes were far too obvious, and the lack of color fading in the background one would usually expect for seeing something in the distance made most of the pretty scenes awkward.
This movie had some good parts, but most of it was ripping apart what we had already thought of the MIB universe, and gratuitous 3D scenes. I wasn’t watching it in 3D which made the gratuitous 3D scenes that much worse. The villain was impressive and understandable to a degree, which is pleasant in any movie. The 5th dimensional being and the Andy Warhol moment were the major redeeming parts of the movie.
The movie was confusing for much of it, but I really enjoyed it. At the end I started seeing how all of it came together, as a war for human rights, and cyclical oppression and redemption. The costumes were fantastic, especially where the Asian girl was made to look Irish/English. I would be up for seeing it once more but I don’t think I’d want to see it more times than that.
Nima is still better than I. We played for a solid 45 minutes and he won 3 of 5 games. The games he won were also not as close as the games I won. I was a little late in leaving my place so I pushed it on the bike ride there and made it in less than 30 minutes when it normally takes over 45. I don’t think it made too much of a difference in the game, but I didn’t stay as low as I normally try to. The bike ride back was more than tiring, but it still felt really nice.
Now that I am back from the DR, I’m working on the new game Apocalypse Overload. This is going to be a 2D infinite runner/platformer. I’m having a great time making it so far, and should have a very simple playable out soon. I’m also going to start up another blog specifically for the company, which will be posted here as well. Robert and I got a lot done as far as planning today, and I have the basic understanding of what needs to be done when to get it ready for a Kistarter campaign in August.
I had a talk with Ryan this morning about Big Data and how he can look at some small parts of it. We went over how things are composed of loops and funnels, how to look at problems to be solved, the difference between being a data analyst and a product manager, the logistic curve and it’s benefits over pure growth models, and A/B testing. I think he will be able to understand most of it in no time and master it quickly. We talked about it over omelets on University Ave.
