A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Belief in The Status-Quo

2012-01-17T22:40:00.008-05:00

First of all, yes, I let this blog pretty much die, but I have been thinking about setting up up again for when I have something to rant about either on video or in text, because, kind of like I always have, I like to think. And when I think, I try to come up with explanations and revelations and whatever other words you want to use for "figuring stuff out". And (be warned cause I'm about to get deep on you) in my life, as an atheist, and a thinker, I realize that the only thing that will exist of you after your time is up is what you left behind. And even that is finite, of all trillions of people who ever lived, what are the oldest names you can remember besides the names of kings and other forms of kings or high level government workers (like Sun Tzu, who was a military strategist)? The oldest I can possibly think of in that category of people who were just ordinary people, is Christopher Columbus, and he kinda doesn't even count because he WAS a government worker (tasked by the Queen of England to set sail), and he died ONLY 500 years ago or so. HALF A MILLENNIUM. That's about as long as a normal person's memory can survive, and he did it by discovering a whole new continent!

Sorry to suddenly get so, well, reminding you of your own mortality with that, but it's an undeniable truth. We're all going to die, and very quickly be forgotten, almost no matter who we were. So I want to put as much of myself out there as possible, so that I might be remembered, just a little bit longer than most. That said, it's why I'm writing this post right now, and the catalyst for writing this post are two things, an image, and a realization I had about the way most human brains operate in today's society. All of it centered around RELIGION.

When-people-ask-why-I-have-a-problem-with-religion-its-hard-to-come-up-with-a-single-answer

I'll give you a few minutes to read through each and every one of those as I did and get nice and pissed off, then I'll tell you why you're wrong for having thoughts like "these people are EVIL" or the like. Oh be pissed off, I'm not telling you not to be, Religion and religious people like these DESERVE to incite a fury in normal rational people like you and I.

The crux of my realization is this, and it does fit very closely with a cliche thinkers have about the religious, that they are weak minded. My theory is very similar, though not as blunt and degrading, and a bit more complex. It all comes down to one thing, tradition. Tradition not as what specific traditions there are, or what you do during a tradition, but the very way we define that word. I'll take 2 paragraphs here and illustrate as best I can by talking about how the non-religious/reasoning types define tradition and then how the religious define it.

To me, and my reasoning friends, Tradition is defined as a good idea that you put into practice and later on put into practice again because it was still a good idea. We may celebrate Christmas (not as a christian holiday but as a more generic one), because of it's value in bringing a family and friends together, exchanging gifts (and stimulating the economy in the process), eating good food, and being cheerful among other things. To us, a tradition can very easily be dispatched with if it evolves into something bad or society changes and it's no longer acceptable/moral/ethical, just like hazing in college.

To the religious minded, tradition is defined as something that was good in the past and henceforth should be repeated (and I hesitate to use this word because of the baggage attached to it, but it is really the best word) like a ritual. To these folk, the reason behind the tradition isn't important at all (hence why Christmas has transformed from being about Jesus Christ's birthday to a commercial and family holiday with the one religious tie left in it being the morning church mass and nativity scenes). These are the types of people who protested fake Xmas trees when they first appeared on the market, proclaiming "A CHRISTMAS TREE MUST BE A REAL TREE!", or opposed the early 2000's trend of icicle lights (you know, the lights you string up on the outside of your house that look like icicle's?) simply because they weren't "traditional". What's important to these people about tradition is the simple fact that "We did it last year! And the year before that! And the year before that! So we shouldn't break the cycle!", or put into more blunt words, maintaining the status-quo. THAT'S what's important to these people.

And the problem is quite simple, this is not just how they look at this one word, "tradition", but it's the way their brains work in general. They look at the status-quo as something that is ideal, as something to strive for is to make things the same year after year, so that we can continue with these traditions. These are the kinds of minds who, if it were not for the likes of Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and events like the Million man March and anti-segregation laws, would still support slavery and segregation. NOT stemmed from hatred of blacks, but simply because it's their "place" because that's the place they were in in the past, so why change it? That's the kind of reasoning these people employ, just take a look right now at another subject that brought me to this realization and inspired me to write this article.

Gays. Take a look around at how they are treated even today still, and who are the main opponents in gay marriage and gay rights. Organizations that pump out that word "Tradition" and "Family" and "America/Nation/Country" like it's on their word of the day calendars (and I'll get into talking about the "Nation/Country/America" crap too later).Just a few examples I can think of right off the top of my head are the Catholic Church, Right Wing Conservatives, The Westborough Baptist Church, American Vision, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Institute, Traditional Values Coalition, and Focus On The Family (Who's latest ad which was shown during the recent NFL Broncos Vs Patriots game was what REALLY started me wanting to make this article, it was the initial spark). Notice that just about all of them are, especially in the case for gay marriage opposition, talking about "TRADITIONAL marriage" and "healthy/strong/proper/TRADITIONAL FAMILY structure" and then notice that the vast majority of them are religious organizations, well that point I'll get into in more detail next, for now I want to focus on gay and bisexual/open interests because, let's just say I have a vested interest.

I know you're reading this and going "but they DO hate them! What are you saying they don't HATE them?" Yes, for the most part they do, but you have to look at what that hatred stems from. If you see a guy flipping out, pissed off on the street, about to club people with a baseball bat he's carrying around, you'd better damn well understand WHAT is pissing him off before you go try to calm him down or especially reason with him. The source of the hatred is not gays and such themselves, or the activities they do, it's what they represent that is causing all the problem in their minds. Remember these people hold maintaining the status-quo to be their highest ideal and biggest goal, and when something comes along to shake up their world view, they will fight it tooth and nail, and when you're resisting something and fighting against it, what ends up happening to you emotionally? You end up hating that thing! It's just a human emotional response to the mindset they have. If someone walks up to you and holds you up at knife point, you hate them don't you? But you hate them because they are representing the opposite of what people are supposed to do in a reasonable society (namely make your own money and let everyone else keep theirs). It's exactly the same thing with gay-haters, and it's one of the reasons why they are literally impossible to sway with any sort of rational argument and why you'll see headlines like in the linked article such as "Mont. Woman takes crowbar to disputed artwork in Loveland (the painting was a gay scene)" or even worse, "Iran Executes 2 Gay Teenagers" or even WORSE, "My Name Was Not Eric. It Was Faggot." in which 19 year old Eric (last name omitted) killed himself, AFTER HIS OWN MOTHER TRIED TO EXORCISE THE GAYNESS OUT OF HIS SOUL.

I'm getting tangential though and pisses off mentioning off these examples, which is not what I want to do. Yes, again, they are so deserving of getting pissed off over. When I first read some of these headlines my thoughts immediately turned to grabbing the nearest sharp/pointy/heavy object I could find and jamming it into my eyeballs, LITERALLY, but I digress, I'm not writing this to express my anger, because plenty of people are already doing that, and like I said before, it won't change anything. My point that I wanted to get back to is who these people are at their core and why they think and act and hate the way they do, and that leads me into one of the main things I want to talk about, religion.

Think back a few paragraphs and you'll remember about how I said that the most important thing in the minds of these people is maintaining the status-quo and how I hated using the word "ritual" to describe it? Well because the word "ritual" immediately has ties with religion, and if there's one thing I absolutely do not want to do with this article is to imply in any way shape or form that religion is the cause for these people's way of thinking. It's in fact the direct opposite. RELIGION, is the EXPRESSION and the OUTLET and the DIRECT RESULT of the way these people think and act. Let me explain. Think about all the ways these people act, foremost that they cherish the status-quo and traditions for the sake of history and doing things "the old way", then think about what religion offers. Religion is dogmatic. It is designed to be based off of a person or a work from the past, and remains the same throughout the ages, no matter what culture shifts happen around them save for massive sways such as the end of slavery and such. Being a Heretic is the enemy of all religion, because it involves questioning the status-quo in order to CHANGE the status-quo. Now to a person who just about lives their life by the status-quo, it's a perfect fit and a very attractive package. Religion says "Here are the traditions we celebrate, the ideals we aspire to, the answers to life's great questions, and the rules we live by; they have never changed and they never will change!" That is EXACTLY the type of pitch these people are looking for, and it's pretty much WHY a lot of people like myself and others will simply merge the two and call it "religious thinking", which in a way is easier and simpler to explain and say than "people who aspire to maintain the status-quo" but it's an oversimplification AND like I said, it mistakes the reaction for the cause. As you've probably noticed by now I am doing just that, referring to these people not as "religiously minded" or "closed minded" or anything else, but instead constantly referring to them as "people who aspire to maintain the status-quo", despite how many words it takes, because it's the key distinction I've made in this recent revelation of mine, and the very thing I'm trying to communicate through all of this.

I don't really want to boil it down to a dichotomy (us and them), but it really is the best way to describe it when leading into my next point, which is that either you are one of these status-quo people, or you're the type of person who isn't afraid to question things, or actually LIKES to question things. And now I begin to talk about "us". One of the problems about what I' talking about here is that there is no real unifying value to "us", we all simply reject the status-quo in favor of some form of progress. We're the type of people who look at the end of the Victorian era with glee; the type of people who say "What's the point in being alive if you're not trying to better yourself/your way of thinking/the world in general?"; and the type of people who are on, as much as I don't want to use this description but it's the only one that encompasses what I'm trying to say, The Left Side Of The Culture War. The people who look at a new technology or new idea and are excited about how it will change the world, instead of being fearful and resistant when thinking about the very fact that it's going to change the world or bring and end to something you love.

Going back to these status-quo-ers, again it's that fear and resistance to change that is what drives them in every facet of life. How many times have you heard the cliche about people hating how TV was going to kill radio, or how DVD's were going to be the end of the movie theater, or who made cliched remarks like "back in my day we didn't have this fancy new gizmo! We had to do this instead!" None of my grandparents at all, two of them still living, two having died after 2001, well after the adoption of personal computers, have either owned, nor USED a computer, and they refuse to learn, simply because of what it represents. An end to the old way of doing things. It sounds like a cliche, and it is! But it's the one which is more true than anyone realizes and is at the heart of social conservatism.

Now, I think I've laid out my thoughts on that pretty cleanly... OK, no, it was sloppy, but hey, I'm having a brain spill here so it's OK. The next point I wanted to get to about these people is another thing that is tied in with the way religion is a perfect fit for their method of thinking, and it's Nationalism. The very concept is something I've hated for ages, and I started hating it after reaching the point in my maturity that I started thinking of everything deeply and then heard the national anthem played loudly and boldly before a pro sports game. I didn't think about the WORDS in the national anthem or anything like that, but instead I simply thought about why the national anthem is played here at this time, before a pro sporting event. The simple answer is that it's a tradition, and I mean a tradition as defined by the status-quo-ers, something that's been done for years so it continues to be done. But then why did the tradition start in the first place? is the next question that popped up, and the unsexy truth that I came to after a few dozen minutes of thinking about it was that simply put, people are still tribal. It's the same reason why we eat more food than we "should", and why we are obsessed with sex, because it's part of our core human instincts. Evolutionarily, we survived better in packs than we did by ourselves, so we evolved to have a deep and profound instinct to stay rooted to our tribes/clans/groups. Now that the modern world has set in, there really are only a few outlets for that instinct to feel sated by, and they are family, sports fandom's (I'm a NY Giants fan), state and nationalism, and your group of friends (though that one doesn't count so much because your circle of friends constantly changes at a rapid pace). So since it's such a core instinctual urge, and one of the few outlets that it has to be expressed and satisfied by, nationalism is clung to like a religion. And again, when these people with the status-quo mindset are exposed to things like religion, they tend to start thinking in dichotomies as well. If someone isn't as patriotic as you are, he's a traitor. While I was working at Metlife Stadium on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, there was a fan who didn't stand up for the national anthem, and in his row on the way to the aisle was an ex-military person. The ex-militant took offense to that and classified the guy a traitor, and hence blocked his path when he tried to get up to go to the bathroom later on, and this escalated until the guy pulled out a tazer and started tazing people! This is the kind of stuff that baffles my mind about patriotism and forced me to think even further.

The problem is they treat patriotism the same way as they treat their other beliefs, which is that they don't think about it, don't question it, and simply accept it at face value because that's the way it can stay the same over time. If you considered yourself a patriot and defined your patriotism like I do by saying "I love our country because of the rights in the constitution, our legal structure, and our way of life", well then every single one of those things can change right along with the culture, and you have very little control over it. BUT if you define your patriotism as "I love this country because it's where I live!" than the only thing that can change that is if either you moved out or the country collapsed, neither of which is very likely to happen. So the same type of people who are status-quo-ers are basically becoming these chest-beater patriots, and end up starting to think of America like a god figure, like "our government is the best in the world and we cannot question what it does!" Which is the type of thinking that lets government get away with all the crap it pulls from corruption, to mindless wars and laws, the nanny state, the welfare state, and wars. (Yes I'm basically saying blind patriotism is one of the main thing leading to the decay of government)

I fear I'm getting a bit tangential again with that though, but really the thing is that as much as I hate the dichotomous thinking of "us and Them", that is absolutely the case and the cause for most of the ills I can point out. It's people who don't like and don't want change. These are the kinds of people, who, and this is probably the most obvious statement ever, are trying to put a stop to change and progress simply because they prefer the status-quo. In this article I've named but only a few examples (Blind Patriotism, Religious Folk, Gay Haters, Christmas Purists), but there are so many examples of where this "KEEP AND DEFEND THE STATUS-QUO" mentality is LITERALLY destroying our culture, which must progress in order to survive!. Big Multimedia corporations (Pushing for totalitarian and out-dated copyright laws because they don't like the way the new Internet market works), Democrat vs Republican (We can't vote for a third party! These two parties have been the front-runners for DECADES! I HAVE to associate with one of them!), the notion of "indecency" (We have to PROTECT our children from seeing sexual things! My parents did that to me and so I have to do the same! No matter how culture has changed!), and politeness and political correctness (Oh no! I can't call this guy an idiot or tell him the truth about what I think because that might disrupt HIS world view, and if that happens it's shake up MY world view! We'd just better not talk about anything important just in case!). Those are just a few other off the top of my head examples, I'm sure you can think of plenty more, but that's not my point.

My big point, and what I'll leave you with is this. "The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." — Isaac Asimov

If that statement is at all true, then you must, absolutely MUST, be willing to think things through, and change your mind, your opinions, and your beliefs as well. Anything else and you're just a brainless stone sitting on the side of the road while cars go racing by...

Jugglers on Juggling, All about the Spark

2011-06-29T03:42:00.000-04:00

Co hosts Tanner Alder and Rich Kohut discuss Mark Watson's new summer juggling blog, "Android Hell 2", Wes Peden's "Mediocrity", and question whether the WJF has succeeded in it's goals.

http://markwatsonjuggler.tumblr.com/
Android Hell 2 - http://juggling.tv/6231
Mediocrity - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ9aTcR0HDM

JoJ 05-09-2011 - Perry Romanowski

2011-05-09T22:00:00.000-04:00

Co host Perry Romanowski and I discuss the recent news in Joggling, Juggling Robots, Jay and Wes's "43 tricks" routine, Joe Showers's "How i Met My PX3's", specific questions about tricks and what is being focused on during joggling, and the Flatland Juggling Festival.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Throw, Catch, Throw, Catch

2011-02-02T04:17:00.001-05:00

Listen Up!
Whoops. Missed a week there, sorry about that guys, I guess the first week of classes kept my mind off of things for a bit, never fear though! I'm keeping blogger open in my tabs now so I can see it and be reminded when the time comes. And eah there's a lot to talk about for once!
::
Jugglers On Juggling! My big juggling podcast, I've started it up again if you hadn't noticed in the last post, and so far things seem to have changed for the better with it! I've gotten a hell of a lot more insightful as a host, the format of keeping sections short and very strictly defined seems to be working well, the related topics to the co-hosts and to the other topics seems to work, and overall the show seems to be improving on all fronts! Hooray! Hopefully this will lead to a sponsorship sometime XD
::
College classes, it seems like this semester is going to be one of those not too easy but not too hard semesters, seeing as how I've got a blend of my favorite professor and one of my least favorite professors. My favorite one teaching the portfolio class, where we're learning how to put together resume's, portfolios, and getting a job. The other professor teaching the last actual art based class, which was snowed out it's first day so i actually am about to have the first day tomorrow. More info on them next week as I have them.
::
I've got my footage and submitted it into the 4 ball collaboration juggling video for Rec.Juggling and I must say I'm fairly proud of what I was able to do, and not only that but spending time after or during each of my classes so far gathering footage feels like it's bringing me back into actually getting good juggling footage, so who knows I might actually make progress on videos this year :D
::

Juggle This:
As for juggling related stuff besides the 4 ball collab video I'm getting a lot done for Pong Progression 2. Once again like i said last time I've gotten a slew of interesting new shots already filmed and I'm going through the proccess of making all the original shots from the first video, which may sound bad on paper but the better lighting I'm getting and good angles and such are really making things look great, not to mention that this time I've decided to keep my converted footage in HD, so this video will be my first proper high-def juggling video for you all once it's done!

But while I am talking about this project I will say this, I'm quite frightened by having to choose music for it, because really Pong Progression was my best made video so far, the best music to match the footage, the most color coordinated, best shot, and possibly the best edited, but the music again was the key part. The Flashbulb track was absolutely perfect for it, but it wasn't that long of a music track and I made a resolution waaaay back when I started making videos to never use the same music twice because that would be stagnating to anyone who watched my videos. So I'm right now thinking I'll have to use another Flashbulb track but I'm just afraid I won't find one as good that'll be long enough for the 5-6+ minute long video I'm planning to make. Well, I guess we'll find out what happens as I continue making it and then start editing.

Juggle This (again?):
As for non Pong Progression 2 related ramblings, I want to talk about Jugglers On Juggling a bit. I'm not really to say frightened about JoJ, after all returning back to the original format of a weekly review show was a risky move but absolutely a needed one, because it was the only way to make the show regularly, fill it with content, and have it be relevant. Of course all the fears came through after the first few episodes and though a few of them have waned a lot of them either persist or have gotten larger.

The biggest one I have is about my decision to live-stream the show. I made that decision for a number of reasons, first I thought it'd be pretty damn cool if ever anyone wanted to call me up on skype and voice their opinions during the recording but after last week's Call in show didn't fetch a single caller out of the dozen listeners I'm never gonna do that idea again. But also I made the decision because it saves me LOADS of work to produce an episode, all I have to really do is have my audio equipment setup right and then hit stream and record on ustream and it's all done, meaning I don't have to edit the audio, convert it, save it, upload it, then write up the post to the page with a manual RSS feed that really i don't think ever worked very well. Though that at the same time has had a couple drawbacks, number one of which is any screw-ups anyone makes mid recording stay in there for all to hear, I don't do any noise removal (but it hasn't been a problem yet) and I can't get a download up for people in mp3 format which I'm not sure whether people want or not. Either way the big problem is with the livestreaming, I really have no idea whether or not people are more in favor or more against. I've heard a couple people telling me they like it being streamed and others that they don't, I just never really have enough feedback it seems to make big time core decisions. Well, in time.

While I'm on things though another fear I have about it is the co-hosting issue, the idea that I'd like to have as many different co-hosts as possible throughout the season as opposed to me and a set second person and maybe a third guest every now and then like the first seasons. However after the first four episodes I already have had one where I couldn't get someone to co-host in time, and that worries me a bit, if one out of every four episodes is me by myself that's not going to last very long is it? I've gotten some great suggestions on ideas as for people to co-host but then again I only have so many jugglers in my email contacts (0_0 I just remembered! I never sent anything to all my FACEBOOK juggler contacts, where I receive like 5 invites from other jugglers a week! Hang on a minute BRB), but either way there've only been four episode so far again and Matt Hall has already said yes he'll be on once he's freed up after the school year (he does have a class to teach after all XD), so once again, we'll see.

Of course there's other points that I'm of course nervous about with the new season like if the listeners will keep on listening or whatever but those are all pretty unsubstantial, to be blunt, so far I've only gotten two big worries about the new season and everything else feels like it's working great! So here's to good podcasting!

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

So.... uh.... yeah.

2011-01-17T16:06:00.003-05:00

Listen Up!
So things are pretty much meh right now. I got sick over the weekend and that stalled me from writing stuff, but there were a few noteworthy things to happen last week, of course none of them really had much to do with work or college, so this section of the blog is pretty empty. Who cares though right? None needs to know about this crap anyways XD
::
The JETS! (NFL) Even after working at Meadowlands all of the past season and watching them go, I didn't think they had it in them to beat the Patriots yesterday, but DAMN! And now they are one game away from the SuperBowl, but there is no way their match against the Steelers coming up is gonna be anything other than a coin flip. But I'm for both teems so that's great, and the Packers on the other side of the League have a fairly easy win over the Bears to put them into the SuperBowl, so this is gonna be interesting!
::

Juggle This 1:
Pong Progression 2. I'm officially announcing it here, despite having said multiple times in multiple places that I'm doing it XD Basically I hope to release it either the summer of this year or near the end of this year, I'm not sure which.

The thought to release it at the end of the year comes to me because despite being viewed more than any of my other juggling videos and being featured on juggling.tv's homepage, when it came time fo the yearly top 40 jugglers vote, noone seemed to remember it or even be very impressed by it anymore. I know this is so silly and a bit sad, but after getting such a high vote 2 years ago in 2008 and then not even getting on the list in 2009 (which I can understand why), I didn't want 2010 to be a bust too, hence I finally did my two big ideas that I had sitting on the table and made Pong Progression and Android Hell, and while Android Hell was a bit of a bust in terms of views and such, Pong Progression did great, but I released it during the spring. I know I'm a decent size name in the juggling community, I guess I just don't want to fall out of it yet when I've still got a lot left in me to show...

Back to Pong Progression 2 though, I've already started getting some tricks on video for it, and with this video I'm planning to release it in HD as well, I'm making sure to convert all my footage into 720p after recording it (recording it at 720p also, I never upscale.), especially now that I have 2 HD Camcorders, my old one and my Flip Mino. The tricks I've already gotten are incredible I think. I've made a better version of the opening trick from the original, the spiral bounce trick, and made 2 entirely new shots that one is a long distance shot like you wouldn't believe and the other being a kind of shot you just have to see to understand. Let's just say this video if I keep coming up with ideas and footage like this, is going to easily be my best video yet.

Juggle This 2:
Jugglers On Juggling! My big juggling podcast, I've actually gone and committed to doing it again! Yes you may pick your lower jaws off the floor now. The first episode, despite the audio lag from my co-host being in Australia this week, the show went quite well, ustream worked great, and we had a good number of listeners, I'm really amazed at how smooth and easy it's gotten after all the podcasting experience I've done and the pre-planned format now that I've changed the show to.

There is one snag I hit though with the show, and that's the physical setup for the audio. Since ustream and Skype haven't made themselves compatible with each other yet, my setup is essentially to host the ustream broadcast on my main laptop, run skype on my backup laptop and pipe an audio cable from the headphone port, through a splitter so I can listen to the skype call on my headphones, and run the other split cable into the microphone in of the laptop running ustream. It's a hell of a setup that took me about a half hour to get working right, but once it did I got everything just the way I need it to be so I can run audio and the skype call on ustream.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Choosing Between Apples and Apples

2011-01-07T16:19:00.003-05:00

Listen Up!
Had quite the interesting day at my last day of work for the season, I'll tell you all about it in a bit, but for right now I'm back to job hunting during the semester breaka nd the season break as well.
::
I'm still a bit pissed about having my same professor for half of my classes next semester, she really doesn't care at all, but I'm also happy and eager because the opposite is also true, I've got probably my favorite art professor for my other class coming up. It's going to be interesting.
::
Well,I've taken the leap and am going tom start the new season of Jugglers On Juggling tomorrow. I've decided to bring it back to the original format of sorts, in that it will be weekly and a review type of show as opposed to the one-off types of shows I'd been doing for the past 2 seasons or so. A couple major differences is that we'll have specific sections now, very well defined, and that it will be streamed live and there will be no live-plays for videos reviews. I think this is going to be a much better show.
::

Daily Life:
So my last day of work for the season was last Sunday, and let me tell you, it was quite an interesting way to end! Firstly, let me give you the info, the next event to happen there is on the 28th of March, and it'll be a soccer game, so there's basically two and a half full months of nothing there. So that's going to be, well, a bit long and boring.

On to the game itself though, was a pretty meaningless game for the Jets, as they were already in the playoffs as one of the wild-cards and that's about it, of course I'm glad they won their game because it meant the fans at the stadium were happy for their last game of the season. I came in in the morning a bit tired and hungry as usual, and I go out to the big pump-up meeting inside the stadium bowl where the higher-ups give a pep-talk, which I've never really been for at all. I get amped about doing a good job by myself, I don't need cheers, clapping for the employee of the game, or listening to them go "let's show them how special we can make this place! 8D", I just need to have a customer thank me after I help and solve their dilema or have a nice conversation with them and it makes me feel good.

Of course what I wasn't expecting is after that was done and I headed back out to the team meeting at the gate I was posted at during roll-call when the leader got to my name and I announced I was here, he then hands me an envelope, I was the only one of the group to get one, and I'm standing there a bit wide-eyed at it and opened it to find a fairly decent looking Meadowlands pin inside along with the note congratulating me that I had taken care of a secret shopper during the last game and got a 100& score on it. Sweetness :D

So that pumped me up for the day pretty nicely, and after chatting with my buddy Brian who I became friends with there at work the leader made a call for someone to work the elevators, and since Brian didn't catch it (we both like working the elevators, I'll explain in a second) I was the one to be noticed and then brought over to do the job. working the elevators is pretty awesome to do as opposed to scanning people into the stadium, where you do get a post to lean against, but in the elevators you have a full blown chair to sit in for as long as you're working in there, along with having a TV (granted a muted tv) to watch the game on, and your job is simply to know which floor a guest needs to go to and bring them to it. It was only when I got into my position that I learned that guess what, I wasn't filling in for someone who hadn't shown up yet, I was filling in for a guy who had called out and wasn't gonna show up at all! I would be in the elevator all day! Awesome!

Of course I found out during my day long shift in the elevator that there is one massive drawback to the post, and that's sleepiness. If you are the slightest bit sleepy at the start of the shift, don't go for the elevator post! It's repetitive nature will basically have you falling asleep in your chair around the third quarter or so while waiting for someone else to summon you for a ride. So that was pretty much fun near the end of my shift XD

But the shift did indeed end and I rode the bus out to the parking lot tohave the return of the traffic-jam-lot. They'd gotten pretty good at letting everyone out of the lots during the past half of the season, but suddenly they were doign another different route for people to leave, and man did it back things up. I ended up hanging out for a half hour or so listening to one of the nearby tail-gating post bonfires, and then got a clean ride back home where I then set the Giants game to record and flopped down for a nap.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Sorry About That.

2010-12-26T20:26:00.003-05:00

Listen Up!
Yeah... sorry about the massively late post guys. The semester at college this year plus new working at the Meadowlands really sapped my time and energy. Haven't juggled much or even done much to put on youtube. Well hopefully now that the winter is here I'll be keeping up on things. Well since I'm in a ranting/typing kind of mood and there's a lot to talk about, prepare for a big long post!

::

Working at the Meadowlands is probably the best damn job I've had overall, it just has not gotten boring or mundane at all since getting the job back at the start of the summer, and in fact I think it's gotten better with the football season. Firstly, they've actually been working to make the stadium better, at least for us. Granted they still have huge policy changes to make for both the employees and the guests, such as allowing us to (officially) take out coats home with us and designate smoking areas inside the stadium for the guests, but they are listening it seems. The employee break room changed from essentially a closet during the summer to the nice big club sized room for the football season, then one day they started offering Meatball Subs in the break room at a reasonable price, and they changed it back to meatballs after they tried doing hot-dogs instead and half of the employees at least complained about it. So things there are great despite the cold weather and the fact I'm on my feet the entire game time and then some. Best job I've had in ages.

::

College is almost over :D I have two more classes to take before I have completed my degree in Media Arts, and once those are done next semester I'll be off looking for a full time job while I take a few extra courses I want to take because I'm interested in them :D I'll talk about THIS semesters experience in the next section, as I went on a bit of a big rant :P

::

As for other things cuch as juggling, well I seem to haven't had much time to practice recently, but the past times I have this semester have been pretty damn good. I managed a couple of awesome tricks during my ring practice session back in October, managing another 5up180, long run of 5 ring full reverse, 7 ring qualify, and a lot more high numbers tricks, then in November I managed a couple more flashes of 8, along with learning to do awesome head-stall moves with balls, and now in December I have gotten back into Diabolo and am already progressing fast with it. I of course also managed to upload quite a few great videos here at the end of the year.

Daily Life:
College is finally over this semester, and I have to admit, it's a damn miracle I managed to get through my two classes this semester. Oh no I don't mean in terms of grades, my final grades were a C+ and B- for the semester, and no I don't mean the workload, that was actually fairly light and fairly easy, no I'm talking about the professor. She is quite possibly the worst professor I've had. I literally, out of all the bad professors I've had, am hard pressed to remember one worse. From my physics 1 professor who was so boring he couldn't make an experiment where we learned about gravity and parabolic arcs by launching CATAPULTS interesting, to my math professor who was the most uncompromising and least flexible person I've ever met.

What makes her bad do you ask? Simple. She doesn't teach a damn thing. She simply tells you what the assignment is, doesn't even give specifications very often other than that we HAVE to use a certain program even if the job can be done easier and more quickly in photoshop, and then goes away, not even being clear about what the due date is. She doesn't open any book even once, nor does she show you how to do anything or give any tips on designing something. She just gives the assignment and goes away.

Granted, this technique works in a way, the best way to learn something is to screw around and see what works and what doesn't, but we are PAYING her to do.... nothing! That and her attitude too, she blatantly said right out in the middle of one of the last classes "I was the only one willing to teach these courses..." which explained why there was only one option in taking these last few required courses, but it also blatantly says "I'm here because I have to be and don't want to be." which is just BRILLIANT for actually getting students to give a crap, because if the professor doesn't care (which she seemed not to at all) why the hell should we?...

Juggle This:
k, I didn't want to say anything about this situation over at the top 40 jugglers of the year poll but it's been niggling at the back of my mind now for weeks. First I have to make a qualifying statement though.

I don't dislike Wes anymore. For a while I admit I felt like he turned his back on the technical side of juggling in favor of just doing whatever crazy idea pops into his head, and while I still think that's true it's his decision to make and there's no reason for me to feel "betrayed". So I'm simply put, just not a Wes fan anymore :P I don't hate him or anything, he's just another juggler with a style I don't care for, albeit a really good one.

That said! I have absolutely no idea why people CONTINUE to vote for him in the end of the year poll. I had no idea why they did it last year and even moreso this year!

#1. He hasn't put out ANYTHING this year save for 1 video, a trailer, and his 1 pay-to-view video. Hell GATTO's put out a hell of a lot more than that for free, and I'VE put out a hell of a lot more than that, and I'm actually a bit pissed at how little I've been managing to upload the last year or two!

#2. He's already won the #1 spot what, 3 times now? I understand he's immensely inspiring but you really don't want to see anyone else be the #1 juggler besides him? I mean hell, even Thomas Dietz HIMSELF grew tired of being the overall undisputed champion at the WJF after 4 years! I'd MUCH rather see the much deserving Lauge get #1 this year, just like I think Doug Sayers should have been #1 last year.

#3. I can't shake the feeling that people are forgetting this is a top juggler of the YEAR competition, not an overall competition... Everyone votes for simply their favorite jugglers, not the ones who deserved it most over the course of the year. I have to admit, it is tough to not do this, even I may be guilty of it though I make sure to let the jugglers who have a shot at the top ten not be influenced.

For instance this year I didn't vote for Vova because granted while he did put out two r three awesome tricks on video late this year, he hasn't put out compilation video of any sort, and until the WJF Video competitions I even forgot about him for a short time. He wasn't at the WJF and really didn't do much, hence why despite being one of my favorite jugglers and a friend, I didn't cast a vote for him.

I just had to get that all off my mind :P Sorry ^^;;

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

If Richard were a cheeseburger, he would be a really good cheeseburger.

2010-10-14T05:30:00.000-04:00

Listen Up!
Sorry about the delay, being sick really does suck. It's odd how you only really remember that when you get sick XD. I got the flu right before heading off to Philly Jugglers Fest on the 2nd and 3rd, and then got better just in time for it, then got sick a few days later and that was worse, then I finally got better yesterday.
::
Well my classes are doing fine, parents are paranoid about me getting there late and making sure my assignments are done, but I have stopped expecting anything different from them. Still annoying as hell though. But either way, the class is pretty basic and simple so far, and I'm breezing through the assignments, I expect it to get harder in a few weeks time though.
::
Work at the Meadowlands has certainly been fun as hell, especially the last game I worked on the 10th, where there were typhoon winds and rains pre-game when I was out scanning tickets, which I'll talk more about later because it was way fun and interesting.
::
And this week's title is actually my new favorite quote to put on DVD's an Posters of me, is what someone said bout me on facebook after I posted a video. I would be a really good cheesebuger if I were a cheeseburger XD
::

Daily Life:
Monday night, which I just found out from my cousin who is a supervisor there is a holiday that I am getting paid double time for (Woo!!!!), was the night of the Jets vs Vikings game, and the night when it hailed in New York City just a mile and a half away. Toi be blunt, this was a fuuuuun night. I'm coming off of the flu, and I've still got soem soreness and a cough but that was all thankfully, and I'm headed off to my usual post at the Verizon Gate as a ticket scanner. Of course I am switching around between handing out playbooks and taking tickets the whole time which is usual and good because it keeps things interesting, but then I come back from my break and go on ticket scanning duty right around an hour before kickoff. They said 20% chance of rain.....

Suddenly about a half hour before the game was to start a few drops of rain fall, nothing bad at all, and then a few more, and within a minute it's done and dry again, and for a few minutes it stays that way, until suddenly, with absolutely no warning at all, it is raining enough to flood the parking lots, literally! That was plenty fun, especially having everyone suddenly crowd in as the scanners and security checkers moved under the gate's roof to stay dry, until a few minutes later the wind picked up, and I was on the left side of my section, getting pressed and blown into the railings of the gate by typhoon winds as the rain blew sideways straight under the roof. There was NO dryness anywhere save for inside the stadium, and then the winds picked up even more right as the lightning watch went into effect and delayed the game. Literally right after they started the lightning watch, the tents, tables, chairs, and all the other signage that was placed about on the plaza outside the stadium, tore apart and began blowing down, nearly mowing people down on the concrete if not for the "LOOK OUT!" warnings me and other employees were shouting at them. I was just having a blast the whole time.

Then of course the game began and I was redeployed all over the place, first I took over the space of a guest services rep who had been punched in the stomach by a guest after trying to enforce the policy that noone can carry more than 2 beers at a time around. Next I was redeployed after he returned to the escalator area, which is the most open to the air part of the stadium, and hence where all the smokers thought their area was, which in reality was down the escalator on the plaza/ground level. I barely even got to watch the game on the monitors I had to run around so much politely telling people to just go down the escalator to smoke. it was quite the fun night indeed...

Juggle This: PHILLY FEST 2010
Philly Jugglers Fest this year was really quite a good fest to go to, like it always is. I got a friend who lives about 20 minutes out of Philly since last year, and so I invited him to the con at the same time as I stayed over his place for the night instead of hassling the local jugglers like I do every year XD. So I get there early in the day to find he's gotten a stomach bug of some sort right before we were to head out, literally I was ready to go and so was he, we waited through a quick breakfast and then as I was waiting in the car for him he ended up hunching over the toilet with nausea. It sucked but we figured tomorrow he'd get to go see everything, just not me performing, as I left for day one by myself.

So I was prepared to perform 2 routines this year at the stage show, Android Hell, which is my angled surface apparatus, and then Muffin Clutches. I was all ready to perform both like I said I would until I got word from the headmaster around 4 PM or so that he'd not let me do Muffin Clutches. I was a bit bummed and confused as it's not at all a tasteless routine, and all the other jugglers/performers/staff were excited to see it too, but hey, if the headmaster says no...

So after 4 rolled past and I'd spent the first few hours in rehearsal (which was going on the moment I got in) and then said hello to everyone again, happily surprised to see Jason Garfield was there this year, it was time for some of Jason's Combat Games. I teamed up with the other random guys that were left and readied to try out a few new strategies I'd thought up and observed since playing them last at WJF6, and they worked well. Zombie Combat my team won handily and then Kill The King was even better as I tried out my strategy of 'Less defensive players, strongest survivor as king, and the second best survivors going in and flanking the king, just trying to get past the defenders and not attack them'. We won that hands down and then Sumo we managed to edge out as well before finally came the 360's combat, and NOONE on my team could do 3up 360's well enough to compete XD so that made for quite the fun round as the only person who could do them was pitted against another and just tried like hell to stop him from spinning. It was so much fun to watch.

So when that was over we advanced to the finals against the BEAST team of Joe Showers, Josh Horton, and Anthony... We lost before we even started let's just say, despite their intentional handicap of 3 on 4 players throughout. I was a bit bummed as I didn't give Jason as much good footage as i usually give him, but hey, can't have everything, I was too focused n being psyched that my team was doing to well in the first rounds, making my win count in MLC 2-3 in Zombie, Sumo, and Kill The King. Not a bad record I'd say.

So then it was time to perform, and I was a bit worried about Android Hell, not because I couldn't do the routine, I could nail it ever time, I was worried about the presentation of it, as it can only be seen well from the front, and the seating at the Philly stage is pretty wide, so unfortunately people on the sides either got a view of the back of the apparatus or of my back, and not much else. Hopefully I can improve the apparatus with a plexiglass surface instead of a stiff cardboard one so I can change the visibility of it, but overall it went well despite the setback in visibility. Then it was time to leave for my friends place to spent the night.

Day two began with me managing to coax my buddy back off to the fest and most of that day was spent at the left side of the gym playing around on the projection screen, getting all sort of awesome rolling patterns going along with showing off and getting other people to try out my angled surface. Got a lot of good footage of the rolling juggling, and hopefully I'll be making a video with that footage sometime soon.

The games went good as I played a lot of them, doing my 4 ball body fountain to one on the head stall for best trick and go a fair bit of votes, of course I was going to do that and Muffin Clutches if I could, but I found out only after I went that you could only do one trick out of the three attempts, which is crappy rules but oh well, I wouldn't have got it anyways as I myself was voting for the through the legs whip catch of a diabolo, just amazing. I also made a big run in the 5 ball endurance of 2 minutes and third place, of course the winner went on for a full ten minutes even after winning going for a personal best, which is just insane. And I made a good shot too at the handicapped standing on one foot juggling, where I got third as well if I remember right.

Overall a great convention and I got to have my good buddy experience a juggling con for the first time, my first performance going well on the Philly stage, and just an all around awesome way to spend a weekend.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

I honestly don't know

2010-09-26T16:02:00.003-04:00

Listen Up!
Indeed it does. I've got a pretty bad cold of some sort for a good 5 days now, and I had to call off a day at work because of it. Basically I'm over it now, but I hate how each time I ever do get sick I never am able to do anything. Of course there was an interesting point my mom brought up when I told her I'd called off of work, and that was that she couldn't understand how I "laze about" when sick, no matter how bad it is for her show powers through and does her work no matter what. I find this just silly, and I'm wondering, because it is a totally subjective thing, if I'm crazy for actually STAYING at home and maybe even in bed when I'm ill...
::
So on to other things, I'm headin to Philly Jugglers Fest this weekend! And I'm finally performing as part of the stage show there, where I'll be doing Android Hell and Muffin Clutches. Once again I've thought about saying farewell to the Muffin Clutches routine, but the great thing is it's just so simple, and easy, and great, I don't think it'll ever get old, even I'm getting excited about performing it again! The last time I did so was on the Juggle This stage in the spring. Hopefully Android Hell will do well though, because while I'm able to do pretty much all the tricks in the video now plus a few more, I'm still not sure about viewing angles for the audience. i mean the balcony is going to have a GREAT view of the act, but I'm still not too sure about the others, well, we'll see what happens.
::
College is doing VERY well this semester so far! My projects are getting done quite quickly and I'm getting to class pretty much on time each day, despite what my parents may think. I'm so glad I got my copy of photoshop years ago, because playing around with it has given me all the knowledge and skills I need to basically finish these classes faster than half of the rest of the class. Things are good.
::

Daily Life:
SO I've been having strange and memorable dreams recently. the past two days in particular have been quite incredible, from essentially the first sex dream I've had in years which I won't go into detail on two days ago, to yesterdays dream which I will. It was somewhere between a dream and a nightmare, and I can't really remember plot or such from it, but the imagery of it was so incredible and it's stuck with me so well I might end up making it into an art piece.

The dream started off as I was inside a store in some sort of car race, racing some sort of go-car type car through a K-Mart like store with all these bends and diving between racks and such, and it was awesome to say the least. As that ended though and I made my way to the back room however, it ended up with me somehow unwittingly walking into an underground organization of some sort, dealing in some sort of illegal substance, it wasn't any specific drug, but it essentially was that, and I was forced to play along and be part of it from what I knew was a notoriously "kill any intruders" type of boss in this white cinder painted back-storage room which now that I reflect was a lot like a Shoprite back loading docks if all the pallettes and such were removed leaving the white painted cinder walls.

After he realized who I was and saw how I was intelligent enough to play along, he put me into a loyalty test thing, where basically I was to hold a screw up to the wall and stand there in the same spot holding the screw to the wall until he said otherwise. Of course I knew this meant I'd be standing there all night, so I settled in and entertained myself somehow with looking around and getting to know my surroundings, until suddenly he snuck up behind me and set a pair of headphones on me, with mini-screens the flipped down in front of my eyes. I resisted a bit but there was pretty much nothing I could do as I was still intent on holding that screw to the wall. So soon enough the video and audio started, and it was just like a virtual reality helmet, and it went on a propaganda type horror video, you know, the type designed to desensitize people to something while scaring the shit out of them?

Basically this video went on with all sorts of images like what looked like a disembodied Weird-Al Yankovich head (from his early days with the mustache) coming closer to me and shaking from side to side as it's face was filled up with needles, dozens of them, starting on the left, then spreading like a cancer to the right and all over, all the while creeping closer as more flew in. Another image I saw was when I was running down the same white storage room I was actually in save for fake buildings that dotted the sides, while a line of arrows was shot at me along the ground, chasing me to the wall where there was a bent one stuck in the wall which, when I grabbed, seemed to halt them for a moment before they fired again straight for me. Another image was the classic image of all the walls of a room showing massive faces belting out insults or other sayings that messed with your head, and one final image I remember was me hiding by clinging spider-man style up in a corner to hide from him as he shot up the walls with a machine gun. All the while with this I would remember it was VR partly and put my right hand back up in front of me to hold that screw to the wall.

I woke up right in the middle of the last image with a shock and I still have no idea what to make of any of it, but those images were just so visceral and mind-fucky I just can't forget them. I've had VERY few dreams like that, the most memorable one is the recurring nightmare I had when I was around 6 years old of us going to a dining hall and having a massive tongue reach out from the megaphone style speakers across the room and shoot towards me

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

The New Semester

2010-09-22T04:45:00.000-04:00

Listen Up!
ANOTHER New video?! Yes! Android Hell. My inspired little routine of sliding balls on an angled surface in order to juggle them, and an act I'll be performing at Philly Fest this year in a few weeks. I'm really quite proud of this, and the editing on the video too. I hope you enjoy it!
::
College is working quite well, of course I'll let you read more about it below, as that's what I'm talking about this week in depth. And a thought just popped into my head! If I'm always missing so much because I can't think of something to write in the longer sections of the blog, perhaps would me readers simply be happy listening to me give little updates from just this first section if I never missed them each week?.... I love and hate my random ideas sometimes.
::
Work at the Meadowlands has been fairly good, I've been watching the Jets suck and then suddenly put EVERYTHING together in the second half of their last game against the Patriots, and I was quite excited to watch as they went to just clear house and get a 28 to 14 game against them! That was incredible to see let me tell you. Of course then I saw when I got home that the Giants were absolutely CRUSHED TO POWDER, and yeah, that put me in a meh kinda mood, even after seeing all my other favorite teams win, the Dolphins, Steelers, Buccaneers, and Jets.

Daily Life:
Well with college having begun it's time to talk about what I've got going on this semester. I've gotten a big change this semester over the others, I'm only taking 2 classes. There's a few reasons for this, first of all, they were the only 2 classes besides morning classes that were available that went towards my degree. That was the big reason, but the other reason and the reason why I'm not taking extra courses to pull out a full 12 credits is because I'm hopefully going to continue my job hunting through the semester and get a good job besides working at Meadowlands Stadium, that way I can actually start building up money for things such as buying a new laptop, paying back college debts with my parents, and paying for trips and such.

Now I did learn recently that the new meeting time for the Tech.MCC club which I've just stepped down as president from is now during my class time on Tuesdays, but I figure I'll be able to at least pop in from time to time as long as I get my work done readily. It's going to be a bit weird but I think I could get used to not going there each week, and Jon seems to be doing an alright job already of spreading the word and getting people into the club, I heard that there were 4 people at the first meeting without there being fliers put out, which is a good sign.

Now, on to my classes though, my first one is Typography, and it's going to be an excellent class. I've always known about how text and type can either compliment or detract from an image, and now I'm going to be learning the nuances of this and hopefully getting better at designing things. Another thing I love it, like the other class I'm taking this semester, all the work, or at least the majority of it, is going to be done in photoshop! Always great to be in my element at the computer with my program. Already the first assignment had been done and handed in, and I think it's a great start to things! I'm eager to see where this class leads. Tuesdays from noon till 5.

The next class is on Wednesdays at the same time, and it's a very similar class, even sharing the same instructor, and it's Digital Graphics. Plain and simple, you can't get more descriptive than that title, or more broad. I am also eager to see where this class leads, because it is done in nothing BUT photoshop, which is great! Like the other one the first project has already been done and I've done a decent job on it as well I believe, and it was a simple cutting and pasting assignment, the technical word being a photo-montage. Basically cut out elements from one photo and put them into another so they fit nicely. It seems to be quite easy with the skills I've gotten from doing EXACTLY THAT in a few of my profile and facebook pictures over the years, so while I'm not going to say I'm going to breeze through these classes, I will say I think they are FINALLY going to actually compliment what I already know how to do in the real world and have good real world applications as well.

Juggle This:
I am so eager for Philly Fest to arrive. I've been practicing my performance routines and am absolutely ready for it. I just hope that Michael Karas manages to show up, I may sound a bit awkward saying so, but I really don't get to see him enough. I don't know what it is, but his style and thought process I find compliments my own fairly well, and I've been inspired to do lots of things by bouncing ideas off of him, granted some of the ideas have been worse than others, but we really do get along grandly and I just feel a kinship with him. He is my best juggler friend and again, I hope he makes it so I can try out some of the awesome juggling machines he's made, I've been fascinated by so many of them from the pipes to the very notion of underwater juggling.

Sorry this is getting really tangential, Philly. Each year has been a blast and this year I hope will be no different, and of course I'm always eager to see just who shows up and maybe I'll also host a workshop there about videography or something, as I love doing that despite having only a few things I'm actually qualified to run a workshop on.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

A Tale Of Video Editing

2010-09-03T16:27:00.003-04:00

Juggling video hosted @ Juggling.tv

Listen Up!
Workin at the Meadowlands is just great. I just have to say that. There's plenty of things to nitpick at for sure, like the parking situation for example. Which has gotten way worse now, since they are making us park at the BACK of the employee lot and having to go through quite a number of hoops just to get to the punch in clocks. But the big thing that will never change is that I'm in a customer service job, which is what I'm best suited for, and getting PAID to watch football games. This is just awesome. OH! Especially sicne we just got a new break room! One which is literally triple the size of the old one with working AC and NORMAL chairs to relax in as opposed to the high-chairs of the old one which were almost leaving you better off standing.
::
College is about to start, and I think this is going to be interesting, because for the first time ever, I'm going to only be taking 2 classes, and continuing to job-hunt the rest of the time. It's going to be good because the two classes I'm sure to like, Digital Graphics and Typography. I'm not 100% sure what to expect this semester, but it's going to be an interesting one for sure, especially since I've stepped down as president of Tech.MCC
::
I've rarely felt like a more awesome juggler, as you'll read below. I think the only times I've felt more proud of being a juggler was when I was featured on Juggling.TV for Pong Progression and when I was featured on the list of the top 40 jugglers for 2008. I'm so eager for Philly Fest!
::

Juggle This:
This, feels, AWESOME. Not only have I released Intercepted Gravity a few days ago and gotten nearly a thousand views already on Juggling.tv alone! But I've also come up with a unique routine that I can finally put together and perform at Philly Fest on the main stage! I'd thought about doing Muffin Clutches up there as an in-between routine but enough people have seen it and kinda isn't right for that stage, especially the fact the routine barely lasts for a minute and a half. But this new one is awesome, and I don't want to reveal too many details about it right now, so instead I'm going to talk about Intercepted Gravity and what went into making it.

So I start off the same way I always do, by gathering footage from whatever practice sessions I do, and trying hard moves that I hadn't managed to do before or breaking personal records for them. While doing that I also try to get routines in there of tricks strung together in interesting ways, and so after a few months of doing that, I had enough footage to start editing. Now, when I start editing I always never have enough footage to complete the video, and that's kind-of intentional, because I like to have my videos build themselves, and I would like to explain that further because that was a very mystical statement.

I don't like to plan things out, especially when it comes to my videos and such. I always leave room for improvisation and as with my music videos, leave footage space so i can record more later. This is because as I start editing, I'm able to look at the style of the clips and find a piece of music and editing style that matches, giving the video a cohesive center. From there, that allows me to be inspired by it and come up with more tricks and routines that are done with that style in mind, so it compliments the whole video even more. That and it's very easy to record more footage than I need after I've started editing and gone back to recording, and that is a very good thing, because then I can afford to toss out the worse portions and replace them with better ones.

Once I finally get done with the first edit, I always continue to record more footage to see if things can be improved, and I watch the video over and over again. This is to make sure that I notice things, like segments which are too long, slow, or boring, and replace them with better ones or fix them. A lot of the times the editing will be imperfect like when I make a trick that synch's with a certain beat of the music, sometimes it will be off a bit because the editing preview isn't synched as well as the final video, so I get to fix those things after watching it fully rendered.

Usually from there the video is done and I show it to a few of my good juggling friends to see how it looks to them before upload, which is what I did for this one, but around the 3rd revision round or so, I struck upon something amazing. I realized about the color curves tool in Vegas, and looked at each clip of my video. Nearly all of them had incorrect colors! ESPECIALLY in the form of too much green and blue. So I managed to figure out how to finally fix my colors in the video, and make things look professional once and for all! I can't possibly see how I managed to edit videos before now! It's absolutely incredible if you watch my more recent videos and then compare them to Intercepted Gravity. They just look so much worse!

Well that's what I had to say about that, I'm quite elated with what I've been doing in relation to juggling recently and I can only hope this will continue until at least Philly Fest, and then past there so I have a shot once again at getting on the top 40 jugglers of the year once again XD

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

New Meadowlands Stadium! The Place To Be!

2010-08-17T03:52:00.003-04:00

Listen Up!So now that my blog is back and I've talked all about jugglign last week, I suppose it's time to finally talk in depth about my job at the New Meadowlands Stadium, as I've been there working 10 times now (Bon Jovi 4x, Soccer 2x, Hot 97, The Eagles, Giants Practice, and Jets vs Giants), and haven't discussed a single event. Granted some have been more boring than others, and some have been more exciting than others, so I think I'll just do a quick run through of one event then a full report for another one this time. And then maybe the same thing next time if the Giants vs Steelers turns out to be a mediocre game.
::
Bartending jobs sure are HARD to land. I had one at Bensi's Italian Restaurant seemingly down, until I went in for the interview and was told they'd just filled out their positions. I'm still looking obviously, and I'm going to be going back to the training center in Red Bank soon to get in some physical practice as a refresher before going out and looking for more. Bottom line, it's tough...
::
After finally going through all my WJF6 footage and getting that video done, I've gotten to look at all the trick footage I've gotten of myself for my next video, Intercepted Gravity, and Holy Crap was there a lot of good stuff! Enough in fact that I've been able to edit the first cuts of the video fully!

Daily Life:
So since I haven't talked about it yet, I've changed my mind and I'm gonna talk about what I've done so far with the different positions instead of going into details about one specific event. So far there are very few places I haven't done around the stadium, and that's a good thing.

I've worked inside and on the seats of the sideline club, basically the most VIP/Premier/High end club in the stadium, during the Hot 97 concert, which was the most brutal experience ever and I'll go more in depth about that in later posts.

I worked in the 300 concourse right in the endzone, in other words the nosebleeds section, for the first set of Bon Jovi concerts. They had an amazingly great view of things, especially during the finale with all the fireworks and then when the stadium was lit up with all the monitors, and it was also nice and cool with the winds constantly blowing through the tunnel to the seats.

I worked in an elevator lobby during the first soccer game (Mexico vs Ecuador), and during the Eagles concert I worked in a plaza level elevator lobby, where the speakers weren't on and the TV was stuck on channel ABC 7, so I couldn't experience the concert at all, just sit and watch Jeopardy and Wheel Of Fortune in silence.

I worked the ticket gates for the first quarter of the Giants vs Jets game and the first part of the last Bon Jovi concert, which is a great spot to work in until the show starts, because you don't have to deal with moving people to the right seats, dealing with smokers, or anything else, just scan the ticket and say "welcome to Meadowlands, enjoy the game" or something along those lines.

I worked in the 300 Concourse corners for the Giants Practice and for US vs Brazil, and that was an interesting spot to work because of how the sections are designed for sure. Luckily during the Giants practice I really only had to sit down in the seats and get a big tan while waiting for people to come up and see their seats as where the soccer game, well I'll go into more detail in later posts on that as well.

And finally I worked in the 100 Concourse, right on the corner of the field, for the last 3 quarters of the Jets vs Giants game, absolutely the best spot to work in so far from the view alone, but the worst because so many complained about not being able to see when people stand up, and that's because the seats are set at such a low angle.

So far though, with each of them, the traffic getting there hasn't been that bad, save for the USA vs Brazil soccer match thanks to a rubbernecking caused traffic jam that ate up a full half hour of driving time RIGHT in front of the exit to get to the stadium. The break rooms have been getting slightly better each time, though the food still sucks and the rooms are way too small, at least now they're air conditioned better and have working TV's in them, now to just get breaks given to us at decent times is all. Traffic exiting the game has gotten better and better with each one, and deservedly so after the nightmare of the Mexico vs Ecuador Game which had traffic backed up for a full three hours after the game had ended.

Though no matter what downsides this stadium has, and there's still plenty of them in terms of working situation and in stadium design, the simple and wonderful fact is I'm getting PAID to watch concerts and football games. NOTHING could beat that in terms of a job. And it's why I intend to keep this one as long as I possibly can.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

WJF6 - Who says you can't act stupid?!

2010-08-02T04:21:00.005-04:00

Listen Up!
So yeah, sorry about the nearly three month long hiatus from the blog. I think it was kinda needed though because every post felt like a chore and writing them became tedious. I would put them off for weeks and then just completely forget about them. Well, the break is over and hopefully you guys are still reading this before I bore you with too much stuff!
::
My job at New Meadowlands Stadium is going absolutely GREAT so far, I've got a couple great stories from that place already and every single time I've worked there (save for one) was at the very least interesting and at best fun and AWESOME. I'll talk about it some more next week.
::
As for my bartending stuff, I'm STILL on the hunt for a bartending job. I'm noticing most of the reason I'm having trouble is because even though I do have my certification, very few bars are willing to hire first time tenders, so that's making it difficult, because I have a great resume when it comes to customer service, it's what I'm good at and what every job I've held has dealt with save for one or two.
::
Being the summer, not much is going on in terms of college, however, the TechMCC Pinball machine is finally starting to take shape, there's still lots of physical work to be done but that's almost all there is to do is the physical work. Oh, and as a side note, I've finally passed off the presidency to someone else this semester, I've made a couple bad moves the past two semesters and really need to give a fresh set of hands the club reigns.
::

Daily Life:
SO this years WJF was definitely an interesting one to say the least. No Vova, and no Dietz, it certainly made for a huge opportunity for the juniors to shine once again as they did last year. But let's go back to my usual timeline style of recapping things!

So I arrived a full day early in order to give myself time to sleep in and get over the jetlag, which fortunately was in the backwards direction, my usual time of waking up of noon turned into waking up at 9, which made things SO much easier on me to actually get into the con earlier than usual, but here I go again with tangent details. My roommate for the con was Casey the whole time except for the last day, in which I stayed by myself because he left the day before I did. I didn't expect him to spend the night before the con at Circus Circus, but I was pleasantly surprised when I did, Circus Circus is so far the second best hotel and casino I'd been to on the entire strip, only second to the MGM Grand. I spent a good chunk of time waiting for him and getting some blackjack and gambling out of my system, winning a number of toys in the arcade thanks to the skill based games that I had an advantage at as a juggler. So then he arrived way late in the evening and we went up and got the sleep we both desperately needed, the next day going over to the Riv in order to put our bags in the room and get to the first day of the con.

As with all first days at a con, I spent the first few hours introducing myself around to everyone who came up to me after seeing me on yourube and catching up with good friends, namely Steve Hoggan, one of my best juggler friends (the others being Michael Karas and Kevin Axtell if you were curious) and then finally it was off to finally start juggling. Now being the summer, I really didn't have anywhere to practice regularly beforehand, so I could really feel myself struggling with my rings. That got better as I warmed up and got reassociated with numbers, but still.

So the first day was mostly just that, hanging out, juggling, doing a bit of filming of some AMAZING stuff like a ten ball flash and 5 diabolo runs that you can see in the montage video I made, and then came the evening, and time to go to the Major League Combat orientation. We went over the rules of MLC games again and found that there were 5 teams going for 4 slots, so the last two teams had to end up competing to get in. I was on one of those teams. So the next day, one of the first things to happen was the qualifying round of MLC between "Those Guys" and "These Guys" as we temporarily named ourselves. We were Those Guys, and over a few rounds of Zombie, Sumo, and Kill The King, we ended up sweeping it and claiming our place in the finals as Team Passing Zone. Awesome.

Day two was a fairly relaxed day, enough so that in the evening I was even able to swing over to Circus Circus again and hang out in the Adventuredome. So with that let's move on to day three, where things REALLY started kicking up, namely because it was my day to compete. I thought I'd be less nervous this year, because I'd already competed at the last WJF in intermediates, but I guess that feeling of "Okay, you actually have a shot at this, don't screw it up" really does mess with ya, as I was the third to come out and while I did hit my 5 ring half shower and full reverse on the second attempts, my 6x4 string was a bit of a wash, and the time went by so fast that I didn't get the chance to do much besides that! My hands were shaking a bit and my heart was racing the whole time, especially because I thought I was screwed, since the sheet said that there were 4 competitors, but then as I heard Casey announcing that was the end and they were moving on to clubs, I realized that there was an error in the printout and the worst I could have done was third place! Hey, I'm plenty happy with winning the bronze by default! Especially as I was able to bring my half shower to the table and hit it this year.

So I watched the rest of the competitions go and was utterly amazed of course by the level that the intermediate clubs were at along with the endurance competitions, followed of course by the advanced competitions later which were astounding to say the least, I can hardly remember any of them because my brain was just concentrated on trying to keep track of what they actually were doing and soaking it all in. Then after the juniors competition was over the judges were taking a hell of a long time to come up with the results, and since everyone wat sitting there waiting for them, the juniors competitors ended up going and fooling around on stage, to which me and Casey started having some fun. Casey started playing some of the cheezy party dance songs like the Macarena and the Cha CHa Slide, all of them doing the dances mid juggling pattern before I got the idea to do a Limbo contest with juggling patterns in the mix of it! I went out and with another person grabbed some of Drew's canes and used them as a limbo bar for the juniors to either 3up and then slide under or crawl under while doing a low 3 club pattern. It turned out to be quite the awesome thing.

After the competitions was an awesome time, me and Steve recognized that Jason had left the lights on on the empty stage, and we started filming. After yesterday managing to film us doing 5 ring full reverse side by side, we were amped to try passing again as we did at WJF5. After warming up with 7, 8, and ten ring ultimates we moved on to twelve, and after only about 16 minutes of absolutely determined efforts, we qualifies 12 ring ultimates passing. Everyone at the convention heard my celebratory cry the moment we got it, and from that alone you could tell how awesome it was for me! What was even better was that before we started passing we'd both gotten tons of great footage of our best solo tricks in the brilliant lighting for our next videos, me getting everything I could do again from a 97531 with 5 rings to a ton of 4 ring strings, but that wasn't the end! After me and Stave drew everyone into the stage with my shout, people began to do the same as we did, including Doug and Ben, who went and started trying to break more passing world records right in front of everyone's cameras including mine, getting a WONDERFUL clean run of 15 balls that broke the old record by a full 7 or 8 catches! Needless to say, this was one of the highlight days of the con for me!

So the next day after that was another banger of a day. The Major League Combat competitions started right around 2PM after the "Maximum Overdrive" event, which was awesome in and of itself, a big conglomeration of the top level competitors simply on stage trying to do their hardest moves or whatever else they wanted. Our team was the very first one out, and all of everyone being jugglers, we felt like playing up the intro's, of course we went for the classic Purple Cobras entrance, and it looked great. Of course it must have jinxed us (the Purple Cobras lost in the movie XD), as we lost every one of our 4 events to the eventual second place winning team, Duncan. It was way worth it though. Especially as we gave a couple good highlight clips for Jason to use.

Of course after that was probably one of the funniest hours of the convention for me, and noone else got to see it but me, Crizzly, and Jason. Why? Because it was the rehearsal for the Battle for the Presidency show, where I learned exactly what I would be doing during the show after the mysterious email I received from Jason the week before asking if I wanted to be in it but not revealing a single detail. I was to be given a piggyback ride my Jason, and then to fall on top of him XD. If that alone doesn't make you laugh you have no sense of humor! As we rehearsed and figured out exactly how I was going to get up on Jason's back and stay there for the short time I needed to, I realized just how hard the piggyback technique was as opposed to acrobatic positions like a human tower, but that's a random observation you probably don't need to hear about. We found out how to do that, and then I found out the next thing I would be doing in the show. I was going to be crawling with Jason sitting on my back for a jousting match XD! Needless to say I managed to handle his weight nicely and we figured out what would happen during the bit and then I just couldn't stop chuckling the rest of the night. I kept thinking to myself "Thank god I have no shame XD"

So the next day arrived and after another quick rehearsal in the morning it was time for the big show, my bits were some of the very first, so after goign off and getting my big laughs during the Piggyback concentration competition, and then a few bits later doing the WJF Jousting, I came back up and watched the rest of the amazing show. Getting to see Doug's routine again was mind blowing, as well as the debut of Doug and Josh's routine, which was absolutely stunning. Finally the whole thing was over and then it was time a few hours later to head off to the banquet at, of all places, an Indian restaurant 20 minutes away. The food sucked and there was no video thanks to Jason not really having enough time to compile it before needing to get there, but the sign on front made up for it all. "Closed for World GIGGLING Federation" it said. EVERYONE took a picture and had a big laugh at it, and for a moment or two, it truly was the World Giggling Federation thanks to that very sign XD

So after that I spent an extra day bumming around Vegas, I should have asked Steve to go with me in hindsight, but whatever. I had a good sleep on my flight back and arrived home, this time without losing ANY footage or any equipment, which was very nearly a first time occurrence for me! I'm so eager for the next WJF which are going to be in Springfield Illinois, a WAY closer venue AND one which is going to provide for a LOT more convenience and support from the city!

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Dreamy...

2010-05-19T16:28:00.003-04:00

I've got a bit of a different blog post for you today. My regular posts are going to continue absolutely, I just need to get the time and opportunity to do them.

Dream Sequence:
Holy crap did I just wake up from some incredible dreams. The first one wasn't all that special or memorable, something about me helping to arrange and organize Steve Wozniak's personal desk space at his new house during his housewarming party in an effort to keep him interested in staying there. The other one though was WOW.

Now I've never but any stock in conspiracy theories, they all are absolute crap, but when my mind wanders around in dreams, it seems that in my skewed dream reality I am at least willing to investigate them. I started the dream right off having heard a rumor about cereal companies really being shady underground mob-like organizations. In this reality cereal is a commodity that's sold like nothing else, it's available at every corner vendor and even in "cereal trucks", exactly the same as ice cream trucks only selling boxes of cereal instead. After casually investigating I find that my dream world version of "Cookie Crisp" is most worthy of investigation, so I go down in this dream world to the production floor. In this dream world, it seems like society is built in floors, at least the city that I was in. Where the top floor with sunlight was residential, the next floor down was the ground floor where all commercial stuff takes place (and it was particularly dingy in a sort of Ninja Turtles way, and the underground floor was where all industry took place. I went down to the industrial floor and into the Cookie Crisp area, munching on an open box of the stuff to look innocuous enough, and I asked for a tour at the tiny little desk window. To my right was the big entrance gate, and there seemed to be no walls in the factory, and it looked like Cookie Crisp was made in the last stages simply from taking an extruded log of solid Cookie Crisp, and then chopping it into the disk's the cereal consists of. I don't remember the exact conversation I had with the guy at the window, but in it he dropped rather unsubtle clues to "not ask too many questions, save you find yourself in a box of cookie crisp". It was all very Soylent Green feeling, except I've never seen Soylent Green, so I'm sure it wasn't exactly matching, but that's when I ran off back over to the main set of hallways in the industrial level.

Now this is where the dream starts to get interesting and intellectually stimulating at the end. I find myself suddenly walking through a big doorway and suddenly I'm on an elevator down to a place, it looks very brown and is shaped like an L with the elevator that goes down from the really high roof of the place to the floor level over what I could describe as nothing else but a lava pit. I am forced to get off the elevator and explore this strange place, and the elevator goes on a cable then into another doorway to the side, a doorway that can't be accessed by anything other than the elevator because it's over the fire pit. So at first, I'm looking around and there seems to be a division in the places, the left half of the right side of the L shape is dedicated to food and social gathering it seems, the right side of the half for games and such (as it's like a ye-olde-times arena. The left half of the L shape seems much less interesting, and seems to be where everyone lives in a big apartment complex like thing. The entire place is encased by big walls that go all the way up to the ceiling, which is up about a hundred feet above. This is essentially a ye-olde bubble society built somehow underground, with the elevator the only way in or out, and as I quickly learned from the lore, the elevator rarely if ever goes up to the ceiling and the exit back, more often it will drop into the lava pit or through the doorway and into what they thought of as hell or something.

So essentially I'm stuck here, and at first all the townsfolk hate me because of the simple fact that I'm an outsider it seems, and it takes me all day to even gather up enough to find a place to sleep it seems, and this is where the dream gets bits and pieces on me, but I essentially spend the next MONTH getting accepted by the people there, whose sole concern is just living in there from day to day, not escape, not anything, and the only time the elevator ever showed up was to go down or to the doorway. When it did finally show up a couple weeks later going up I was actually skeptical of it for some reason, even though it seemed to stay there waiting for me as opposed to it's usual being there for only a few moments, almost like it wanted me to get on, but the townspeople had filled my head with the idea that "sometimes the elevator comes in to tempt us", so I walked away, looking back occasionally at it and not even seeing where it ended up going whether it went to the ceiling exit or the other two options. I was feeling absolutely like there was noplace else to go and at that point I did sort of give up on getting out, which is INCREDIBLY ironic because the thing that made me give up WAS a shining beacon of hope!

After that I don't remember the details of it but I somehow found and trained a dragon, much as in "How To Train Your Dragon", over the course of a few weeks, and he basically became my partner/best friend. I stopped checking the elevator and even got into playing the "outsider's game" in the arena, a technological based game where there was a large metal ring where once you hopped inside over the lip of it the ball the game was played with and you, started to look a bit pixelated and tron-like if you can imagine how that looks. I have no idea how the game was played, but I remember being innovative with the game by actually picking up the large but surprisingly light metal ring and flipping it over and around the play-field. It was very odd, yet cool at the same time, and I remember somebody breaking the rules after like 5 minutes of hard combos and awesome moves and thinking "GREAT! Now I'm gonna have to do all that cool hard stuff over again!" I guess because the rule of the game is it must be played from the beginning to end without foul or you start over.

At the two month mark the elevator returns with for a few minutes showing as going up and out, and this time I immediately got on and tried to take my dragon with me, of course being that the elevator is way too small, he couldn't fit being the size of another full grown person and a half at least. The elevator by the way looked almost exactly like the cable car going across the Roosevelt Island Tramway in NYC, only just big enough to fit a person and maybe a backpack or two inside, you needed to scrunch inside to fit. So I got back out after the dragon tried to fit himself inside unsuccessfully, and watched the elevator cable back up to the ceiling and disappear.

I'm not sure what happened after that until the three month mark, where I had finally had enough and climbed on my dragon to fly up to the ceiling and escape. Somewhere before I'd even mounted him I suddenly popped into existence back in the industrial level of the real world outside the doorway which made me vanish into that world, and of course my first sight was of two of my friends, standing right there at the entrance, and then I saw someone else there who I somehow KNEW was the person responsible for casting whatever magic or spell it was that made that doorway go to the bubble society, and here's the point where my brain seemed to begin working in the dream, because I went off on him about what gave him the right to trap people in places like that, and how many more of them there were, to which he responded "I don't know" to both, completely nonchalantly, as if all he was doing was dropping crumbs on the street for the birds to pick up and eat. To which I knew the place was FULL of these "portals" and I immediately turned to see some other guy disappear suddenly as he entered a doorway, popping back up a moment later to go "need a hardhat in there!" before grabbing a hardhat from a nearby shelf and disappearing again. That event, if I can pause for a moment, really challenged my thinking of whether this was a sort of break room or something that other people knew about here on the industrial level, but that wasn't as thought provoking as the realization that happened in a little bit. So after I watched him disappear I ranted more about how it wasn't right and how my dragon was still trapped in there and that I wasn't going to risk getting stuck in there again for three months just to get him back, and then I proceeded to yell as he was walking off about how I was going to stop him by putting warning signs all over and stopping people from going through the doorways he'd changed. Then suddenly right as I woke up the thought popped into my head about how much time had passed while I was in there....

And that's what's kept me thinking for the past hour or two since waking up, is what would happen depending on what the answer to that was? If it had been a 1:1 ratio that I'd really spent three months in there then it'd be completely justified in my vendetta to stop people from getting trapped in there, but what it it'd only been a few hours (like in reality it was because this was after all a dream), then what? Was this a known sort of "Break Room" for the industrial workers and should I go back and try to unravel the mystery of trying to get my dragon back out into the real world? Or should I go back and live there for a while longer or something? Just so many questions flowing through my mind about what would happen, and what if it was like a 2:1 time ratio, where I'd spent three months in the bubble and a month and a half in the real world? What about the implications then? It's just all these things flowing through my mind and I really hope this is a recurring dream so I can find out!

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

NEVER AGAIN! AT 9AM!

2010-04-23T16:41:00.000-04:00

Listen Up!
To make sense of the title, I think i figured out where all my tiredness, business, and stuff is coming from this semester, and that's the fact that I have a 9AM class 2 days out of the week. I've struggled to get through that class so much and deal with the sleep schedule that it's absolutely ridiculous. I'm NEVER going to take another class that starts before noon again, simply because I just can't deal with the screwing up it causes to my schedule, productivity, and everything...
::
My college life seems to be doing good, I've dropped the problem class and the remaining three are in good standing. All my assignments are being kept up with and they're usually coming in with good marks on them, so unless I'm miscalculating, I think this semester will be another good one.
::
TechMCC is in a weird space, basically we're getting work done on the pinball machine in leaps and bounds, and it looks like we might indeed be getting it done by the end of the semester, but the problem is the "we" means me and Jon, the only other member that's basically shown up to the meetings this semester.
::
As for work, I've finally started training at the new Meadowlands Stadium, and so far, it's good. Mostly common sense stuff about using common sense in customer service, but there are a few things to pay attention to that are specific and you wouldn't think about until you were in this job. I'm glad we're getting paid for the training for sure, and the fact they are giving us free sandwiches is just as good there at the sessions. Right now I've got two more to go to before we start working on May 9th.
::
Now, for my OTHER job, I GOT my bartending certification :D I am certified to work as a bartender anywhere in the United States from here on out, and it was absolutely amazing that i passed I think. I didn't actually expect to make it until my 3rd or 4th time through the test, especially considering how many low-ball drinks (my weak spot) the instructor quizzed me with this time around, but I got them and learned my shots, and now I'm going around looking at all the bars that are hiring this weekend. If all goes well I'll have the money coming in real oon that I need to go to the WJF again!
::

Daily Life: Rant about Schedules
I absolutely hate how busy I've been recently, I think I've had one day this past two or three weeks when I can truly say I didn't have SOMETHING that I needed to do and SOMEWHERE I needed to go. Plain and simple, the reasons are college, job training at the Meadowlands, job training in bartending, looking for a bartending job now, running errands to help out with the household stuff, and most importantly, trying to find the time to do stuff before going to sleep each night, especially on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, because I need to go to sleep around midnight in order to wake up by 8AM and go to class or wherever I need to go. I've ALWAYS liked to do work late at night when I know I'm alone without the possibility of being interrupted, and when I can be most productive. Not to mention that late at night is usually when my memory will work and the rememberance will pop into my head of something I wanted to get done, like this blog post which I've delayed for WAYYYY too long.

I'm a night person, always have been and always will be, and I hate that the world is so intent on making everyone conform with "get up at sunrise and sleep at sunset" type of schedule. It's so inefficient! This is a rant I make almost every damned time I walk from the back of the packed college parking lot to class because I'm so pissed off at the idea of a schedule I've been forced into, along with everyone else! Think about this for a second. What if we simply took everyone out of their schedules and distributed them evenly, so that half the population is always asleep while the other half is always awake, and that state is pretty much constant throughout the day, so that at 9AM there's people who are just clocking into work, just clocking out of work, and midway through their day.

There would be no such thing as rush hour! No such thing as not finding a parking space somewhere! No such thing as "peak hours"! No such thing as "Closing Time"! It would completely solve so many problems I think! But nope, Middlesex County College only offers the classes I needed to take this semester at 9AM and Noon. The bastards....

Juggle This:
So Juggle This the NYC convention came and went, and now it's time to reflect on it and tell the story! So I started off getting up on Saturday at around 11 to get on the bus, and it was weird because I would have normally drove in, but I couldn't get the car to drive in, and noone was going with me, so I took the 116 Bus into Port Authority terminal, and from there too the A train down into Brooklyn, where I switched to the G train and then walked 2 blocks to get to Pratt. Oddly, it actually took about the same amount of time as if I'd have dealt with the traffic on the Staten Island driving route!

So I get there, and it looked like a pretty good turnout, I immediately went over and greeted my good friend Michael Karas, and was a little shocked to see Joe Showers pop in out of nowhere along with Ross, so that was great! And from there I did some chatting with them and showing off some of the new things I was working on and performing later like my Ring In Mouth routine, tennis ball and racket tricks, and some shaker-cup moves I'd just started playing with a few days before, and as I was expecting it was a little mixed reaction, but mostly good stuff and it made me confident about performing at Renegade with the ringmouth bit. So I leave them be to continue saying hi to everyone, when suddenly the host of the stage show comes up to me, which is awesome by itself, but then he asks me to do Muffin Clutches in the stage show! AWESOME! I mean, I wasn't going to do Muffin Clutches because I'd already performed it at 2 renegade shows and it's a year old act on that very day, but to do it on the main show would be way too good to resist, so I eagerly said yes and then spent a little time practicing it because I hadn't done it in ages.

Once that was overwith though, I basically spent the next few hours catching up with everyone, including Jason, which is always a pleasure to do when I don't have to travel across the country for, and juggling a few different hard ring tricks I hadn't practiced in way too long thanks to my busy college and training schedule. I made a 5 ring 97531 on the 4th attempt! Which I was absolutely and obviously astounded with, and it made me think that eventually I may get good enough to do it at WJF6, and that thought alone filled me with enough joy to last an hour. But then as that hour ended, something else replaced it, and that was the WJF New Combat games!

Now, it took a bit of thought to understand all the rules, but I got them all down and helped everyone out pretty quickly during the games, my team did sort of suck, or perhaps it was just Team 4's extreme pwnage of everyone else that made it seem that way, lol. Then again, having Joe Showers, Casey Rentmeester, and Josh Horton on a combat team together, no matter WHO the other two are, is a little unbalanced I think XD. Talking about the individual games though, Zombie Combat was an interesting idea, and Kill The King Combat is absolutely a GREAT strategy version once you get a team that thinks cohesively, but where things REALLY shined, especially for me, was SUMO Combat! Basically a circle drwan on the floor, and you played combat inside the circle, and the first to either drop or step out loses, and pushing is allowed and encouraged, and the teams switch out members round-robin style in a time limit. It was tough getting used to it, but once I did, holy damn did I have an awesome run! I took out at least 5 other players before finally getting knocked out during our team's round.

So that was awesome, and as that ended, it was time for the shows to begin, which i'd completely forgotten to buy a ticket for until at the door of the show, which was embarrassing and made me feel like a dunce. The first big surprise of the show was after Coney Island Chris started off slow and awkward, he came back three times on stage and smashed two out of the park. The diobolo duo was always awesome every time they came on, and then of course there was me. I knew Muffin Clutches was an awesome routine, but as I listened to the audience reaction after I finished I guess I was reminded just how good XD. After the show for the rest of the night and the next day, every juggler who didn't know me from online came up and complimented me on the routine, it was quite humbling actually, one of the things that definitely made the weekend worth it!

After that high point and the end of the stage show, things went down a notch for me, though I must say the first half of the Renegade show was ABSOLUTELY the BEST series of acts I've seen in AGES, from Robin doing Diabolo, to the team passers, to the whip act, they were all just so good right after another! And then came my routine after a little while. I wasn't really going up to be impressive, because I knew the two or three things I was showing were completely experimental and I hadn't even tried to see how they work for an audience, and that's kind of what I use Renegade shows for at the weekend conventions like Juggle This and such. So the first thing i performed was a quick routine I'd come up with after having an inspirational idea bounced off of Karas back at Carmine St one week, which was how could I juggle through a stable ring just held somewhere, and then I thought to hold the ring in my mouth, and this routine was born a little while later. It got a moderate applause, as I expected it may, it's more of a filler routine than anything. So next came my second ever tr at making a routine out of a tennis ball and racket, and a few tricks got some decent applause, though the routine for the most part was again, another filler like routine. I was pretty much fine with that, as I'd had my big ovation for the night doing muffin clutches in the stage show.

But after that show ended, I was going to go over and stay at a friends house over in Manhattan, unfortunately, he ditched me because I was going to be coming in "too late" (it was about 1:30AM) and he essentially left me stranded in NYC with noplace to sleep and no way to get home because the last bus went out at midnight and I wasn't taking a train back home for ten dollars. So I basically found a quiet corner of Penn Station after doing some subway hopping, slept there for a few hours, got woken up and then took the subway back to near the Pratt Institute, where I slept through a black catholic church mass until the Pratt institute opened their doors again to the gym. Needless to say, it was the low point of the convention for me, especially considering how much time I spent walking around and on my feet during the night, so by the time I was in the gym on sunday, I couldn't stand up for more than 20 minutes I was so sore.

That said, Sunday wasn't bad, I learned how to get a lasso going as well as some knot throwing during the workshop and participate in a couple of the games, which is always fun, and I just overall didn't mind so much about my sore feet thanks to the fact that it was still the juggling con and that I was having a blast at it. I said my farewells a little early thanks to my feet not being able to hold me up any longer, and took the subway back to the Port Authority, where I rode the bus home and just slept for the next ten hours it seemed, happy to have had a good time but absolutely exhausted.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Wins and Losses

2010-03-30T06:17:00.002-04:00

Listen Up!
As the title may suggest, the last week has been an interesting week of ups and downs, a lot of them really way too widely ranged to make one single sentence for, but essentially, as one thing was going great, another thing was doing plummettingly bad, the Neutrality Theory of mine in full effect it seems.
::
I tried taking the bartending exam for the first time over this weekend, and though the absolutely WONDERFUL thing was how much I'd learned in the past 48 hours before taking the test, from memorizing ALL of my hihg-ball drinks finally to learning Daquaris and other fancy drinks and even a few All Alcohol High Balls like the Alabama Slammer, I went way over the time limit of tthe test and ended up not making it this time. It's perfectly fine though, as not only was I not expecting to pass it for sure this time, but it's free to take and you can take it an infinite number of times. I think next week I'll have it down though ;) Another upside of the very same 48 hours of bartending class, was I met and befriended 2 girls there, who I've already gotten the numbers for and have been texting over the past couple of days.
::
I finally managed to start working on the pinball machine project for Tech.MCC, of course the meeting where I did everything literally NO OTHER MEMBERS SHOWED UP. Ugh. Well hey, next one hopefully will be better when I post pics and stuff to the website of what I got done last week.
::
I haven't done anywhere near the amount of juggling I want to because my wrist if hurt a bit in my left hand, however, judging from the responses I've gotten from people with my Tutorial entry for the IJA contest ( http://juggle.org to vote for me ^^) it looks like I've got a good shot at being in the upper half of entries, aka the winners and runners up!
::
Let's see, what else, well I've been sick this week along with my whole family, but I had the house all to myself this weekend coming up! Which is good and makes up for it. I've also gotten my last order in for Cutco, and I will finally be turning my stuff in coming up and then putting that job officially on hold unless someone else wants to place an order through me, which can still be done at anytime and I'd get money for it! Though i doubt that'd ever really happen.
::
Ugh, the screen I was using for my Wii setup is busted, somehow the power is not getting to the battery to charge it at all, so I need to pull it apart AGAIN and see if I can fix it, otherwise it's 30 dollars down the drain. At least I have my backup PS1 screen that can be used, though it's not as big.
::
AH! I managed to encode pretty much all of my VHS tapes into DVD's and ripped them to my hard drive to watch, now it's just a matter of conversion before I can share the lot of them, however I already have one torrent up that's gotten a moderate number of downloads ^^ not saying which but it's good stuff for sure.
::
Unfortunately nothing really big and story-worthy has happened this week, or last week after the blog post, so this is pretty much it for this week's post. Though that will change next week after Juggle This takes place :D Where hopefully my Renegade act will do well. I still have no idea if it's good or not, probably not as good as last year's Muffin Clutches, but hey, I think that was my absolute perfect routine anyways.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Things! They Are Happening!

2010-03-21T16:58:00.008-04:00

Listen Up!
Well my month long break from my blog is over and I really feel a desire to write them again once a week, which is GREAT! I think I'm going to be writing them was things happen though, because to force myself to do them on Monday just makes me put it off until the next day, and the next, and the next. So that's going to be a good change hopefully.
::
So first off, I gotta talk about college. I Fucking HATE havign morning classes. Granted I haven't missed or been late to them, but they will be the death of me because I cannot get my brain to work at 10AM no matter what I do, and I will NOT resort to getting addicted to caffeine and gaining 30 lbs from drinking the Mountain Dew required to get the proper dosage again. Next semester I am not taking any classes before noon, no matter whether that limits me to 2 classes a semester or whatever.
::
Secondly, I'm getting a huge leap in terms of working :D Since my last post, I went to an open interview at the new Giants Stadium, and was accepted pretty much right away! I went back and got my ID taken, and training for this job starts next month. The awesome bit is it's paid training, so regardless of the fact that we have no idea when we start work (probably only once summer begins) I'll have a few hundred in my pocket from that! But since it's a ways away before that will start generating money, I saw an ad in the paper looking for bartenders, no experience necessary, and I'll get on with this story later on because there's a LOT to say :D
::
It seems like for once the Tech.MCC Big time semester-long project is actually gonna happen! Granted it sucks that only me and two other members are actually showing up to any of the meetings at all, but when I'm getting the packages of pinball machine parts and plexiglass at my house, and the design layout made in AutoCAD (as seen on the left here) it's hard not to get eager about actually having an assembled playfield wired up and working.
::
I knew my youtube videos would get me someplace someday :D My latest video, Pong Progression, which a couple people, including one of my friends who I respect a ton, said it's like a work of art XD and I'm not exaggerating, read the comments! But back to the point, out of nowhere as I'm browsing youtube a couple days ago, I look at the top of the page to see my PM inbox has a new message, and so I open it up, turns out it's from a guy who runs a website about beer pong tables and he was asking me to be in an interview for a podcast episode! So I basically set up the soonest time I could and spent a half hour over Skype answering his questions and such, and essentially, I'm going to be featured as one of the "50 greatest beer-pong players" series! Awesomeness!
::
Another minor milestone I had recently was finally having an inspiration about how to transfer VHS tapes into my computer without spending extra money on a damned card or external device. We have a DVD player/recorder that I bought while I was working at Shoprite years ago, and as I opened my closet and looked at my old VHS tapes for the first time in ages, I realized I could simply plug the VHS player out into the DVD recorder in, record the VHS's to DVD's, and then rip them back onto my computer. And that's exatly what I did to my old Car Wars, Heroes On Hotwheels, and Junkyard Wars tapes from back in the 80's/90's which aren't up on bittorrent. Of course now they WILL be up on bittorrent thanks to me ^^ since all are old enough that they are basically abandoned licenses.
::

Daily Life:
So let's talk bartending! It's been something picking at the back of my mind ever since I got anything good at juggling that a bartending job would be a good job for me. I'm good with customer service jobs (requiring good Reacting skills, not Proacting skills like manufacturing and working man jobs that I'll rant more about another day), it's a practical job (where I'm not typing, ringing up, or doing anything else, I'm physically just handling and pouring the drinks), obviously when I get good there's the juggling aspect, it's primarily a night job, and while I don't drink that much myself as I've said before on here, helping others to get a bit drunk definitely doesn't seem too bad (almost no matter what the customer will like you ;).

So there was quite a bit of skepticism about it being a scam, because what I essentially found in the paper was a middle-man company, the National association of Bartenders, and they pretty much hired me on the spot and asked a fee of 300$ for the certification. It turns out it is legit though, because after I got the ok form my parents to put it on their credit cards, the weekend came and I went off to Red Bank to start training, and the deal about training is that it's free and you can go to as many lessons as you want at any schedule you want, and once you pass the test, which is making ten randomly selected drinks in ten minutes, you get the certificate and go out to work. So far it's been a bit of a struggle, since the job is all about memorization, which has never been a strong point with me, but I'm learning my high ball drinks, Manhattans, and other drinks slowly but surely. So far I've been to two of the training sessions and we'll see what happens from here on out.

Daily Life:
So, as a direct result of me releasing Pong Progression a little while ago, my high school group of friends got in the mood to play beer pong on Saturday of last week. This is always good, because I love beer pong and it'd been a while since I got hammered, and their parties always got me there. So along comes saturday, and this was the day the nor'easter hit, with flooding EVERYWHERE, huge winds, and road closures all over the place. I left the house and tried to get there, but found all the routes I knew were closed and so I had to turn back and call them saying I couldn't get there. Of course they're the types to not take no for an answer, so they piled into the SUV of theirs and drove down through the flooding and through all the side-roads to get to me to pick me up. So I'm there now and we start off immediately with my first ever shot of Yeager, which I was amazed to find was like drinking liquorish, and quite good! I think I've found a new favorite shot besides vodka! But either way, we quickly setup the table and cups, and the game begins with coors light and wine split between the cups, and after a few throws to get my eye in, I start making them, and keep making them, and the games continue with the wins/losses pretty much sided to my team, until I'd drank enough to be drunk.

At that point we continued to play, struggling to get every single shot as the game went on for quite some time, at one point Alpha even getting to his trademark puking on himself way earlier than usual! So once that got cleaned up we continued play until the game was finished, and then got down to watching Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, another first for me since I'd never seen it before, and I'd heard the best way to watch it was drunk. Man were they right! I was plenty well hammered and every joke was so perfectly hilarious, I couldn't catch my breath after the first few scenes! Of course we all began to realize right at the same time about halfway through that we were getting hungry.

One or two of them wanted to go out, but I'm pretty responsible even when drunk, and I knew that noone was sober enough to go out driving, especially in the torrents that were beating down on the roads. Luckily, the other level-head of the group who was hosting, decided it'd be perfect to make an upside down pizza to split between us, and holy crap was he right! The 30 minutes it took to prepare were the longest 30 minutes I've spent in a long time, but man was it worth it for a homemade, upside-down, true NJ pizza.

After that I don't remember much, because it was around 3 or 4 AM and we were all ready to finish Harold and Kumar and get to sleep or home. As the movie finished, the host wa basically napping on the floor in front of the TV, and the other two were sober enough to leave, so I spent a little time and cleaned up some, checking my email and such on the laptop upstairs, and then finally falling asleep myself to be driven home the next morning.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

The Rimshot

2010-01-27T07:29:00.003-05:00

Listen Up!
Alright, so this time there's a reason I posted this blog entry late, classes. No it's not that I'm being bogged down by them, though I am, it's that I wanted to wait until I'd had my first class of all my classes so I can talk about them here.
::
Man I really do need to get a CAD job. it's the one shot I really have at being able to make up that 1000 dollars in less than a semester and still have spending money for stuff. Of course, I have my certificate and good references, just need a good connection so that I can get to work.
::
Speaking of work though, my job with Cutco has finally really solidified, and I know with confidence what I'm doing when I go to the office once a week. I still loathe the core of the job, which is that I'm selling knives and relying on people to say yes to an appointment, but it's not all that bad really. It's just complicated is all, at least the presentations are fun to do :P
::
I've thought a bit recently about Jugglers On Juggling, my juggling podcast, and I think I'm not really going to continue it until the summer, partly because of some advice I got from Michael Karas, and because I've already had the show on hold for almost a full half year. I do want to continue doing it sometime, it's just such a chore to do, especially when with the current show format I'm really doing all the work and stuff, but yeah. We'll see what happens with it in the future...

Daily Life:
So college has started, and right now a few things are immediately clear, it's going to be a varied one. I have two computer courses and two art courses. Like I said last week, the classes suck because both art classes start at either noon or 9AM, when the college is most packed and when I'm having the most trouble staying awake, and I did find myself fighting off the urge to nap during my 9AM classes, but luckily they only last for 2 and a half hours so they're not hard to get through, that class would be Graphic Design skills by the way, where I'm FINALLY getting to use more photoshop and technology to put together art as opposed to doing things on paper and in theory.

My noon class is also tough to stay awake through, and I'm still a little unknowing as to what we'll be learning in it because the class was vague, even the description is vague, "Print Production", but all I know about it is that it's a full 5 hours, and it's going to be the class I like the least almost for sure.

BUT! There is another competitor for least liked class this semester, remember two semesters ago or so when I took my computer applications in business course? Basically it was a tutorial course on how to make a slide in powerpoint and indent paragraphs in MS word. This Tuesday course of mine seems to be the hardware equivalent of that course, "Microcomputers" is the course title, and basically we'll be learning how a motherboard transfers electrical signals to the cpu and out to the different devices and stuff like that. Basically everything my dad taught me about when I was 10 and I watched him build my 2nd ever computer from scratch.

The last class to round out my semester I suspect is going to be the most useful and fun one, and it's "Information Security". Just from the title you'd expect it to be some course about how to control and oppress data within a network, but the professor is a professional white-hat hacker, and he's already outlined our final project as going to a website, and doing some hacking to discover and report vulnerabilities :D That ought to be awesome.

Juggle This:
So I've really been interested in working on my beer-pong tricks video recently, and so far I've gotten quite a good bit of new footage for it, of course each clip only being 4 seconds long or so it takes a lot of clips to make a video even with slow motion replays on some clips, so I've got a bit of a ways to go with it. So far though I've found that I can use spare wall tiles that I found in the basement to make pretty good bouncing pads so even though the entire house is pretty much carpeted I can do shots anywhere. They're definitely hard targets to hit, being only 4" by 4" and having a few surface imperfections from the way they've been painted (they have a big pattern on them), but their versatility definitely makes up for it. It is strange learning this new skill, because like bounce juggling, I'm used to throwing upwards, and here I have to throw downwards, AND add in the fact I'm using an entirely different size ball and throwing technique.

I am making some really good shots like I said though, including a massive pinball machine ramp like shot where I bounced from the floor to about 5 feet high, landing in a channel I made and falling out of the channel back to the floor where the cup is. Another shot I made was of course the long distance shot, which by my measurements was about 8 feet and no bounces. Then another of my big shots so far is the 6 bounce shot down a thin strip of bouncing surface, which came courtesy of my new bed frame.

Besides that video though, I'm also working on an idea or two for my next renegade performance coming up at Juggle This. I thought about doing Muffin Clutches again but after getting advice about repeating the performance from Sean Blue and Michael Karas I figure they're right, it's no fun doing an old routine everyone's seen before, especially if it's so short and basic. I really wanted to do another routine which takes advantage of my body type, especially in a Renegade style way, but so far I'm just coming up completely dry on ideas other than maybe leaning back and doing balances on my chest? Nah, that sucks.

I've got another idea I'm kicking around with a ball on an elastic string and using it in a cascade with crazy 423 type tricks and stuff, but right now I'm nowhere near consistent with it or have enough tricks with it to show it off. I thought about doing a routine using my yo-yo sticks, but I have absolutely no idea how people would react to it, especially since I haven't come up with more than 3 more tricks since releasing the big video showcasing them, and they're really tough to make a routine that flows with them. It's another idea, either way I'll be performing for Renegade again, what I'll be doing is anyone's guess. Maybe I'll bounce a ring up off the ground behind me and catch it between my butt cheeks x_x

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

facepalm

2010-01-18T07:49:00.003-05:00

Listen Up!
Ok, really sorry about letting the blog slip by a full MONTH this time, I really need to get motivated to write this thing every week, of course it just seems when school is out that it's my job to relax and be unproductive X3 So it's what I've been doing is playing video games and stuff without doing much in terms of anything. I really need to kick my own ass here for next week.
::
So, I'm preparing for the new semester to start, and especially the new semester for Tech.MCC, because this time I'm gonna make sure we DON'T miss the club fair and that we'll actually have a room and reliable projects to work on. So far, I've made a mock-up of the table layout with bristol board, and posted pics of it here and on the forums. So things are looking up, I just need to make sure they don't fall down before they get started again.
::
My juggling. Seems to be hitting a weird place, as I went to the NYC Juggling Club last Thursday for some much needed practice, socialization, and the reappearance of the Magic Club. It seems as though my high numbered basic patterns are getting nice, I made a new record of 50 catches with 7 balls on the very first 7 ball cascade I did! CONVERSELY, my rings seem to be suffering with my usual tricks like 5 ring reverse and half shower, BUT my 360's were quite good that day. Just seems so strange and I'll be heading back next week to try again.
::
Now, I've hit my stride with my new job, and it seems the job does pay nicely, of course there's still the massive amount of BS where the managers are pushing you to do more and more and more presentations and intent on making you come in for (what is essentially) the twice weekly brainwashing session. It works though, I'm finding the people I'm presenting to are having fun with it, and I'm making a few sales every now and then, like i expected, and it seems I'll be making around a hundred dollars a week so far, which is good for what my goal is.
::

Daily Life: Ranting about my 2010 plans
Ok, I came up with a list recently of what trips I want to go on this year, seeing as how that's usually what eats up all my money each year. The way it looks now, I've got a trip once every two months, most of them are going to cost less than a hundred bucks because they are local, but the others may cost more, especially WJF6 when it finally happens. Now here's the big point that I want to make, I have a 1000 dollar debt to pay off by the end of the semester to my parents, because right after the semester ends is my first major trip. That's where the problem is though, is that the reason I did so well last semester was I wasn't actually worried or really trying hard to get a job, and was focusing on the college work.

Basically this is what happened last semester. I started off having just been let go from Home Depot, and the semester began with my parents on my back to get a new job. I listened to them. I spent a lot of my time searching for a job and trying to figure out what I was doing with my money, and I saw right before midterms came up, that things didn't seem to be coming together right with my classes, I luckily (unlike previous semesters) had professors and classes, where most of the major projects and tests were due at the end of the semester, stuff like the 100 page sketchbook for 2d drawing which I had only filled to 10 pages by midterms.

I suddenly stopped looking for a job and set myself down to work on classwork. IMMEDIATELY I knew things were getting better. Of course my parents were still hounding me because of my job status, but the thing they STILL can't seem to get into their heads is that I do NOT use my ADHD as an EXCUSE!!!! I really CANNOT MULTITASK between big things like school and working! It's why I've been floundering with my GPA for the past few years, because I cannot balance a job/finances and college at the same damned time! I don't know what's so hard to understand about that for them.... Either way, I just felt like ranting on that because it was really getting to me when my grade sheet came in and I realized what happened over the semester.

Bottom line, I'm the type of person that either has to be a full time, unemployed student, or a person with a job and income in order to be able to do EITHER any better than competent...

Daily Life:
So I got two quick things that happened last week. First was obviously my trip to NYC on Thursday for the Carmine St Jugglers meeting, and of course I realized one thing that day as I was coming home. Two hours is WAYYYY to short of a chunk of time to meet during that. It takes a full hour to really get comfortable and warmed up, and then the other hour goes by as if it were only ten minutes. Especially true if you're me trying to get footage from other people to make a short video. But that wasn't the least of our problems this week. The basketball players on the court the club uses were really adamant this week for some reason, and as the club went from me and another two people to about a dozen, when the employees asked to clear the one of two basketball court rooms for us to not be squeezed in a corner they got really agitated, even going so far as to smack talk juggling. "This shit ain't even a real sport!!" I heard one of the white skinny guys with the headband and spiky hair say as he passed by, in my head thinking "neither is weight lifting, jogging, stationary bicycling, or free shooting basketballs, but you can do all of them here."

So that was fun for sure, but luckily they didn't start anything and the employees got us our designated space for the week. Oh, and let me mention that there was no Karas, Paris, or any of the other NY performers besides Sean Blue, so that was fun. Anyways, After the short 2 hours, everyone headed for the usual Chinese place, like always, and I tagged along. I realized after the last time that I do indeed have enough time from when we're kicked out of the gym at 10 to the last bus home at 12:30 to eat, hang out, make it up the subway to Port Authority and get on the bus, which is essentially what I did. I had my usual chicken lo-mein, hung out for a while, and then proceeded up the subway line to the port authority.

Of course I did screw up a little when I ducked out a station early, because the thing is, I need to transfer trains or walk the long ass tunnel between the terminal and the 1/2/3 line, and since I'm not a fan of walking when i have a duffel bag full of equipment, I like to transfer. Of course I got a little confused somehow and jumped out at the times square station on the 1 train. It was actually good though, because it's been way too long since I've really been to the urban parts of Manhattan like Times Square especially, and I walked right down the middle of it at midnight to the sounds of the city. I love doing that kind of stuff. So either way, I found my way over to the terminal and caught the bus home with no trouble, except of course for the headaches I get from trying to play my DS on the bus where the pedals basically are either 100% throttle or 100% brake no matter how hard the guy presses, so it's constant jerking forwards and backwards. Fun times XD

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

Speaking of my DS though, I recently picked it back up again and have been playing it constantly, why? Simple, I got an R4 (Revolution for DS) card. So I've basically been trying out new games of all sorts on there, including the Japanese Quendan series, which is the older sister of Elite Beat Agents, the best rhythm game ever. Of course here's the problem though, my DS is one of the very first DS Lite's, and essentially, the left shoulder button does not work reliably, the right shoulder button works only when you press it at the right angle, and most importantly, the screen hings is broken so the top half of the DS is being held together by the other side hings and the wires inside, and the wires get pinched easily so the top screen turns to white. Basically, the bottom line is it needs REPLACING or REPAIRING.

Now, the problem is, I would have just gone to Gamestop and traded it in for a new system and paid the difference, which is what I was gonna do back in the summer, but turns out if the hinge is broken they can't buy it from me. So my only two options are ebay or send it to Nintendo for repair or replacement. Granted they have a decent deal, 75 bucks to repair, 85 dollars to replace with a new system, but it's still money that I need to use to pay college debt. Oh well... I'll figure something out, but in the meantime, I can still play plenty of good games on it by holding the top screen delicately and using my plastic shell as support for the hinge.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Lateness Is Annoyance

2009-12-21T16:21:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
Well now that finals are FINALLY over I get to get back to doing stupid shit like writing my blog post! Sweet! :P
::
So like I said, my classes are over, and the grades are starting to come in. My freehand drawing class I've gotten a C in thanks to the grading points of improvement shown / final project / and sketchbook. I'm posting my final project drawing here so you guys can check out how much I'm improved in my drawing abilities. -- The other grade I've gotten so far is an A in my 3D design class, which I knew was coming, that class was perfect! Interesting, simple, easy, and creative! Just perfect, and I think I might make use of it later in my life as a job, hopefully. -- The other two grades have yet to come in, but I doubt they're lower than a C, which means I will NOT need to pay the tuition and stuff for next semester if all goes well! YAY! and that of course brings me to, next semester x_x
::
Next semester is going to be quite hellish, seeing as how I have to take courses that I have no need to because the college doesn't offer the ones I need to take for my degree, and the ones it IS offering are happening at 9AM. *falls over and dies*
::
My job situation is interesting right now, I've got a job selling knives for Cutco and Vector Marketing, which is a decent job, as I'll be getting 15 bucks for each sales presentation I do, never mind if I sell anything or not! Of course after my pessimist seeming parents go and blast the job about how "Anyone can get that job" and "You'll run out of people to sell to in under a week!", I'm still looking around, more casually now. The big idea at the moment is to check out Newark Airport for jobs, either with the airport itself or with the stores inside because damn it's a big place and tons of jobs there I would expect.
::
One of the big things I'm also doing right now for making money is survey taking! Yes, I've registered for valuedopinions and so far I've built up around 12 bucks worth of surveys since December 1st. Not bad for spending a half hour every week or so to grab some quick easy money. Granted they only pay you once you reach 20 dollars and the surveys are all averaging about 2 to 3 dollars a pop, but hey, it's good stuff, and I get to have my opnion heard because I like making products better!
::
I have discovered a few awesome jugglign tricks I'm capable of doing since releasing 19:87, got a little footage of them, but I'm still working on perfecting them actually. I have found an awesome new place to practice however! The Perth Amboy campus of MCC has a stairwell in it which has a platform that is about 12 feet wide, 6 feet deep, and the ceiling is at least a dozen feet tall, so with any luck I'll be getting footage there.
::
I'm also going to be putting up a youtube video of my new room setup maybe because of the new paintjob and the new furnishings, lamps, and shelves up on the walls. It's not 100% finished, but at the moment it's close enough.
::

Daily Life:
So I have a nice story to tall, about my last day of classes, well technically I had no classes that day, but it was the last day of the semester, and I was doing two things. Firstly, I was running the video game lounge for Tech.MCC in the afternoon as part of the end of the semester party. Secondly, a few hours after that I was going to perform in the Christmas variety show put on by the theater and improv club.

So let's begin in chronological order, with my usual rantings about how the bureaucracy of the college keeps getting worse and worse all the time. I had reserved the room and asked formally on the papers for the projectors and TV's we need at 11AM. I woke up on time and got there at 11, to find that the stuff isn't there and the room we requested is LOCKED. Luckily student activities is in the same building a few meters away, so I go down to see what's going on. THEY tell me that they saw the request sheet for the room to be scheduled for noon. Fucking A, alright, so an hour isn't that bad. I waited and grabbed some food while I setup the equipment inside after the custodians unlocked the door for me. Noon comes by, and the projectors and TV's I'd requested haven't showed up still, and the thing is only going to last until 5:00, so I give the AV department a call from the info desk, THEY heard 2PM as the time to deliver the stuff! FUCK!

Luckily the AV department isn't that incompetent, as I'd spoken to the head person there she sent out a notice to all the staff who were on their lunch brewaks to bring the equipment there as soon as their break was over. Alright, so finally 1PM rolls around and here's the guy with the projectors and a TV, and I can finally setup! Now, I personally brought in 2 systems, a N64 and a Wii, and I was hopefully going to have other club members come by with either another console or at least more N64 controllers, what a shocker, nobody from the club besides me and another guy who didn't have any equipment showed up...

It was alright though, for the next three and a half hours the game room went off without a hitch, even though I had a hell of a time with the signs, seeing as how if I put it over the door or the window it's be considered a fire hazard and the tape wouldn't stick to the brick walls. So people came in and out and played Mario Kart and Smash Brothers and things were good, very good in fact. Then we got the call around 4:30 to pack it up so the AV department can put back the equipment before their 5:00 ending time. Fair enough, thanks for telling me. So overall, a decent success, of course another problem I had was with the assholes of the college in charge of parking, where I had to get alkl of MY equipment for both my performance and the game room out from the loading area THEN go park in the far away student lot instead of the lot right next to the building, which up until this semester was a visitors lot... Oh well.

So a few hours passed and now came time to perform, I was pretty nervous about my act because I was doing such a heavily revised act and I hadn't performed since the summer. I started second act after the intermission. I started off with my 3 ball act, and holy crap a made a few nice drops right at the start of the routine, managed to cover them with kickups but still, I made my way through there to the 5 ball routine which went well except for one big drop right at the start of it. Then I tried my 7 ball run, as I planned, because I'm not great at collecting that on command yet, I did the usual run until you screw up and stop trying to catch them all. So that went well then I brought out a new thing, my three bat routine, that went great save for a stupid drop right in the middle and a big drop on a 1up360 I should have never attempted in the first place. So after that came the volunteer half of the act, and that went swimmingly, because there it's ok to drop and I even planned on making drops thanks to my blindfold portion. So that went well indeed.

Now, before that night as I was deciding what to perform, the idea came to me to bust out my Muffin Clutches act, but then i decided against it seeing as how it was a christmas show and there'd be older folks and maybe even kids. During rehearsals though I heard the rap group go through their set and HOLY SHIT there was a lot of swearing and crap in there. It was then I decided that I would perform it, and right at the end of my act, sure enough I came back out onstage without a shirt on, tucked two under my man boobs, and proceeded to perform, much to the enjoyment of the crowd. Chalk up another standing ovation for this stupid little routine of mine, that's three out of three standing Ovations so far.

After my act I went backstage to hang out on the couch in the dressing room and mull over how I'd done, I was a bit pissed and upset about the number of drops I had, but I eventually came around after even my fellow performers were giving me high fives over the act and saying how entertaining it was. So overall it was a good act :D I'm not gonna post it to youtube because of all the drops, but at least I achieved my goal of satisfying the audience.

So the rest of the show went by and then it was cleanup time, where I was FINALLY able to bring my car around to the stage door parking lot and put all my crap in the back, and then we all headed off to the Skylark for a traditional post-show diner dinner! Which was great because I'd never been to the Skylark yet and I was starving for a good burger. It was all great times hanging out, making jokes and everything, and then came 2AM and time to leave for home, full, satisfied, and tired as all living HELL! XD

Juggle This:
So what have I been practicing to get recently/have gotten recently? Well there's a few really good moves I've been looking back upon recently, stuff that I'd done 3 or 4 videos ago and have not done since, stuff like 720's (from Not Yet Famous) and 5 ring half overheads (from Slow Freeze). I recently got a full qualify back to a cascade in the 5 ring half overheads trick on camera. I actually got it twice on camera, the first time within 2 minutes, but that time was completely out of frame *facepalm*. Nevertheless, I got it again and it looks totally sweet. The next move I got recently was my first ever two stage 720, with three balls I got the first two up, then the third way up, caught the two, then threw in the next spin and made it. Of course that time the BATTERY ran out right as I was getting the damned trick, so i have to do it again now. I'll get it though, it's a simple move when it falls into place.

I'm doing quite a bit more training now than I used to do, and I've recently realized about lone of my favorite 5 ring tricks, the full reverse, that I could go into and run the pattern, but never come back out into a normal cascade. So I've been spending a while working on that and I've made it once or twice. I also spent some time and broke my record with that very trick as well, now I'm standing at a 36 catch to a clean finish run on camera for my next vid.

I do want to bring up one last thing though, and it's really bugged the crap out of me, what with all my classes and laziness, I haven't gone to a juggling club since going to the IJA. It especially gets on my personal nerves because at Philly Fest, I got my turn to have the Magic Club from Dan Eaker. It's sitting right there in my prop box, and I haven't done a damned thing with it, that gets me irked because I want it to do it's traveling, I want to see it go to the next person, but I want to bring it to the NYC juggling club at least and make a video with it before sending it off. Just something that's been irking me the past few months. Hopefully now that classes are over, I'll be able to make it to the Carmine St Irregulars either on the 31st or on the 7th and get that video done so i can mail it off to whoever is next on the list, I really gotta check that too...

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

19:87 VIDEO!

2009-11-30T17:00:00.000-05:00

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

TO THE MOON!

2009-11-25T06:51:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
Damn, I don't know whether it's just I'm getting old enough that a week seems like a much shorter period of time now or what, but every time I make a blog post it seems it's time to do the next one! Though to be fair, this one definitely has a worthy story or two for it.
::
So college stuffs, god damn do they suck. My current classes seem to be doing just fine, but at my parent's proposal I spent the past week registering for the next semester of classes, so let me explain my situation. I'm balls deep into my current degree major, I only have 5 classes left to take, and they're all top level specialty courses if you know what I mean. The type of classes that have at least 3 prerequisite classes for EACH. Next semester the college is only offering FOUR of these 5 classes, and TWO of them have the other three courses as prerequisites. So I am FORCED to take 2 useless or "Fluff" courses next semester to stay full time. NOT ONLY THAT, but all of the classes that I needed to take are only available at one time, 9AM That mean no night option, no option PERIOD. I am again FORCED to come to the college at 9AM, when I'm most at risk of falling asleep right in the middle of class and my brain is not working, AND I have to deal with the crowded parking lots, AND I have to deal with pretty much every factor outside of my comfort zone I can imagine. Not only that! They're building a useless new "Green" building, and they're not putting it in the middle of one of the numerous unused grassy areas of the campus, no... THEY'RE CUTTING THE MAIN PARKING LOT IN HALF AND BUILDING IT THERE!!! FUCK YOU MCC!
::
Where was I?... Oh right, well Tech.MCC is meh. We're working on stuff, and the college is still making it hard for us. We do have one big thing coming up, in the Robotics meeting, which will be the nesxt meeting, where we'll be building LEGO and circuit based robots! So yay for that!
::
What else is happening, ummmm, well I'm still browsing around for a job, my latest attempts have brought me around all over Woodbridge avenue, and hopefully something will turn up there, but in the meantime, I'm still taking surveys online and am slowly building up money with them, of course it's a bitch to find the time to take them and remember to take them when the parents are trying to make me change sleep schedules (unsuccessfully I might add), but I'm working on it all nonetheless.
::

Daily Life:
So I've been bonding a bit with my dad recently. We've started tearing down the wallpaper in my room and are going to be painting it shortly, which was awesome and interesting. I'll have a report on that next week, but what I want to talk about today is what happened when we went out to get the spackle for the walls. We took a trip down first to get the spackle, and then drove down to Monmouth to drop a few things off for my sister. I fell asleep as we started driving south somewhat, and when I woke up, I found my dad had taken me to Asbury Park. I was wondering why he needed me to come along to pick up spackle and drop off a thing for my sis . So we got out and figured out how the parking meter system worked, and my dad couldn't stop remarking about how busy and alive the city was, seeing as how it's been desolate for years, and now the business district is alive and well.

So we made our way up the district for a bit, eventing ourselves at the destination, a pinball museum, which was placed in the basement of a store, and had dozens of old machines from the 60's through the 90's. It was definitely a interesting place, and I proved I'm a better pinballer than my dad, doubling his best score on the Mars Attack machine. It was really interesting seeing how similar all the machines were, especially the older ones, where they all had like 3 bumpers in the middle, small fippers, and one set of drop targets. There were a few interesting innovative ones, but it mostly got me thinking about how simple and easy it would be to build my own pinball table. Nothing complex like modern tables, but a set of bumpers and drop targets like the older ones. Hell it'd be a great big project for the next semester of Tech.MCC! Back to the museum though, they really should have had more historical info I think, it was more like a vintage arcade than a museum, and that's fine, I just like more historical context than the single plack above only half the machines giving a single paragraph of information about how many were produced and by whom. Then again, their business model is more about BEING a vintage arcade than a museum, which is great, they got the right idea, pay up front and unlimited play on all the tables ensues. So overall it was in interesting experience, the big table I wanted to play on, the "Challenge" table, where two players played at once from opposite ends and against each other on one table like a game of soccer or foosball was broken, but hey, you can't have everything.

So as our time ran out from there, we got to talking on the hour and a half long ride home about random stuff like how I can sing pretty well with some songs (which I'm thinking about putting one or two up on youtube sometime soon) and other random stuff. It was interesting, and I was admittedly thankful when we got back home because I was quite sleepy, and that was that day.

Juggle This:

NEW VIDEO COMING WITH THE NEXT BLOG POST! Definitely gonna be good, more detail about it then!

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

The Infinity Machine

2009-11-19T05:54:00.002-05:00

Listen Up!
Wow, holy shit have I been busy recently, I missed 2 weeks of the blog and this one is late by a few days. Sorry about that guys, the college is absolutely sucking so much it's rediculous, more ranting on that later. Right now let me say I'm sorry again, I've been able to continue working on my new juggling video, and being able to do my usual socializing and classwork, so I am doing fine, just squeezed for time is all.
::
So let me talk about my new video. I've been steadily gathering footage since Adverse Reaction, and because of how it was absolutely horrible, I've changed up the entire way I organize the video, and for the first time used Vegas 100%. I've built the video by starting with the music track, making sure to find one like the track from Slow Freeze, with a slow heavy tempo and with many sections where the feel completely changes. I started with that, spending agood day finding the track, and then I built up the video and right now I'm showing it to my trusted previewers and seeing how they like it.
::
College has been taking an upturn in terms of grades. I managed a 98 on my Sociology midterm, and I've gotten many A's in my 3d Design class. My Sales class is even doing better now with a B on the midterm, my Freehand Drawing class is still crap, thanks to the morning status, but I'm improving there too, with the professor taking a breath and saying "Oh wow" in reaction to a recent sketch I did of one of my classmate's face. In short, things seem to be on the up, and I'm glad about it outside of the time it's eating up in ordser to get those numbers....
::
Tech.MCC is doing better. Todays meeting was a bit of a wash in terms of the projects, but we got at least 3 new people come by in response to the fliers dropping by, asking about us building robots. So in response, next week we'll be having the robotics meeting, where we're going to try and build more than one Lego Robot, bring in a bunch of Rc bots, as well as see if we can build a set of swarm bots. It should be an interesting meeting for sure. Of course hopefully we'll be able to get a room somewhere so we can be more official and have the space for the robots, still working on that...
::

Daily Life:
So, time to start complaining about the college now. I have to admit, I've been doing some speculating about why they're doing things the way they are this semester. My big conclusion? They're making bad decisions in the wake of the recession, trying to shift the focus of the college from "Let's make a good environment for the students" to "Let's make absolutely sure we make a profit". My evidence? Well I haven't confirmed anything, but from what I've heard the student activities budget has been literally cut in half, as well as their staff was cut in half.

I've also been seeing what they're doing with the College Center, the main place where students are to hang out. They've been trying to get it so that less and less students are spending their free time there recently, at least it seems that way. They made a great move in lining the side wall of the cafeteria with extension cords that lead to power outlets, but apparently it worked too well in giving people a reason to stay, because they were gone within a week. They also removed the couches from pretty much all the usual hangout areas of the building within the space of two or three weeks, because the center was doing it's job a bit too well.

Again, I'm not blasting MCC or anything, again this is all just speculating from crap I saw or heard from other people. It's just that so much is different this semester from previous semesters, and I'm not the only one to be noticing it. Either way, that's my craplist about what the college seems to be doing wrong, and what things seem to be right now.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Blasphemy RULES

2009-10-25T17:18:00.003-04:00

Listen Up!
FIRST UP, ANNOUNCEMENT TIME! I'VE OPENED UP MY NEW SHIRT STORE ON MY WEBSITE! Filled with a bunch of unseen designs before, and one of them has been featured on the homepage of redbubble.com! GO THERE! CHECK STUFF OUT! Reeses2150.com/store.
::
Well, let's say that past week of being home alone was AMAZING. I loved every second of it, and I wish it happened more often! Had all the time and the free schedule to work on classwork when I wanted, take a shower when I wanted, eat and watch tv when I wanted, and pretty much everything except go to class when I wanted! It was awesome!
::
College stuff, well, like I keep saying, I am loathing my freehand drawing class, but not so much because of the workload anymore, not because of the drawing itself. My style is based on drawing things small, with solid lines and everything be outlined. The professor is looking for big drawings with blurred or even NO lines and all these center and structure lines. Ugh... At least my 3d design class couldn't be going any better and my other two seem to be doing fine.
::
Tech.MCC is doing quite well now that we've had the schedule and venue change, our first social night is coming up, and we've got an idea for spending money on the budget now, as well as our fliers being up around campus now. Things are going well.
::

Daily Life:
Well I don't have a story to tell, but as I was forced to mow the lawn today, I had time to do some random thinking. A week or two ago while I was in my college advisers office, I made a joke about my being an atheist, and there was a hardcore christian in the room, the type that want s to convert everyone. So she asked me to stay for a few minutes after I was done to have a quick little philosophical debate. I learned recently that the best type of debate to have is with someone who doesn't agree with you at all, because that's when you get to actually have to think about things. We pretty much ended the debate in a stalemate because I had to leave for class, but she gave her proof as "when you see this picture (she didn't have with her, she said she would bring it in sometime and show me) you will say 'Oh My God...' and you won't be able to deny it's because of god." Now that statement of course is wrong because of course I'll be able to deny it, but let's look at the part where she put words into my mouth, because that's what I was thinking about as I was mowing the lawn today...

"Oh My God." She thinks that if I say that I'm agreeing with her about Jehova, Jesus Christ, and the Christian god. Let's break that saying down though. "Oh", "my", and "god". in that, the "Oh" is just an enhancer/expletive, so let's take it out and say that I'm saying "Oh God." which is the same thing in almost every way. "MY" according to the rules of English that I learned as a little boy, is possessive, it means "MINE" or "to convey ownership". When put into the context of "My God", it turn out I am saying "MY god", as in "The god I believe in". Now, being an atheist, I don't believe there is a god, so I'm really calling out to someone that doesn't exist, like someone saying "Holy Shit", they don't actually believe in a divine piece of poop. I could easily replace the entire thing with "Oh President Gore!" or "Oh my million dollar bank account!" it doesn't mean anything, especially that I believe in HER god.

But while I'm on that train of thought, before I go on to another example of an expletive taken at more than face value, let's examine her logic. To her, my crying out "Oh My God" would mean that I believe in the christian god. The ONLY way I could deduce as to how she could think of that is to solve this like I would solve for X in a math problem. Input x X = Result. In this case, Oh my god x Her thought process = Belief in god. Now, let's look at this as two layers. There's the words at face value and there's the meaning behind why I said them. In this case I would say "Oh My God" as an expletive, like as if I was saying Holy Shit. She disregarded that meaning and took the words at face value. Her thought was, "Ok, so he's said 'Oh my god', what do I mean when I say 'Oh my god'? I mean 'Praise the lord Jesus!', so that's what he must have meant as well, He's saying he believes in Jesus Christ!" To which I slam my head against the desk. WORDS MEAN DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE. Just because I said the same words you did doesn't mean I MEAN the same thing you do when you say them! So my conclusion is something I already KNEW about Christians, is that they only hear what they want to hear, and they don't listen to anything else.

Now, I had another line of thought while I was thinking about taking words at face value in the name of god, I thought about something that I have said before that she would also take as me praising her god. "Jesus Fucking Christ." Now, let's take that completely without tone of voice and anylize it word for word. "Jesus", usually refers to Jesus of Nazareth, a dude who supposedly was born 2009 years ago. "Fucking", the act of having sex with usually is what that means. "Christ", the holy spirit, a divine presence or person. So when I say "Jesus Fucking Christ", I'm REALLY saying "Jesus of Nazareth is having sex with the holy spirit." That made me laugh so much. Why? Because that TOO can be blasphemous in more than one way. It either means that Jesus wasn't holy and that he was also fucking around with the holy one, which would be a huge insult. It can be even MORE blasphemous though by saying that Jesus IS the holy one, in which case the sentence would go "Jesus is having sex with Jesus", or in other words, Jesus Christ, who is supposed to be completely free of sin, is Masturbating, thus making him a sinner because according to Vatican rule, any sexual act that does not result in the production of a child is a SIN. I just found that to be funny as hell when I figured out the undeniable logic of it.

So now I FINALLY have an explanation rather than just "It's a figure of speech" to give the hardcore religious nuts for when they "CATCH" me calling out "Oh My God..."

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

Take Time. Make Time. Break Time!

2009-10-19T07:08:00.003-04:00

Listen Up!
Well there is definitely ONE incredibly awesome thing happening with me this week, my parents are on vacation with grandma for the whole week! I have the house to myself, and just the dog to keep me company! Ahhhh, it's so nice to be able to stroll around nude at whatever hours I want, take a shower when I choose to, and just live a little ^^ I love it so much!
::
Now on to the crap. Though we've finally got things rolling with Tech.MCC (The computer club at Middlesex County College), to get our projects approved, we need to get paperwork done to setup the arcade at the two parties we'll be having this semester, we need to print out lots of fliers and put them up around campus, and of course we need to think of things to do throughout the semester. On top of all that, my ability to get messages out and use the website is really slipping with my lack of time, and it's hurting the club quite a bit. I'm actually starting to think about letting someone else be president next semester and just hanging bck as Vice president instead.....
::
FREEHAND DRAWING CLASS!!!! UUUGGGGHHHH!!!! I mean come on! I spent a good 5 hours total working on just my sketchbook for a checkup last week, and after seeing what others were doing in theirs, I'm going in a completely sidetracked direction. Damnit, I hate this class, I really do, not to mention the big drawings I need to get done too! I mean my other classes are all doing great, I know for sure I'm passing my 3d Design course, it's the easiest course I've taken so far and I love doing it, and my Salesmanship class isn't too bad either, my Sociology class I still sorta hate because of the assignments we need to do, but last week we had off, so it's not really looming in my memory right now...
::
What else. Ummm, juggling stuff! Still absolutely no time for JoJ, it looks like I might be finishing up season 4 after the semester ends if things keep going the way they are, same with my next big juggling video! Even though I do already have most of the footage I need, it's just too time consuming right now for me to do it all... I frickin hate college burning up all my time.
::

Juggle This:
I must admit, I have been neglecting my rings in favor of balls and even my clubs! I'm absolutely astounded by this! But when i thin about it, it does make sense because I only really have the space and time to practice rings on Thursdays, and for the past 2 I really haven't done rings even then, I've been doing so much ball stuff it's ridiculous. Though it has thrown me into an oddly great spot where now I can hit 97531 every time and where I'm doing 3 ball combinations worthy of being recorded, I've even been working on a 5 ball back of the hand cascade! It really is weird for me, and I hate how I'm not having as easy a time doing my 5 ring cascade, but at the same time it is a very nice change of pace to be working on 7 balls quite often, and being able to run a 6 ball half shower for as long as I want...

Let me think though, what else have I done..........
Yo-Yo Sticks! I've finally uploaded the video and putup the page for people to buy them online from me! I haven't sold many that way so far, as I expected, shipping costs included the things are ten dollars or more, but I've gotten a lot of interest from the video, and when I go up to Cornell (if I do go, there's still a slim chance I won't be able to depending on the DATE) I'll be selling them there too, and like philly, I should be able to cut my convention costs or even eliminate them!

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150