A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Off Into The Abyss Once More

2009-06-30T15:04:00.008-04:00

Listen Up!
Damnit, not again. Sorry I missed last weeks post, again! I really am busy and tired now that I've got a full job that I'm working at and all the random stuff like jobs for my parents, keeping up with TV and movies, and socializing with everyone I know and love. I'm just absolutely swamped each day, and I really do have to apologies about it.
::
Well Tech.MCC is hit a snag. The summer meetings I've officially dropped, partly because noone seems to have the time or money to go, but that everyone's really lost interest in them since last year. Part of the reason is because Tech.MCC is going through a change in it's core members, because a lot of the older members are graduating and being replaced by new freshmen and sophomores, and though this is wonderful in terms of what new stuff we can do as a club, it really is mixing things up. Since the summer meetings are not happening I had the idea to have at least one or two summer parties at a members house (maybe even my place), but right now I don't have time to think about that.
::
WORK! Work, work, work work, work......
I couldn't be happier about the amounts of money I have coming in, but it has the terrible price of sucking up time like you wouldn't believe. It takes an hour to get there and back, that and managing two stores, especially on shipment days, arew absolutely insane. I mean, especially now that shipments only seem to be coming in on Thursdays and nothing else the entire week, it means I'm sitting there and only working for 3 hours total on non-shipment days, and then thursday I'm there from 2 PM until closing time trying to find room to put everything! Granted, it is a bit exciting trying to beat the clock like that....
::
Well, I'm still waiting for my degree certificate to process.....
I've already paid them and submitted my application for it back a full month ago it seems, and still no word on whether my certificate is there to pick up or not. I mean, granted, right now I don't have the time of energy to go out and search for a new job in the CAD field, but it'd be nice if they had a system that took less than a full damned month to send me a piddly little certificate :P
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Daily Life:
So let me think, what stories do I have from the past two weeks that would be moderately interesting...
Not much I'm afraid. I mean sure I've had a few hard days at work, especially the Thursday Shipments on the 18th, but reall I've said the exact same story before. I have 3 carts worth of plants per store and I spend an hour throwing away half-dead plants and rearranging stuff to make room. It's a tedious and time consuming thing, but it's not very interesting at all. "I put the hydrogenias up front and they instantly started selling before I was even done, I brought over the kart full of Kalanchoes and put them out next to the Hydros..." Yeah, not very exciting or interesting...

I haven't been doing much traveling or anything thanks to me trying to save money for the IJA, so no go there. I've been hanging out with my old friend from last year a bit recently, but not much to talk about there other than I went over her apartment, played Rock Band and Mario Kart with her and her friends, and then watched a few movies. Again, something interesting to do, but not really to talk about. See this is why I miss working in customer service jobs, because granted I LOVE working for Kurt Weiss, where I basically set my own hours and schedule, and the work is fairly easy, but I don't get to deal with anything interesting like I did back when I was working at Shoprite or Spencers. I don't get to say "And then this one customer came in wearing just his robe and asked if we had any marmalade" or anything... No interesting stories, just the same thing. It's actually a slight bit of a bummer now that I think about it, but again I have the wonderful paycheck and flexible schedule and easy work to offset that and make me love this job!

One thing I have done recently is get SmartFTP working again, so I've finally updated my website with stuff. I'm redesigning some of the pages right now and planning to add more, but for the moment I've uploaded a bunch of new pictures to the gallery, added my deviantart gallery slideshow to my photography page, and updated the juggling page to showcase my juggling videos. I'm planning to make a Stories page, where I'll post story videos and excerpts from my blog to, and I'll also be copying my window media player guide from customize.org onto my website as a page, hopefully with visual examples so that it will be even EASIER to follow for everyone, because I have received a few emails with questions and it's been WAY too long since I've done something relating to windows media player...

Juggle This:
The IJA is coming up QUICK. And my plan is to release my next video "Adverse Reaction, right before I leave. Right now I think I've got just enough footage, but I'm looking to get one more absolutely INSANE 4 box trick I came up with before I start cutting it all together. What trick? Well, I'm really eager to get it and I want to be the first person to get it because I've never seen anyone else do anything similar, so you're just gonna have to wait for it I'm afraid, heheh.

That said though, I talked to Michael Karas recently about finding a roommate for IJA, since I had a hotel room already reserved and the deposit already put in, and he came up with a wonderfully amazing suggestion and tipped me off to something I had no idea about. The Bindlestiff guys had rented out a nearby orphanage and were housing jugglers for the convention at $25 a NIGHT. That is AMAZING. As soon as he sent me the info I reserved the room, and though originally we though "well I guess I'll be eating hundred bucks, I realized that I could just modify my reservation to be for one night, that was I have one night at the end of the con to sleep in a nice suite and then the other 6 days I'll be staying in on the cheap! Thanks so much Michael! You really did save my ass there! Because I'm sitting here looking at a bank account balance of 500 dollars, and I have to pay for gas, the room, food, and whatever stuff I do there. So yeah, thanks a ton.

Other than that though, just yesterday I found a strange little mini-routine that I found to be quite addictive and probably entertaining. I'd be starting off doing a 3 ball box, and then switch the pattern around to other patterns like a shower or a double box, or a [6,4x][3,0]* and I'd do it all in time as I count from 1 to 8. So I'd do 8 rounds of a box followed by 8 rounds of a shower, etc. Then after going through the basics I'd mic and match it so that it's almost musical. I really liked what I was doing, and I think I'm gonna see about developing it into a short thing I can perform, or at least turn into a mini-routine video.

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

Clouded Future

2009-06-16T05:00:00.006-04:00

Listen Up!
Ok, before I start, I'm not talking about work in the Daily Life section, so I need to get something off my chest here. The people in HQ who determine what we get in terms of shipments are completely insane, lol. Thursday, they sent me boston ferns when I asked both my supervisor and my rep at HQ for NO MORE BOSTON FERNS! They also sent me three full carts worth of stuff when we had no place to put any of it to both stores last Monday. I know it's what they're supposed to do with the weekly refresh shipment (Monday), but for gods sake listen when my supervisor tells you that WE DON'T HAVE ROOM FOR ALL THOSE DAMN KALANCHOES!!!! XD
::
Besides that though, I'm really considering letting the summer meetings for Tech.MCC go right now. It seems that noones attending them, and the two that we didn't cancel had a total of three people, and then one person show up. I love being able to go out once a week, but I really am not sure what to do. I really wanted a less meeting-like thing where it was basically a once every 2 or three week party at a mmbers house, but so far noone seems to be willing to host. Well I'll see what happens there, it's a little low on my priorities list at the moment unfortunately.
::

Daily Life:
So let me talk about my day today. I knew last night that today was gonna be busy and/or suck, because either we were gonna get a shipment at work and I'd have to go in and make room for all the stuff they sent me, or I wouldn't need to go into work and instead have to run errands that my mom has been bugging me to do for the past week. Well it turns out I didn't get an email from my supervisor, so no shipment came in, and I was off to do errands.

Before I even managed to do that though, I needed to put away my clothes "BEFORE THEY GET WRINKLED!" *grumbles* "Watch this mom," *smoothes out the wrinkles with my hands* "TA-DA!" but if I did that for real I'd get a nice slap for sure. So I did all that for no reason, and then I was off to the Department Of Motor Vehicles to get my license renewed, as my mother had been panicking about for the past two weeks at least. My old license would have expired at the end of the month, that means I still had 16 DAYS TO DO IT, but alas she's panicking because she still believes I haven't gotten my old habit of waiting until the last minute to do something, but whatever. So I tried going there a few days ago, but the route I know was blocked by a bridge that was out, so I had to turn around and go to work after trying to find the detour unsuccessfully. Today I go to the alternate route my parents told me about, and guess what, IT'S BLOCKED TOO! Luckily I was able to follow the detour and make my way there somewhat easily, filling out the forms and getting my new license without much trouble.

Went back home to drop off all my Id's and my passport and now it's off to college to apply for my CAD Certificate. I'd just completed all the required courses last semester, and now was the time to get the fancy piece of paper I deserved. Of course I have no idea what I'm doing, this being my first time applying for the actual degree, so I get the run-around going from registrar, to adviser, to cashier, to registrar before finally managing to fill out the right paperwork and put it in with the right people. Of course what I love most is that the entire deal is gonna cost me 50 bucks total by the time the degree gets MAILED to the college, they call me, and I go in AGAIN to pick it up. What the hell is that!?

So after I get the run around and things go through, I move over to the theater, where I am free to use the stage to practice juggling on and gather footage while the theater majors watch and do their own thing. I made a few easy tricks, tried a couple things including 5 ring cakes and a nice 4 ring string of tricks, and then I felt I was ready to move up and try to match some of my best tricks for my next video. I was going for three things after that first half hour or so of easier tricks, an 8 ring flash, a clean 7 rign qualify, and 6 ring flat-front wimpy's for more than just a flash. I worked on swapping them around for a good hour before finally pulling off one, the 8 ring flash. My arms are already sore enough, but thn I am committed to doing the other two, especially because I know that I'm not gonna be back on campus to go again anytime soon and I'm as warmed up as I would ever be.

I continued to struggle with the 6 ring wimpys before getting a good 8 catches and deciding that was plenty. I hit the camera again, took a brief break and then went for the toughest trick of the three, the 7 ring qualify with no drops. I qualified twice with a drop after the 15th catch, and though that's good enough, I want this next video to be perfect, so I threw that out and kept going while the skin on the back of my pinky peeled off and the nail on my left index finger separated from the skin. I made it and collapsed into a chair immediately afterward, happy as hell about making the trick. I made my way home before the soreness kicked in, and spent the rest of the night relaxing and converting the videos I'd just gotten.

Juggle This:
So if you haven't been paying attention, I'm heading to the IJA, but I need to talk about two things with it. Firstly, my roommate bailed, and now I'm stuck with a reserved room that I absolutely cannot pay for by myself and only a few weeks to find someone to stay with me, at a time when everyone's already figured out where they're staying! *grumbles* But on the flipside, I got an email from Matt Hall saying that my workshop request was good and that I will be heading up the videography workshop on day two! *cheers*

For the workshop I think I'm gonna end up splitting the hour into fifteen minute segments, because there's three parts I want to cover and then I'll leave a fifteen minute bit at the end for practice. The three segments I'm thinking will go like this... Equipment and setup, Framing/Lighting/Angles, and then editing/footage tips. I don't want to give away the entire workshop right here, so that's all I'll say about it, but I am eager as hell now to be in charge of my first workshop, EVER. Granted, as I look at the schedule, it seems the IJA has at least 3 workshops constantly goign on, so I have no idea how many people will show up for mine, but whatever, I'm ecstatic regardless!

Like I said in the daily life section, I've been doing some CRAZY stuff recently for my next video, and looking back at the trailer, I'm glad I did put in what I did, because at the time I made the trailer I really thought I wasn't gonna get much more footage before releasing the video, so I was debating whether to show all the good tricks in it or not, and eventually I decided to put in some of the best footage I had. So I'm gonna see about starting to edit the video when I finally have the free time to, and I expect it to turn out incredible

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

Crap Crap Crap

2009-06-08T15:59:00.000-04:00

Listen Up!
First off, sorry about missing last week's post, I really didn't know what happened there, and I'm sorry if this post is late too, seeing as how I got sick yesterday and today (Tuesday Morning/Monday Night) I am feel like death....
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Work is going very well, I'm making enough money to get me to the IJA, and the work is going smoothly enough that I don't need to frett too much over losing the job. I've been able to do more than just water and remove dead stuff, so I've shown myself to be valuable asset to Kurt Weiss I think, and I'm gonna ask my supervisor for her opiinion of my performance so far, to see if there's anything I need to step up my game on or if there's anything I'm forgetting.
::
Tech.MCC has been a bit of a wash so far during the summer, I've ended up cancelling 2 meetings in a row out of the 3 we've had so far, and the trip to Diggnation was a wash too...

Daily Life: A Trip to the Live Diggnation
So there's this little podcast network called Revision3, they have a little show on there called Diggnation. The hosts of the show are geek celebrities who have thousands of fans, I am one of them. I was featured on this show in one of it's early episodes (as can be found on my youtube channel), for my juggling, and since then I have gone to every meetup in NYC and juggled at all of them. They did a live show in New York City last year, and I was there for that too, but this one was much bigger at Webster Hall, and as I did last year, I sent out an email to the members of Tech.MCC (and in hindsight I sent it out WAYYYY too late) inviting them to join me. One person did, so here's what happened.

I got all my juggling supplies and packed up the truck to go to work, I spent the 5 hours at Home Depot doing my job and excitedly thinking about what will happen at the show later that night. my work ended and I took the short trip to the Train Station near where I worked, where I was to meet the other member of Tech.MCC, who would then drive us both to the event in Manhattan. Things went smoothly on the way there, including getting through the Holland Tunnel and finding our way to the spot. After nearly 20 minutes of searching for a free parking space, we broke down and went to the nearest parking lot. The price was 35 bucks. We made a deal that he'd buy whatever drinks I was gonna have if I paid for that. The deal was struck, and I broke pretty much even because I only had 3 Brooklyn Laguer's and a Corona at 7 bucks a pop. But that's later.

Once we got in line, we got what we were expecting eagerly, free Klondike bars! Why? Klondike was sponsoring the show, so even as it began to rain outside annd everyone stood in line, we had something good to keep us happy. I broke out a few juggling moves in the line as I did last year, of course this time because of the rain they moved us all inside (and by all of us, I mean the couple hundred people in line) to wait. While in there, there was a space where a stage light was shining, so I took advantage of that and juggled a bit there for everyone, and managed to get some attention and pass out a bunch of business cards, much more than last year. So me and the other Tech.MCC member split up and went our separate ways into different groups, and waited for the hour or two before we were finally let updstairs to the main ballroom of Webster hall. There was another half hour or so of DJ's playing stuff before Alex and Kevin (the show hosts) came out for the pre-show. That was an epic moment, because almost as soon as they got onstage they threw out T-shirts for Revision3, and one of the pure geniuses of the audience threw it back. This turned the audience into a mob, and everyone started throwing random stuff onstage to them, including one guy who took off his belt and threw it up, numerous people threw their Klondike bars (which more were given out throughout the evening), and one group of ladies threw onstage all their phone numbers on a pice of paper! That was fairly epic, and then the best thing of all happened, another Geek celebrity from New Jersey, Gary Vaynerchuck, threw his WALLET onstage from the balcony, and that was how Kevin and Alex found out he was at the show before tossing it back up to him. Talk about epic.

So the show began, and there were a number of noteworthy bits that happened, one was a random drunk person who jumped up onto the stage and was promptly removed by security, that was funny as hell. Another cool thing mid show was that someone threw onstage (not part of the mob, but during the show) Kevin's jacket which he had left at a taping location 2 live shows ago in Texas. How much more epic can you get than that? I'll tell you how epic, when one of the show's sponsors sends out chicks with a t-shirt gun, and both the hosts end up firing it off into the rafters, at the same time they took turns throwing more Klondikes into the balcony, half of them covered in hard ice that made them, essentially, rocks. Fucking Win.

After the show was over there was of course the mad rush to meet them for a photo-op in the corner while the DJ played. I missed this last year because I had to catch a bus, but luckily this time, thanks to the Tech.MCC guy, I could stay as long as I want, and maybe even catch Alex, who is also a juggler, and do some juggling tricks with him after the mob went away. Of course I did get the chance to get a photo op, that's what's off to the left here, but unfortunately as soon as that was over the guards rushed both hosts back to their isolation booths for the rest of the night. That sucked for me, but that was just the beginning of my woes!

On the way out, I found I only had 30 dollars of cash on me, so I had to pay some with my debit card to the parking guys. As soon as that happened we drove down to Canal Street to enter the Holland Tunnel. All fine and stuff, of course the second we hit Canal Street, the first light we went through was yellow, and we went pretty late, we saw one flash as we entered and another flash as we exited the intersection. The NYPD had set up an auto-ticketer on that light and thanks to the economy have cranked down on it's leniency setting. pissed me and him off, but that was again, nowhere near the end. The next light was pretty slow with the way traffic was going through, on both sides, and we got stuck in the middle of the intersection as the light went red, thus, we were in the way of traffic going through, fine, we moved up as far as we could for people to get through behind us. You'd think that the cars wanting to get through woudl go through the opening we made, nope. One asshole jumps in as soon as the light on his side turns yellow, so now we have the green. As the car in front of us pulls up, he jumps in and squeezes through in front of us, nearly clipping of the bumper as we went. We both flipped him off instantly, and IN THAT TIME, ANOTHER asshole driver decided to make a left turn and nearly smacked us head on as we went to get the hell out of the intersection. Now we're both a little bit pissed.

We're about a block away from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and things are at a dead standstill. Absolutely stopped. We sat there for 20 minutes before the line moved up enough for me to squint and read the sign that said "one lane open". ONE FUCKING LANE?! Yes, only one lane of the tunnel was open, with everyone crowding to get out of the city. Finally, the line moved enough where we could turn out of the line, now fuming, and hit the West Side Highway to the Lincoln Tunnel instead, wasting gas and time. I have no way to describe other than that my hair nearly burst into flames each time we hit a red light. This continued and it seemed like every light all the way back to the fucking train station where I'd parked the truck, was turning red right in front of us. It was hell, and I sat there appreciating EVERY red light on the route home from there. *grumble*

Juggle This:
I've done some reflecting recently, and what have I come to realize? I hate summer and what it does to my juggling. I don't have the big roofed spaces on campus to practice in anymore and I don't have my props and camera constantly on me like when the semester is going. I feel bad about it because I look at my youtube channel and see it's been weeks since I posted anything good, and I'm gathering footage for Adverse Reaction at what seems to be one trick a week! DAMNIT!

I really do want to be recording stuff, it's just that ll the stuff I want to do is with rings and needs a high roof. I can't do the stuff outside because of the constant wind that results from living between the Turnpike and a river, and the garage ceiling is the highest ceiling I don't have to go out of my way for, and that's only 9 feet high or so, not even enough to do 6 rings under. I mean I have spent some time outside getting ball and club footage, but the thing is it's all been for Adverse Reaction and nothing worth posting by itself to youtube.

But besides that though, I've been doing some work pre-planning what's gonna happen with JoJ season 4, and it seems like I have a dedicated co-host for this season and a few topic ideas. The thing is, right now we've only just started planning out ideas and stuff, I have no idea what I'll be doing for video or what we'll do in terms of recording or what. Right now it's just ideas flying around, but one thing that I do have down for sure, is that before summer ends, there will be the next season of JoJ beginning.

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

Ready At Checkout

2009-05-25T15:23:00.000-04:00

Listen Up!
Fuck. I got in my grades for this semester and if you're a regular to my blog you know the deal I have with my parents. They pay for my semester as long as I don't get any D's. This semesters past tuition was 1700 bucks, I have 500 in my bank account. I got two D's (photography and Manufacturing Materials). And of course you also know I have a convention coming up in July that's gonna cost me at LEAST 500 bucks. I'll say it again..... FUCK.....
::
As for how work is going, things seem to be doing well, my supervisor watched over one of my recent shifts and basically had nothing bad to say about the job I was doing. This is all great, and with me starting to get comfy with what I'm required to do whenever I go in, I think this job is gonna last me for a while. Of course my mom is now hounding me to get ANOTHER job, why? I have no idea why, I think they're just intent on watching me squirm as they force me into debt with them for the first time in my life as my plans for the IJA stand on muddy ground even though I've already been planning it since JANUARY.
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I've heard a couple people talking about how they miss Jugglers On Juggling, and my youtube account seems to be running pretty dry lately, so even though I'm not fully set up with a list of topics yet, I'm probably gonna start work on Season 4 for you guys :D
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Daily Life:
Well I wish that my current job was good for stories, but seeing as how I deal with foliage all day, there's really not much for me to talk about. "I overwatered the plants and because there was no drain in the floor I need to mop up after myself!" Yeah, not really exciting stories. That said, the drive to and from turns out to be a bit of a challenge, especially coming back home. I have two possible routes that I can take, either I can jump on the Parkway, which runs south-WEST too, when I need to go south and East, or I can take 27/35, which goes right where I need it to, but is full of lights and a lower speed limit. I've still not been able to time which way is faster, but let me jst say getting off the parkway and onto the right road home is hellish.

What else can I say about this job. Not much really, but something I can mention which I don't think I have is that I'm mowing lawns on the weekends. I hate doing it, but not as much as I used to since i haven't done it that often for the past year. I'm basically using that money for gas money, which speaking of which why the FUCK are gas prices going up?! Nevermind, I don't want to go into that rant today...

But yeah, that's about it for my working details, let me tell you about Saturday then. I'm sitting there in bed, having just gone in at around 5 AM (yes, I sleep late during the summer), and I find myself waking up to the screams of my mother, who is in the room and yelling at me to wake the hell up and clean my goddamned room. I look over at the clock to find it's not even 10 yet, I've slept for little over 4 hours. I can tell by the mood she's in, and the fact that my dad, as usual, was backing her 100%, that I wasn't gonna win no matter how legit of an excuse I had that I needed to sleep in order to get to work tomorrow on time. I was forced to not only do the usual dusting and vacuming, but to go and fully reorganize my room as well. This took about 3 hours total, and though my room has never been cleaner, there was nothing wrong with it before other than that a clothing basket full of shirts wasn't hung up and my chair needed a spray of febreeze.

Then, once that was done, I was ushered in to vacuum all of the upstairs bedrooms. Okey, not too much of a problem, but as soon as I'm done with that I'm ushered away and told to get some clothes on because I needed to help mom go buy mulch from Home Depot. I grumbled and did as I was told, quickly being rewarded with a free subway sub on the way back as we stopped for lunch. Overall, very nice indeed, and luckily I didn't need to do anything else the rest of the day. But I have something else to gripe about before we move on to my recent juggling accomplishments.

I hate it when my sister is home. It has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with her, or how I feel about her. We get along just fine and everything, but my parents made the rule that when she is home, since she has to sleep downstairs on the couch, I am not allowed to go down. This means I can't watch TV at night, or eat what would be my dinner. And they're strict about it, I swear they've got a stethoscope rigged to the top stair of the staircase, and I hate it. I've gone to bed hungry at least a half dozen times because she was here and I got caught trying to go down to satisfy my hunger. I friggin hate that rule, but I do understand it, the downstairs is essentially her room whenever she's there, and I don't expect anyone to come barging into my room when I'm sleeping, even though they do.... Actually it's kind of hypocritical now that I think about it..... I need to end this rant now before it SERIOUSLY pisses me off :P

Juggle This:
Hey, I've actually gotten a few new tricks for my video in the past two weeks! A few I'm pretty proud of, so let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. I've been working on my 4 ring flat front tricks, and I've made a run, on camera, of 4 ring wimpy's, to synch, to asynch fountain, all in flat front reverse, and each of them qualified. That I was really proud to get on camera, but another rather inventive trick I came up with is a 4 ring grind trick.

Basically, I throw a multiplex to a grind in each hand, then instead of my usual trick where I'd swap the two spinning rings, I throw the entire set of rings, both the spinning ring and the ring being grinded on, in a 31 pattern, catching it and going back to a fountain as the grinds ended. It looks fairly spectacular I think, and it's a lot easier than I thought it would ever be, I made it on the first try ever.

Let me think, what else, OH! I went to my local dollar store oe day, and I found something amazing. It's called the yo-yo-stick, and what it is is essentially a 16 inch long stick with a string coming out the center, but the string is attached to twisted rubber bands inside, so that when the string is pulled out, it will snap back towards the stick. Essentially, the entire thing is a stick that will return to your hand when thrown, and I've found it to be quite an amazing skill toy. I'm currently recording a video of simple tricks I've discovered for it, and if my video editors work soon, I'll have it up before the week is over.

RANTING TIME:
if you haven't figured out by now, I have the rant and raves section of craigslist constantly refreshing in one of my firefox tabs Recently, a guy on there complained about people who hold up the line at supermarkets. Being a former cashier, I felt I should throw my hat in.

Guy 1: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1109956752.html

QUOTE

Instead of watching the person check-out your stuff get your payment ready. I hate watching someone watch the cashier scanning ALL your stuff then you look for your CC or start to write your check
If using check,fill in store name,date,sign it and wait for total. Sounds simple doesn't it ?

My first response: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1110066714.html

QUOTE

THANK YOU SIR!

I was a cashier at the shoprite of Woodbridge from 2005 to 2007 and if there was ONE THING I hated besides when a customer had a massive order and made me bag the entire thing with paper, it was when people would hold up the damned line in any way that was stupid, especially looking for coupons or waiting to start paying and crap.. Just wanted to let you know, most cashiers share in your frustration too.

Guy #2: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1110380355.html

QUOTE

I'll add my 2 cents. I can't stand these people who won't help the cashier to bag the stuff that they're buying, especially when it's really busy and there's a ling line. It seems like these people feel like they're entitled to that "service" as part of the price they pay, and it also seems as though they're lording it over the cashier, as though bagging their own groceries is beneath them. I knew a woman who said proudly, defiantly, one night at dinner that she would never bag her own groceries. I lost respect for her when she said that.

Guy #3: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1110923363.html

QUOTE

I was a cashier at Wawa for 4 years, on and off. On top of having to wait for customers to count out the exact change for someone that was $4.38, the thing that annoyed me the most was when they were on the cell phone and were so distracted by the conversation that they would take even longer to pay me.

When this happened, I'd just stand at the register and stare at them until they got OFF THE PHONE and then we resumed the transaction. If they refused to get off the phone, I'd do the transaction, but 9 times out of 10, they'd get to the car, then have to come back in because they wanted change or forgot cigarettes or some other thing that they would've probably remembered had their attention been on paying for their things as opposed to what color Joan is dyeing her hair this week.

I am so glad I am out of retail and have a real job now. Working with the public is a true test of patience.

and now the asshole: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1111940318.html

QUOTE

Well fool, the reason I watch is because you scanners can't even do that right. I suggest that everyone keep an eye on the screen where the totals are displayed in case of an error.

And BTW why not just put the order in a bag as you scan it? Is that too complicated for a moron like you? Scan. Bag. Try it douche.

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Instead of watching the person check-out your stuff get your payment ready. I hate watching someone watch the cashier scanning ALL your stuff then you look for your CC or start to write your check
If using check,fill in store name,date,sign it and wait for total. Sounds simple doesn't it ?

My responce to Asshole: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1112429260.html

QUOTE

Well, idiot, if you don't trust the cashier who's JOB it is to ring everything up right, maybe you can trust the RECEIPT. There's a reason why this little piece of paper is handed to you at the end, and that is so you can check and see if something went wrong, something was rung up twice, or whatever, and hey guess what, most cashiers are on the same register for about 3 hours at a time. You can go home, find a mistake, come back, AND TALK TO THE SAME PERSON WHO RANG YOU UP. Granted, no we can't help you once we hit the button to end the transaction, but we do have a phone to call up the manager and we know where the customer service desk is located. If you have a problem with your order, it's not like it's going to KILL you to fix it, customer service usually bends over backwards to fix whatever mistakes a cashier has made as long as you have the receipt. So don't go holding up my line because you don't trust me to do my job, trust the folks at the customer service desk to do their jobs once I've done mine.

As for Scan - Bag - Try it douche. What? You think we haven't tried? I'm sorry to have to burst you're little "I'm too important to bag myself because I don't trust the working cashier" bubble, but do you see that row of humans with carts full of groceries behind you? That's called the LINE, and it's our job to keep it moving forward. Let me throw a little math at you, let's say, conservatively, that it takes twice as long to scan and bag an item as it does to just scan it and place it on the conveyor, in reality it takes somewhere around 4 times as much time and the cashier has to be ambidextrous, but I'll leave it at a simple twice as long for you. Now, take a usual customer's order, somewhere around 80 items, or about half a cart. Each item takes two seconds to pick up, find the label, and run it over the scanner to the other side. 2 seconds times 80 items means the order should take (if there are no produce items or troublesome items that need to be punched in by hand) around 3 minutes, and if you're still bagging by the time I'm done scanning everything, I will GLADLY bag whatever is left while you get out your money, that's why I have a set of bags on my end too. Now, let's take that figure of 3minutes, and say I'm doing all the work now. That means the order has taken me a full 6 minutes to do while you sat there and the line didn't move. That's another full customer I could have gotten done with and sent on his merry way that I wasn't able to do because you decided to be a douchebag and not help me out. You see, it's all about ALL of the customers, that's what my job is, to keep as may customers as I can happy. If you want, the next time you're in my line, I'll stop and stand there for three minutes before starting your order, and we'll see how much you and the people behind you appreciate it.

A Very nice person, lol : http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1112599508.html

QUOTE

Rich, very well put, Kudos to you, and what I definitely noticed, for those of you that think cashiers are idiots or are not educated, well Rich Bravo to you and the ability to get your point across intelligently. "applause"

I also got an email from a girl praising me for my response as well, I won't post that, but yeah it was nice and it made my day. Than came.....

The asshole's response: http://cnj.craigslist.org/rnr/1112614397.html

QUOTE

Well Rich, I can see why you've reached such heights in your career. To get this straight you want ME to spend whatever time it takes to go home, check the order, COME BACK and THEN try to convince customer service that my order was wrong when I left your register? No thanks. I will check as you scan. And I do this because you are stupid. Too stupid to do even the most menial of jobs.

Now try again. Scan. Bag. The bag is right there. It's no more work than putting it somewhere else. Try to take some pride in your job.

I didn't bother to respond, because I'd already made my point, it was late in the day, and I already won the argument

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

To Boldly Go

2009-05-12T04:10:00.003-04:00

Listen Up!
So my job is going well. I've learned what I need to do and have been doing it as well as I can. I'm about to get my first paycheck soon, and will be adding it right to my bank account for the IJA. As for more details about the job, I plan on talking about them today along with what a long day seems to be there and why this is so far the best job I think I've ever had.
::
Well there's not much else to say now that college is over. My report came in and I am a little stunned as to some of the grades I got, but no failures which is always good. Basically, I passed the main course I needed to pass this year, which was my last Civil Engineering course, and now all I need to do is apply for the Drafting Certificate and I will be a certified Draftsperson, and if all goes well and I get used to the workload at Home Depot or decide I need MORE money, I can find a job right now as a draftsperson somewhere and work in AutoCAD.
::
There really isn't much else to talk about this week. I haven't been doing a hell of a lot because this past week and a half has been my week to break from college before I start working on personal projects again like my next juggling video or deviantART submissions and such. Either way, my break went well, and now it's time to generate some content! Including, maybe, the plans for JoJ Season 4?.....

Reeses2150's Reviews For The Intelligent Human
STAR TREK
Let me start off by saying, I was SO scared about this movie. The first teaser trailer got me amped, but then I started thinking as more and more trailers came out "Wait, all they're showing is action?" and then I see the tagline "This isn't your dad's Star Trek" and hear the quote from McCoy "We've got no captain and no first officer to replace him" and each of them made me cringe with fear that JJ took the franchise away from what it was all about and turned it into an excuse to have big space battles with no respect to the canon at all. Walking out after the end credits I could not have been more wrong. I saw three big flaws in the movie that I'll spoiler alert about later, but for right now let me talk about the masive amounts of good that this film brought to the table. Firstly, the casting for everyone was BEAUTIFUL. Getting Zachary Quinto to play Spock was an absolute stroke of GENIUS, and the only two people that didn't seem to fit their roles well were Checov and Uhura. Everyone else did Magnificently.

The story now. This is where the bread and butter of Star trek has lied for MANY years, is it's great storytelling. I wish I could explain without giving away half the movie, this movie really is best seen when you have no idea what to expect. Let me just say though, that my biggest fear was that JJ was going to just hash together a story that allowed for nonstop action with little or no reason. Not the case. Though there was a LOT of action in the movie, and it did feel a lot like Wrath Of Kahn at times, there was still plenty of explaining and storytelling to justify it. By far one of my biggest fears was because this was an origin story, that JJ was going to completely throw away the entire Star Trek Canon in favor of his own vision. Though that is EXACTLY what he did, he managed to creat a story that did that WITHOUT slapping the old Canon in the face. Two words. Alternate Timeline. and that's all I'll reveal for you guys.

Now for the 3 little errors I caught, and these are *spoilers*. #1, how the hell can Uhura order a Cardassian drink in the 23rd Century? Starfleet wasn't even halfway to exploring Cardassian and Bajoran space until the 24th century, but here's Uhura before the Enterprise even takes off ordering a cardassian drink on the menu. #2. And this is where it gets serious. Why the hell doesa black hole suddenly turn into a time machine with NO modifications or special treatment? Just like that, this "Red Matter" ignites and creates a black hole, which should crush anything that falls into it right? No, instead, as Spock's and Nero's ships get dragged into the black hole, they suddenly just pop out somewhere else in the past. #3. What the hell is with this "Red Matter" anyways? It's never explained at ALL, and somehow it seems that a drop of the stuff will create a black hole big enough to suck up a planet, as where the entire sphere of the stuff, which must have been a BILLION drops worth, created a black hole EXACTLY THE SAME SIZE, MAYBE EVEN SMALLER! Can someone please explain how that fits into the laws of physics? Please?

Daily Life:
Well let me talk about my working environment, which is absolutely wonderful. I already said last week that my basic job is to water all the plants, put out new ones, remove dead ones, label everything that needs labeling, and organize/rearrange all the plants. So now let me give you just a quick bit of info on what the working environment is like. INCREDIBLE. Basically, I make my own hours, so I just need to go in whenever I need to, call the main office to clock in, do the stuff on the list, with NO supervision, NO limitations on when I can/can't go to the bathroom or grab a drink of water, and with no time limit or anything, and then just call the office again to clock out when I'm done. This is by far the best job I've had. But there are a few drawbacks that make it a little tough to do.

#1. scale. The number of plants in both the stores I maneg is ENORMOUS, and having to water/manage EACH plant every time I'm there, it isn't hard, but it's time consuming as hell and tedious too.
#2. Space. Every 3days an order comes in, and though this is the summer and people buy a lot, half the time I'm there at either store I'm finding myself staring at a ful cart of flowers with NOPLACE to put them, and that's my job is to rearrange everything and make room.
#3. Insects. I have to make sure that the insects don't get into any of the plants and eat at them every time I'm there, so that's another tedious thing I need to do and check for that makes the job suck somewhat.

Other than that, the rest of the suck is all minor stuff that can be related to ANY job, like filling out and faxing paperwork, to helping the random customer that doesn't understand I'm in a different department than they need help in, and whatever. But so far, I'm happy, and I'm making a fair bit doing this stuff, so let's hope it lasts until July eh?

Juggle This:
Sorry, nothing here this week simply because I've been busy relaxing and doing work at my new job to juggle much, that and with my college classes over, I've lost my access to the great high roofed places around campus that I usually juggle at. I'll swing back to campus once every few weeks to do some practice, but for now, things are slowin down slightly.

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

Here Comes The Money!

2009-05-05T15:03:00.004-04:00

Listen Up!
I AM SO HAPPY TO SAY I HAVE EMPLOYMENT!!!!! YES!!!! I am now working for the Home Depot of Garwood and Elizibeth (yes they're both a ways away from Sewaren, but whatever) as the floral representative for an affiliated company. Basically it's gonna be my job to make sure to go into both stores at least 3 times a week and water the plants, remove the dead ones, keep track of them, and put out new shipments when they come in. I'm essentially the floral product manager. It's not a hard job at all, and the thing I love most is I'm gonna be able to make my own hours, the thing I may end up having problems with is that I may not have ENOUGH hours. I really want to crank myself into gear and make tons of money before my trip to the IJA in July, and from my first day of work yesterday, it seems as though each day I'd only be working about 3 or 4 hours... We'll see what happens I guess...
::
The college semester is OVER! I've already had my finals in 3 classes, and just have my Photo final tomorrow before I'm free to work for the summer. I'm kind of loathing this semesters end, because a few of my good pals are transferring out of MCC over the summer, including Jacob and Mark, two of my best pals. It's a little sad, but hey, I'm getting in with the people in the media arts classes, so it's not all bad. What was I talking about again?
::
Tech.MCC is gonna start summer meetings next week, which is awesome. We never got the chance to do anything with the robotics kit we ordered, and I think we still need to do a community service project because I have no idea who went to help with the end of the semester party, but overall this was a good year. I'm finally having Gordon actually TEACH me some things, I know what we need to do as a club, I'm learning what works and what doesn't, and we're getting new members who are willing to do stuff. One of the best ideas I had that turned out to be a MASSIVE hit was I asked members to bring in their old computer parts they had laying around and didn't want to give away to the other club members, holy crap did this get a good response! Free tech stuff to mod and play around with? What could be better!?
::

Daily Life:
So my first day working in the floral section at Home Depot of Garwood. Not really all that exciting, especially compared to my other jobs. I started the day by going in and meeting the supervisor from the affiliate company I'm working for, and she showed up about a half hour after I did, so I spent that time blocking/facing (in other words rearranging to look nice) all the plants outside, because I don't need to water them, it's raining. I then went to the foyer and began removing the few dead plants there were, and in the middle of that, she arrived to help.

So she explains to me how dead a dead plant is before we consider it dead and throw it out. Yeah, there's a certain level of deadness something has to achieve before it is worthy of being canned. But I digress, we did that and cleaned up and snipped all the dead blossoms from the plants and made our way to the inside shelves, where we really started cleaning up and making room for the shipment which was due to arrive that day but hadn't yet. So we do that, it takes about an hour, and the shipment still hasn't arrived, so we grab the massive watering tank, which is an awesome piece of equipment, basically a massive 40+ gallon tank on wheels, hooked up to a garden hose with a nozzle. So we fill it up, which takes a half hour (during which time we continued to face/block the plants), go back, and I water everything on the inside of the store. This takes about an hour, and now we're left with nothing to do and the shipment still hasn't arrived.

She tells me one key piece of info, and that is that if the shipment is this late and you have nothing else to do but wait, just clock out and come organize the shipment another day. So that's exactly what we did, she showed me how to fill out the what we threw away sheets and how to clock out before we clocked out and I left for class. Basically, pretty easy, just a matter of doing things is what it all is.

Juggle This:
Wow, uh, yeah. I have hardly done any juggling over the past week. I actually feel kinda mad at myself for not juggling anywhere near what I should, but somehow every time I do juggle, I haven't seemed to have lost anything and am still improving on some things. Granted, some things I simply have not practiced and have suffered immensely, like my 4 ring mess, but eh I can't practice everything. I really do wish there was more I could put here, bu8t really NOTHING juggling related has happened to me in the past week, absolutely nothing. It's quite annoying.

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

OW, OW, OW, OW, OW.....

2009-04-27T15:47:00.000-04:00

Listen Up!
BIG NEWS! I JUST GOT A SECOND DEGREE BURN ON MY THUMB BY SPILLING BOILING WATER FROM RAMEN ONTO IT! lol note to self, two ramen packages will NOT fit into one bowl.
::
Bit of bad news I'm afraid, Shoprite finally got back to me and said they can't hire me again because I was fired. Oh well, BUT good news, I've got another lead on a new job with Home Depot, who one of my friends works at, so that's another opening. I've still got to check back with AMC Theater first though. That and call back the US Census department to see where that stands from long time ago.
::
College is almost done, yay! All my classes seem to be doing just fine, including the craptastic ones, and it looks like for once I may get higher than a C on everything! But who knows right now, I don't want to jinx it. Overall though, I'm just happy to be almost done so I can FINALLY concentrate on getting a job so I can go to the IJA in July.
::
Oh, did I not mention that? I'M GOING TO THE IJA! Finally, right? I'll be heading down with a good friend of mine who I haven't seen since elementary school, Zach. He doesn't know how to juggle, but he's coming up from Florida to hang out with me for a week and maybe even learn to juggle himself.
::
Tech.MCC News! We've got a meeting left to go and we're FINALLY going to be using the robotics kit we ordered. other than that, we'll also be helping out with the end of the semester party at MCC this year, seeing as how there is no all college night thanks to the douchebag that brought a GUN to the last one....
::
Sorry about the missing post last week, I really have been busy trying to get a damned job in this economy and making sure that I'm up with all my college assignments.

Daily Life:
So while I wait to get a job, it's warm enough for me to START MOWING LAWNS AGAIN! Something I haven't done for 2 full years, but the second I started I INSTANTLY remembered why I hadn't. But that actually wasn't the first thing that happened on Saturday of this week. First of all, last week I found someone in Sewaren throwing away a massive rear-projection TV that was completely intact and still worked. I knocked on the door, asked if I could have it, and scooped it up into the truck myself. That was an amazing feat in itself because the thing weighted about a hundred pounds and was bigger than I am, but I just man handled it up somehow, and then the guy came out of the house and started a conversation with me, and from there, he invited me to a job interview at where he worked. So Saturday I had to get up at 8 AM in order to get picked up and follow him all the way to Tinton Falls to sit in a "join our company" pitch. I saw through it around 30 minutes in. It's a pyramid scheme, so I sat until it ended, and I won't be going there. So now I arrive back home around 10:00, and I immediately am off to mow lawns.

Now, I've ranted before about how much I hate mowing the lawn, and now I'm stuck here in the 80+ degree weather with two lawns to mow, running on no breakfast and about 4 hours of sleep, trying to make 25 bucks. Granted the 25 bucks is nice, but to refresh you on why I hate the lawns, I think it's too much effort for not enough payback, the result of an hours work only lasts a few days, it's time spent working outside sweating in the heat with mosquitoes biting at your limbs, and all that grass has to go somewhere. I just hate doing it, and I hated doing it the entire hour I was out there with a crappy mower and a hefty bag.

Well I finally got done with THEM and now I was on my way home to eat and take a well earned nap. So after munching on some Pizza Bagels, I traveled upstairs, took a nice shower to cool off, and slipped into bed, only to have my mom suddenly yell at me about the rest of the family going off to a baseball game and leaving me with a list of stuff to do, most notably was to MOW OUR GOD DAMNED LAWN. I made mental notes and fell asleep for a while.

Well guess what happened, I woke up around 6:00, and it was too late for me to do the lawn before it was gonna get dark, and I was lying to her about it on the phone when she called. I hurriedly vaccumed the downstairs and put my clothes in the wash lie she asked, but I figured I'd wait to do the lawn tomorrow anyways, seeing as how it was too late, and it really isn't critical. Well she and dad apparently didn't think so, barging in and just yelling at me in general about it, not asking for an excuse or even willing to hear one, just yelling more meanly than I've heard in a long time, with me sitting there puzzled as to what the hell the big deal was. Eventually they left me alone and mom later came in to apologize, but I still had to more the lawn the next day.....
Juggle This:
Well I haven't really been pushing my abilities as of late in terms of high numbers, BUT! I have been working on a lot of simpler tough moves I've as of yet been unable to do. I started off by trying to get 3 ring shoulder slides, and I managed to get a full flash to a cascade on camera! Woo! But I didn't stop there, a few days later I was practicing my 2 box stuff because I hadn't in months, and all of the sudden I found myself with the idea to do a face-on one-handed stack flip, where instead of both boxes rotating sideways in opposite directions, they rotate face forward in opposite directions, and I managed to get THAT on camera as well! Then right after doing that I made a reverse side-on version where the top box made a full spin and the bottom box a half spin. Talk about technical box tricks!

Oh but the fun didn't stop there, I then came up with a short while later, 3 ring full reverse penguin catches! I made a video, posted it online, and then proceeded to try it out some more, and I've gotten the move down completely, I can run it to a qualify in a full reverse pattern, and I've run it to a qwualify doing inward flat-fronts as well! Thay look so good on camera, I can't wait to complete my latest video with them. Oh yeah, you heard right....

My next video is coming out soon! I'm almost done gathering footage for it, and it's going to be AMAZING. All the tricks I've done are awesome, all the footage looks great, and I'm now goign to have the video released in 720x480 resolution, aka WIDE! So yeah, keep an eye out for that somtime in early summer!

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

DAMNIT! My Schedule!

2009-04-15T15:28:00.004-04:00

Listen Up!
Sorry again that I'm late with this post, it's just been so busy recently I haven't had the time to do anything like new art or whatever, much less keep up with this. I will be able to in about two weeks when classes are finally over, but for now, argh!
::
Well college is nearing the end, and it appears that I'm going to pass all my classes. But I still need to do the final assignments for each, and they all suck. In photo class we need to do a series of pictures to tell a story, but at least we can finally use digital! Applications in Business (AKA most useless class ever) I've still got 2 nice juicy assignments to do, that are simply "Copy the typed stuff into the program one bit at a time", easy as hell, but time consuming, that and I've got the final powerpoint presentation to do. 2D Design luckily we've just got one more project to do and it's done in class, and my last engineering class seems to just have quizzes and tests left which I'm totally ready for. But the bottom line is, I've got so much busy work it sucks....
::
The job search? Ugh.... I'm still waiting for responses from AMC and Shoprite, and I'm also looking at what other jobs I know people that work there. AMC I can't keep calling because they said the next round of hiring is done at the end of the month when the movie season begins, and Shoprite my uncle just said he's talking to the manager on Saturday when she gets back. A bit frustrating....
::
Now as for the talk I made last week about possibly doing a video for Juggle This, I still want to, but the footage kind of sucks the more i watch it, and I don't have the time to edit it anyways, so I'll probably still do it, just not until a week or two from now.
::

Daily Life:
Well I guess yesterday was a good enough example of how busy my life is that I can go through it and you can see what's going on with me. So Monday I stayed up to around 4:00 or so doing the usual stuff I do at night and catching up on all my forums and internet sites. I stayed up that late because I had class from 6-10PM that day, so it was really just 6 hours of free time I had, which is just enough to catch up on the TV shows I want to watch, check all the websites and forums I visit, and manage my daily needs. I had to wake up at 10:30 in order to get to my first class of the day at 11:00. So basically I'm running off of 5 hours of sleep to start, which has been a BIG trend recently seeing as how I have class at 11:00 two days of the week and one day where it begins at 1:00 PM. So I've just been tired all the damned time this semester, even falling asleep in some classes, which has never happened before since high school. But I digress, moving on....

That class ends, and it's now 1:00. I set up a to-do list of things to go do before I got home and so I went to it. While I was still on campus, I went to the student activities office to keep up on a thing for Tech.MCC, and then after that happened I went to my advisor to talk about my fall semester courses. This all took a little time up, so it's now 1:40 as I'm starting the engine to the truck and heading off to do the other things I need to. I went to the bank, the post office to mail something, the gas station to fill up, and finally to Subway to eat for the first time of the day. This all took about an hour and a half, so it's 3:00 now. On my way home, I pass by someone's house a few blocks from mine, and I see a big rear-projection TV that was on the curb, perfectly undamaged. I pass it and then decide to circle around and stop. I go up to the door and ask if it was being thrown away, if it still worked, and if I could take it. Yes, yes, and yes I got in response, and so I took the ten minutes to pick it up and heave it into the truck. When I got home I spent another 20 minutes or so wheeling it into the backyard and covering it with a tarp on all sides, including underneath. Why'd I pick it up? Well it's a free big screen TV for if/when I move, and even if not, inside is a wonderful parabola that can be used as a juggling device. Besides, a free working TV!

So after all that was done it was about 4:00 or so, and I've got to leave at 5:30 for class at 6. So I basically have only an hour and a half to relax and take a shower while helping grandma and doing stuff around the house. Well needless to say the two hours go like butter and I haven't gotten anything done, and now it's suddenly time for my last class of the day, which afterwards I was going to head out for dinner with friends. So class goes until around 9:30, and now I'm off to Houlihans to hang out and keep up my actual social life, because recently I've been feeling the need to keep my friends closer. It's not a bad time, and there's not really much to talk about other than that I ordered a burger and hung out until midnight when we disbanded. And now I'm on my way back home, and I arrive at around 1AM, with 3 hours left to catch up on all the stuff I'd missed today before I need to go to sleep and do it all again.....

Juggle This:
As you can see from the aove section, I really haven't had much time to practice, and Jacob I haven't seen since Juggle This because he's been absent from class, but I did find the time on Monday to practice and get an awesome trick on tape. I made my first qualify of a 5 ring half shower! I'd been struggling with the move for SO LONG and recently I just clicked about how high the over throws should go over the straight throws, and I managed to get a run of 16 catches in 6 minutes of trying! Yay! I'm so happy to know that even with hardly any practice, I'm still improving.

RANTING TIME:
Well I figured I've made the last few posts a little short, and I've got a few nice rants I've made to other sites recently, so here goes nothing...

So this discussion went around on the central Jersey craigslist Rant and Raves section for the past day, and I thought it'd be goo to share. Here's the first post that kicked it off:

Person 1's original post

QUOTE

I had a conversation with someone recently, he's not a believer, which to me is a non-issue, I never considered it my business to discuss faith with him or debate with him or try to get him to see things the way I see them. Why? Cause I'm related to him. I love him. I enjoy his company and his conversation. We can talk for hours and laugh. That is until the topic of "religion" comes up.
He's pretty hostile about it. I shy away from discussing it, not out of fear, but to keep my own lid on. I think that if my own can of worms gets opened around him, it's sure to escalate. For now, I just prefer to lay low. I like to listen to his point of view on things, and it's educational for me to hear his opinions on why God simply cannot exist. Even though I disagree (and know he's wrong), still, I listen intently and try to see where he's coming from. I respect him and I show it. (no, I'm not talking about my father.)
He, however, has yet to master the art of giving the same in return to me. It's ok.
So in dealing with him, I've gotten a better perspective of where atheists are coming from. I understand. I also know that from a sensible human standpoint, the atheist point of view makes perfect sense. But I also have come to realize, they simply have yet to experience the spiritual.
This is something I brought up with my relative. He's really knowledgable in financial things, investing, the stock market, etc etc. This is a bermuda triangle area in my life. I have very little interest, knowledge, and understanding when it comes to finances. To me, it's as basic as this: go to work. Earn paycheck. Deposit in bank. Spend some. Save some. Period.
I suppose this is why I am nearing 40 years old and still have the mindset of a teenager when it comes to money. I'm smart enough to realize, it's due to my own ignorance. I pointed this out to my relative. I said, I have a feeling that if someone would have taken me by the hand and walked me through the ins and outs of money and investing and what-not, and taught me how to be successful with it, and maybe even enjoy it, and let me experience first-hand the rewards of making a profit- maybe then I would embrace it and want to learn more. But as it stands, I'm an outsider in that realm. I'm inept, I've tried and failed to get ahead financially. So I gave up, and I get by on the bare minimum.
He just stared at me and wondered why I was saying this.
I told him, I have a feeling this is how you are when it comes to believing in God. You simply haven't experienced the spiritual, or witnessed any miracles first-hand. You don't know Him. Your sensible mind can't fit Him into your own understanding, so you dismiss the whole thing.
I honestly feel that this is what's going on, big-picture, with atheists. They don't get it, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater- to hell with it all, it makes no sense!
After we had this conversation, the ridiculing tones from him ceased. But it really got me to thinking about it. Why are atheists so quick to mock and ridicule us? Does it make them feel superior? Do they think it actually helps their case?
I just want to let it be known that it's hurtful, and unnecessary. There's a way to debate and conversate without putting the other person down. If you really want someone to hear you out, watch your tone and treat them with respect.
I see this growing debate between atheists and believers, it seems to have gotten pretty nasty. I wonder if all the stress from the economy is making us all a bit tense.
I got some good insight from the guy I was talking with- he was raised in a legalistic, religious kind of way, grew up in a small town. He grew up and moved on, and I think he's associating God with his sheltered upbringing. I get it. I understand why he views believing in God as small-minded and ignorant. The problem is, he's quick to make others who believe feel the same way.
All I'm saying is, I think it's time to start listening just a little bit more.

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Person 2's response

QUOTE

It's not just Christians, we question Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, seventh day aventists, Scientology (which is a joke) and pagans as well. And it's not mocking, it's asking you to really really think about your beliefs that are based on fairy tales.

The bible is not the word of god. It's the word of long dead leaders that would rewrite it to control their own people. Look it up, the KIng James bible took alot of things out.

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Person 3's response, aka THA ASSHOLE

QUOTE

Yes Billions of people around the world are wrong and you are right, call the paper we will all stop believing in historical facts because you think its a fairy tale. If you do why do you care what we believe? Think of it this way, if we are wrong nothing happens but if we are right YOU are so SCREWED!

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MY first response

QUOTE

"call the paper we will all stop believing in historical facts because you think its a fairy tale"
Historical facts? HISTORICAL FACTS?!

I wasn't going to post, but that sentence just irks me beyond anything. Where is the PHYSICAL EVIDENCE to support ANYTHING in the bible? If it can't be proven, atheists and agnostics don't believe in it! Simple as THAT. This is EXACTLY why atheists hold any sort of grudge against most religious folk. They just blindly go along with what a certain book says or the magic tricks a certain guy names Jesus did nearly two thousand years ago, without EVER looking for hard evidence that anything in the bible ever existed, and IGNORE all the other evidence that CONTRADICTS IT! The bible says the earth is only a few thousand years old, then why the hell to we have astronomical evidence that the earth is BILLIONS of years old? The bible says that Noah piled EVERY type of animal (take a look at the size of THIS. It's the list of all ENDANGERED species on earth. JUST THE ENDANGERED ONES) into a SINGLE boat that didn't sink and that he built in less then a lifetime by himself, even though it's physically impossible and that we haven't found ANY evidence of this MASSIVE boat ANYWHERE.

But I think the thing that separates most atheists from any religious group, is that we can believe that we're wrong. How the FUCK do you, sir, know that the Buddhist faith is wrong? How do you know for a FACT that Hinduism is wrong? How the FUCK can you POSSIBLY consider that you got it right and everyone else has it wrong (including the agnostics, of which I am, who basically sum up their religious beliefs by saying "I don't know if there is or isn't a god. There's just no way to say EITHER is true"), when you have nothing else except the word of the person who wrote the book telling you so? I say stop thinking you're right and throw your arms up in confusion when asked if there's a god, because WE JUST DON'T KNOW AND THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW.

And to respond to your very last paragraph. YES If you're right, every other person who ever chose any other religion is screwed, but reverse it, if you're wrong and atheists aren't right either, BOTH of us are screwed. So don't go looking at it like "It's our way, or the wrong way", because there are HUNDREDS more paths then just Catholicism and atheism asshole. As as for why I should care what you believe, I DON'T. I COULD GIVE A SHIT WHETHER YOU BELIEVE AN OMNIPOTENT BEING MADE THE WORLD IN SEVEN DAYS OR WHETHER THE EARTH WAS CREATED BY SPACE ALIENS! THAT'S YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO BELIEVE WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT! But don't go claiming you're right and everyone else is WRONG, because that's forcing your beliefs on others which IS unconstitutional. I'm not trying to convert you, I just want you to STOP BITCHING about us atheists and agnostics and let your religion be your own. If someone bitched at you when you DIDN'T try shoving religion in their face, then yes, they were wrong, but anything else and you deserved it!

Now that post actually got me about 2 responses on the boards saying that I'd made their day, and one woman who actually emailed me and said thank you for being so clear headed and stuff!

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Person's 3's bold attempt at insulting me....

QUOTE

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And my final respone to him, posted but 30 minutes ago

QUOTE

Excuse me raving lunatic. I believe YOU started the rant! I really don't give a rats ass what you believe but don't stop me or anyone else from our faith. Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddists whatever we believe is none or YOUR FN business. Go crawl under a billion year old rock moron.

Ok, I'm not going to get pissed off, I'm just going to point out where you are wrong with this response.

Excuse me raving lunatic. I believe YOU started the rant!
Uh, no, I did not start the rant. There was the Original Post (Of which I have respect for the guy who posted it, he seems to have a level head and an open mind), the First Response (whom I do agree with, but I don't agree with the bluntness of his statements), and then YOUR response (which provoked me into writing MY first response.). So don't say I started it, because two other people before you started it, and then I made the 4th response.

I really don't give a rats ass what you believe but don't stop me or anyone else from our faith.
I don't give a rats ass about what you believe either, and had you actually read my response you'd know that. To quote myself:
"As as for why I should care what you believe, I DON'T. I COULD GIVE A SHIT WHETHER YOU BELIEVE AN OMNIPOTENT BEING MADE THE WORLD IN SEVEN DAYS OR WHETHER THE EARTH WAS CREATED BY SPACE ALIENS! THAT'S YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO BELIEVE WHATEVER THE HELL YOU WANT! But don't go claiming you're right and everyone else is WRONG, because that's forcing your beliefs on others which IS unconstitutional. I'm not trying to convert you, I just want you to STOP BITCHING about us atheists and agnostics and let your religion be your own."
And I'll leave you to wrap your brain around what I'd already said. Or to summarize, "I'm not trying to convert your faith, so don't try to convert mine."

Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddists whatever we believe is none or YOUR FN business.
I completely agree, and I sincerely hope that you follow that sentence yourself, because if you don't, that would make you a hypocrite. (And just in case you don't understand the english language well enough to see what I'm saying in that sentence, I'm not calling you a hypocrite. I'm saying you COULD be one if you don't follow your own advice, which is the definition of being one. If you do follow you're own statement, then you are NOT a hypocrite. )

Go crawl under a billion year old rock moron.
To that I can only think of one response. "Go find and see if you can get back into the garden of Eden, myopic imbecile."

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

Double Juggle

2009-04-03T23:43:00.008-04:00

Listen Up!
First off, sorry about missing last week's post, I was pretty low on sleep all week and I just didn't have the energy after midterms. And as for why this post is late, again, same thing, a mixture of no enough sleep, job hunting, and college.
::
Well my job search has gone down to focusing on two final candidates. Lowes Cinema in New Brunswick, because it's a job I'm qualified for and my uncle Jerry works there. Then I could also go and try to work back at Shoprite again, because I was a good worker and my uncle Pete still works there as a manager. I've just sent in the application to Shoprite, and I've already talked to the hiring manager at Lowes. I really hope I get the job at Lowes, it's a job I think I'll really like.
::
College seems to be running smoothly. My grades are good, and I haven't missed many classes. Of course now is the time to register for Fall courses, and wouldn't you know it, they hate me. They schedule the classes I need right on top of each other, and they say I need to finish the prerequisite course in order to register, and the prerequisite courses are what I'm in right now! How much sense does that make?! I'm gonna go talk to the supervisors tomorrow or sometime about that, cuz it's crap.
::
Now, with my podcast, well, if I'm having trouble finding time for my BLOG, I have absolutely NO time to do JoJ. Season 3 is over anyways, and I met my promise to put out a half dozen episodes, so I'm happy with season 3. Even though I don't have the time to plan out season 4 yet, I'm still thinking about it, and for this upcoming season my idea is to do it over the summer and have it be a debate show. Basically take a classic juggling related debate, or whatever isn't being talked about, and go between myself and another co-host in a debate format where we explore the topic and just try to generally provoke thought. I think that'd be great, who knows if it'll work though...
::

Juggle This:
So you all remember Jacob right? Youtube user "TheRisingIris"? Well, I told him that there was this juggling convention in Brooklyn coming up and he instantly wanted to go with me. So we ended up running around with all these different plans and eventually it turned out that he'd drive us in his car on Friday and Saturday and stay over my place which is right next to Staten Island Friday night. So that was the plan, we'd go to the class we had together at Middlesex County College on Friday and then as soon as it ended head back to my place to swap cars and barge ahead to Brooklyn. We managed to drive in really easily and as we walked in, I couldn't help but say to him "Welcome to my world", like an absolute dork. But alas, I dropped off my equipment at the bleachers along with him, and quickly introduced him to Adam, whose place I had stayed at last year and who is also a novice juggler. While tI let the two of them get to know each other and practice a bit, I went around and looked for the familiar faces I know and love seeing, faces like Michael Karas, Emmanuel, Paris, Jacob (from Canada), Jake Ledermen (there really are a lot of jugglers name Jake aren't there), and others. I then proceeded to juggle my ass off and socialize with the lot of them before Jacob and I decided to go get ourselves Pizza.

So as we got pizza with Jacob from Canada coming with us, we discussed some of the finer details of what it's like to be absolutely addicted to juggling and loving it with the young juggler. It's a conversation I don't get to have very often, and it's one I love giving because I love giving advice from experience. After we finished pizza the rest of the day was pretty uneventful, the two of us went from trying to get the other to push their limits (me trying to get Jacob to get 6 catches of 5 balls and him trying to get me to do a 5 up 360), to socializing with other jugglers, to just having a good time there, and then finally it was 10:30 or so and time to leave. Now, this was the interesting bit, is we had two routes we could take to get back to my place, the first was go back through Staten Island, which was a much simpler and easier route, but we'd have to pay a big toll going back into Staten Island from Long Island. The second option was to go across the Manhattan Bridge to the Holland Tunnel to Rt 1/9, which was much more complex, but completely free. We decided to go the free route, and found our way to the Manhattan bridge fairly easily, but then had to loop around a block or two because Canal St was blocked off coming straight from the Manhattan Bridge for some reason. We made it back though, and the next day we did the same thing with no prob at all.

So day two, the real day I'd been looking forward to. We got up around noon and made our way into NYC to get to the Club Passing workshop, because if I wanted Jacob to learn one thing, it'd be club passing, because there is no greater joy in juggling than passing, especially clubs. So we spent time at the workshop and he managed to get 3 passes in 6 count before we went back and hung out more. The rest of the day until 7 was pretty much a repeat of yesterday, going around juggling and mingling, and for me I spent an hour hanging out and throwing around ring ideas with Michael Karas and Emmanuel, which was an absolute dream for me. I managed to learn from them a backcross pulldown and pulled off a 3 ring pancake pulldown (where I throw all three rings up as cakes as a flash and catch them all on the head.) It was all just great.

So then 7:00 came by and it was time for the Gym to close and the show to start, we split a pizza pie between my Jacob and a random New Yorker to save money, and then made our way to the theater. The first half of the show was gfood, but nothing overly spectacular, until the dance act. Holy Crap was that act absolutely incredible, Kenichi Ebina is a genius, if you don't believe me, just watch the frickin trailers! Then came intermission, and me and Jacob spent some time passing in the waiting area until the lights flickered and we went back in for what I knew would be a most insane closer. Karas and Paris, holy crap guys, I knew it was going to be awesome, but I had no idea it would be as incredible as it was! I really wish I could share pictures or video, because it was so much better than anything the both of them have done solo. But we need to move on, there were more acts, like Lin Junming doing a ten ring flash onstage! Holy, wow! I mean, the rest of his act before then was ok, doing 3 ring tricks and such, but that ten ring flash, god damn. I looked over at Jacob after it sunk in for me and he was still sitting there with a blank expression of awe. Then it was finally time for Get The Shoe! I'd been waiting to see them live since I first saw their trailer, and they only had one drop in the entire performance. Everyone, as I expected, was blown away by the performance, me, Jacob, everyone. Just can't stop talking about it for the next 20 minutes after the show ended! Insane!

Then came the time waiting for the Renegade show to start, where I would debut my "Muffin Clutches", but that comes later, they opened up the cafeteria right next door, but failed to mention the ice cream, smoothies, and drinks were not being served, so I stood in line for about ten minutes before hearing from Paris that they weren't selling any of what I wanted. Oh well. The renegade show started and I got up on sage and did the most humiliating trick ever, I picked up each of my man boobs and stuck a juggling ball under each one, I the n juggled 3 more, threw them up, took out the other two, and continued a 5 ball cascade. And that is how to do Muffin Clutches. The rest of Renegade was pretty good, of course nowhere near as good as last years I think, but still good. I spent half of the show though helping Jacob find his cell phone as it fell out of his pocket. So once the show ended, I said my goodbye's to everyone and me and Jacob headed out, still raving about Get The Shoe.

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

Sickness Sucks

2009-03-23T18:06:00.006-04:00

Listen Up!
Yeah, I hate being sick. I somehow caught ANOTHER cold/flu/something over the weekend (it's not the reason why I missed last week's post, that was because I was relaxing over spring break). But yeah, I hate being sore everywhere, not wanting to get up, feeling like I want to hurl, and everything else. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it....
::
Overall though I had a good spring break! I was able to just lounge around the house nude until anyone got home, and it's always fun to just be free, lol. Seriously though, sorry about the image that I just put in your head of a bare 270lb me making macaroni and cheese, and I had a great summer break. I caught up on a lot of sleep debt I'd built up, and really was able to intensify my job search, speaking of which...
::
I'M STILL UNEMPLOYED! WTF!? Seriously, I must have answered 2 and a half dozen craigslist postings and put in 5 online applications to different major stores, and even after checking back and going to some of them and asking the hiring manager for an update, I STILL haven't gotten any calls. I'm going to call up my uncle once again and get him to hire me back at Shoprite, because I really need to start saving money for all the things I want to do this summer, NOW.
::
As for my summer plans, let me outline them real quick. First, the IJA convention is happening in North Carolina this year, so I can easily drive down and have a blast, especially seeing as how there's not going to e a WJF until 2010. That's one week of July, and for the month of August is my REALLY ambitious plan. I want to move down to Texas to live (ONLY FOR THE MONTH OF AUGUST) with one of my juggling friends who's got a new house and is looking for other jugglers to fill it up and help split the cost. I'm really iffy about whether this will happe n or not, but the reason is that I want to see what it's like to live on my own away from my parents for a while. The longest time I've ever spent away from them was the last two WJF conventions, and they both lasted under a week, so I have no idea what it'd be like to support myself long term, and I want to try it out.
::

Daily Life:
So I said already that spring break was awesome, I got to hang out nude. I didn't really go anywhere or do anything, and my time spent at college has just been, meh. Though I did hit a breakthrough with Tech.MCC recently, all thanks to JerseyCowboy. He basically came in one day a few weeks ago and shook up the club by calling for more organization and progress on projects. Everyone listened, and now we've got a massive project on it's way, and that is the Lego Robotics project. Basically, the club is going to buy a lego Mindstorms kit and use it to learn about programming, autonomy in programming, and general engineering. It's a great project, and hopefully we'll get it working soon, because I love it, and so does the rest of the club.

Other than that though, things have been a bit quiet and boring, so here's a nice story for you to watch and listen to:

Juggle This:
Ok, so I've had a few breakthroughs in new tricks since the last post, the most noteworthy one if a QUALIFY of a 5 BALL MILLS! Woo! I've also done a new one high tw low variation with clubs, broken my 5 ring full reverse record, flashed a 6 ring flat front reverse with rings, and broken my 6 ring record! I'm actually a bit amazed at how much I'm still improving considering how little practice I've been getting recently. However, I have also continued training Jacob (TheRisingIris) and he is DEFINITELY getting better. I let him borrow a set of my clubs over spring break and tomorrow I'll see what he's managed to learn on his own, he's getting good enough now that he can experiment and find tricks without me showing him (makes me so proud :P ) So yeah.

As for me though, I've got Juggle This coming up in two weeks, and I've been pretty set in my decision, that now I have 16gb worth of total SD card memory and a wonderful HD camera, that I'll be producing a convention video when I go. Of course my problem is, as usually with convention videos, how will I have fun at the con and still get all the footage I want/need, how long with the finished video be, what will be in the video, etc. All this stuff that makes a convention video hard to do... I know for a fact I'll be recording more of the Renegade performances and putting them up as well! And speaking of renegade....

I REALLY want to do something for this years Juggle This Renegade show, but I still have no idea what to do. I got the idea from Michael Karas to do a parody of JoJ, and I think that's a great premise, but turning it into a routine of some sort is driving me mad. I've come up with a REALLY stupid, but somehow still hard, trick that I want to do, I'm not sure the response it'll get though. I've also thought about who I could do a collaborative routine of some sort with or serious tricks I can do, and I was thinking about doing my arm-club-balance-flips on the renegade show or for best trick, because it's a really hard trick that I've got nailed down pretty well, and that's fairly unique, so I still don't know..... If you've got any ideas for what I should do, please don't hesitate to suggest something!

Now, I was also asked recently by someone what's going on with Jugglers On Juggling. Well, to be blunt, I think that season 3 is over. Why? I have simply run out of good ideas for things I think I am knowledgeable enough with to contribute to, and so I think that if I did any more topics, I would be making stuff up and speaking out of my ass, which is something I want to avoid at ALL costs. Basically, Season 3 of JoJ was all about me informing other jugglers about what subjects I knew more about than the average juggler. I think, unless I make an episode about siteswaps, that I've pretty much run dry on things I know better than most jugglers. So looking back on Season 3, I think it was a great success. I improved the format by leaps and bounds, made up a recording method that's easy to edit and record and leads to good results, and I've gained some respect from people who used to hate it. Basically I've learned from Season 3, and for Season 4, I want to try something different. I want to change the format again. I'm looking to try interview type format, where I bring on other jugglers and have a recorded debate about subjects, such as sport vs art, tricks vs numbers, basically all the classic juggling debates. Me on one mic and another juggler with an opposing viewpoint on the other mic, going back and forth trying to prove each others point. I think that'd make for an intellectually stimulating podcast...

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

We've Still A Ways To Go

2009-03-09T18:51:00.007-04:00

Listen Up!
So last week I didn't write a post because I had a MASSIVE flu hit me right on Sunday. I was sore, I couldn't breathe well, I couldn't do a lot of stuff, and on Monday I was just way too far gone to write anything. SO sorry for that, but hopefully now you're pissed off at the Church of Later day Saints for the shit they're spreading.
::
TechMCC has finally hit a stride. I can't thank JT McGuire enough for what he did. Basically, he came in two weeks ago, and suddenly saw exactly where our problem was and why the meetings haven't been as good as they can be. They were not organized at all, and we really had no serious projects we were working on, or even meeting ideas that were anything other than ideas. He shook it up, kicked my ass into gear, and now we're really striving forward with two big projects featuring robotics and alternative operating systems. We're still a little short on quick projects to do while we're setting up the big projects, but we are dozens of times better right now than we were the weeks before.
::
My job search, man, I really hate talking about this, because everything I've done so far has failed. NOONE is hiring ANYONE. The latest thing I've done is applied for a job with the US Census on Friday. I'm calling them back tomorrow to see where things stand, but I've already taken the basic civil skills test and passed with ease, so I'm really thinkling things will work well here, but after so many bad leads, I'm not getting my hopes up.
::

Daily Life:
So I've noticed something recently, and that is that I'm getting a lot more political. I did a bit of thinking about this recently, and I think it's a good thing, because a lot of my close friends that I have talked politics and psychology with have said that I am "very profound for my age". However, I think I've got a bit of a problem in that I can't think psychology or politics when I'm alone, because I've said in earlier posts, I don't have the ability to believe that anything I think is wrong. In other words, I can't debate a point or idea by myself because I'll have one thought, assume it's correct, and run with it until I decide to do research. I always need to have someone with me to debate and bounce things off of, because they could see the errors in my thoughts and bring them up. It's a bit interesting for me, and I come up with a lot of interesting ideas because of it.

Now, this change isn't just in how often I talk politics, but in how often I get pissed off. I used to be (up to about 5 months ago), the most lax guy you'd ever meet. I wouldn't get pissed off over anything unless your idiocy directly affected me. I guess that's still the case, but that now I'm seeing as to how many more cases there are. I used to be pretty lax about things like the death penalty and the war on drugs. Then I started thinkign about most of them (well, actually I began watching Penn and Teller's Bullshit! )but either way, I started realizing how many stupid things are done by stupid people that directly affect me. The death penalty for instance, I used to say "Eh, if the person wants to kill the murderer, I'm fine with that. It will never directly affect me because I'm never going to commit a murder." Then I did some thinking and realized, ok, well what about the innocent people on death row and all the complexities of how prosecution is entirely hell-bent on winning and especially how once you kill and innocent person, you can't undo it. Then I thought, "Well what if I was framed for a murder? I'd MUCH rather spend life in prison and still have the ability to decide when I want to die instead of being killed off." And now I'm against the death penalty.

Mostly what I think has changed is two things. One ifs my ability to expand and see how direct certain things can affect me, which I already just gave an example of with the death penalty, and also I have grown to become a skeptic. I'm INTENSELY grateful for both. I love being a skeptic now, because I will notice things that I wouldn't have noticed before, and be more sure of my decisions. A great example of this was the last time I went to the dentist for a cleaning about 2 months ago. When I was about to go home from the cleaning, the dentist who did the final check handed me a flier and asked if I'd want him to do "a simple procedure to check for gum cancer". I immediately was skeptical, and as such, I looked at the flier for the ONE THING that would make me possibly consider spending the extra 60 bucks to "Shine a harmless light against my gums to highlight potentially cancerous areas". I looked for the number of people in America that had gum cancer. I saw nothing about what my odds of having it were, not even how many reported cases there were last year or whatever. I asked the dentist these same questions about what exactly my odds of having it are, and how many cases there were. As soon as I heard him say he didn't know, I turned down the procedure, checked out, and walked right out the front door, 60 bucks still in my pocket and my gums feeling fine. Careless? maybe, but I'm not going to spend money on protection that I have no idea whether I NEED or not. That's just one of my life ideas now. It's like charging a guy in a padded cell who's given 3 liquid meals a day life insurance in case he dies from an accident. IT'S POINTLESS AND A WASTE OF MONEY.

So I figured I'd just let everyone who reads this know about that little change in my personality, because it really has been a while since I was deep and personal here on my blog. I really don't like being pissed off about things, but I still wouldn't trade in my newfound clarity and depth of thought for ignorant bliss any day. Because now, I can notice the problems, which is the first step in correcting problems...

Juggle This:
So being sick last week, I couldn't do all that much juggling practice. As such, I'm rusty as hell, and can feel it whenever I pick up a ball, ring, or club. HOWEVER! Today I found a few magical things that should be wonderful for my juggling work in the near future! I heard from a friend that our local Office Depot was closing also (the circuit city a block and a half away already closed up), and that there was a ton of great stuff there. I decided to go there today on my way to the most useless class ever. What did I find? absolutely nothing worth buying in terms of products, but there were two pieces of furniture and equipment from the store that I could NOT pass up. One was a basic metal bin that was used to hold random things on display, it's about a foot by a foot in it's area, but it's about 2 and a half feet deep and elevated so the rim of the basket is about 4 feet off the ground. I saw it, and instantly thought, "PROP RACK!" I now have a nice looking rack to hold props in when I'm performing! The clubs go inside the rack, the balls will either sit on the bottom or in a bag off the side, and the rings will hang off a metal hook on the side. I'll post pics of it in the next blog maybe.

But the better thing I found, was that they sold metal poster displays. Sounds lame right? Uh, remember my ideas for the Picture Frame Routine? Well I FINALLY have the stand I need AND a non-breakable metal frame that I can unbolt and use on it's own! After years of thought and bad equipment, I can finally finish the routine and make a video for it! Yes, I just said a video for it! Now that I can finish the routine,I will be premiering it sometime around Juggle This or later depending on how it goes.

Speaking of Juggle This, I'm planning to perform something in the Renegade Show, and I may record another convention video because I haven't in a while. So expect to see me runnign around with my HD camera gathering footage and then doing something stupid and humiliating on stage at Renegade!

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

CIVIL FUCKING UNIONS

2009-03-06T00:59:00.003-05:00

Ok, I wasn't going to make a blog post because I am sick as hell with a nasty Flu this week, but I just found this online and this has just made me more pissed off than anything in the past YEAR AND A HALF. It's actually WORSE for me than Prop 8 passing. (copied directly from RPTRCLUB , all credit to them for finding this steaming pile called a letter!)

From Box Turtle Bulletin, via Joe.My.God.:

In a private email sent out to LDS members of at least one ward in Illinois, church members are being encouraged to call their representative to voice their opposition to the bill, which would provide same-sex couples with recognition and limited protections under Illinois law. But the official LDS-sanctioned email to members is loaded with much of the same misinformation that was present in the campaign against California’s Proposition 8.

A trusted source sent me a copy of that email, authorized by Bishop Chris Church, of the Nauvoo, Illinois 3rd Ward, which was sent out by that web site’s ward administrator:

This message has been authorized for sending by Bishop Church.
The Civil Union Bill (HB 2234) has been scheduled for a hearing in the Youth and Family Committee this week on Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. in Springfield. If the bill is voted out of committee, it becomes eligible for a vote before the full Illinois House of Representatives. This bill will legalize civil unions in the state of Illinois, and will treat such civil unions with the same legal obligations, responsibilities, protections and benefits as are afforded within marriage. In other words, civil unions will be different in name only from marriage. As has already been seen in Massachusetts, this will empower the public schools to begin teaching this lifestyle to our young children regardless of parental requests otherwise. It will also create grounds for rewriting all social mores; the current push in Massachusetts is to recognize and legalize all transgender rights (An individual in Massachusetts can now change their drivers license to the gender they believe themselves to be, regardless of actual gender, which means that confused men and women are now legally entering one another’s bathrooms and locker rooms. What kind of a safety issue is this for our children?). Furthermore, while the bill legalizes civil unions, it will be used in the courts to show discrimination and will ultimately lead to court mandated same-sex marriages.

To help defeat this bill, please call your state representative and state senator and ask that they support traditional marriage and vote against the civil unions bill. If you are unsure who your legislators are, please see the link at the end of this email.

Also, please take a moment and call the following members of the Youth and Family Committee to encourage them to vote no on this bill. We need 4 votes to keep it from passing out of the committee. And - as always, please pass this on to all who believe in protecting our families and our children. If you are interested in attending the hearing, it will be held on Thursday, March 5th at 9:00 a.m. in Springfield in Room 122B of the Capitol Building (I can give you directions to the Capitol Building if needed).

Members of the Youth and Family Committee:
Rep. Greg Harris (D-Chicago) (Greg Harris is also the sponsor of this bill, but he needs to hear your opposition to this bill)
Chairperson
217-782-3835

Rep. LaShawn K. Ford (D-Chicago)
Vice-Chairperson
217-782-5962

Rep. Mike Fortner (R-West Chicago)
Republican Spokesperson
217-782-1653

Rep. William D. Burns (D-Chicago)
217-782-2023

Rep. Michael P. McAuliffe (R-Chicago)
217-782-8182

Rep. Al Riley (D-Matteson)
217-558-1007

Rep. Dave Winters (R-Rockford)
217-782-0455

Directions for identifying your legislators:
You can use the following link to identify your state legislators and their contact information: http://www.elections.il.gov/ DistrictLocator/ SelectSearchType.aspx? NavLink=1 (and enter your 9 digit zip code). If this link doesn’t work, you can use the general link www.ilga.gov and then click on ” legislator lookup” near the bottom of the page, then click on “by zip+4″. Type in your zip code, and you’ll see a list of your legislators. You want your state senator and state representative as they will be the ones voting on the bill.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Sister Combs.

So, marriage is a sacred institution. But they won't even let not-equal civil unions through the door?

Remind me why I have to be nice to these people?

What? It isn't enough that the fuckers won and made gays unable to enter into a legal "marriage" but now they don't even want this to go on so much that they completely MAKE UP SHIT like how teachers will be required to teach about gay marriage (uh, hello, THEY'RE LEGALLY BOUND TO NOT EVEN TEACH ABOUT STRAIGHT MARRIAGE!), and how PEOPLE WILL BE FORCED INTO GAY CIVIL UNIONS!? WHERE THE FUCK DID THEY GET THE BALLS TO THINK THAT PEOPLE WILL ACCEPT THAT KIND OF FUCKING BULLSHIT! NO REALLY, I HAVE TO GO SLAP THEM IN THE FACE NOW. IT'S THE ONLY THING THAT WILL MAKE ME FEEL BETTER AFTER READING THESE FUCKING CONSERVATIVE, BOGITED, MYOPIC, SELF RIGHTEOUS, "I'M BETTER THAN YOU SO YOU SHOULD ALL ACT ACCORDING TO MY RULES AND BELIEFS", FUCKING ASSHOLE-CUNT-BITCHES!

I love you but.....

2009-02-23T19:22:00.008-05:00

Listen Up!
I needed a break last week. For some reason I just didn't want to do ANY typing or ranting, or even sharing myself. Last week was an introverted and boring week. But this week is different, most definitely.
::
So my job search is really becoming repetitious, and not in a god way Damned the alleged economic crisis. I do have two new eds that I think should be promising, Petsmart and Bed Bath ad Beyond thanks to someone I know. The Bed Bath and beyond will NOT be floor work if I get it, it will be night stocking work, so be quiet about me selling perfume and crap, lol. OH! And the US Census 2010 is also hiring, so I've got to find a time to get an interview there too.
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TechMCC is turning out to be quite a strange little dangle off of my life. More about what happened at the last meeting in the Daily Life section, but just thank god that next week is the Movie Night, where I don't need to do any planning or whatever. Demolition Man FTW.
::
What else do I usually say here? College is exactly the same as it's been so far, and my home life is pretty simple, so yeah, that should be it.

-- Music Release --
I know I haven't done this in a WHILE, but I've had a few ideas after listening to so many different tracks in my car on the way to and from college, so I MAY end up doign a new mash-up or two over the course of the month, so if you were interested in that, keep a lookout here for if and when the arrive.

Daily Life:
So let me talk about TechMCC, because really not much else is happening that I can talk about besides what goes on there. I mean my job search is getting redundant and predictable (Go to the place, get application, fill out, return, call back 3 days later to have them say sorry, do the same a week later to have them say sorry again). So are my college courses, well, about as redundant as they can be with me still learning something every day. So yeah, the club is the most interesting thing for me to talk about because I don't go out much, though I should mention the past 6 days or so have been absolute HEAVEN for me. Because with my sister at Monmouth University, my parents took a vacation down to Myrtle Beach and the new house. So I was left alone for 5 days to tend to the pets and do whatever. I love it whenever I can just walk around nude through the house and nobody's there to do anything about it, lol. But that was great, so now back to techmcc...

So this week was supposed to be two things, the Inter-promotional game tournament between TechMCC and the Anime Club, which would be a dollar entry fee, a third of which will be split evenly between the prize pool and the two clubs, in a neutral game which neither club had an advantage in. This was all setup very nicely, and then in the 2 days before the meeting, the entire thing fell apart ad there was rumors of it being cancelled. Well, after having it fly apart at the seams, me and the event organizer for Anime Club decided at the meeting to postpone it for 2 weeks, so now basically TechMCC was at the Anime Club meeting for no reason other than to play video games for nothing. Which was kind of useless, BUT THEN, that was only half of what happened.

Also, that day was the day that me and Gordon decided to go hang up fliers around campus for the club, and we'd already gotten the design and details approved, and we went to make copies, which was fun. Gordon told me that we'd be printing and copying them in the office of our supervisor because he had a color copier. Turns out, not true. What he had was colored paper and a black and white copier. Now. That was ONE problem, the next thing that happened was how after I spent a LOT of care in making the design, all the sudden the advisor says that the border I made to attract attention looked bad, and on THAT ALONE, he cut off the border and started making copies. Basically no input from me, and for no other reason, he changes the ART MAJOR'S design. How much sense does that make?

BUT THAT'S NOT THE END. So the next half hour after that, Me, Gordon, and two other club members are going around campus stapling them up, which was no problem, and we did a good enough job of it that we ran out just as we each finished our assigned buildings. So fast forward a DAY. I receive an call from Gordon telling me that ALL of the fliers we'd put up have been torn down. That gets me confused and pissed at the same time, I ask why. "Someone made a complaint about one of the things on it and notified the staff. The staff then too them down." So they didn't even BOTHER to contact me, or even let me know what was going on, they just went "Oh! You're complaining about the posters? Well we can't have that happen, let's tear them all down!" I'm going to go in on Tuesday and find something to complain about with EVERY POSTER PUT UP IN THE COLLEGE.

I eventually learned that what was complained about was a line I had on the flier which simply said. "Learn how to unlock your media and to make money on craigslist by selling old things." This was taken as "We the Technology Club of Middlesex County College, support the practice of PIRACY and will INSTRUCT you how to pirate media from companies!". Which is crap, but I can see the leap they made, and though it's not a small pond or an Evil Knievel record, it's a fair jump. So NOW I have to change the design AGAIN, and then next meeting we will make copies AGAIN, and put them all up, AGAIN. God damnit I hate administration. This is why I believe in small government EVERYWHERE, at college, the Federal gov't, etc...

And that was my TechMCC Hell over the past few days...

Juggle This:
So let me talk about my new best pal Jacob. Youtube user The Rising Iris. I go to college with him and we've had a lot of the same classes before, all for engineering. Now this semester he's in my Strength And Materials Testing class, and that meets three days, and I never have a class after them for at least a few hours, and neither does he. Now, you're wondering what this has to do with juggling, well, he's my new apprentice. I say new, though he did learn to do it a while ago, actually about a half a year ago at least, but recently he's become as addicted to it as I am, and has asked me to coach him and teach him some new tricks every time after that class. Being a juggler, this is one of the most wonderful things you can ask for, it to have someone who is absolutely hooked and looking to you as a mentor, because you have the opportunity to not only watch him progress and reflect on how you progressed when you were learning, but you can also steer him in the right direction so that if he keeps going long enough, he will become better than you. That and it's just great to watch someone and know they're having a blast.

So three weeks ago, I sold him my set of 6 fo-leather penguin balls that I had never used, and every day now he brings at least 4 of them to practice with, and over the course of those three weeks, I have taught him a 3 ball half shower, reverse cascade, tennis, 423, 1up 360, 2up 360, 1up 180, 1 up 2 up, and the 4 ball fountain (synch and asynch). I've taught him about how siteswap works and he seems to have a basic grasp of it, so I can tell him a random siteswap and he'll be able to know if it's valid or not and with how many objects. Oh, and he's also gotten a 5 ball flash on camera, so go him.

He's progressing really well, and one of the things I'm, I guess proud of the most, is that he is getting good enough now to recognize and see where his mistakes are. He doesn't need me to tell him that he's throwing his 4 ball throws in front of him too much and not to the same height, he says it before I do. Of course, seeing the problem and fixing it are two entirely different things, but then again, he is just learning and it's good to go one step at a time.

But what I'm more impressed by is not how many tricks he knows right now, because tricks are fairly easy with balls, but it's that he's also learned to juggle rings and clubs even. As you can see in the video above, his 3 club record is 13 catches, 1 past a double qualify! And that was only about 30 minutes after he first touched a set of clubs. Needless to say, I was impressed. He's also been practicing with my rings almost as much as he has with balls. On Thursday (the last day I saw him practice) I saw he was only a few practice sessions away from qualifying 4 rings. This was again, his first time ever trying 4 rings, so even though the best I saw him do was 6 catches, it still was really good. I let him borrow 4 of my rings to practice over the weekend, and we'll see what happens on Tuesday when he shows me again.

But to end with, let me tell you what I'm most excited about in terms of him and his juggling. It's his enthusiasm. He's pretty well obsessed with it, and when I told him abotu Juggle This (the Pratt Institute convention) coming up in about a month and a half, he said he's right on board and will go with me.He's also proposed to me the idea of doing a joint juggling video like what me and Joseph Jaeger did with Two Guys From Jersey, the only difference being, that he's not just proposing a joint JUGGLING video, but a joint juggling and longboarding video. He's also a really good longboard rider already, and so we've been coming up with ideas as to what I could do creatively juggling in a skatepark, and what he could do combining longboarding with juggling. So far, we've come up with a LOT of good ideas, and it looks like we're going to start shooting the video in summer.

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

SLOW FREEZE

2009-02-17T03:19:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
Sorry about the late/no post this week. I'm busy looking for a job because that last one I was talking about, they said they were going to keep the job internal, and when I talked to them about it, they were pretty deadset about it, so now I'm off to look elsewhere for money....

HOWEVER! I have finished and uploaded my latest video! And you can check it out right now, it's already proven to be tied with No Sleeves Attached as the highest rated of the series, and so far is doing very well in terms of comments and views, so go ahead and check it out!

Number 17! And talk about a technical improvement! 5 ring 97531, 3up 360, 18 catches of flat front reverse! Not to mention the 8 ring flash and 7 ring qualify! OH! And don't forget the new box tricks including the super-stack collapse! What about the 7 ball half shower? Or the 3 club shoulder pads?! Bottom line, I have never been better than I am right now.

I've been told by a few jugglers already that it's the most well edited video I've made, and I'll tend to agree with them, because after watching it a ton of times, I noticed there's something in general about the video that I can't quite nail down. Something that makes it feel different than the others, and I'm guessing it'll make it fairly special. We'll see when you reply. Oh, and PLEASE REPLY. Leave a comment no matter what you think. If you think it's the best video ever, Say So! Same goes for if you think it's the worst video ever made by human hands! I've got thick skin, and I love to hear what people ACTUALLY think as opposed to people just being nice.

It still blows my mind to think that I'm the #12 most popular juggler of 2008...

Hi Res Download: Link
Wallpaper: Link
Ad Image: Link
ANIMATED: Link

I swear I'll make up for this next week, I've just been having the flu or something, plus work searching, plus college, plus etc = too damned tired to care about a blog post right now.
A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

The More Days Go By///

2009-02-10T23:23:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
The more I feel like ranting about political stuff. But I realize that it's really hard to do that without pissing a FUCKLOAD of people off, so I won't do that until I grow an even bigger set of balls. Granted, I know I've got some nads like you wouldn't believe (just look at JoJ when I started), but they're not that big to publicly talk politics yet.
::
So I just had my interview today with the Circuitboard Manufacturer today. It wasn't so much an interview as the manager introducing me around and showing me the process and what parts EXACTLY I would be designing. What the company does is make multi-layered circuit-boards. This is 2 or more circuitboards that are sandwiched together to make a more compact and efficient circuitboard. What I would be doing is designing the bridges between the 2 boards. The bridges are bacically thinner sheets of material with copper that goes THROUGH the material, instead of just staying on the surface like on a normal board, and the copper would be lined up with areas or the 2 boards being put together that it would make an electrical connection between the boards. It's all very technical how it works, but it's a really simple part in terms of how it works and how it will be designed. I mean, from what I saw today, it seems as though he's already hired me!
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College is college. I have found a good use for my Applications In Business class (the most useless class ever), it gives me access to a T1 connection and a computer for about 4 hours, so that I can update my website and blog. Because all the assignments I finish within the first 10 minutes of the class, and ace all the tests in 1/4 the time it takes for the rest of the class. As for my other classes, it seems my art professors really like canceling class or not doing much work. Each one of my art classes so far has had at least one canceled class. Interesting to say the least. Otherwise things are moving smoothly.
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NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO COMING! MY NEXT [JUGGLING] SERIES VIDEO IS FINALLY READY TO GO! It's going to be called "Slow Freeze" and I'll upload the trailer on the 12th and the video on the 15th. I'm a little bit "eh" about what I think of this video. I mean the tricks I manage in this video I have absolutely NO idea how I did them, and the editing is good, but just the overall feeling of the video seems weird. Maybe this is a good thing? I'll email a few of my big juggler friends and get what they think.
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Mobius-X's redesign is goin pretty smoothly behind the scenes, I'm almost halfway done with the new skin, and we've pretty much decided on the new logo. We've also go the youtube channel off to a FLYING start, and we've got a few new members on the boards too. Things are lookin up for MX.
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Tech.MCC, Damnit I wish I had more time to think about this damn thing. I am president after all, but strangely, it's not really that high on my list of priorities. HOWEVER! Meetings are doing fairly well, with about a dozen members showing up for the first two meetings, and us getting a LOT of stuff planned out for future meetings and official business with the college. We'll see what happens there...
::

Daily Life:
So, let me think of a good story to tell from the past week. There really hasn't been much in terms of stories to tell for the past couple months, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I only want to tell really good stories? I have no idea...
Well I guess I'll go through my day on Monday, because it was a pretty long day.

So I have to get up at around 9AM< because I've got a BIG interview today, and I need to get ready for it. Now, the main thing I have to do is shower and get myself "Presentable", which is something I hate doing, and only kind-of understand the point of, but I won't get into that. Bottom line is that I need to take a long shower and completely wash-cloth myself off. Now, if theres ONE THING I HATE besides mowing the lawn, it's taking a shower in the morning. The earlier, the worse. Because you've just woke up from your nice warm bed, moved into a room that is 9 times out of ten colder than the room you were just in, have to deal with the fact that the water temperature is NEVER comfortable, and then deal with the coldness of jumping out of the hot shower (because there's no such thing as "warm" in the morning except for the bed you were laying in). It just SUCKS, end of discussion. I'd rather stand outside naked in 40 degree weather than take a morning shower!

But so I've taken my shower, gotten my flash drive and laptop with directions, and headed off to rt 287. Only to realize as soon as I parked at the facility that it's 10:55, and my interview is at 11:00, and I've forgotten the hard copies of the AutoCAD examples I spent an hour fussing with to print out last night! GAHHHH!!!! Turns out I didn't need them at all, because he didn't even really care to look at any of the work I'd done, plus I didn't use a plotter to print out the examples, so they were muddy looking and not sharp at all. So he explains to me exactly what my job will be and then tours me through the manufacturing process as if he'd already hired me! Wow things are going good! So I then am shown exactly the part that I would be designing and drawing out, and explained what it is and what it does, and then the interview was pretty much over. It took about an hour, and I was now free to decide whether I should head to Middlesex County College to work on a Phtoto 2 project that day or whether I should wait until tomorrow to do it. I decided to head home because I was starving and hadn't eaten anything yet. I could do the project tomorrow.

So after an hour of being home, I get a message from Logokas (the current co-runner of Mobius-X, myself being the other one), and we start going through making a new logo for MX, and over about 2 hours of constant inspiration, collaboration, and going back and forth checking how each design looks on the website, we decided on the ultimate redesign, and now all I have to do is finish the skin design and upload it all to MX. Sounds pretty dull, but collaborating with another artist over something is almost as good if not better than hanging out with another juggler of equal skill level. Just constantly bouncing ideas and designs off of each other and working towards a common goal is one of the most productive feelings you can have, because it IS productive as hell. Either way, just know that collaborating with another artist on a design is just as high on my list of things I love to do as juggling by myself. That's how awesome it is.

So now that that's done, it's time to head to the most useless class ever, Applications In Business. Before I leave home though, after working on a website for hours prior, I get a GREAT idea for MY website, and that's to make a new page for just my juggling video series where it's got all the links to every video and everything related in a nice looking easy page. So I pile all the original hi-res files of my old videos onto my flash drive and head out to class. When I'm in class, I upload all the files onto my website, and then start designing the page around the files. It takes me the whole time, but I was able to participate in the class and do whatever she needed, because all we were doing was learning how to make a font bold and crap in MS Word. Wonderful. So I finish the web page and put it up, and then it's time to head back home again.

Now, I get home at around 9:30 I think? Which was midway through the new episode of Heroes! Luckily, my mom got caught up in a phone conversation about 209 minutes ago, and had paused the tv, so she only saw the first ten minutes. She finishes her conversation and we play it from the beginning. Now, I'm not going to talk about this new season of Heroes yet, because this is a long story as is, so that may come in next weeks post. But we get through the first half hour, and then all of the sudden, I see something on the DVD, it's stopped recording for some reason! So I stop the playing, go to live, and hit the record button. Somehow, this completely fucks up the operating system of the DVD, and now it's frozen and I have to go over and hard reset the box, my mom yelling at me to fix it the entire time! It takes a good ten minutes and 3 tries before I finally get it back working again. Ten minutes of constant frustrated groans from both me and mom, and hopeful wishes that all we missed were commercials and 5 minutes of the show. Unfortunately not the case, we missed a good ten minutes. "Well, that sucked", I said as I walked back upstairs to watch it on NBC.com...

Juggle This:
So some of the tricks I've been working on recently are really pretty boring. I think that after I did a 97531 with rings, I pretty much ran out of ideas and inspiration. Now I'm not practicing many new moves, but I am working on solidifying a lot of my lower number stuff. However, my 7 object patterns are solidifying like you absolutely would not BELIEVE! Just today, during my practice session, I got 16 catches of 7 rings and around 30+ catches of 7 balls! It's absolutely the most amazing thing that I've ever seen. I'm just sitting there, having warmed up and already doing a few runs of 6 rings to warm up, and the third or so attempt of 7 rings, I can see and understand the pattern PERFECTLY and CLEARLY. And I end up just watching this 7 ring pattern like I was watching a 3 ball cascade! But what's even better was how 7 balls looked. My god, I was CORRECTING ERRORS IN THE PATTERN AND CONTINUING! That's how well I was understanding the pattern, was that I was in TOTAL CONTROL of it! I guess unless you've gone through and done 7 balls you will have a tough time understanding, but I know a lot of better jugglers than me read my blog, so they should know the feeling and wonder I'm trying to communicate.

But besides all that, my next video. I'll be releasing the actual video with next week's blog post. SO I've just finished sending it out to a few of my closest juggling friends, and got their feedback on the finished video, and really I was hoping for a lot more negative criticisms, and I did ask them to be a bit harsh, but ALL of them were blown away by the video. I can see why after watching it having read their comments, because really these ARE tricks that could get me a medal in the WJF Intermediates comp if I could pull them off first time, and definitely the editing is great. I was really hoping to get comments about the FEEL of the video, because after watching it a lot, I could sense something different about the complete video that wasn't there in any of my others, and I couldn't nail down what it was for all I was worth. I'm not sure whether it's going to make it the best video yet, or whether it will detract from it, but we'll find out next week! Until then, the trailer for it will be up on Thursday.

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

Time To Write Yes?

2009-02-02T13:55:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
Well, once again it's Monday. Time to update you on everything. Let's start with Tech.MCC, because it's the most complicated thing by far. I was able to get the GPS over with from last semesters contest (remind me never to do that again because it was such a hassle for so little of an effect). But what I was REALLY happy with, was about how we finally got down to actually taking apart a monitor and building the digital projector that we decided upon last semester. Of course, he got the wrong kind of projector for it to work, so we have to get him to find someone willing to trade his front-lit reflective projector with a backlit projector. We'll see what happens, but at least we were about to take apart the LCD screen we needed without a hitch. I was able to get video of the entire process, and should have it up on techmcc.com as soon as Gordon gets it setup for me. Speaking of Gordon, he showed up and basically we had a massive thing with all the members where we figured out what we wanted to do this semester and how Gordon is now in charge of the off-campus meetings and events. There's a whole lot more that I don't have the typing space to cover, but let me say it was an awesome meeting and we got a LOT covered.
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Now, let's move on to my classes. Good god is my Computer Applications in Business course crap. Today we learned how to create a file in word, save it, and email it to the professor, and then we learned something completely irrelevant, the history and origin of the internet. Wow is that useful in business. As for my other courses, well, 2d Design is looking more like middle school arts and crafts class than anything else, but I'm cool with that, because I am experimenting with 2d Design physically again, instead of all in Photoshop, and it is a good artistic path for me to go down. My Photography class was canceled due to snow, and my Strength Of Materials class couldn't be more awesome. Bottom line, things are going as smooth as a milkshake.
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Where am I getting money right now? That's the big question, and the one that doesn't have an easy answer at ALL. Basically, every job I've looked at is not hiring because of the alleged economy (I say alleged because I think you have to always just ignore the economy and spend. Because SPENDING STIMULATES THE ECONOMY AND KEEPS IT GOING! More of that rant later). So I've got a few alternative options, Gordon is showing all the members of Tech.MCC sometime how to setup an anti-virus computer clean-up service that each of us can run by ourselves and make money with. This will be great because all I have to do is run a few programs and defrag a drive, and it'll net me about 40 bucks a pop if all goes well. Another option I've got is one I'm REALLY trying to hunt down, and that's the job my professor is looking for in Materials. He''s looking for an AutoCAD person with a background in electronics, as I explained last week, and I've gone past the resume stage and am looking to receive an application sometime this week. Bottom line, I may be down, but by no means am I out.
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MY NEXT JUGGLING VIDEO WILL BE OUT WITHIN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS! I just wanted to say that, because I've been putting quite a bit of work into it over the past week or two, and it's almost ready to go. just need to finish up a few things in editing it, save it, promote it, and then upload it.

Juggle This:
So anyone that knows my history, or even just watches my main video series, knows that I love half showers. Half showers with balls are absolutely one of my favorite tricks and I do them with any number I can flash. Right now I'm thinking about doing an 8 ball half shower flash, because I have flashed 8 balls (and rings), and it's the next easiest trick. But before I go that far, I want to qualify a 7 ball half-shower. My most recent record as of today is 12 catches, and I found something very interesting that I want to share.

With higher numbers like 6 and 7, I don't like to go from a basic pattern and transition into the half shower, just because it takes so long, and I can only run 6 and up for a short time anyways, so I always try to cold start the half shower. This has been a bit of a challenge, because the way I like to do half showers, is in a timing rhythm I like to call "Quarter Sync". It's a timing that goes something like this. RL--RL--RL--RL Basically, very close to being synchronous, but with the hands staggered by about a quarter of a beat. I find it works WONDERS with the half shower pattern, but the hard part about this timing, is getting into the rhythm. Until today.

I discovered, and I'll be using 5 balls as the example, that if you start with a sync set of 6x4, then make the next set of throws in the regular pattern of 6x4x, then the timing is perfect that all you do is throw the last ball, and when that first 4 comes down, it's setup perfectly for quarter-sync. Don't ask me how it works, all you need to know is that is you, and I'm using 7 as the example now, throw this sequence, [8x6][8x6x][8x6x], you will be setup absolutely perfectly for the half shower. My previous record before today was 7, just a flash, but then I found this method and my record is now 2 short of a qualify.

(Sorry about the short post this week, I really couldn't think of any stories to tell or rants to rant about, so next week I'll have something good for you guys to read. For now, you've got a few extra minutes, go enjoy a sandwich!)

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

You Do NOT Mess With The Kohut

2009-01-26T11:06:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
So I'm down into the first week of my new classes, and WOW. So far, it seems like Photo2 is going to be AWESOME, I'm going to be learning new techniques I haven't tried before in both photoshop AND film. My Construction Materials Testing seems like it's going to be an epic hands on course that I am going to love, except for the math. And my Computer Applications In Business class is an absolute JOKE, I'm learning how to open and save files in Microsoft Word right now, lmao. I'm not sure what the last course is like because I haven't had it yet, but 2D Design should be an awesome course regardless because that's what I've already been doing for years.
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Well my job search has hit a snag. I haven't heard back at ALL from Fed-Ex (which I really thought would be a slam dunk), UPS, and Blockbuster, even after following up with them. So now I've got to find someplace that's still hiring now (with the alleged economy crisis and all), and that will fit my skills set. HOWEVER! My professor in Contruction Materials Testing, said on day one, that he's looking to hire someone who knows AutoCAD and has some electrical background, and me and only one other person come close to qualifying those requirements. So that I may end up getting, I hope... ALSO! I'm only one semester away from getting my CAD certificate, so if I don't get a job DURING the semester, it should be easy to get a higher scale job in the AutoCAD field after I finish this last class I need.
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Don't even MENTION Jugglers On Juggling. Good non-existent god, I literally cannot think of a single episode idea that I could do on my own and NOT sound like an asshole. I REALLY want to do more episodes, the thing is I've already covered all of the topics I think I'm qualified to talk about and that I think would hold the viewers interest for more than 3 minutes. I'm thinking about doing co-hosted episodes again, but more of an interview type setup, where I'd get someone like Michael Karas on talking about how to be creative with new props, and I'd be sitting back as the casual listener and ask whatever questions I have to him. Whatever happens, it's going to be a little while before the next episode I'm afraid. Unless of course I have a sudden brain-wave and come up with an awesome idea for a solo episode.
::

Daily Life:
So let's see, a story, a story, my kingdom for a story. Well, I guess I can talk about today. SO! I knew thanks to Gordon telling me on Friday, that the semi-annual CCPP Club Picnic thing was happening today. Basically, this is where you set up a booth among a bunch of other booths in either outside during the fall, or in the cafeteria during the spring, and try to convince people to put down their email addresses so you can count them as having joined the club. Now, seeing as how I didn't think about it until Gordon told me 2 days beforehand, I didn't have a single thing planned, and I even forgot to remind the club members to show up for it. Whoops.

So let me get to my point, I knew it was today, and I had a general idea of when. I didn't bother to check, I just assumed it would run from 10:00 AM to 2PM. So I figured I'd have to show up a half hour early to get everything ready, and a half hour to get there, and 20 minutes to pack up everything I needed to bring with me, I figured I'd have to wake up at 8:20 AM. Which doesn't sound bad, but remember, my sleep schedule is off of the normal person's by 5 hours. 8:00 AM to me is essentially 3 AM for you. So I wake up, do all that stuff, and head over to find out, THAT IT DOESN'T START UNTIL 11:30!!!! DAMNIT!

Well, I use the time to drive back and pick up some other things I thought about while I was walking from the parking lot to the Cafeteria, and then by the time I got back and set up, it was already time to go, and there were TONS of people. Mostly they were there for the free food, which is tradition at the semi-annual thing. So I'm sitting there, for a while, trying to think of what the hell I can do to grab attention, and all I had was my laptop (playing shows from Revision3), my camera, my juggling equipment, and a screwdriver. So I spend about a half hour constantly taking apart and putting back together my old broken camera, and then juggling for people. Then it's 1:00PM, and all of the sudden, the crowd is gone and everyone else is packing up to leave. I'm sitting there dumbfounded at the horrible schedule. But I decide reluctantly to do the same, then go practice juggling and get a few awesome tricks in the process, which I will talk about later.

So I go back home once again and hang out for about an hour or two, and then it's time for my class at the Perth Amboy center. Now, it's been about a year since I mentioned it, so let me describe it quickly. It's a shorter drive to get there, it's a pretty laid back class structure, and it's nearly 100% Hispanic students. Of course, that means nothing to me, I could care less about all those details except for the shorter drive, but what I did care about was the class I'm taking. It's title is "Computer Applications In Business". Now, with a title like that, you'd think we'd be learning Linux or some sort of proprietary thing, right? Nope. Instead, today we were learning how to open and close files in Microsoft Word. I WISH I was joking. The class schedule says that the hardest thing we'll be doing at the end of the year will be making a power point presentation. Are you fucking kidding me?!

For the love of god, I REALLY hope that when I go talk to my adviser tomorrow, that there is a test I can take to instantly pass the course and get a partial refund on the tuition. I didn't say that much about it, because it is so stupefying that talking about how simple this class is just makes me lose faith in human intellect, so I don't want to talk about it. Bottom line, it's the easiest and most pointless course I've ever laid eyes on, and I'll leave it at that. That was the end of my day, and now I'm writing this. Hooray.

Juggle This:
TODAY WAS A GOOD DAY! SO WAS FRIDAY! Let's go in chronological order then. Friday, I've got class in the Tech Services center from 11:00 Am to 3 PM, and then after that I'm free. Now, I haven't had access to anything over an 8 foot ceiling since WJF5, and I've been just ACHING to practice my rings again. So I figure I'll go into the foyer as I usually do and practice a few 5 ring moves for a while. Then all the sudden, I feel the rings getting easier and easier. This happens to me pretty often when I don't practice for a while, whatever I haven't practiced becomes easy for a short while afterwards. So I felt this, and decided to try and make a few tricks I'd been thinking about doing. Since I was getting 3 ring overheads in one count somewhat easily and even getting a flash of 4 ring overheads one count, I figured I'd try for more than one throw of 5 ring half-overheads. I failed miserably, because the foyer's roof sucked something horrible. It's a glass ceiling and it was a bright sunny day, so when a ring would get between my eyes and the glass ceiling, it would disappear. I looked around for another place, and noticed that the massive lecture hall which is setup like a theater, is open, and has no class in it. I go in, and it is amazing how well it worked. After about a half hour of trying, I managed to get both 8 catches of 5 ring half overheads back to a cascade and 10 throws to a collect! HAPPY AM I! And then of course, having done that, I decided to try another move I couldn't do under 8 feet. A 5 ball cascade with a 6th on the forehead, dropping the 6th down into a fountain mid cascade. THAT I got, ON THE FIRST TRY! Absoluterly perfect, so I left that day happy, for sure.

THEN, zoom across the weekend to today. After having to sit in the college center for the club fair thing for a few hours, I then had 4 hours until my next class, and I've had another move I REALLY wanted to try. A 97531, with rings. I'd done it to a collect before, and felt like after getting 5 ring half-overheads, that I was ready to get it. So I go back and see if the Theater at the College Center is open, and it's not, but I find my way in through the side door, to find a class going on. Damn. Well, at least I know a place right next to the side door that has a high enough roof for a 9, but the lighting sucks. So after fussing to get it for 30 minutes, I find out that the class is over and I can go use the AWESOME lighting on the stage to get footage for my next video. I spend another half hour, and through pure sweat and determination, I make it. I see it go up, all the throws are perfect, and I catch the first 3, then see that the first two throws were in fact, NOT perfect, and that they were actually really low for what I needed, so I quickly tossed the other 3 out, and went into pure subconscious-save-the-pattern mode, and in a flash, save it and manage to reenter a cascade. I made a 97531 with rings, to a qualify. It sounds mundane only because there is no correct punctuation or way to express how excitingly awesome it is in text. Oh wait, there is...

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *Falls over, rolling around with joy

So after that incredible move that I don't think I'll ever get again before WJF6, I decided that now was a good time to try and break my 5 ring flat-front-reverse record. I beat it by one catch with 18 catches clean. The footage looks absolutely BEAUTIFUL, and I couldn't be happier than I was right then and am right now remembering how happy I was then. Wait, what?

(This week's photo's of my compliments of Ville)
A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

What Hasth Become Of Thouh?

2009-01-19T13:30:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
Well, nothing particularly amazing, I can assure you.
::
So college classes start in 2 days. I'm a little bit nervous to see what hppens with these new classes, mostly because of me not having a job and being a little low on money. Sure I can afford a DSLR if I need to get one for Photo2, and I can afford all the books I'll need if it turns out I need all of them, but only just, and that's what's making me nervous. Otherwise, all my classes look like they're gonna be GREAT! Photo2, More Business classes, and the last class I need to get my CAD certificate, all I need is a D or higher and I can be proclaimed legally as a qualified draftsman! WOO!
::
So the job hunt is hitting a little snag. I didn't realize that the market really HAS dried up as much as it has. I've already hit dead ends (or what seems to be) with Fed-Ex, Blockbuster, Gamestop, and other local stores. I'm right now running down and seeing if I can get something at Lowes (the cineplex and the hardware store), Best Buy, USPS, and Walmart. Here's hoping one of them goes through...
::
I'm really not sure what else has gone on that I can quickly sum up. I've started using Twitter again, /Reeses2150. I got and beat a cold over the past week. It snowed, a lot, and often. Plus I'm still having trouble with episode ideas for JoJ. Damnit, this new format I'm using for the podcast, it's sure leading to a much better end product, but it's just so hard to come up with ideas for. Well at least I met my promise back in the summer to make at least a half dozen episodes before the season ends, so anything from here until the end of the season is gravy.
::

Juggle This 1:
Uh, yeah. So I think I've pretty much refined and finished what I could do with "Club and Ball". I think I came up with a lot of good stuff, and the video looks great. I'm happy with it no matter how many views it gets, so yeah.

Because of all thew snow, I can't record my pot manipulation video yet, which I was so stoked to FINALLY be taking one of my old ideas and making a full on routine video out of it. I AM going to do this video, and I WILL also be making a routine video for the picture frame routine, although I can't say when that will be even CLOSE to ready. I'm still coming up with more ideas for it, and it sucks because I can't use the main method I came up with for holding on to it, which was to tape 2 hangars to the ceiling and hang the frame from them, because "It damages the ceiling too much". Ok, I'll give you that, but weren't we already going to repaint my room and the ceiling sometime this year anyways? So what's the point in trying to preserve it exactly the way it is? It's like getting a new TV, and instead of having fun with your old TV (like taking a sledgehammer to it or safely dropping it off a high building) you just throw it out. I NEVER understand that type of logic...

Ok, I've rambled on long enough about that, it's time to let you know what I've ACTUALLY been doing in terms of progress and props. Now, if you've been paying attention to me on Rec.Juggling, I lost one of my 5 penguin balls at WJF5. Before WJF5, I had given away/sold all of my old black and yellow Dube bags to people I was teaching how to juggle. SO besides my set of 5 Dube Illuminated balls, I now only have one set of good balls, and I've only got 4 of them. So I was in the market for some new balls. Of course, I still had hope because even though I had had a fiasco and a field day (at the same TIME no less!) with the penguin juggling 24 panel suedes, I was going to receive a set of 5 of the new 12 panel suedes of the same size. The short story is that I ordered the 24 panels while they were out of stock, waited a LONG time, contacted them asking what the status was, being informed by them that a week ago they had discontinued the ball I ordered and were instead replacing that product with a 12 panel version by a different manufacturer, I got pissed off about them not notifying me or putting out ANY kind of word of this to ANYONE, I complain, I get no response.

Then I remember that I'd tried out the jugglingstore.com Tangent Bags at Juggle This last year, and LOVED the way they felt. SO I go to order them on jugglingstore, and guess what, they have been discontinued as well! DAMNIT! Of course, I had to learn this by calling their office, the only thing that is shown on the website is that they are out of stock. Does any juggling distributor now anything about PR and customer service? Either way...

So I've really (thanks to the 24 panel penguins) become addicted to suede and want NOTHING BUT SUEDE. Then I look around and see that nothing else really fit my liking, and so I get an idea. If I sold all of my bags, and people are still trading FERGIES around inside the community, maybe I can find someone with a used set of Tangent bags that I can pick up! So I put the word on rec.juggling, and I get a response from a guy who's got 5 he's willing to part with. Of course, he can only find 3 of them right now, and so I say to let me have them and if he finds the other two, I'll buy them later. So skip ahead about 4 days for the postal service to work it's magic and here I am with a BEAUTIFUL set of 3 tangent bags. Could not be happier. So then, all of the sudden, about 2 or three days later, I get a message in my inbox from penguin juggling saying my order has shipped! WOO! New balls! Again, wait over the weekend to allow the postal service to move item A from B to C, and here I am, staring at a package that looks really big for only 5 balls. I open it, look at the receipt, and see a note on there saying that "here's 5 extra balls for the inconvenience". GREAT! Still doesn't entirely make up for the bad PR< but at least they've got the right idea to stop me from complaining in a blog about them, or wait a minute....

Well either way, so now I've got a set of TEN penguin 12 panel suedes, and, well, they are the worst bags I've ever used in my life. I have absolutely no idea why they wanted to change the bags in the first place, but these new ones feel EXACTLY like moss covered rocks. I'm not joking. The suede is really shallow, and the bags are overfilled with birdseed to the point of bursting. I thought, "crap. I'm going to have to return these and look for someone else with more tangent bags." But then I noticed something odd.

I put one of the tangent bags right next to the penguin bags, and somehow noticed the size of the panels on each. They looked pretty close to being the same size, so I measured them, compared them, put them up against each other, and guess what. The panels on Tangent bags and the new penguin bags are EXACTLY the same size. I'm thinking, there is no way this could possibly be true. Butthen I figure, I've got 10 bags, let me see what happens. So I decided right there, to see if I could remove enough seeds from the penguin bags, to make it feel the same as the tangent. I did that, and after a letting out nearly half a dixie cup worth of seeds, I sewed it back up, and they feel like EXACTLY the same bag. I could not believe my luck. Apparently, the same manufactures that used to make the tangent bags, are either now making the new penguin bags, or sold the design for the tangent bag to the company now making the penguin bags. Bottom line, they are the same material, same size, and after having removed a half dixie cup of seeds from three more, I have a set of 7 Tangent bags, and a set of 6 penguin bags (which I'm optimistically hoping I can get my college friends to break in for me. Because I have no idea how good they'll be when broken in). Good times.

Juggle This 2:
Damnit! I've told a great story there, but I still haven't said a damned thing about what I've done recently! CRAP! Well, after going to Laguardia Airport with dad to pick up my sis from her trip to Europe, I decided that while waiting for her 11:00 PM flight to arrive, I have a nice ceiling and these new bags with me to practice 6 with. Over the course of the hour wait, I managed 48 catches of 6 balls, 4 rounds of 66661, and came OH SO CLOSE to doing a 5 ball cascade with head balance, then dropping the 6th ball from my head into the pattern. I need to do that move again now. Besides my ball skills, which are amazing considering how long it's been since I practicing anything more than 5 balls, I've been working on my ring overheads.

Now, my ring overheads have been a thing of beauty for a while. The only problem? I could only throw right handed overheads, so although I could run it up to 4 rings, I still had yet to flash 3 ring overheads in 1 count. The short version is, after less than 3 days of practice, all under my 8 foot ceiling in my room, I've qualified 3 ring overheads on camera, and then in the garage flashed 4 ring full overheads with 3 throws. I'm amazed at how much progress I'm getting for how little practice I actually do.

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

I'm Like'n This Hibernation Thing

2009-01-12T18:39:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
So after giving you an extra week to read the worlds longest blog post, it's time to get back to talking about stuff.
::
I've uploaded a new batch of art to my deviantart page, I'd really suggest checking it out, for two reasons. All that stuff I uploaded is REALLY good, and because it seems like every time I upload a new batch of anything I get less and less views on it all, and it's really making me not want to do it anymore. So yeah...
::
JOB SEARCH! Well, I'm focusing on three major places right now for jobs. Fed-Ex, Blockbuster, and UPS, in that order. I've already had an interview with Fed-Ex and am waiting on the final yes or no, but I'm 75% sure it will be a yes because of all the low requirements and the connections I had. Blockbuster I've yet to interview with, so I've got to call them back soon about that. And UPS I've got set on the backburner right now, because I'm waiting to see if I get a yes from Fed-Ex before I go there. Bottom line, I'll be working again this semester.
::
Jugglers On Juggling. Yeah. I've gotten a few more episode ideas, and I had planned on recording an episode or two last week after coming back from WJF5, but somehow, as soon as I walked in the door, I caught a really nice cold and couldn't speak for all I was worth. So I had to postpone, and then I got better about 5 days ago. Then, after doing all the job hunting stuff and catching up on all the internet stuff that needed catching up on, I was going to record another episode, and I can feel myself getting sick again! DAMNIT! And Luke released another episode of Juggling Podcast, so it's good to know he hasn't stopped, but he's making less episodes than I am, and that's kind of sad.
::
No college right now, so I'm happy there. Grandma's back in Florida for the next couple months too, so I'm happy about that. And to clarify, no I don't hate my family, it's simply that the fewer people are in the house at any time, the more comfortable I am. On days when my sister, grandma, father, and mother are all here in the the house, I get really nervous and uncomfortable. I have no idea what it is or where it comes from, and when I'm alone in the house, and I know that nobody's going to be back for a few hours, I am absolutely ecstatic. I guess it must be some kind of phobia I have or something, I have to look it up sometime...
::
So I said last post I'd talk about some of the ideas I've had for new videos, so let's get that out of the way right now. Remember Pot Manipulation Ideas? Well, I've come up with a BUNCH more ideas for it, and will be making a routine video for it as soon as it gets warm enough to film outside for more than 20 minutes. I've also released Club and Ball, which was a video for a few ideas I was kicking around, and I've recorded some more tricks of the same type after a few suggestions, so expect Club and Ball 2 to come out sometime. I'm also going to make a few more ring tutorials, especially a flat front reverse tutorial, because I didn't get the chance to teach Sondre at WJF5 and it's a move that's so easy that not enough jugglers do.

Daily Life:
So! Having turned 21, I am now legally able to make a rant about alcohol. I've been in a ranting mood lately, and I've already had a bit of experience with alcohol (not in all the different tastes of different beers and such, but I'm talking about alcohol in general, not specifics), so I'm going to give my thoughts about it.

I don't like alcohol. Plain and simple. I like what it DOES to you, but that's the only real reason I ever want to get drunk is for those effects of being relaxed and uninhibited. I kind of look at it like I would look at cold medication. There's a time and situation when you need it's effects, and your choice of flavors ranges from crap to "It tastes ok". Simple as that. Wow, that's really the quickest I've explained my opinion in a while. Let's go a bit deeper.

Alcohol is GREAT for if you're the type of person that HAS to put up a facade and barriers around other people. Why do I have to do this? You guessed it, A.D.H.D. But it's not about the hyperactive portion, it's about how one of the things about the disorder is the impulsivity. It used to be, for the longest time, that if I had a thought, or an idea for a joke, or wanted to be in on a conversation I had nothing to contribute to, it would go straight from my brain to my mouth without me even realizing it. Or what's even worse, is that if I felt like doing something, regardless of the situation or who was watching, I would do it (well, to a POINT. I'm talking about wiping sweat from my head, adjusting my balls, picking my nose, etc). I don't think this is one of the reasons I was unpopular, but it lead to a LOT of embarrassing situations through middle and early high school. So to deal with a lot of that (the talking part), I had to develop inhibitions with my conscious mind. Basically, I had to learn to FORCE myself to stop and think before I said anything. Doesn't sound that tough, but that's because you know how to do that much more easily. So now I've got this barrier in my head that I have to live with constantly, whether people are there or not, because that's the only way to make it all work. So Alcohol demolishes that barrier, and it's very nice and liberating to just blurt. I like doing it, and the best part is, I can be myself, but have an excuse that people WILL UNDERSTAND. When I say "Sorry, I got ADHD", they don't believe me or don't accept it as an excuse, as where everyone accepts "Sorry, I'm drunk". That's the BEST thing about alcohol for me, of course the problem is that I have to get absolutely SHIT FACED before that happens. (Note: I'm assuming that the basics of this point, that alcohol allows you to be yourself and have an excuse, applies to EVERYONE, but I think it hits me harder because I do have to have a bigger mental barrier than normal folk)

Now, I really tried to think of something else that I like about alcohol, but I can't think of anything, so it's ON TO THE NEGATIVES! First off, I absolutely HATE how a few hours after you start drinking, it hits your digestive system hard near the end? You know what I mean, there are 2 things, you can't stop going to the urinal, and then when you have to go to the stall, it's warm and nasty. That's all I'm going to say about that because it grosses even ME out.

I already said I don't like the taste of alcohol, but let me clarify. I HATE THE TASTE OF BEER AND ALCOHOL. I only have found one beer that I can come CLOSE to liking, and that's Yuengling. Otherwise, I like Vodka especially Smirnoff, but either as a Shot, or flavored. That's IT. Give me anything else, and watch me wince as I drink it. I find it miserable to pretend to like alcohol at a bar or social thing, and the only other alternative is to feel like a pussy ordering soda or a wimp ordering water. I HATE social drinking.

Another thing I don't like about alcohol, is how much I have to drink in order to GET DRUNK. Yes, that has to do with my body weight, but even considering THAT I'm really resistant to the stuff. I once had 5 shots of straight vodka and couldn't feel a damned thing (and I hadn't even been impaired yet, I could still juggle up to 6 balls). And couple that with my first point of being drunk is the main reason to like alcohol for me, and then factor in how much alcohol COSTS, and I'm basically paying 10 bucks to get anywhere NEAR drunk and happy. Thinking about that makes me like it all even less.

I really think that's it for what I don't like about the stuff. So to sum it all up again, I LOVE the net result of being drunk and what it does to you, but what it takes to get there, especially depending on the situation, is absolutely the worst thing and I do not like doing it. Yup, next week I'll be ranting about how ADHD affects SEX! lol.

MY NEW CAMERAS:
Well, since The New Steve broke my camera at WJF5, I had to get a camera to replace it. As I was there, and seeing as how the ONLY camera's I could see were all these consumer models (basically cameras with NO manual settings, NO video mode worth talking about, not even high iso and F-stop ratings), I figured then that I would spend the money on something I'd been meaning to get for quite some time. A camcorder. So as I said in my last post, I spent about a half hour looking at the rack, until I had it narrowed down to the Panasonic and the Sony. And then i realized I was looking at Sony, and instantly went for the Panasonic.

Now, having used it for a few weeks, I've got some SERIOUS gripes about it, but first, let me get the great stuff about it out of the way. The screen is wonderful, I can finally see whether I'm in frame or not quickly by just turning the screen around to face the subject! So happy about that! Battery life seems to be awesome so far, it's lasting for about an hour constantly each charge without needing more. Finally, the sound from it's microphones are boss! I could almost record an episode of JoJ without using the external mics, almost.

The bad stuff. What burns me the most is that, despite recording directly to SD cards, which I specifically made a priority as I was buying to avoid importing clips (a completely arbitrary and useless process meant for IDIOT consumers), I NEED TO IMPORT THE CLIPS VIA THE SOFTWARE! GAH!!!!! HATE IMPORTING! JUST RECORD THE FILE AND CONVERT IT TO EITHER AN AVI, MPG, OR MOV INSIDE THE CAMERA SO I CAN PULL IT STRAIGHT OFF THE CARD!!!!!! It's the main reason I really am not using this camcorder that much. Another thing I hate about it is the pictures it takes. For the love of the non-existent god, it records video at 800x600, BUT IT ONLY TAKES 640X480 PICTURES! WTF IS THAT!?!? It's bad enough that the camera doesn't give you ANY control over manual settings in both taking pictures AND video, but you can't get good resolution pics anyways! ARGH! Another gripe, when I import clips recorded in 16:9 aspect ratio, which I was so happy to finally be able to record 16:9, the imported clips are squished sideways, making the 16:9 mode about as useless as an escape slide on a helicopter! FUCK!

Other than all of those, however, the video I get from this thing is WONDERFUL. It's clear, crisp, and is very good with maintaining it's framerate, so for juggling videos, the footage I get from this is awesome. BUT! It's not any faster of a framerate than my OTHER new camera...

Kodak Easyshare V803. After I'd used the camcorder for a while and realized what crappy stills it took, I knew I needed a new still camera, but I figured I'd go look on craigslist and wait for a good Kodak to pop up, because they record videos directly to SD cards as MOV's no converting or importing needed, and they usually have really good settings. So I wait a day, then this one pops up for $80, because the guy had sent it to Kodak to get the LCD screen repaired because it shipped broken, and during the wait time he bought a different camera, and then got it back and sold it to me. I am VERY happy with this camera. But I still have some major complaints about it.

Firstly, it has NO MANUAL SETTING CONTROLS. FUCK! Yes, I can change the shutter speed to a slower speed and manually choose the ISO, but it's completely unwieldy to get to through the menus, and it's shutter and aperture that I REALLY need to control. That and the F-stop only goes down to 2.8, which is dismal at best, but hey, it's a point and shoot, what do I expect. OH! And as to be expected, the video microphone sucks to all hell and back.

What I DO like about this camera, is that the flash works, for now. My old camera lost it's flash basically, a few weeks after I got it and the return policy ran out, it's not the "OMG LOOK AT THIS CAMERA IT'S AS THIN AS A CREDIT CARD" style that WAY too many camera's are being made as now, And I really love how quickly it boots up and is ready to take a shot. Excellent for my street photography. Other than that, it's got the same kind of stuff as my old camera, which was PERFECT in terms of what I needed, but a POS in terms of a camera. This one is exactly the opposite, it's a wonderful camera, but has only about 75% of what I need. We'll see what happens with these two later, but for now, they seem to be working well, so no complaints yet.......

So I was going to post about what my juggling skills are like now, but they really haven't changed all THAT much since WJF5. I AM going to rant about finding the right juggling balls next week. And I may still review Heroes Season 3, but who knows. For now, it's winter, I must go back to hibernating to try and fix my sleep schedule (still fucked up from PRE-WJF5 crap). Live long and prosper, but only if you really DO believe in logic and common sense.

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

The WORLD JUGGLING WHAT?

2008-12-29T18:57:00.006-05:00

THE WORLD JUGGLING FEDERATION
Day Zero:
The day before the convention starts, and the day of my flight. The 16th. Well, that was an interesting day to say the least. My flight was scheduled at 7:00 PM EST so I'd already be arriving in Vegas late as hell (scheduled for 11:00 PM local time) but all of the sudden in the middle of the day, it starts to snow like MAD. Which is usually one of my 5 favorite things that happen to me, but today, it meant that the flight WAS running on schedule, but after we boarded the plane we had to get de-iced, and there was only ONE station and three planes ahead of us. So that meant we were sitting on the runway for at least an house before we were even cleared for takeoff. Once we got in the air there were absolutely no problems though. Even the guy who I was sitting next to on the plane found me and the whole World Juggling Federation thing to be interesting, and he was asking a bunch of questions during the flight about it. So that was good and cool.

Day One:
So then we move to day one of the convention. I start off as anyone would, meeting the other jugglers I haven't met yet (Lauge, Sondre, Steve, John Nations, Fowler), saying hi to the old ones I'd already met (Freddy Sheed, Vova, Thomas, Joe Showers, Rob Crites), and being greeted by jugglers who I have no idea who they were. God I love being popular within the community. So, the first day I spent mostly catching up with everyone and preparing for prelims, but that happens later. In the meantime, there was a very early game of combat, and in a MASSIVE field of people who were way better than me (including Joe Showers, Dan Eaker, Joelle, Laura Ernst, etc) I won two games. The first of which was awesome because I ended up having to go one on one with Eaker, and after I made 3 dodges, he dropped after attacking, so he was behind me and I didn't see him drop, but I immediately knew I was because right in front of me, in the most sincere and shocked tone I've ever heard in someones voice, Joe Showers says very slowly, "I don't believe it..." epic win for the massive underdog!

Also before the prelims started, I had been meaning to buy or at least try the new Play One Piece clubs, and I'd waited to buy them at WJF5 because I figured that Jason would have ALL the colors available instead of just the red, white, and blue available online. Of course that was not the case and I had to get 3 conformist white clubs, but I'm planning on getting one of my artist friends to draw all over them in marker sometime soon, because the clubs really do well with sharpies. One thing I LOVE about these new clubs, is that they bounce on the end SO well, I'm sure someone will have a video up within the month of them qualifying a force bounce cascade with three... They're ok clubs, and I'll have a full review next week because this is already going to be an ENORMOUS post.

So. The time comes for the preliminaries of all competitions. Luckily for me the intermediates were last at 5:00, so I had plenty of time to warm up. For what good it did though. I'm not sure what it was, but absolutely EVERYONE, especially me, bombed their prelim routines. I swear noone was able to put a full routine down with any less than 10 drops. I still have no idea what happened, but out of five competitors that tried, I found out the next day, I was one of the 4 that qualified for the competition! That made me just so happy.

And to end the day, I went for my first meal in Vegas, yeah, I didn't eat dinner last night, breakfast, or lunch today. Of course when I realize this, it's already past midnight and all the food places are closed save for one. Kady's Coffee Shop, the GODSEND for everyone at the convention, a burger joint open 24/7. The deals were pretty good too,well, for Vegas anyways. $13 for a bacon cheeseburger with fries, I'll tell you I had probably one of those every two days while I was there, but that's enough about day one, let's talk about day TWO!!!!

Day Two:
So moving on, the next day goes by, and after my complete bombshell of a routine yesterday I decide to run through it a couple dozen times, and guess what, it makes absolutely no difference. I still can't get through it with less then 6 drops. ArGH! Well, all is not lost, at least 3 of my moves are back to being 100% sure things, my 4 ring 2up180 connected to 2up360, and my one handed overheads with 4. But those have been sure things for the past month, so I'm still stressing over it.

Now, one of the big differences between yesterday and today is that I actually remembered that I was hungry, because there wasn't much I needed to do in terms of what was scheduled, so I was asking if anyone wanted to go to Subway across the street next to Circus Circus, and the only response I get is "Too expensive". Wait, Subway? Too Expensive? Alarms start going off inside my cranial cavity, and after 4 responses of too expensive, I ask how much it is for a foot-long over there, they say "Ten Dollars". My jaw drops like an old woman's groceries after she'd just walked into the house and saw her youngest daughter banging her youngest grandson. I can't believe I just wrote that, but it's the only sentence that emphasizes properly how stunned I was. I decide that I HAVE to go see for myself, that and I was already craving Subway because I hadn't had any in over 4 days, and find myself absolutely amazed to see that they were telling the truth. I walk up, order a foot-long Meatball Marinara on Italian herb and cheese, and I say it straight to the cashier as I'm paying, "If this isn't the best damned meatball sub I've ever had, I'm not coming here again for the rest of the week". I didn't get another meatball sub all week. Not to say it wasn't bad, but it was nowhere near worth ten bucks.

So after I get back from lunch, I see someone on their laptop, and after realizing last night that the internet costs 10 dollars a DAY when you get it in your hotel room, I ask him whether it's free here. To my amazement, IT IS! He tells me the password to the WJF5 network, and away I go, or so I thought. Turns out that the router was being used to spur multiple networks or something, because the connection would be there one minute, and gone the next. And when it was on, it was slow as sin. ARGH! Oh well, what am I to expect, besides, I'm not here for internet, I'm here to juggle! So I promptly go over to The New Steve, who is practicing ring passing with Ville I think, and right as he's done, I take over.

If I've not said this before, let me say it now. I LOVE RING PASSING! I love passing rings more than I love rings solo and club passing combined! It's the easiest to do high numbers with, and the easiest to control. I love it. So when I start passing with GoHeads, I'm just so happy about it. We start off simple, 6 ring ultimate sync. Just to warm up a bit and get used to each other, then out of nowhere we both get the idea at the same time to do 360's in the middle of the ultimate sync pattern, which was great, and we decide to jump straight up to 8. Screw the weird odd numbered ultimates patterns of one person crossing throws the other doing outsides, we just go straight for the easy sync stuff. We do 8, again, like it's nothing, but it does take a little bit of dialing in because when done in sync, it's 4 rings apexing at the same time in the same space, so it's a bit tricky. But it was remarkably easy, so I say, "Screw it, let me set up the camera and let's go for 10!" "Sure" he says, and we're off trying to qualify ten ring ultimates. I take a moment to think about what I'm doing, 10 ring ultimates! I've never done that many balls with another person in 2 count! We go for it, and it only takes us a dozen attempts to qualify it on camera clean finish. Can you say epic?

What came next, oh yes! As I'm already done the most awesome thing I can do today, it's time to hang out with Freddy Sheed and the Gangster Gang (redundant, ain't it?) and he once again pulls out a Mountain Dew and thanks me for getting him addicted to them. My pleasure. And then all of the sudden they start talking about how Penn Jillette and the Passing Zone were here this morning and were not going to come in again. The realization hits me and if my life were an anime, my face would become white with a crooked Wario-mustache-like line going across it in blue with a rather large sweat-drop. I had missed one of the things I regretted most after wising up after WJF3, which was that at WJF3, I saw Penn Jillette and the Passing Zone in the gym, but because I was still celebrity-shy, I didn't talk to any of them, and I really regretted it. So here I am now, one of my goals for WJF5 crushed, which was to meet Penn, the man I think should be president in 2012, and my longtime idol (the other being Adam Savage). Well, at least nothing worse than that could happen.

Day Three:
So, since yesterday was such a downer, let's start with the good stuff. Today was the day of my competitions, the intermediate competitions. I am stressing out over it so much I nearly popped a vessel, and I'm not joking. I already knew from yesterday and the prelims that the best I could POSSIBLY do was third, unless everyone dropped all of their tricks and I had a miracle run, because Daniel Eaker is at least 3 times as good as I am, and Cameron Ritter is twice as good. So it's between me and Sondre already for who gets third place, and though his main area is balls, he's still got me covered with rings fairly well. But besides that fact, what lead to my barely-not-a-heart-attack was the fact that so far, in all of my practice sessions in the gym, I had not gotten a run I could be proud of in any way. That and especially going out third and watching Daniel and Cameron go through and do a great job with their routines, I was standing backstage absolutely petrified.

So the time comes for me to go out, they call my name, and I'm walking out thinking "I have no chance", and then it hits me, "I have no chance." I realize in that moment as I'm walking out that I know I've got no shot at winning any of the prize money for first or second, and all I'd get for third is a medal, so in that moment as I warm up in the minute it takes the judges to get ready that this is just to show what I can do, and how much I've improved since last year (which is a HELL of a lot, watch the 2 routines one after another when this DVD gets done). So this weight has been lifted, but I've now got this new weight of "Now show them what you can do", and I nearly have a stroke.

Those three minutes after the judges say "ready" were an absolute BLUR. I started off with my 6 ring pattern and qualified it on the second try, then I moved on and made my 5 ring full reverse on the second attempt. Those two moves were EXACTLY what I wanted to hit and could NOT hit for the past 3 days, and now suddenly my brain is thinking about that, meanwhile my hands are continuing to go through the routine, and I'm just standing there on the stage watching myself doing 4 ring overheads, flat fronts, 2up180 to 2up360, and the whole lot of my routine. It was so surreal, and all that was going through my mind was "holy crap, I'm actually DOING IT." And then the crowd of jugglers starts applauding as I enter probably the best 4 ring one handed overheads pattern I've ever done in my life, and I just decided in that moment to keep it going for as long as I could, and I double qualified it without even shuffling my feet across the floor. Of course, right at the end of the routine, as I get to the tricks that I hadn't practiced, my ADHD hits and I, like I predicted months ago, forgot what move came next. I ask the judges with my routine form what came next and just as I hear the move that I want to do next, I hear the other juggles table go "Time", which was good I guess, because those other moves were my real high risk ones. I acknowledge the audience and gather my equipment, wishing Sondre good luck as I pass him on the way out to backstage. The second I get backstage I collapse from joy.

I think the best thing about it though, was after I gathered myself up and went back out into the audience to watch everyone else, everyone that was near me, including Dietz and Garfield, told me I did an awesome job of it, and I am forced to reply "I'm just SO HAPPY! The one time it mattered and I stomped it!". Absolutely the second highlight of the convention for me. The biggest highlight will come later.

I'm really tempted to just end on that epic note and move on to day four, but that's not the end of it. Freddy Sheed, man, Freddy. He was having EXACTLY the same problem I was having. Up until now, all of his moves that he was practicing in the gym were only being made 50% of the time at BEST, and he's really pushing himself this year, going for the win in Intermediate Clubs. I'm not sure whether the god of juggling was looking down on all of us during these few hours or what, but exactly the same thing happened to him. He somehow pulled it all together and didn't miss a damn trick his entire routine. Of course, his reaction when he got backstage after was much better, as where I took the introverted approach and just kind of broke down into happiness, he let it all out. Screaming and doing laps around the bleachers, hugging and high-fiving anyone withing 18 feet of him, which was really funny and awesome to watch. I can only hope Jason got it on one of the three cameras there.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!!!! Thomas and a bunch of the other advanced competitors, after the intermediates competition was over, decided it would make an awesome shot to try and get a bunch of them doing a synchronous DB97531. I was the one with the best camera available, so I was sitting there watching them just try this insane thing for about a half hour. Eventually they gave up on it, except for Daniel Eaker. Of course, he gave up on doing a synchronized DB9, but instead opted to try and be the first person ever to do 2 connected Db97531's. After about a half hour and coming INSANELY close, he was getting tired, and made one to a series of multiplexes back to a qualify. He took that as "good enough", and stopped for the day. Of course this was around midnight, so we all decided that was enough, and went to sleep.

Day Four:
So let us begin this new tale by having me say that if you thought yesterday was awesome, YOU'RE RIGHT! But today was almost just as good. Why? Because the advanced competitions were today, but that's the end, let me take you back to the beginning...

So I wake up late, because I had stayed up the night before VERY late, not wanting that awesome day to end, and I realize right off the bat that I'm hungry. Now, over the course of the past three days I've only eaten at three places. Kady's, Subway, and the expensive (but great pizza) pizza place in the same building as the Subway. So I decided to see what else there was in the Riviera in terms of food. There was an Asian rest, which I passed up, an Italian Place, which I saw was WAY too expensive, a snack bar which everyone was saying not to eat at, and finally the sportsbook. I figured they'd probably have the best selection of food that I like, seeing as how it's the mecca for guys. So I walk in there, and starting me right in the face on the menu is a 16 inch NY style pizza for $11. The best deal in Vegas, I swear, I bought it without even looking at the ones in the heater where slices were taken out of, and then I look at the actual pies and my eyes become a glow. They actually look like authentic NY pizza! Cheese going all the way to the edge of the crust (on the outside), thin but not crisp, and with enough cheese to choke yourself on. I am so happy! It sounds like I'm overplaying it, but ten minutes later when I was having it, the looks were deceiving, it was even better than it looked, which was amazing.

"But Reeses, you just skipped something, doesn't it take 15 minutes to MAKE the pizza?" Indeed it does. "So what did you do in the meantime?" Well, let me tell you my little friend, I went and gambled for the first time in Vegas. Wasn't really anything special, I just went to the video poker machine that was inside the sportsbook. Nothing special about it, I just slipped five bucks in, and went for the deck with Jokers and Jacks or Better. I place max bet, and the very first hand I get. Crap, absolute crap. The only thing in there worth keeping was a king, so I hold the king and hit deal. Two more kings and a Joker pop up for four of a kind. That's worth $25 on max bet! I immediately go "Cash Out! Thank you Riviera for the 2 free pizza's!" and proceed to not gamble again the entire convention.

So, after that whole thing happens, it's time for the advanced competition to take place. I really do have a hard time remembering what happened because I was just in a constant state of jaw-on-the-floor amazement over what was being done. I just remember it was some of the most incredible stuff I'd ever seen in my life. Dietz doing 8 ball tricks in his regular routine, Vova doing 7 clubs 360's in his regular routine, and Arash doing connected 540's like they were nothing! Oh, and I can't forget about Sergei doing exactly the same routine as in 2004 and still blowing mine and everyone elses' mind with it. Besides that though, the side competitions were just as amazing, especially seeing Vova get over 100 catches in 7 club isolated on the first try and just being entirely nonchalant about it. Good God, it almost made me want to stop juggling right then and there, but hey, I have to keep going for next year right? As for what else everyone did, I'm not saying. Why? A combo of "I can't remember" and "I don't want to spoil it for you when you watch the DVD".

Afterwards, as is the new tradition at the WJF, I began standing clubs on their ends and tried making towers with clubs. I made a devil stick tower for the first time using 3 sticks and 2 rings, of course it was really unstable and I barely managed to get a picture before it came down. I realized the new Play One Piece clubs are absolutely GORGEOUS for stacking because the knobs and the heads are flat as anything, so I was able to get a 4 layer tower up before running out of the plays and having to use my fish (which are slightly warped) to try and get the 5th layer. of course out of the 4 tries I made, I couldn't get more than 2 clubs up on the 5th layer before it came down, but oh well, at least I got a good 4 layer tower standing long enough to get pictures. Here's to getting 5 layers again at WJF6!

Day Five:
So, day five, Sunday, the day I decided had the stuff that I would miss the least in order to go see Penn and Teller at the Rio. But before any of that happens, I'm in the gym hanging out instead of jumping around Las Vegas like I should be. Of course, it turned out to be one of the best unintended consequences of a decision the entire convention. Why? Daniel Eaker.

So, I already explained how two days ago he had tried and failed to do 2 rounds of DB97531 back to a cascade for a qualify, well, this morning he decided to try again. And once again, I was the person holding the camera, well, actually laying on the ground next to the camera mounted on a mini-tripod, but you get the point. The point is, camera on and zoomed out properly, he does it! He actually does it. I was absolutely amazed. Daniel Eaker became the first person ever to do 2 rounds of DB97531 to a qualify, and I am the only person that got it on tape. So happy was I, of course he was happier because he was the one to DO it, and his reaction was the best I'd ever seen. Drops to the floor in happiness, then rolls on his body across the floor, it looks awesome. He's uploaded the video to youtube, so here it is right here:

Besides that though, right after I caught that on film, I went over to the desk because I heard the scores were posted for the earlier competitions, and I looked eagerly because I thought I might have done well enough to beat at least Sondre, but nope. I placed 4th in ring intermediates, by 1 point. I got a .6 and Sondre got a 1.6, hey, didn't bother me, because I did what I wanted to do and I made it into the competition and on to the DVD, so it really didn't bum me out too much. Of course I then began thinking about why that happened, I had some connections in my routine, and I didn't drop more than 6 times throughout the entire routine. Then it started to come to me why I didn't do so well. I probably could have beaten Sondre if it weren't for two things.

First, I had a move in my routine that was one of the high risk ones I was going to do last, and I tried it and it didn't work. My 4 ring cross-armed columns, which everyone told me after was really pretty. I was originally planning a month ago to do just 4 or 6 catches back into the basic pattern, but when the whole "revised moves" thing came in, I saw I had to do 8 catches back into a fountain. So I tried 3 times during my routine and didn't get it once, which cost me at least a full point. So that alone if I didn't go for it MIGHT have won me the competition. But then I realized that another move I had done may or may not have counted for anything. My 4 ring sync flat-fronts. When I do them, I always do them crossing, but one of the interesting things that happened when I was doing my routine was that as I was doing that move, about 4 or 6 catches in, the rings stopped crossing and went into a regular fountain. I decided at the time to go with it and made 3 more sets of catches in a non-crossing fountain back into the basic pattern. Sounds great right? Well, For that move to count for anything I had to get at least 8 catches back into the basic pattern, now here's the thing, when I saw the rings stop crossing, my brain lost count of how many catches I'd gotten, so I'm pretty sure that I didn't do enough of either move (crossing or not crossing) to count for any points. I'm not 100% sure about that, so I'll have to wait for the DVD to see if I screwed it up or not, but if I did screw it up, that's definitely what cost me third place. So overall, I wasn't surprised after thinking about it, but I wasn't unhappy either, because I was still psyched just to get a lot of the hard moves I wanted to get in my routine.

Ok, so now that I'd done all that, it was time for me to go to the Rio and see Penn and Teller! Something I'd been wanting to do ever since I realized I missed seeing the show at WJF3. So now this next story might sound a bit mundane and like I'm overstating it, but that's just because you don't know EXACTLY how much I admire Penn Jillette. I already said that he's my choice for the next president of the US in 2012, but let me explain why. He is the person that introduced me to what I REALLY am. A Libertarian. He was the first person I'd ever seen (either in real life, or on TV and radio) that REALLY stood up for exactly the same things that I believe in, and it's too complicated for me to explain, but you get what I mean, I think. I had always thought I was the only person who thought the way I did that was brave enough to think about voicing the way I think and trying to convince people, until I found out what "Penn and Teller's Bullshit" really was. So with that in mind, Penn means almost as much to me as my family does (granted, in a different way, but the same level). It's complicated, just let me say Penn is my idol.

So with that out of the way, I went off to catch the tram, to the shuttle to the Rio, and I stumble in the street and scrape my knees pretty good, but I'm in a good mood, so I just walk it off on my way to the tram. I haven't tripped in a while, and strangely enough, it's something that should be experienced once in a while to remind yourself of what it's like and everything that it means (kind of like how I believe it's important to accidentally cut yourself or burn yourself every now and then, again, it's complicated). So let's stop with these random half-deep-thoughts and move on to the Rio. Damn, I can't seem to tell a story today.

The Rio. Well, first off, that place is really confusing in how it's laid out, and to make matters worse, the funky digital touchscreen map doesn't work worth crap, so I just ask my way around until I find the box office and pick up my pre-paid ticket. So then I ask my way around again until I reach the lobby of the Penn and Teller Theater. Guess who I see there, none other than famous juggling kilt-man Crizzly! I greet him again and exchange a joke or two about how this was the only time that we could actually go see the show thanks to the WJF schedule, and about how he thought he saw a few others from the WJF at this show, but I was really the only one. So I buy a few things at the store, and we go into the lobby and find our seats. The pre-show is cool, just kinda sittin watching Penn and Mike Jonez playing Jazz on stage far-right, but the real show absolutely blew that out of the water, it was AWESOME.

I was really just expecting to see a bunch of routines I'd already seen done in person, like the card-trick drowning tank, broken bottle juggling, Blast-Off, needles, etc. But I was shocked at how much they did that I'd never seen before from them. Of course they did a few things I knew about, such as the Bullet Catch as a closer and the Burning Flag routine, but there were only about 3. One act that REALLY got my attention was Memorization by Penn. The act is an old vaudeville style act, where Penn rigs a nail-gun so that it will fire in a set sequence of nail-air-nail-nail-air, and he goes through the act explaining it and it's history as he goes through the sequence of shooting nails into a board, then putting the gun to his hand and shooting air. It was awesome. There was Teller's new ball and hoop act which was absolutely INSANE to watch, and even more insane to try and figure out.

So the show ends and at the end of every show, Penn and Teller always go out and do photo-ops with the audience members. I knew this beforehand, and when I saw Crizzly in the lobby and talked to him, we decided to be smart and wait until everyone else had finished talking to Penn so that we might be able to have a bit of a longer conversation with him, little did we know how well that plan would work. The crowd around Penn diminishes to just 1 person, and after hanging out with Teller for a few minutes, me and Crizzly walk up to Penn and say "Hey Penn, we're coming over from the World Juggling Federation", he says in a very direct tone "GREAT! You wanna come backstage with me and hang out?"

We looked at each other, paused, and then eagerly nodded. So he leads us back into the Theater lobby and then through the door labeled "Emergency Exit" and through the backstage area to the Monkey Room. He tells us to go ahead and make ourselves comfortable in there and says that he'll be right back after he warms up his dinner, telling Mike Jones that "We've got a couple of jugglers here today". So we go right into the Monkey Room and right there sitting across the couch from us is Mike Jones and someone else that I didn't know offering us sodas from the mini-fridge. Which is fairly awesome by itself. Now, let me take a moment to describe the Monkey Room, which is I think one of the most awesome rooms besides any major room from any of the later Star Trek series'. Basically, the room is filled with memorabilia posters about the history of Penn and Teller and even the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, and around ALL of that, the room walls are covered with fake foliage and basically jungle stuff. Then all the lamps, fixtures, and furniture, had some sort of monkey on them, and the metal monkeys like the ones on the tops of the lamps had cigarettes in the mouth, because Penn always says "There's nothing funnier than a smokin monkey!", quoting the Marx brothers.

So we are just sitting there, and in walks Penn with his tray of chicken, and just starts asking us all these questions about who's doing what and how's Vova doing, and has Thomas gotten better at English, ad all these other things. So me and Crizzly just start rambling off about what's been happening at the convention over the past few days, and about how Daniel Eaker was the first person to ever do (on video) 2 rounds of DB97531, which Penn was just amazed at, as was every other juggler whom anyone told. Of course, this starts him on a little bit of a trip down memory lane about how in his day, when he was at a convention he saw someone break the world record by juggling 6 clubs; and how even the person that did it, when asked what he though the most that would ever be done was, he very seriously replied "six". And as he's going down this trip and making this monologue, I'm just sitting there and I have this sudden realization, that I am sitting here with Penn Jillette, literally right next to me, eating chicken and talking about juggling, backstage in a room that probably has only been seen by the staff and by other slightly famous people. It just absolutely blows my mind.

So after we talk about nothing but juggling and what it means to Penn and what it is now, he finishes his chicken and says that he's got to get home now. So he walks us out backstage, shakes our hands, and tosses us DVD's and novels and other stuff. And as we say goodbye and walk back out into the lobby, I just can't help realizing how calm and actually there I was. This has been a HUGE problem for me in the past, which was anytime I was around anyone who is famous in any way, I would always choke up and not be able to even continue a conversation, much less start one and contribute something insightful to one. But there I was talking juggling with Penn better than I ever did in any episode of JoJ, and just enjoying myself, like it would have been with any other person that wasn't famous. And that blew my mind just as much as the fact that I was backstage hanging out with Penn, was because I really didn't think I had it in me.

Of course, once we got out of the lobby and it was just me, Crizzly, and his fiance walking through the Rio, I couldn't help but just stare into his face and go "I, am the luckiest son of a bitch on the planet. If it weren't for you being here, I would have probably never got backstage being just one person. Talk about right god-damned place, right god-damned time!" and he's looking me right in the eyes, and he understands PERFECTLY, because I think he feels the same way, that if I weren't there, he probably would have never gotten backstage either, and he just says "Yeah. I know..." and then we both laugh about it. Meanwhile, you couldn't wipe the smile off my face, even if you used a sledge-hammer.

He realizes that he's forgotten his fiance's scarf back in the monkey room, so he says he'll meet me back in the Convention floor. So I'm off to ponder and let sink in, all that has just happened on the tram ride back to the Riviera. And at that moment, on the tram thinking about what had happened, I realized that I never got a picture with Penn. But I could care less, I got him to sign the program, and because I have a story I'll be telling for years...

Day Six:
Well, after last night, I decided that since we came back late (around midnight) that I would stay up all night to try and reset my sleep schedule, because for the past five days at the convention, I'd been going to sleep at 5 AM and waking up at 2 PM, and if I did that again tonight, it meant I would miss being part of the combat tournaments. I figured I wouldn't be able to fall asleep anytime before 5 AM anyways because I wasn't tired at all, to counter your argument of "Well why didn't you go to sleep early". So the nigh goes through and here I am in the open juggling space on the couch, catching up on all the stuff online that I can in the moments when the router decided to work. So it's now 7 AM Las Vegas time and my plan is going well, except for the fact that now I'm laying down on the couch with my eyelids halfway closed, and when that happens, you know what happens next. I fell asleep, but not only did that mean that I broke that rule (don't fall asleep in the convention space), but I also took my shoes off in the dazed moments before I fell asleep (footwear must be worn at all times when in convention space), AND it also means that I didn't get to shower (must not smell offensive during the convention). Great, so I just accidentally broke 3 rules of the convention at once, and I only woke up once everyone had already gotten into the convention space and the combat tournaments were about to begin. At least nobody sharpie'd up my face.

So after that, me and Steve, doing so well with the ring passing the other day, decided that since we're pretty much the only 2 people at the convention that were ANY good with Cigar Boxes, we were going to try and come up with a few new box passing patterns. After about 15 minutes of screwing around, we came up with a REALLY good one, where there are 4 boxes, and we'd take turns by moving the entire set down 1 block, and person A would catch the last 3 boxes on the tail end in the regular set position, and the 1st box that was leading would drop off and be caught by person B. Then person B would pass that box to his other hand while person A does a solo trick with the 3 box set, and it would go back again where person A would throw the 3 box set and catch one of them on the end, and then person B would use the 2 in the air and catch them with his box and catch all three in the set position. Repeat.

A strange pattern, especially to shoot on video, but it was really original and had a REALLY good beat to it. So we figured we'd get it on camera, and we figure the best and easiest way to do it would be the camera on the floor pointing up at the pattern. So we did exactly that, and then Steve makes a really bad catch and somehow manages to smack down on the hand I was using to catch my set of boxes, and that knocks the box downwards out of my hand and straight, onto, the, camera.

Yeah. The lens breaks on possibly the best camera I'd ever used (consumer level anyways), and I figure that since the warranty is out on it anyways, I know Kodak's reputation for REALLY bad service and repair, and I know that the repair cost is more expensive than just buying the same model camera new: I decide to take it apart right there and try to reset the gears. Because after turning the camera on and off a couple times, I can tell the problem is in the gears, so I figure all I have to do is go in and physically force the gears back into the right position. So after finding someone with a jewelers screwdriver, I take the camera apart and I'm looking into how it all goes back together. I'd taken the batteries out to ensure I don't get a shock, and then all the sudden I see what I think is the set of gears I need, and so as I swap my hands around on the open and exposed camera to get good leverage, I accidentally touch the camera's capacitor.

Now, for those who don't know electronics, the capacitor is designed to store a charge and release it very quickly. SO as soon as I touch the capacitor, I get a shock, that though I KNOW it was only 5 volts and about 1 milli-amp (nowhere near enough to even affect your muscles, much less kill you), but that feels like a penny in an outlet. I scream "ARGHHHHHH!!" in the middle of the convention floor where my table is, and all the sudden I can feel the eyes of every juggler in the room focusing on my table. I don't even need to look around to know that everyone looking at me, so I say out loud "I'm fine!", pick up the camera, and put the cover back on and leave it in a plastic bags.

So Steve felt bad about it, and he didn't offer to help PAY for my new camera, but he offered to drive me around Vegas looking for a good deal on a camera. We end up at Best Buy an hour later and I've narrowed it down to getting either the Sony (yeah, I was actually considering SONY! Ugh!) camcorder or a Panasonic SDR-S7 camcorder. I really liked the Panasonic for $199, so that's what I bought right there and used the rest of the week. I'll describe the camera next week, but yeah. What I really found interesting about being driven around Vegas by The New Steve was that I was getting to talk to him one on one about his style of making videos and trade insights about SPEAKING in videos especially. Because he recently got asked by a certain juggling organization to make promotional videos, and he was thinking about making it an entire talking video, but he's not 100% behind all of the members of the organization (ok, I'm paraphrasing and summarizing, but just go with me here), so he was at a little bit of a quandary, and I'm sitting here going back and forth talking about my belief that the only way to convince or promote something is to believe in what you're talking about. "I can't convince someone that religion is good because I don't believe in religion" is the basic summary of my argument. I find a good one on one talk, especially with a guy who thinks like I do as Steve does, very fun and stimulating. So I'm almost glad he broke my camera, as great as that quote would sound out of context.

So, after that, it was almost 9:00, and it's time for one of the things that I REALLY wanted to go to at the WJF. I missed it at WJF3 because I didn't see the point in it (stupid-young-juggler I was...), and that wasn't at WJF4, and that was the Ethics of Juggling workshop. For the past year and a half or two, I have had a slight fascination with Ethics, because it is a very simple idea, and a very easy thing to grasp, but because it applies to EVERYTHING and is ALWAYS DIFFERENT with every case you apply it to, it really makes your brain melt. It makes your brain melt worse than a 6 person game of Risk. I like that, and trying to sit in a room and figure out HOW it could POSSIBLY be ethical to use the Piano Juggling routine by putting your own spin on it, it's just so much fun and so tough, and I love it. The thing is I can't think about ethics by myself because I really don't have the ability to think that anything I think is wrong, so I have to have another person arguing with me to get anywhere. So that was awesome, and then, with my brain melted for that, it was time for the WJF Poker Tournament!

Now I don't want to spend more than a short paragraph about this because this is a HUGE post already and I've still got another day to go, but it was awesome! I didn't win at all, in fact I bought back in halfway through, but I did win a couple good pots and one race which went REALLY well where I hit a flush on the river against a pair. But yeah, I got a pair of aces at one point and won a huge pot, I saw someone hit a 4 of a kind to win a pot on the river, it was awesome. I'll leave it at that and go on to the last day of the convention.

Day Seven:
So the last day wasn't really much in terms of what happened early in the day, so I spent most of it asleep. But then came the Battle for The Presidency show, and it was without a doubt, the best show I'd ever seen. Basically it was a series of random competitions between Jason and Thomas that had nothing to do with juggling, such as who can hold the most PX3's in one hand, an arm wrestling contest, and my personal favorite, who can move 5 Juniors competitors from one side of the stage to the other the fastest. Why was it my favorite? I'll explain later, but all of those competitions were spaced in between a bunch of the competitors doing their regular stage shows, like Lauge doing all his tough tricks that he performs, Joelle doing her routine, and other awesome jugglers. So that was amazing by itself, but with all these awesomely hilarious competitions just made it the BEST show ever. Then came time for the MAIN competition, which was a 7 minute routine between Jason and Thomas. Jason went with his routine first, which despite what I thought would be nothing because Jason hasn't shown himself juggling since WJF4, he has made some vast improvements in his juggling. 7 ball overheads? 8 ring qualify? Yeah, all amazing.

Now before I get to Thomas' routine, let me tell you why the Juniors moving competition was so great. First off, it's the FUNNIEST concept for a pointless competition I've ever heard of in my life, and I was already on the floor watching Thomas go first and picking up these kids and running back and forth across the stage. But then Jason's turn was coming up, so they needed to switch the juniors out for a new set, and as soon as Scotty (the emcee) said that the new juniors should come up on stage, Thomas ran up and stood on the side of the stage where they were supposed to line up, like lightning. I didn't even see him move, he was on the stage, then he was in position, and as soon as I saw another person in the audience stand up it clicked in my head "OHHHHH! So this is the joke!" And immediately after that, the light bulb came on and I realized I was the HEAVIEST PERSON AT THE CONVENTION at 270 lbs. I've never run so fast in my life, and I've never gotten a bigger laugh and cheer combo either. The competition was the funniest thing ever, and let's leave the mystery of what happened up to you. So then let's go on to Thomas' routine, which was his "Juggling Race 2000" game stage act, which is an awesome act by itself, and then he asks me to be the second character in the routine. EPIC! Let me just say, you need to buy the DVD when Jason puts it out. There is no excuse not to...

So after all that was over, a few jugglers weren't going to be at the banquet, so I said goodbye to them, and then came the banquet. But before I talk about that, let me make a note about the one thing I didn't like about the Riviera, and it's not about how big it is. The key cards. The damned hotel-room-key-cards! I swear, I never had a single problem with them, but Joe's and Ville's cards somehow kept getting demagnetized. At least once every two days, one of their cards would stop working. Now, this wouldn't be a problem at all, except that I, being the person the room is under, am the ONLY person that can get the front desk to give me a new card. That doesn't piss me off TOO much, but what sucked was about how when you need any number of new cards, from 6 down to just one, they have to invalidate ALL the previous cards, and as such, I would need to find Joe and Ville in order to give both of them the new cards or else they can't get into the room at night. Damnit...

So, the banquet. Nothing really special happened, I ended up sitting at the same table with Laura Ernst, Thomas Dietz, Marcus Furtner, and basically everyone else at the convention who were multi-lingual. So basically, I'm sitting there not understanding a word of what anyone else is saying because they're all talking about how they all know German, Russian, Slavic, Yodeling, etc. Duh! That's fine. The chicken and ESPECIALLY Marcus' Penne Pasta was awesome. We move on to the winners for all the popular vote competitions (nicest smile, most improved, most inspiring), and as I jokingly asked people to do in my WJF Profile video, people voted for me in the Best Body competition, enough for me to Tie with Vova! I am now co-WJF-Best-Body champion! EPIC! So then we get to Jason's great 45 minute long banquet video, and like the extreme competitions DVD from WJF4, I managed to be the humorous fodder once again. Of course this time right in the middle of the video after he shows me doing a 5 ring full-reverse, he plays over and over again the shot of me wiping sweat from my forehead using my sleeve. Well, thank god I have no shame. Granted, it was.... ...funny as hell.

And that was it for the convention. Congratulations for making it all the way through the post! You've earned 300+ reading points! GO CELEBRATE!!! As for what will be in NEXT weeks post, I'm going to talk about my new camera's, what my juggling abilities are right now, the finale of Heroes Season 3, and perhaps another story. And I'll also fill you in on a few ideas I've had for some upcoming youtube videos and maybe new JoJ episodes, seeing as how Juggling Podcast (Luke Burrage) hasn't been updated in 2 months....

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

Heaven >/=/< $1000?

2008-12-16T03:54:00.004-05:00

Listen Up!
The title means that my total cost for the World Juggling Federation convention in Vegas (heaven), should run me a total of just under $1000. It will be awesome though, and somehow still cost less than a semester of college. More on that later.
::
I've been in a really liberal activist mood lately. I've been supporting things like legalizing marijuana and repealing prop8 for a LONG time, but now I've just got this nagging urge to actually act on those notions, so I'm thinking of what I can do now. Maybe expect my youtube channel to get just a little bit political this January.
::
College is over. Parents are kind of douchebags, but they're really not. The deal is that if I get C's or higher on ALL my final grades, they'll pay for the semester, otherwise I pay for it. I got a D in, guess which class. Solid Modeling, where I said for the ENTIRE SEMESTER, the professor is an IDIOT. And look how it all ended. I now have to pay for the semester.
::
Jugglers On Juggling! I just released another episode! FINALLY! Granted it's getting a pretty luke-warm reception with only 200 views and absolutely NO useful comments , and no comments PERIOD on Reec.juggling, but hell, I've come to expect this... As sad as that is...
::

Daily Life:
So, I've been talking a lot about college already, so let me tell you straight up what the bill for next semester will be. Remember, this is before books, supplies, and travel. $1,879.00 !!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!

Yes, for community college I need to pay almost 2000 dollars a semester, and I don't have the money for it, simply put. It would only be 800 dollars, which is reasonable, considering the alternative, but there is this BOGUS as hell fee of $1000 to simply be AT Middlesex County College. Uh, I really am thinking about just grabbing my CAD certificate and getting the hell out of there. From what I've learned about what college is anyways, and what a degree is, college is a place that only 30% of people graduate from, and which only 10% of people actually make it past a 2 year degree. PLUS! I've learned that a degree doesn't mean anything more than a piece of paper to an employer that says "I have the ability to suck it up through the worst situation imaginable for at least two years".

To quote Penn and Teller, BULLSHIT! At least I'm only one class away from my CAD certificate and I'm in a major that I REALLY love now.

Juggle This:
So, the big question of the day is, am I ready for the WJF? The big answer, MAYBE. I know for a fact that the best I can do in my competition is third, and I think I'm probably going to place 4th, but who knows, maybe Sondre will screw up big time and I'll have the best run of my life! Because here's my dilema. All of my money-maker moves, I CAN'T PRACTICE. I think I've complained about this before, but the highest ceiling I can go that without having to drive anywhere and potentially get pestered, is the 10 foot roof of my garage, which is great for practicing all my moves with 4 rings and one or two five ring moves, but other than that it's useless. I have absolutely no idea what will happen, so I'll fill you in next week when I get back!

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

Ban Left-Handed Marriage!!

2008-12-13T03:50:00.001-05:00

We simply cannot allow the practitioners of this perverse and unnatural lifestyle choice to get away with destroying marriage!!Don't give in to the Southpaw agenda. This country was founded by right-handed people. Stand up for traditional morality! Stand up for right-handedness!

read more | digg story

* TILT! *

2008-12-09T15:07:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
Ugh. I was having a perfectly OK week, and then SLAM! I get all this crap happening to me at once. More on that though later, for right now, let me just update you on everything you don't care about.
::
College is FINALLY over for the semester, and this means two things. One is that I don't have to deal with the work anymore until January comes around, even though I finally found a subject where I don't mind the work at all. And it means that I lose my primary high ceiling space for the remaining week before WJF5. At least I think I've passed all my finals and can STOP STUDYING FOR THEM.
::
Since now that finals are over, I can finally record another episode of Jugglers On Juggling. YAY! And I actually have an interesting topic this week. Someone asked me on Youtube how to make a ring holster for high numbers like 7 and above. That got me thinking "Hey, that's a really good question! And it'd make for a really good episode!" So I went down to the basement workshop and recorded this week's episode that I'll release sometime this week.
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My WJF competition plans have suddenly been turned on their head! I won't say right now, but that's this week's juggle this segment.
::
Tech.MCC, well, last week was movie night and it was ok. We didn't get a huge turnout, but I'm not surprised at all. We watched Transformers, and once again, FinalTrigger didn't show up, so we couldn't build the projector. I'm really hoping he shows up this week, otherwise this last meeting is just going to be a lan party with pizza. The videography meeting was really the best meeting of the semester after all.
::
And before I go, Zero Sixteen did quite well. It's already at about 600 views, and counting, and if you haven't seen it, I really suggest you watch it. It's awesome.
::

Daily Life:
So I've just gotten commissioned by a guy at MCC to redo his website, http://afripr.org . A pretty simple job, if only I really had the time to get it done anytime soon. What he wants is really quite perplexing, he wants me to keep the website as close to what it is as possible, meanwhile he wants to completely reowkr the arrangement. Strange. Of course, I've checked the coding, and guess what. It's based in PHP, the one language I don't know...

That's ok, I'm going to be retooling the whole thing anyways, and he says he'll be taking cae of all the content, I just need to redesign the navigation, add a side bar or two, and turn it into a frame based website. Nothing really that complicated, except for again, it being php, and I really don't want to build it from scratch in html. I guess I may have to though. But I've already setup and finished one thing he wanted, which was to make a gallery system that's easy to update. That's done. http://afripro.org/gallery and yeah. Oh, how much am I getting? I asked for $40, and he gave me a hundred. Awesome!

But while I was doing some of this stuff, I got back into the mood for doing HTML, and another one of my big projects that is doing quite well, Mobius-X, I remembered had a HUGE amoutn of content that went down with the website expiring. I also remembered that I had most of it backed up on my hard drive and that it really wouldn't be that hard to do a few quick things. So I copied the gallery system I was using for Afripro, and I re-uploaded all of the old Radio Blue episodes (Mobius-X's official podcast) to MY website and gave the links to the forums. Of course as soon as I did that, I got a message from Logokas asking me to do something for X-mas. I went "NO". Until he listened to my alternative suggestion of just changing the background of the banner and adding the old javascript snow effect that I'd saved from the old site.

So I did that, and then suddenly, here comes Marluxius. And he wants to add sprites to the banner, so he does, without the slightest idea about web-design, and for the next day and a half, and even now, I'm here having to try and teach him the basic principles of what makes a good design and he's just bluntly refusing to listen. Well, that's Marl for you. But I've rambled on long enough, for more info and the complete story, check here.

Juggle This:
Now I think I see why jugglers may hate Jason Garfield and the WJF. You know in the last video update, which was well over a month ago, that it was time for us all that are competing to start drilling our final routines into our brains and muscles so that we can get it every time? Yeah, I took note of that, and I'd already submitted the Excel file with my moves listed on it a week before that. So I've basically been drilling my moves down for the past month or so.

The comes today, I get an email from Jason, "here's the revised moves list for your routine. Please go through it and cut out anything that you don't want to do and edit it as you see fit." What he'd done, was basically informed me in the document, that almost ALL of my 4 ring moves had to be double qualified to even count for a single point (as where at least 5 of my moves were one round moves back to the basic pattern), or that my moves didn't score anything at all. The biggest case of this was when he said in the file that my big kicker of a trick, the one that I was betting on to give me an edge over my competition, my 4 ring mills mess, wasn't worth anything. Uh, What The FUCK Jason? I've been working on that more than any other move, especially because it's the second hardest move in my routine, and just like that you say it's worth NOTHING?!

That pisses me off enough that I basically have to cut at least 6 moves from my routine because I simply can't do enough catches to get any points with them, and at least 8 of my other moves I will now be struggling with in competition. But then you have to realize, that I only got this revised list, YESTERDAY. What does that mean? The means that I've been drilling these moves for the past MONTH not knowing that they're worthless. Jason, do you really think that it's fair to say a month before you even look over our lists to start drilling our routines, and then a week before the competition say that we have to rework them entirely?! I think not.

This is EXACTLY the reason why I've been pushing Jason to make a defined, public list on the website, probably in an excel spreadsheet, of EVERY MOVE THAT WILL SCORE POINTS IN THE WJF. YES it would be a lot of work to compile, but it would make the entire event TEN TIMES FAIRER TO EVERYONE AND AVOID PISSING COMPETITORS OFF LIKE WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO ME! I really can't tell you how much this pisses me off, because there's really no way to emphasize it enough through text. Just know that I made a suggestion to Jason the second I saw the inner workings of how moves were scored when I ran the beginners competition, and that he's ignored it until he's seen the downside of not having it firsthand. At least NEXT year will be better.

Oh, and to top all that off, I FINALLY know who I'm competing against, again, only a week before the competition. And what I was expecting to be 2 or 3 people that I might actually stand a chance of winning against, turns into 5 total competitors, 2 of which I know for a FACT I have no chance of beating, and the other two who have either no video of themselves online or no footage of them juggling rings since 2007. SO the absolute BEST I can do is third! I WOULDN'T HAVE ENTERED THIS CONTEST AND BOUGHT $100+ WORTH OF UNIFORM AND FEES IF I KNEW THE BEST I COULD POSSIBLY DO IS THIRD! ARGHHHHH!!!!!! *dies

Oh, and I also just found out that the ONE show I want to see, the Penn and Teller show, DOESN'T HAVE A SHOW TIME THAT DOESN'T INTERFERE WITH THE WJF SCHEDULE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!

*dies again

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

The Doctor Is Golfing

2008-12-02T16:25:00.000-05:00

Listen Up!
Ok, let me get the first thing out of the way here because it is most pressing. Jugglers On Juggling. There hasn't been a new episode for 4 weeks now, and I realize that. That's why I feel bad about it right now. But let me explain to you why I haven't had the time...
::
FINALS. It's about damned time the end of the semester showed up, well, actually this semester went by incredibly fast, and that's caused a problem or two. Because now I have all these final projects that are due this week, PLUS finals to study for, and I've got to prepare for other things at the same time. So if I was busy BEFORE, I can only imagine what word would suit what I am right now.
::
My job hunt. So I've sent out applications to Blockbuster and to Fed-Ex now, and I have put on there that I'm not going to be available until 2009. So I'm not expecting anything to come from them soon, but everything else I tried, looking back, I guess fell through because I was aiming way too high. I was looking for a bunch of jobs with AutoCAD and Art related stuff (you know, RELEVANT things), and I don't have the paper qualifications yet. I can do either job, but they want the documents saying I can. I hate the system...
::
Other news is pretty dry because there was no meeting for Tech.MCC last week because of Thanksgiving, and everything I've been doing recently has had to do with either college or, well, college. I've absolutely been beaten over the head with college for the past week, so I'll be done venting at the end of this post. Thank god there's only 1 more week left...

Daily Life:
Ok, I DEFINITELY don't have a story to come close to the epic failure of last week's story, so I'm not going to even try. What happened in Photo101 this week then? Well, RELIEF. Complete, unabridged RELIEF. First I was worried all for the past week that my negatives from last week's hell-trip to New Brunswick weren't going to come out because I was using the college film camera. To refresh your memory, the college camera has NO LIGHT METER, and has an absolutely horrifying habit of not advancing the film. So I was sitting there opening the canisters and developing the film for 30 minutes just sweating like all hell because I knew there were only 2 outcomes. 1: The film advanced and the pictures will come out. Or 2: The film did NOT advance and I'll have two developed blank rolls of film.

It advanced. I was saved from going back through hell again. Of course a lot of my shots (not the majority) looked like SHIT because I didn't have my light meter'd camera and had to use the hand light meter, which NOONE in the class knows how to use, and having to use the B setting on my shutter dial... Basically, for all of last week's trip I was so far out of my comfort zone I was amazed I got the shots I did. If you're curious, here's the contact sheet that I got out of it right there on the right side. (Yes, I know they're all flipped different ways, it was how I shot them, just flip them around with your normal image editor like mspaint or something.)

But besides photo1 class, I had a hell of a time with the class which was today. Art and Industry in commerce. The final project, which I'd gotten done weeks ago, was due today, and I'd already handed it in to him online, but he wanted a hard copy. So SI set out about 10 minutes before I left to print out a copy on the laptop with printer downstairs. Yeah, the laptop suffering from data bloat that doesn't like drivers and new devises of any sort, including my new USB drive. SO after 15 minutes of fussing and not getting the damned thing to run (I swear, my ancient IBM Thinkpad Laptop that I use myself is three times better than this piece of crap) I leave for college.

Of course, when I get there I pass by the library on my way to the classroom, so I was going to print it out there. Guess what, the first computer I try, won't recognize the USB. The second says the file is corrupted. The third says the file is corrupted. The 4th says the file is corrupted, and now I'm worried. I pull out my laptop to check and see if the file really is corrupted, because I wrote the file on my laptop, and guess what... YUP! "This file has been corrupted, please purchase and use our data recovery tool to recover this file." "Ugh...", and I stroll off to class with a hung head because now I'm late, don't have a hard copy, and know that that was the only copy of the file I have. Luckily the professors copy I emailed to him is fine according to him, so he'll be emailing it back to me to print out and hand in next week (which I find odd, but I'm not dwelling on it).

OH! And lest I forget, my Solid Modeling professor, everyone say it with me, IS AN IDIOT. I really don't need to, nor do I WANT to describe the shit he's making us have to do within 1/3rd of the time it will take us to do...

Juggle This:
So I'll talk about JoJ later. Right now, I've released Zero Sixteen, to an AWESOME response in one way, and a horrible response in another. I've gotten over 400 views on it so far within it's first week, actually it's first 5 days to be specific, which is better than any of my previous videos for the series. However, none of the topics about it got more than a few general comments, and the comments on youtube haven't really been much more than "I like it". HOWEVER! Sondre, my new best friend lol, sent me a private 10 minute video telling me EXACTLY how and why he liked the video over the others. THAT made my day when he sent it to me, bottom line. I'm not saying that's what I want everyone to do in response to my videos, no way. That'd be just way too much work for YOU guys. I am saying that it was a hell of a lot more than I was expecting and it absolutely just made me so happy that night. I have a quote that I like to use a lot and it fits perfectly to describe it, "You couldn't wipe the smile off my face if you used a sledgehammer!"

So after that happened. I went back and continued practicing rings for WJF5. Of course I'm not sure why, but now I'm obsessed with my higher numbers with rings. I guess since now I know I can get a 7 ring flash once every few tries or so, and all of the sudden 6 ring fountain is no longer really that much of a hassle
I feel like doing them more than my 5 and 4 ring stuff. Well, that and I KNOW that my 4 ring tricks that I'm doing for WJF5 (all except for my mills mess and cross-arm columns) are absolutely 100% ready to go. I just need to go through them two or three times to know that they're still good and ready to go. It's my 5 ring stuff that I'm struggling with. My 64 and 6x4 are absolutely no problem at all and I can do them first time every time, but my full reverse and 744's are slowly feeling like they're slipping away. It's frustrating as all hell because those two are my massive point getters for the routine, and I don't want to have to try them twice or three times, but it looks that way for right now. Well at least I know my 6 ring pattern won't be a huge deal anymore :P...
A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150

So, What Happened Today Richy?

2008-11-25T00:55:00.008-05:00

Listen Up!
What happened today? Too much, but I'll get to that later. For right now, let's get the usual updates out of the way.
::
Jugglers On Juggling. Yes, I know that episode 6 is already a full week late. Believe me, I've got a topic for it and I've planned out what I'm going to say. all I have to do is record it, edit it, and put it up. I should be able to do all of that tomorrow if nothing goes wrong, and then after that I'm back to being out of ideas for episode topics. Ah, the vicious cycle of forced inspiration. I think that episode 7 may just be a special all about rings episode. Because I think they are the absolute BEST and most neglected prop in juggling.
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College, puttering along as usual. Of course today's story has to do entirely with what happened today at college, but that I'll get into later. Let me just say it again. Solid Modeling Professor is an idiot, Photo 1 is fun as hell, Business 101 is easy as hell and the best professor ever, and Art in Industry and Commerce is a simple and fun class. I'm getting at least C's on basically every paper I get back. So things are lookin' up.
::
What else to talk about, OH! My next major juggling video! It's basically ready to go! I've already uploaded the trailer, which it has 100+ views just by itself, and I'm going to use that trailer in episode 6 of JoJ. Then the video will be uploaded on the 28th. YAY! Ok, so the first music video is 4 minutes long, then I've got a second bonus video in there because I had so much good footage I didn't want to waste, so add another 2 minutes. It's about 6 and a half minutes long.
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My preparations for WJF5. Everything looks fairly promising. I haven't gotten worse with my ring skills from where I was, and every practice session I do it takes me less and less time to warm up enough to start going through my routine. This may end up being not such a total disaster after all. Wouldn't it be a shock if I were to win ring intermediates? WhOAH that would be awesome!
::

Daily Life:
I started writing this post on Monday after coming home from the awesome trip of hell and fire, but then stopped because I just needed sleep after that day was over. So now I get to talk about it! YAY!

Ok, so here I am trying to get my sleep schedule back on track because for the past week, I've been going to sleep at times between 5:00 AM (and no earlier) and 6:45 AM. Needless to say, that's a bit bad, even for me. SO I decided the night before that I would try to reset my internal sleep clock by depriving myself of sleep one night then making up for it the next. Seems to have worked by the way, but the problem was, the day I decided to deprive myself of sleep for, was Monday. So I've got 2 classes, one of which is a field trip for Photo 1 class into New Brunswick, and I'm doing it on 4 hours of sleep.

So the day starts off fine, considering the 4 hour sleep part, and then I walk into my Solid Modeling class. He assigns 2 drawings to be handed in at the end of the period, from parts which we have to take the original measurements on. If you don't know engineering or how much work that is in CAD, it's like asking someone to fix the lawn mower in ten minutes. Granted, it CAN be done, but you'll be rushing like MAD to get it done. So that was fun, and in fact, most of the class had to stay in the class for a half hour after it ended to get the drawings done. So what was supposed to be my hour of juggling practice at 5:00 turned into my 20 minutes of practice at 5:40. Douche.

So after coming back from a horrible session because I couldn't warm up, it was time for Photo1. Now, last week in the middle of my last roll of film for an assignment that was due that day, my camera BROKE. It stopped advancing the film inside for absolutely no reason, and I still haven't managed to fix it yet. SO I'm having to rent out one of the piece of shit college cameras. Why are they a piece of shit? They don't have any light meter inside of them, they don't have the ability to recommend a shutter speed, and to top all that off, you have absolutely no idea whether the film inside is advancing because the slot for the film on the opposite side of the canister will NOT have a firm grip on the film at any time. I developed an entirely blank roll the last time I used that camera because the film slipped out of the grip and didn't advance.

So here I am with a piece of shit camera, running around New Brunswick trying to shoot a series of things the professor wants, in the cold rain and people staring at us. I'm used to the staring and I've got absolutely no problem with the rain, but the thing is to take this series of shots, we had to run around a total of 8 blocks around a square each side. So the total was about 24 blocks of New Brunswick that the groups had to run around from. Now the shots themselves were rather easy, but another one of the problems was we had a hand drawn map, that only I was able to read. Our group would walk around for about 10 minutes before I'd get fed up, hand the equipment I'm carrying (tripod, camera, light meter, backpack, and another camera) take out the map, and point us in the correct direction. This was even more annoying when the blocks turned hilly and we had to walk up and down.

Example, we had to go to a storefront and take a picture of the Boar's Head sign hanging in the window. No problem, did that, waited for everyone else who didn't know their camera from a block of cheese to do it, and followed them downhill to the next shot. The next shot was a picture of a building. They got to the bottom of the hill and then started wondering which building everyone needed to photo. I again, 5 minutes later, unload my shit on someone else, and I say "Ok, in 5 seconds I will tell you the correct building. 1..." and between 1 and 3 I take the map out of my pocket and open it, on 4 I find where we are on the map, which way we're oriented, and where the building was in relation, and on 5, point and go "That one". Guess where it was. Right at the top of the hill we just walked down on the other side of the street...

So I lug all this crap back to the top of the hill, and begin finding the right spot to get the entire building in frame. It was a little tough because of the amount of trees there were right in our way, but I found the spot, and took my shots (from the sidewalk). The rest of the people in my group though, except for the one guy who actually knows shit about his rights and photography, jump up the ledge and onto the grass of this private property and start to frame their shots. Of course now, the security guard shows up and starts being an absolute dickhole about us being on private property. You know, the classic stuff "I'm gonna call the cops!" "You'd better delete that film!" ""You have no right to take pictures of this building!". Which of course he was 100% correct about, for the idiot Indian chicks sitting there with tripods and telephoto lenses on the grass. But then he walks over to me and starts giving ME shit.

Now, my feet are already tired, I'm sleepy, cranky, I've already taken the shots I need of the building, and I've only got 1 thing left to photo, so I figure I'm not going to argue with this ignorant ass and make his day, I just grab my stuff and walk away to the next shot which was right down the adjacent street. Now here's the thing, the Indian idiots, are actually ARGUING with this guy. "Oh, we got permission from our professor to take pictures!" "You can't take our film!" "We have the rights!" UHhhhhhhhhhh........

I literally grab them and drag them away meanwhile they're calling the professor on their cell phones to try and fight with the guy. I have absolutely no idea how, but I managed to distract them long enough and convince them to move on to their next shot, meanwhile the guard is following us on the other side of the street. I know he can't do anything to me, so I just smile and wave. The next shot I find, is a tombstone that we have to take a picture of in a graveyard. Now, on the sheet of paper with the list of things to photo, he has on it "Tombstone 17417 + 1793" or whatever, so I and everyone else assumes that it's a specific tombstone with those numbers on it that we need to photo.

Well, after a half hour of walking around the graveyard in the rain with sore feet and a bad temper, I find nothing. So I just say to the other logical guy in the group "Fuck it, let's just photo a random tombstone and go get food." He agrees, we take a picture of a tombstone, and star walking back up the street, when the other group decides to join us, and they ask me and the other guy for help with their cameras. We can't be assholes, so we sit there for another half hour helping these idiots from failing. We FINALLY get done, and I figure "OK, I'm not letting ANYONE else lead me back to the vans, because I don't want to backtrack with the way my feet hurt, I'M NAVIGATING."

So we get back to the place where we're supposed to meet our professor, which was a Dunkin Donuts, and bam, he's not there. Now everyone's confused and wants to go look for him. Again, I say "Fuck That. There's a pizza place across the street, I'm going to get a slice, if he shows up, come and tell me." I walk across the street and look into the window, guess who I see... ... PROFESSOR WHITEY! (that is his actual name by the way, it's awesome)

I yell to the guys outside Dunkin Donuts that he's there, but still they insist on sitting there for another ten minutes while I sit inside eating my pizza. So as soon as that's over, we all pile back into the rented transport vans and head back to Middlesex for cookies and pie (I wish)...

Now, seeing as how we just spent 3 hours in the New Brunswick Rain and class was supposed to end in about 20 minutes, the professor gave us the due date on the shots we took as next week, and boom we were off. Of course, he offered everyone who was in Lot 1 (the furthest lot from the building we were in) to jump in the van and be driven to their cars (seeing as how we just walked 24 blocks through rain in New Brunswick). Of course, I take the opportunity right then. "The van doors are still unlocked" he says, and so I run right into the van with a few others expecting him to be out within the next 60 seconds.

Flash forward to ten minutes later and he's still not there, and I'm jonzing to watch Heroes. He finally comes out to drive us out, and I FINALLY am ready to go home. At this point, I don't want to talk to anyone, walk anywhere, do ANYTHING except get home and watch Heroes. So I put on my Daft punk CD, make my way down 287, and boom I'm home. "FINALLY" is the last thing that goes through my head as I lay back and hit the TV on button...

Juggle This:
So my 7 rings hasn't improved, well mostly because I've been too busy practicing my 4-6 in preparation for WJF5, but that's besides the point. I just figured I'd give an update on that because I still CAN'T BELIEVE I GOT 11 CATCHES OF 7 RINGS!

SO back to what matters, Jugglers On Juggling. I was planning on recording the new episode tonight and having it out tomorrow, but that's obviously not going to happen, so I'm still completely stuck on what's going to happen with it. All I know is this, I'm going to make it a screen-cap episode, where I record what's going on on screen as I'm editing together and explaining what makes a good trailer for a new video, DVD, or pay for project, and yeah, that will be the episode, because there's a LOT of material to cover in there and not enough people really know how to create hype for their stuff. So whenever I get the chance to, I'll be doing that. For now, Enjoy the trailer for my next video, Zero Sixteen...

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

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Off Into The Abyss Once More

Clouded Future

Crap Crap Crap

Ready At Checkout

To Boldly Go

Here Comes The Money!

OW, OW, OW, OW, OW.....

DAMNIT! My Schedule!

Double Juggle

Sickness Sucks

We've Still A Ways To Go

CIVIL FUCKING UNIONS

I love you but.....

SLOW FREEZE

The More Days Go By///

Time To Write Yes?

You Do NOT Mess With The Kohut

What Hasth Become Of Thouh?

I'm Like'n This Hibernation Thing

The WORLD JUGGLING WHAT?

Heaven >/=/< $1000?

Ban Left-Handed Marriage!!

*** TILT! ***

The Doctor Is Golfing

So, What Happened Today Richy?

* TILT! *