A slightly better week than the last two.
Sun: 6 mi warmup / cooldown, 1 terrible mile in 4:35
Mon: 7 mi
Tue: 8.25 mi
Wed: 7.75 mi
8x300 3R w/ Chris and Steve - felt pretty good, overall. Wish I could drop a few 41's right now but ain't happenin. 44's at the beginning, then down to 43's.
Thu: 8 mi
Fri: 6.25 mi
Sat: 8.5 mi warmup / cooldown, 1 okay 800 in 1:58.8
tot 53 and change
A lot of good races by everyone else today, though - Avery and the JC Experience beginning their 5k travails quite well, Big T-Unit pops a 1:53 low in the 800m, Chris with a 2:32 1000m. I'm planning on running the mile at Valentine's - maybe this time I will keep my trap shut and just run the damn thing, haha.
On Being A Giant Robot
Thursday, January 28, 2010
For most of college, I was pretty sure as soon as I popped out and put on my graduation cap and drove off into the sunset, I would immediately start working at a video game design studio. It's what I wanted to do since before high school, it's what I took all my electives in and spent a lot of my free time on (that which was not spent on track meets or music). It didn't really turn out that way - the game industry is notoriously competitive to get into, and the economy was not exactly at its best when I started shoving job applications out the door. (I do admit I started a bit late - my senior year was a little chaotic)
Still, I really love the damn things. One of my favorites of all time - Mechwarrior 2 - involves you stomping around on various planets piloting a giant robot warrior, as part of some space-faring feudal caste society that led an exodus from Earth when space travel was first becoming commonplace. Sadly, it's a videogame made in the mid 90's, and the successive sequels to the franchise have just gone downhill. Some bunch of yayhoos, however, undertook the rather massive task of creating an entire new Mechwarrior (as a modification of an existing game engine) and releasing it for free, and hot buttered lugnuts, it is exactly what I have wanted for quite some time.
Sadly, the website is actually overloaded (they exceeded their bandwidth! how about that for a success story) but I shall link to it all the same: http://www.mechlivinglegends.net. The game runs as a full modification for Crysis, so if you don't have it, it's probably worth buying for this alone.
I also recently blew through a new book that had the first pages featured on the NYTimes about a week ago - its release sadly coinciding with one of the deaths of the men it followed. The book, "Last Train From Hiroshima," covers the events that dogged 9 particular men and women who were present at both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (and survived them). The man who recently passed away was Tsutomi Yamaguchi: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07yamaguchi.html.
James Cameron also has evidently optioned the movie rights to it - I am not sure how that would work, considering a great deal of the book is grisly, physics-centric descriptions of how easily nuclear weapons snuff out human life. Here's the news release concerning the movie and the preview of the book that inspired me to buy it.
I've also been doing a little bit of that "running" thing - had a kind-of-not-the-best-last-week last week, with what I will fancifully call "faux-bronchitis" dogging me at every step, and a mile race that was the slowest I've run in 3 and a half years. Ew. Mostly I think that was a case of just mentally not being in it - which, for me, is not such a big obstacle to overcome as not-being-in-shape. The Terrier Invite is this weekend and I'm in the 800 - hoping to see a PR. I'm not positive about that but I think I'm in the right kind of shape. This week has also gone significantly better in terms of running - the cough has basically cleared up and I am not constantly popping pills to stave off muscle aches / slight fever. I would like to take whoever gifted me with this drastically inferior immune system and put them to the question.
Tonight was especially entertaining for running - sometime between when I returned home from work and when I left to run (about a 20 minute span!) two inches of snow just dropped like a lead weight from the sky. I did my usual thing around the Cleveland Res and was greeted by comically intense wind blasts on the eastern side of it. With the full moon, though, it makes a pretty stunning visual - especially combined with the orange light from the street lights and the snow whirling in bizarre eddies from the wind whipping behind you.
I think that's all the verbage I have in me tonight.
Still, I really love the damn things. One of my favorites of all time - Mechwarrior 2 - involves you stomping around on various planets piloting a giant robot warrior, as part of some space-faring feudal caste society that led an exodus from Earth when space travel was first becoming commonplace. Sadly, it's a videogame made in the mid 90's, and the successive sequels to the franchise have just gone downhill. Some bunch of yayhoos, however, undertook the rather massive task of creating an entire new Mechwarrior (as a modification of an existing game engine) and releasing it for free, and hot buttered lugnuts, it is exactly what I have wanted for quite some time.
Sadly, the website is actually overloaded (they exceeded their bandwidth! how about that for a success story) but I shall link to it all the same: http://www.mechlivinglegends.net. The game runs as a full modification for Crysis, so if you don't have it, it's probably worth buying for this alone.
I also recently blew through a new book that had the first pages featured on the NYTimes about a week ago - its release sadly coinciding with one of the deaths of the men it followed. The book, "Last Train From Hiroshima," covers the events that dogged 9 particular men and women who were present at both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (and survived them). The man who recently passed away was Tsutomi Yamaguchi: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/world/asia/07yamaguchi.html.
James Cameron also has evidently optioned the movie rights to it - I am not sure how that would work, considering a great deal of the book is grisly, physics-centric descriptions of how easily nuclear weapons snuff out human life. Here's the news release concerning the movie and the preview of the book that inspired me to buy it.
I've also been doing a little bit of that "running" thing - had a kind-of-not-the-best-last-week last week, with what I will fancifully call "faux-bronchitis" dogging me at every step, and a mile race that was the slowest I've run in 3 and a half years. Ew. Mostly I think that was a case of just mentally not being in it - which, for me, is not such a big obstacle to overcome as not-being-in-shape. The Terrier Invite is this weekend and I'm in the 800 - hoping to see a PR. I'm not positive about that but I think I'm in the right kind of shape. This week has also gone significantly better in terms of running - the cough has basically cleared up and I am not constantly popping pills to stave off muscle aches / slight fever. I would like to take whoever gifted me with this drastically inferior immune system and put them to the question.
Tonight was especially entertaining for running - sometime between when I returned home from work and when I left to run (about a 20 minute span!) two inches of snow just dropped like a lead weight from the sky. I did my usual thing around the Cleveland Res and was greeted by comically intense wind blasts on the eastern side of it. With the full moon, though, it makes a pretty stunning visual - especially combined with the orange light from the street lights and the snow whirling in bizarre eddies from the wind whipping behind you.
I think that's all the verbage I have in me tonight.
Something About Horses
Thursday, January 21, 2010
I am currently expelling all sorts of green matter from my throat after my first real race this track season. I am never too thrilled to make the reacquaintance of track hack, but this is an especially unwieldy case of it. It has effectively stripped me of all the enjoyment of running this week, and that definitely takes quite a bit of doing.
As of today it's settled down a bit, so I hope that tomorrow at work my cubicle-neighbor Teresa doesn't give me the horrified-mother look. Most of my coworkers are of the child-rearing age, so sometimes I feel more like the...young nephew, or something, more than a peer. In some ways that's more or less correct - they do have a lot more job experience (both particular to this job and any computer science job) and life experience. It's also nice to know that there are benevolent people looking out for you.
Still, being at Reggie with Chris, Steve, Tim, Jeff, and Kevin remains the truest feeling of 'home' that I get here in Massachusetts. It is only peered by running along Battle Road or Cutler Park in perfect weather, or laying comatose on the Bentley track after doing fast 400's.
Hopefully, next week will be a little more sane in terms of getting out there and not feeling like trash.
In other news, a band name was chosen this past Monday! If you see me out in public, from now on I'd like you to say "Oh, hey, there goes one half of the musical supergroup Wild Pale Stallions! Why, it's Philip. He's absolutely ravishing."
Also musically, Will introduced me to Pure Reason Revolution, which has been pretty much the only thing I've listened to all week. Hopefully I won't wear it out! This is the one that is currently stuck in my head (Goshen's Remains): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDHW8bsHB0w
I'm going to go sip on this hot lemonade and ruminate on important matters. Au revoir.
As of today it's settled down a bit, so I hope that tomorrow at work my cubicle-neighbor Teresa doesn't give me the horrified-mother look. Most of my coworkers are of the child-rearing age, so sometimes I feel more like the...young nephew, or something, more than a peer. In some ways that's more or less correct - they do have a lot more job experience (both particular to this job and any computer science job) and life experience. It's also nice to know that there are benevolent people looking out for you.
Still, being at Reggie with Chris, Steve, Tim, Jeff, and Kevin remains the truest feeling of 'home' that I get here in Massachusetts. It is only peered by running along Battle Road or Cutler Park in perfect weather, or laying comatose on the Bentley track after doing fast 400's.
Hopefully, next week will be a little more sane in terms of getting out there and not feeling like trash.
In other news, a band name was chosen this past Monday! If you see me out in public, from now on I'd like you to say "Oh, hey, there goes one half of the musical supergroup Wild Pale Stallions! Why, it's Philip. He's absolutely ravishing."
Also musically, Will introduced me to Pure Reason Revolution, which has been pretty much the only thing I've listened to all week. Hopefully I won't wear it out! This is the one that is currently stuck in my head (Goshen's Remains): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDHW8bsHB0w
I'm going to go sip on this hot lemonade and ruminate on important matters. Au revoir.
The Longest Way
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
So I opted to spend my New Year's weekend in Williamstown, soaking in the rarefied mountain air and steeping, like some sort of pale and anaerobically inclined teabag, in the musical atmosphere. Both Sarah and her mother are music people, so it's almost too much joy to handle - it's none too common, outside of my conversations with Sarah, that I get to talk about all the crazy ideas I have for music and all the little things that I love about it. It makes me really grateful that we are able to understand each other about it!
And we talked quite a bit about it - I ended up passing some of the things I talked about with her along to Gums during our band meeting thing. Musicals are a little different than the direction I'm aimed at, but having gone through the whole English degree rigmarole - and paying attention to narrative form in video games and books - I do have a thing or two to say about it. In a lot of ways, the how of the telling of the story is equally as important as the what - demonstrated easily by the many times that personally hilarious stories fall flat when I can't phrase them quite right.
One thing that we talked about was how to work into musicals things that haven't been really done before - experimental ways of telling stories through music, whether the experiment is the narrative form or the music itself. She's an outright amazing composer, so I feel like some weird styles of music in her hands - dub, metal, house or dance, motown, etc - would be awesome to hear, especially mashed into a big lump with her own influences. The idea, in general, is to be as wildly experimental as possible while telling something coherent and powerful - to come up with unique ways of conveying emotion and the musical styles that will carry them. Especially in musicals, it seems like there's a somewhat rigid structure of what's expected, what 'works' - and I don't think that has to be so.
For example, in the 48 hour videogame contest I've participated in a few times (www.ludumdare.com - 48 hours to design a game from scratch around a concept) people use some of the most insane ways of framing concepts and games that I've ever seen. During one of the contests (the theme being "Exploration"), you wander through what is essentially a 2D platformer a la Mario - except the platformer is set inside your character's own head, and you are exploring his past. You kind of fumble through various transformations and trippy text and obstacles without a clear objective or meaning..and yet it's really good because of that. Definitely not something that a major studio would produce, but merely because it is risky - not because it isn't good. I feel the same way about music - and by extension, musical theater - that to make the best stuff you really have to go out on a limb.
In a similar way, that's what Gums and I are trying to do - throw together a ton of different ideas and see what sticks. We both feel that metal in the 2000's has stagnated, kind of grown...dull, fat, and complacent. Sure, you can turn down the distortion or turn up the distortion, add female vocals, add male vocals, do screaming and singing, turn up the tempo or down the tempo...but it still seems like a lot of it is pushing around the same ideas. Maybe it's a little naive of us to assume that we have something new to bring to the table, but I don't know - something just feels really good about collaborating with him. We've gotten a ton done in a really short time, whereas other people I've played with...well, they just flaked out almost immediately.
I have, for once, one of my own songs stuck in my head - and I just finished a small chunk of lyrics for it, so I am off to bed - with my words dancing in my head.
Mine is the longest way
Though my eyes no longer see
Through the path that does not stray
On the road defined by me
And we talked quite a bit about it - I ended up passing some of the things I talked about with her along to Gums during our band meeting thing. Musicals are a little different than the direction I'm aimed at, but having gone through the whole English degree rigmarole - and paying attention to narrative form in video games and books - I do have a thing or two to say about it. In a lot of ways, the how of the telling of the story is equally as important as the what - demonstrated easily by the many times that personally hilarious stories fall flat when I can't phrase them quite right.
One thing that we talked about was how to work into musicals things that haven't been really done before - experimental ways of telling stories through music, whether the experiment is the narrative form or the music itself. She's an outright amazing composer, so I feel like some weird styles of music in her hands - dub, metal, house or dance, motown, etc - would be awesome to hear, especially mashed into a big lump with her own influences. The idea, in general, is to be as wildly experimental as possible while telling something coherent and powerful - to come up with unique ways of conveying emotion and the musical styles that will carry them. Especially in musicals, it seems like there's a somewhat rigid structure of what's expected, what 'works' - and I don't think that has to be so.
For example, in the 48 hour videogame contest I've participated in a few times (www.ludumdare.com - 48 hours to design a game from scratch around a concept) people use some of the most insane ways of framing concepts and games that I've ever seen. During one of the contests (the theme being "Exploration"), you wander through what is essentially a 2D platformer a la Mario - except the platformer is set inside your character's own head, and you are exploring his past. You kind of fumble through various transformations and trippy text and obstacles without a clear objective or meaning..and yet it's really good because of that. Definitely not something that a major studio would produce, but merely because it is risky - not because it isn't good. I feel the same way about music - and by extension, musical theater - that to make the best stuff you really have to go out on a limb.
In a similar way, that's what Gums and I are trying to do - throw together a ton of different ideas and see what sticks. We both feel that metal in the 2000's has stagnated, kind of grown...dull, fat, and complacent. Sure, you can turn down the distortion or turn up the distortion, add female vocals, add male vocals, do screaming and singing, turn up the tempo or down the tempo...but it still seems like a lot of it is pushing around the same ideas. Maybe it's a little naive of us to assume that we have something new to bring to the table, but I don't know - something just feels really good about collaborating with him. We've gotten a ton done in a really short time, whereas other people I've played with...well, they just flaked out almost immediately.
I have, for once, one of my own songs stuck in my head - and I just finished a small chunk of lyrics for it, so I am off to bed - with my words dancing in my head.
Mine is the longest way
Though my eyes no longer see
Through the path that does not stray
On the road defined by me
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