I'll be taking part in Extra Life, a charity gaming marathon started by Sarcastic Gamer. I get to play video games on October 17th for 24 hours. I'm asking for your help to sponsor me starting at just 1$/hour. Donations go to Texas Children's Hospital to fund research and treatment of pediatric cancer. You can find more information or join the effort yourself at http://extralife.sarcasticgamer.com. Or you can sponsor me at https://waystogive.texaschildrens.org/netcommunity/sabin1001 .

Now for the fun part, I'll be streaming my entire day of playing as part of a special RPGCast event, hosted at http://rpgamer.com/live. So please check that sometime on October 17th starting at 8 AM Central Daylight Time and drop by our chatroom on the live streaming page or at #rpgamer on the esper.net IRC network. I can't wait. :)

Just found out my grandpa died. He'd been suffering from lymphoma and pneumonia so it's not out of nowhere.

It's been a long time since I saw him last, and even longer since I saw him regularly. But he was an awesome grandpa. He embodied that independent "don't tell your grandma" spirit that you see grandpa's have on tv. I will miss him, and wish I had spent more time with him recently.

Hmm..I'm still processing this.

Just a note for those who follow this: my trip to Japan is still coming along, almost finalized the plans for it. (September 8th through the 28th, with a week in Seattle for pax before that).

I've finished my Monkey Island Adventure! I just finished the first episode of the Telltale Monkey Island series, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. This comes after working through the first four games in the series over the past couple weeks.

There were highs (Curse of Monkey Island) and lows (Escape from Monkey Island) but all in all, what a great series. And Telltale has done a great job on the new game. Making a balanced adventure game with puzzles that are solvable but not too easy is very hard...as I can attest to from the other games, none of which get it right. So I'm happy to report I didn't have to cheat or use the hints on the latest game, something I had to do on all the others (and wanted to do on Escape so it would just end faster...).

Anyway, time to get some food and ponder what to play next, which will likely be an attempt to finish up Final Fantasy XII. It's so nice to finish games for a change. Thank you World of Warcraft hiatus. :)

So what should I do when I go to Japan?

That's the question I'm trying to answer this week. My company offers a 1 month sabbatical to all employees every 5 years they work there. And if you travel to a company you've never been to before, they cover most of the travel costs. So I'll be taking mine to Japan, obviously. I booked my flights last week and now I have to sort out what all I'm doing while there.

I need to figure out places to visit, hotel types to stay at, how long to stay in each area, and of course, what sorts of awesome food I need to try.

So if anyone has suggestions on what I should make sure to do (I'm looking at current and former Japandemonium columnists especially...) or visit, I'd really appreciate some help.

I've been reading on wikitravel and the whole bathing and do's and do not's have me slightly intimidated. I guess I'm realizing how foreign of an experience it's going to be. At this point, I'm hoping I don't accidentally book lodging at some rural ryokan that doesn't like foreign guests and accidentally blow my nose while I'm there and forget to not step on the tatami in my slippers and take a bath in the water before taking a bath on the stool...yeah.

Another day another workout. I slacked off a bit there for E3 and the couple weeks afterwards, getting only a handful of workouts in. but I'm back in full force now.

I have a new enemy too, Squats with calf raises. They really take it out of my upper legs. But I trust that they too will get easier with time. And no, Jumping Lunges are not "easy" now, though I can get through one set of them at least.

Time for shower.

It was my birthday today.

After a small gathering last night for some Carcasonne and Boom Blox Blast Party with really heavy Chocolate Cake from Costco, I brought in colossal Costco cupcakes to work for people to munch on.

"Woah" is the proper response, or at least the one I heard all day today. Have plenty left over for tomorrow too...

Glad I did my EA Sports Active this morning.

The presents:
1 Sonoma shirt outfit combo thing from sister, very snazzy, I like when others dress me since I suck at it.
1 100$ gift card to Younkers/Boston Store. Very nice, though since I'm bad at dressing me, I will have to take my Mom's advice and buy "some sandals and shorts."
and finally...
1 Phone call from my parents at The Cheesecake Factory in Omaha, NE to me at my house in Madison, WI telling me they were ordering Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake to celebrate my birthday.

Grrrr, so jealous.

Okay this is sweet. I just found out my picture gallery supports Cooliris (formerly Piclens). Go to http://www.cooliris.com/. Install the plugin and restart firefox/IE/Safari. Then go to one of my photo albums at http://gallery.figarocastle.org, like this one. Then either click "view slideshow" on the left of the page or hover over a thumbnail till you get the arrow icon to pop up and click that. Voila, pretty sweet.

Slow computers may not like it so much.

So it claims I'm on day 19, but that's not entirely true since I just had a week away for E3 2009! Look at all that stuff we posted. I am especially proud of this video. Mikel will never forgive me for getting it.

Anyway, back to my workouts. it's good to be back in the saddle again. And it doesn't seem like I lost too much by missing a week. My weight hasn't gone up any, and I was able to finish everything today. Though I must say, the game must have been upset I was gone, as it gave me more of those evil squat jumps today. I struggled through them, and the game thinks I completed them. I think it was one of the sloppiest attempts at squat jumps that has likely ever been attempted on this planet...but at least I didn't skip the exercise this time.

Other than that, this weekend has been about publishing a glut of stuff on RPGamer that I got from E3. Videos, impressions, podcast wrap-up, all that. Please do check it out and let me know if it was any good. :)

I'm also completely off schedule and way overslept for church today, silly time zones. Oh well, time to get a healthy lunch and scan through a bunch of that E3 coverage I DVR'd off of G4 this past week.

Oh! I also need to watch some of the Conan O'Brien episodes from this past week. Was his debut good?

I tried a high intensity work out today. I believe I may have been pusing a bit too hard in it. I finally had to skip exercises. They had these jumping squats which were rather intense, but then they followed it up with something that seemed downright dangerous--the jumping lunge.

In the jumping lunge you put a foot in front of you and kneel forward, your front leg is making a nice right angle with the floor and your rear shin is nearly parallel to the floor. Your front foot is flat and the rear foot is on the ball of the foot. Fine, just a normal lunge, right? Then you are supposed to jump into air from this position, switch your legs and land with the other foot forward, completing a crouch back into the original lunge position. Only now your legs are opposite they way you started. Oh and do it slowly to help work the muscles.

Yeah, I don't know how to land that slowly, or even safely. I tried like four of them and felt like my leg muscles were going to end up getting ripped off of my bones. Not to mention the game was complaining that I was doing it too fast, even when I waited for the little animated guy before doing it, apparently I needed to control my landing and do it slower. No idea how that's supposed to work.

So I skipped the jumping lunges, and am going to go back down to a medium intensity workout next time.

Other than that, I'm still really enjoying doing the workouts. I really hope this continues. :)

Oh and I'm now wondering if anyone at EA actually tried wearing the strap and completing a workout. I cannot understand how it can stay on for anybody at this point, I have it fall off 3 or 4 times a session.

Yes, there's no day 1 cause I didn't think to do this until day two.

First off, I've been twittering a lot, as it's faster, easier, and less time consuming than bloggin, so most of my updates can be found at http://www.twitter.com/sabin1001. You can watch what I"m doing without having an account, though it's much more fun to join in and post as well. I'll spare you by not reposting tweets on my blog as I'm not sure of anyone who actually likes to see those.

So onto the Wii, on Tuesday Nintendo made out rather well from me. I picked up Big Bang Mini (a shoot 'em up for the DS), Punch Out! (I'm a minor circuit champion!) for the Wii, a Wii Fit, and EA Sports Active. While the first two games are fun, I'm most excited about Active, as it's my new plan to lose some weight. I was down to ~170lbs after an initial cholesterol scare in 2004, but now I'm back up to 220, so I need to cut some weight again and this looks like a better way to do it than DDR.

I'm done with the first two days where I burned around 500 calories in the two "medium intensity" (I'm really scared to try the high intensity option) workouts I've had so far. And I hurt all over, especially my legs. They burnses, they do. SIlly fat hobbit legs...okay so maybe gollum isn't the best workout motivator but still.

Mikel tells me I should work out in the evenings too to help loosen up the muscles. I just wish the game would affirm that as well, as I was kind of hoping it'd be taking the full on "I'm your personal trainer" roll. Nevertheless, I will definitely keep going with this, it's fun, I know it's working cause of all the sweat, and most importantly--it has me doing excercise. Hard to have a more successful fitness product than the one that actually gets you to do work. More posts to come.

Oh, and if anyone else who has the game can figure out what I need to do to make it recognize lunges with my left leg better (like...at all) and get the strap to stay on my right leg better, please let me know.

So my latest obsession is with live streaming. I'm playing with stickam and am going to try to start streaming the RPGCast live when we record it on Saturdays. I'm excited to get user feedback while we're doing the show and I think it'll help the show feel bigger and more interactive. Kind of an experiment right now, but hey, anything that works for TWiT should work for me.

The live stream is available here: http://www.stickam.com/sabin1001

Note that it's not going to be up all the time, usually just Saturday's from 11AM - 1PM Central time.

New Sneakers
Socks
Candy
Two new button up shirts
Pair of Jeans
Pair of black khakis
Pajamas
Xbox live points
Check from grandparents A
Check from grandparents B

So I was at Target the other night and I saw this while walking into the store. I think some employees were having some fun.

Also, I posted all of my pics from my trip to Seattle this year. Included are my pics of the Weird Al concert I went to. Unfortunately I was a bit far to get really good pictures, but c'est la vie.

http://figarocastle.org/gallery/v/seattle08/

Okay yesterday we hit up the fair again, this time to see Weird Al. It was awesome, of course. It was raining during the entire concert (the concert was in an outdoor grandstand), and it completely didn't matter.

I was surprised at one part, usually the Star Wars songs come at the end, I thought. They make up a great encore. But not this time, they were in the middle. At the end was Albuquerque. All like 11 minutes of it, with two minutes extra in the middle there where Al came up with new donut flavors. You have to know the song to understand...

Anyway, that was yesterday. Today we went to dinner at our favorite restaurant that we found last year. Nishino. We had the Exclusive Omakase. Oh. My. Gosh. A flavor explosion. For 75$ (you can get the normal omakase for 60$, but I mean come on, this was exclusive) they put together an 8 course meal for you consisting of the chef's choice from all over the menu. It was fantastic.

Mikel and I's favorite was the Miso marinated black broiled cod. It was like butter. So tender, so juicy, so wonderful. Honorable mention goes to the succulent salmon in the sashimi salad and the ice cream thing that I can't describe.

Tomorrow the food adventure continues. A couple days ago we hit up Kidd Valley for a good burger, and tomorrow we'll compare that to Red Mill. Yummy burgers for the win.

I'm vacationing in Seattle again this year. Spending a week with Mikel (Firemyst) before going to PAX.

I arrived on Saturday evening and after a good night's sleep we headed out to the Evergreen State Fair (named after Washington being the Evergreen State, it's not actually the State Fair---I know, confusing).

Blah blah blah, fair, booths, vendors, rides, good food. Here's the pics. LOOK AT THE CUTE CHILD. HER NAME IS VIVIAN AND SHE WILL RUN THIS WORLD.

Those of you who interact with me on a regular basis know I've been battling with Persona 3 for...a long time. This game has been not ending and not ending and still going and getting put off and getting picked up and so on since like at least last September if not earlier. So it makes me quite happy to announce, that finally.

Persona 3 is completed.

Now, I just have to get through "The Answer" expansion disc....it's never going to end.

Oh and no, I have no interest at this time in the upcoming Persona 4. No more > 100 hour RPGs for me. I have better things to do.

Just a quick update to folks that I'm out at E3 2008 all this week. I'm putting up podcasts almost every day, so you can check for those here: http://www.rpgamer.com/rpgcast

So many games, so many appointments, so much to post. :) That said, I'm really having fun using my new Nikon D60 and Zoom H4 to pick up pictures and audio to post. It's a great time and I hope everyone is enjoying RPGamer's coverage.

So I got up early this morning so I could wait in a line. Yes, the line for the iPhone 3G. So yeah, I got one, white 16GB. Everyone else seemed to want the black one, so I got the white just to stand out that much more.

Anyway, figured I live in freaking Madison, WI, so while there are surely some iPhone fanatics, it wouldn't be something I have to worry about. So I set my alarm for 6:30 am, showered and drove down to the mall to get in line. I was probably behind like a hundred people or something when I arrived near 7:00AM. Whatever, we waited and had fun talking about apple and iphones and stuff till 8 AM when the doors open and they slowly started taking people into the store.

And then took more people in.

And then took more in.

Half an hour later, no one had left the store yet...Eventually the first guy came out and it was clear something was wrong. The iTunes activation servers were not working. Ouch. But that wasn't all, the AT&T activation purchasing servers, where they set your plan and sign you up for a contract before checking you out, were going abysmally slow. Eventually, they had to give upon the iTunes activation and just tell people to activate the phone at home. But even so, the AT&T/purchasing part of the process was still taking over 20 minutes per person... and that was only after they decided what they wanted and got their credit checked if they were a new account. So I got to wait and wait and wait until around 10:30AM, when I was finally able to get into the store.

Of course, around that exact moment, the AT&T servers started working properly again, and the iTunes activation started working again. So the guy who checked me out praised me for being the fastest guy to get through the process so far (it helped that I had a current iPhone, apparently upgrading from one iPhone to the other is a simpler process), I was done in like 10 minutes.

I felt bad for being so late for work, but by the time it was clear I'd be late, there were a couple hundred people behind me in line, so I knew I either had to tough it out or wait until sometime next week for a new shipment of phones to arrive... So far, everyone at work has been pretty understanding. But if someone isn't, I'll just have to flash the new phone at them and hope it distracts them long enough to change the topic.

So, any of you out there who read my blog regularly...do you twitter? If so, do you want to email me your twitter account so I can follow you? Or just send me a message on twitter itself. My twitter account is, unsurprisingly:

sabin1001