Pixels: Adam Sandler Does It Again

If you like Adam Sandler movies and video games from the 80s, you'll most likely enjoy Pixels. It's funny. It's cute. It has pretty cool special effects. It's even child friendly. It was exactly what I expected, and I enjoyed it.

What all that said, the plot was very light. It was nothing much more than a series of funny coincidences woven together into an excuse for a washed-up gamer to become hero of the planet. Yeah--your typical Adam Sandler movie.

Some things don't make sense, such as: had we launched a probe in 1982, it would not make it any than the inside of our Oort cloud by now. So, how could aliens intercept it? (Well, I suppose they could have been in the neighborhood.)

But who cares?

If you want a light movie with a hint of video game nostalgia (though only with the more popular games) and mindless fun, go catch this one in the movie theater before it disappears.

Weep -- whap -- woop.

Agar.io and the Seven Habits

Who needs another addictive game? I've got one for you. It's called Agar.io, which you can play here. I seldom review video games, but this one is just so awesome.

You start off as a tiny cell with mass 10. You can gain mass by either eating the tiny little rainbow dots (about 1-2 points each), or by eating another player's cell. The bigger you are, the slower you go, but the more you can eat. In the picture above, I was the 2nd biggest cell on the map, and I don't think doge lasted much longer. Poor little doge.

You move around by simply moving the mouse pointer in the direction you want to go. No clicking necessary. You can also split yourself (with the space button) to launch and destroy other cells. And there are viruses, and just all around coolness.

I have two warnings for you, though. #1) The names people choose can be somewhat offensive, but there's a no-name option if you don't want to see them. #2) Did I mention this game is offensive?

What's also cool is that is isn't too hard to get to the number 2 spot. I've only been playing for a week, and there I am (temporarily) on the leaderboard. #2!!!!! I'm still trying to get #1, but evidently that's a little harder.

Plus, while you play, you can think about a very important concept discussed in all the 7 Habitsbooks. Let me explain the "Circle of Influence."

Recently in the news, you've most likely heard about fun controversial topics such as gay marriage and the Confederate battle flag. And I bet that you had some strong feelings one way or the other. Perhaps you took to facebook and poured out your guts. This demonstrates our "Circle of Concern." This is stuff that we worry about -- things we may want to change, or concerns about things not going our way.

But when you think about it, what do we really accomplish when we pour our guts on facebook? Perhaps 200 people tops would see our post. Perhaps we'd get into a good discussion with our friends. Maybe friends get angry, or someone decides to troll. And then ... our posts disappear into oblivion. Sure, posts are eternal, but nobody cares anymore -- after a while.

The sad thing is, these efforts seldom change or affect the big outcome. That's because we often worry about things outside of our "Circle of Influence." Who do you have power to influence? Your family members? People at work? At church? In your neighborhood? If you're anything like me, your circle doesn't extend much further than that.

Now think of how much time you may have spent on one of those passionate facebook posts that don't really go anywhere. Was it worth the time? Or could you have spent that same time attacking issues within your Circle of Influence?

Covey suggests that we shrink our Circle of Concern so that we can spend more time worrying about stuff that really matters to us. If we do that, something strange happens. Our Circle of Influence actually expands. We gain more responsibilities, and we become able to influence more people.

Imagine if you're some famous person who has accomplished a lot. If you were to then opine on some controversial subject, how many people do you think would hear you? More than 200? How about 200 million?

If you're really passionate about these controversial subjects, and you want to effect real change, then you can take real steps to become a person of more influence. You can study what it takes to become a politician, or what it takes to write an influential blog. You can take classes to increase your skills, and so on, and so on.

In the meantime, you can practice with Agar.io. As your circle starts small, you wouldn't want to take on the biggest dudes. They'd swallow you up whole without blinking. You'd be better off eating the little tidbits until you're big enough to start attacking other players. Then as you get bigger, you can swallow bigger players, and before you know it, you're that biggest dude.

So have fun. Increase your circle of influence, and show them what you're made of.

Update (8/1/2015): I did it! Boom baby!

Also, here's a funny Youtube video that's a good energetic intro to Agario. Warning, though ... a few of the names are a little offensive.

Ant-Man: This Is No Small Movie

Talk about surpassing expectations.  When I first saw the movie poster for Ant-Man, I thought, "Really Marvel?  This is stupid.  Do you really expect me to believe yet another one of your superheroes?  I mean ... being small is a superpower.  Really?"

But then after seeing a trailer that didn't look so bad, I figured it was worth a try.  Even though it's another one of those Marvel-formula movies, it was surprisingly funny, original, entertaining, and sufficiently action-packed.

In fact, among the Marvel movies, I'd place this one near the top.  I enjoyed Ant-Man more than both Avengers movies, and maybe even more than the first Thor.  I even laughed much harder than I did with Guardians of the Galaxy, even though the latter was overall funnier.

My only complaint (aside from inconsistent science, which I don't care much about) is that the writers chose to place Ant-Man in the same Avenger universe.  The movie does so well as a standalone, it doesn't need that extra baggage.  The tie-in felt forced and unnecessary, but yet still entertaining and funny.  The writers will do what they do, and they evidently have future plans for Ant-Man.

Perhaps after the movie's successful opening we should hope to see him again sometime soon.  Count me in!

Inside Out and Back Again

PIXAR does it again with Inside Out.  First I must warn you that this isn't a typical Disney movie, as the girl has both a mother and a father, and they're not divorced or dead.  I know, I know.  You must see it to believe it.

In this movie, we get the see all the emotions inside of our head.  In rainbow color order, there's Anger, Joy, Disgust, Sadness, and Fear.  At first, I was a little skeptical ... I mean voices in our heads?  A whole control panel?  Core memory islands?  Could these concepts last a whole movie?

Well, they did it impressively.  They held my attention the whole time.  It was highly imaginative, colorful, funny, and emotional.  Yeah -- emotional.  I found myself looking back into my own memories, trying to remember ones that were long forgotten.

And did I forget to mention the beautiful animation?  As usual, PIXAR did a good job.

I also enjoyed the music, which had a slight hint of retro 60's to go with the colorful animation.

I caught the 2D version, but I still noticed a lot of depth.  The story held its own without the 3D, but I think this would be a good one to catch in 3D.

My recommendation: go see this one in the theater with your kids.  It's lots of fun for the whole family.  And don't forget to stay for the first couple of minutes of the end credits.

Jurassic World: As Good As the First

After an okay sequel and whatever that third movie was, Steven Spielberg actually pulled off a successful revisit to the island, and he spared no expense.  With a budget of $150 million or more, Spielberg delivers an action-packed, exciting, and scary experience.

As you would expect, the plot is essentially the same as the first movie, only with more interesting characters, less cheesiness, cooler special effects. and a lot more extras: dinosaurs and people.

Despite the cliches and Hollywood formula, I actually enjoyed the ride.  It's worth catching this one in the theater.  It's as good, if not better than the first.

A quick warning, though.  These dinosaurs are scarier, and some scenes are rather disturbing, so I would not take any smaller kids.  I'm hoping for a couple of good nightmares, myself, tonight.  We'll see.

What Me Lazy?

Am I lazy?  Is that my problem?

As I was reading one of my fellow writer's blogs, I came across this post: Five Reasons you Won't Make it as a Writer by the funny author John Hartness (warning -- beware of hilarious f-bombs).  He lists five different reasons writers fail, and they're all true, but is "lazy" the right word?

He says:

Stop whining about how much time you don’t have to write, or how much “real life” gets in the way, or how much time it takes to raise your kids, or work your job, and how you’re too tired after working all day, coming home, fixing dinner, feeding a family, cleaning up after dinner, bathing the little ankle-biters, getting them to bed and then performing your husbandly duties so your wife still loves you. Yeah, shut your cake hole.

What he means to say is: "I don't want to hear your excuses.  If you wish to make it in this industry, you need to write A LOT OF WORDS."  While John doesn't want to hear your excuses (and I don't want to hear your excuses either), you still need to come to terms with yourself as to why you're really not writing -- and fix things.

The first thing to realize is that if you're not writing, it's only because you DO NOT WANT to write.  It's as simple as that.  I'll be honest about myself.  I write in spurts.  When I'm at a writing high, I write like crazy.  When I get tired of writing, I take a rest.  It's like a big cycles of ups and downs.  Of course, I think I would prefer a more steady habit of writing, but I'll take what I can.

The best way to de-lazy-fy yourself is to figure out what makes you NOT want to write, and attack that head on.  You may come up with a list of excuses (ala John Hartness above), but I think to be most successful, you need to really look inside yourself and find that one true reason you're currently stuck.

I'll try to take a stab at several reasons one may stop writing (many of which I've suffered myself at one time or another) ...

• It's not fun anymore.  (Find a way to make it fun.)
• Day job stress really is getting to me.  (Find a way to get better work/life balance and find a positive attitude so you can take advantage of any free time.)
• It's too noisy at home.  (Maybe find another place to write, or write late at night or early in the morning when everyone else is asleep, or even learn to work in the noise.)
• No one is listening to me.  (Just scream louder.  Eventually they'll listen.)
• I'm a terrible writer.  (Are you really?  Sometimes when I think I've written terrible stuff, I'll go back a year later to read it again to find it isn't so bad.  Besides, I'm learning more and more that people care more about what you say rather than how you say it.)
• My current project just isn't working.  (Why isn't it working?  Perhaps you need to set it aside and work on something else.)
• I'm so depressed.  (I haven't quite figured out a solution to this.  Though getting more sleep does seem to help the depression spell go away faster.)
• I have all these shows to watch on Netflix before they yank them away.  (Setting limits is very important if you wish to get other productive work done.  Besides, if the show gets yanked, there are other good shows to replace it.)

As for me, I'm coming out of one of the driest spells I've had in years.  Yes ... I intentionally sacrificed everything else recently to pass one last stupid actuarial exam, but I did it.  And now it's time to reboot my fiction writing.  Who's with me?  Who else has a hundred crazy ideas in your head ready to be written?  Who's ready to let the words flow?  Let's do this!

The Google Earth Plane Game

Today I had some fun.  I grabbed some pictures I had taken last week from my airplane window and thought, "Gee ... I wonder if I can find all of these on Google Earth."  And wouldn't you know it?  Using a little bit of math and a little pattern recognition, I found them all.

Step 1.  Start with a picture that's easy to find, such as a large recognizable land formation.  This one only took a couple of minutes to find.

Once you find that picture, you know which way the airplane window is facing.  And if you have timestamps on your pictures, you can estimate how many miles there are between them.  Just take the difference in minutes and multiply by 10.

For example, the picture above has a timestamp of 1:30:42.  The picture I took before that has 1:24:25.  That's a difference of 6 minutes, 17 seconds.  Take the seconds, divide by 60 and add to the number of minutes to get 6.28.  Then multiply by 10 to get 62.8 miles.

Once you have distance, you can estimate the direction of the airplane.  They like to follow curvy paths (along great circles on the globe).  So, if you start with the location of picture #1 and draw a line toward (or away from if going backwards) the destination point, and draw a line away from (or toward) the departure point, it will narrow down the location of your next picture.  (You can check out my very last picture at the end to see the lines I drew.)

I was surprised how fast I found the next obscure picture ...

Then I used the same technique to quickly find pictures #3 through #14.  Even the cloudy obscure circle-y ones were easy to find.

I challenge you to try the same game should you remember next time you're on a plane.  Can you find your pictures?  Have fun, and good luck!

Poltergeist: The Remake Lives On

Who doesn't love scary clowns?  The remake of Poltergeist has plenty.  It also contains many of the favorite scenes you may remember from the original -- only a little more on the freaky side and with a few plots holes filled in.

Did the original need a remake?  I won't be a complainer, even though I saw the original at least twenty times and used to have many parts memorized.  The cool trailer above gave me hope that the remake would be a good rendition, taking what worked and modernizing it for a newer generation.  The final result did not disappoint me.

I enjoyed seeing everything with a different style and direction.  It's a good story.  The characters are likable and distinct. The acting is decent.  The music is freaky.  The 3-D effects are clear and the depth is exciting.  The depiction of the other side is wonderful.

It's difficult to judge which version I liked better.  It's hard to dethrone the love I have for the original, but I'll admit it was campy and full of plot holes.  (Why again, in the original, did the family decide to stay in the house after the first incident?  Funny!)  The remake is a tighter ship, but lacks much of the magic.  For example, the clown scene in the remake is freakier, but it is nowhere near as scary as it was in the original.

Those who haven't seen the original may not find this movie to be as scary as other recent horror movies, but I suspect that you may find it to be highly imaginative and cool.

And if you've seen the original, I strongly suggest catching this newer version in the theater in 3D.  Enjoy the ride.

Imitation Game is a Good Imitation

As a computer programmer and mathematician, I couldn't resist seeing this movie about a favorite idol, Alan Turing.  As one of the pioneers who paved the way for modern-day computers, Alan helped to create a machine that would break the unbreakable German Enigma Code in The Imitation Game.

This very entertaining movie explores the mind of a genius, touching on practically all aspects one would expect in a story involving Mr. Turing.  There are references to the "Imitation Game" itself -- a test to see if an intelligence is human or machine.  We see to what lengths these guys went to keep the code breaking effort a secret.  The movie also explores what it was like to be gay back when it used to be illegal.

The movie also successfully captures what I like to call a Eureka moment, which is that very moment when you solve a very difficult problem, the heavens open up, and you see everything.  I've had these moments myself, and they are always pretty awesome.

However, there are a couple of small problems with the movie.  The writers took it upon themselves to dumb everything down so the audience could have a better chance of understanding, and they changed a few facts to make the drama a little more exciting.

For example, Alan Turing wasn't such a Sherlock-like sociopath.  In real life, he could get along with other geniuses, though he generally was socially inept otherwise.  Also, in real life, his superiors treated him with respect.  So, all that bit about wanting to fire him for building a stupid machine?  It didn't happen, but it sure did make good drama.

Also, the big aha leading up to the Eureka moment is really Codebreaking 101.  The trick they mentioned would have been the first things they tried.  But this is okay, as what led to the Eureka moment in real life probably would have been over all our heads.

Further, the whole idea of "It's midnight and now the Nazi code is changed and so we all have to start over from scratch and get angry and toss our papers on the floor" doesn't really make sense.  In real life, the code you were working on is still there, and there's no reason why you couldn't finish your work.  Even though it would be too late to decode "current" Nazi messages, you would still learn things and see how to get faster.  Guess what ... that's what happened in real life, too.  They got to where they could solve it in two weeks, then one week, and finally the breakthrough to do it in minutes.

Lastly, a comment on the music:  It took me a while to realize that most of the music imitates the sounds of the Turing machine.  Cool.

Regardless of the inaccuracies, the movie does get a lot right.  If you don't know anything about Alan Turing, I strongly suggest watching this movie and get a good introduction.  You'll get lots of good drama, too.

The AdSense Experiment - One Year Later

A year ago, I started an experiment with AdSense.  I let them put ads on my blog (and some YouTube videos), and they pay me according to how many clicks and views the ads get.  Clicks get more money than views.

You can read my first four posts on this subject here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

After one year, I now report that on the most part, it has been a fun failure.  This blog has earned me almost $6 over the past 12 months.  Woot!  Woot!  The YouTube portion (which I started later) has also earned me about $6 for a total of $12.

In one respect, that's actually a lot of money, considering I didn't put forth any labor.  But then again, if I consider it as payment for putting together blog posts and videos, it's not really that much money at all.  I could earn a higher hourly rate working a minimum wage job.

Plus, I'm thinking more and more that the ads don't look good on my blog.  They hardly seem to match the subject matter.  And as I mentioned earlier, it's difficult to control which questionable ads to turn off.  You can turn off certain categories, but often if I see a questionable ad, there's no good way to determine what it's category is, or to simply block that specific ad.  (As if I click on the ad to get information, I get penalized.)

The exact amount of earnings is still confusing.  If I click on the earnings report, it shows "estimated" earnings.  But why can't it be exact?  It gives me a sense that clicks aren't registering (technical problems), and/or AdSense decides to negate some earnings for whatever reason ... either way it seems that any error will resolve to benefit the company.  And no matter how I look at the numbers, I can never get them to add up to my "current balance."  What kind of money voodoo do they do?

When I did my taxes, I was technically supposed to report my earnings during the year even though I didn't receive a payment.  But there were two problems:

#1) I had no way to get an exact amount from their website.

#2) They provided no tax earnings report for me.  When I clicked on the link to take me to my tax reports, it said "Page not found," implying that there are no forms for me.

No tax report and no firm earnings amount meant no reporting earnings on my tax return.  But don't worry, Uncle Sam.  You'll get your taxes when I actually get paid.

At the beginning of 2015, I hit the magical $10 threshold.  That was kind-of fun.  I got something in the mail that contained some secret numbers for me to set up payment information.  This meant two things:

#1) I can now get paid my earnings whenever I want them.  If it hits $100, they'll automatically send me money.  (Though I still have to tell them how to send it to me.)

#2) I now have access to the payment reports, which provide more concrete numbers.  It shows how much payment actually got accrued to me.  And it shows how much came from this blog, and how much came from YouTube.  On a monthly basis, YouTube provides a slightly higher payout.  If only I had access to this info when I filed my taxes!

What's up next?  As soon as I finish my Justice novel and get it published, I'm planning on removing AdSense from my blog and replacing it with an ad to buy my book.  Then I'll have something that actually matches my blog content, and something that will pay more with each click.  I will still keep AdSense on my YouTube account, and the experiment will continue.