A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

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.
::
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