Breaking Tradition

As much as I hate to admit my nerdiness to the world, the truth is that I've been buying comic books every single Wednesday for the past, God I don't know, 10 years? What do I love about them? I don't know, the pacing, the characterization, it reads differently in this medium than it does on television or in literature. It's like taking the best of these two worlds and smashing them together.

This Wednesday though, I won't be going to the local comic shop. The reason? Space. I'm simply running out of room to store these little gems. This isn't to say that I'm going to give up the hobby. Oh no, instead I will now only buy the occaional collected edition.

It's just another sign of the coming era of the tablet device and cloud computing. With the rise of these technologies we won't have to worry about finding the space for the things we love. Instead we'll just keep them all in digital form on our hard drives or upload them to someone's servers, no more physical media just stored information-like they're just memories to be recalled at will. The idea of this intruiges me, but I'm not sure I'll ever get used to it. Think about it, there's a generation maybe being born right now that may never buy a CD or own a book. Strange.

(I didn't want to get sued for using a comic image that belonged to a company, so the image I used at the top of this page is from a comic created by myself and my VERY talented friend Kyle Frink. Check it out on Lulu. com if you're interested.)

Jump Street

If you're in or around the Denver area like I was last week, I suggest you take the time to find a place called "Jump Street." Not in any way affiliated with the 80's Johnny Depp show "21 Jump Street," this place is part gym part carnival bouncy house.

The facility is a warehouse which contains clusters of linked trampolines. Between each trampoline is a heavily padded joining structure, so even if you mis-jump and land on the solid structure you don't get hurt. Even the walls are lined with trampolines allowing a type of ricochet jump where the bouncer leaps up towards the side and is thrown back towards the center of the room.

The question quickly becomes: What kind of jumper are you? Are you a rowdy bouncer who strives for height and speed, or are you a technical jumper who flips and cartwheels from one trampoline to another? Many of the children I saw at "Jump Street" fell into the first category. There was at least one woman there, though, that definately fell into the other. She was very focused and deliberate with her jumps. Like a gymnast practicing she would try a series of flips and then sit and recuperate before trying it again. For her the experience was much more like a standard workout. I'm not proud to say it, but I fell into the childish bounce around like the Tasmainian Devil category. I have to admit, although I was much less structured in my technique, the next day I felt like I'd been to the gym. Not only were my legs sore, but my back, shoulders, and arms all felt weary.

If you watch the video on their website (http://www.gotjump.com), it looks like a fun and simple activity. But the truth of the matter is, jumping with such frequency while focusing on speed, height, and distance is quite a workout. Travelers, such as myself, will immediately feel the effects of The Mile High City's thinner air. I jumped for about two whole minutes before the burning in my legs and lungs left me laying on one of the padded supports, wheezing.

If commpetion is more your thing, there is a specific trampoline court that is used for round robin style dodge ball games. It's hard to say what was more satisfying: bouncing off of a wall trampoline and hitting and opponent square in the chest with a ball, or leaping hard off the trampoline to dodge and incoming missile by jumping over it.

When our hour of jumping was over, i knew that I had to come back here and try to get the word out about this place. It's a great unique experience that is fun for both adults and children. Often, places that offer these kinds of quirky fun activities seem to suffer from lack of business (and I have to say there weren't that many other people in the facility the day I went). So, if you're in the Denver area, do yourself a favor and seek out "Jump Street," you won't regret it.

"Avatar" Review

I put off seeing this movie for so long; worried about the length and the lackluster reviews I had read, I just never had the motivation to go. Yesterday, however; along with a friend on mine, I finally decided that if I was ever going to see this movie, then I should see it as it was intended to be seen-- on the big screen and in 3-D. So, after shelling out the extra cash for the special glasses (which, I might add, were oddly Blues Brothers-esque), I sat back and tried to keep an open mind. I'm glad I did.

First off, Avatar isn't a revolutionary movie. Yeah, the effects are great, but it doesn't change the way we view movies. In other words, Cameron hasn't given us the paradigm shift that many thought Avatar would be. In fact, I found that the film seemed more like an amalgamation of a few different sci-fi movies from the last two decades, some of them Cameron's own. Case in point, the walking mechanized suits the soldiers wear is straight out of Cameron's Aliens, and the many of the plot points, even down to (the bomb being dropped on the aliens' sacred place) were reminiscent of The Abyss. Beyond these fans of the genre will find similarities to Dune, The Matrix, and District 9.

Like District 9 was to apartheid, Avatar's plot tries to give viewers another perspective of what the American Indians must have experienced when the Europeans came to North American. The plot goes a little something like this: Humans have traveled to the planet Pandora for the specific purpose of mining a special ore found there. This ore though is not easy to come by as Pandora is a very dangerous place covered in dense jungle filled with dangerous creatures. Among these creatures are the human-ish Navii: 10 foot tall blue bi-peds whose religion holds all things on Pandora sacred to their Earth mother deity. The Navii can plug themselves into plants and animals and share and link with them, which makes it all the more ironic that the humans find a way to plug themselves into the Navii. This occurs when a group of scientists looking to study Pandora discover a means to use a machine to download their minds into Navii bodies. These scientists are desperately trying to find a diplomatic means of moving the Navii off of their land so that the corporate types, that fund all the work on Pandora, can get their grubby little hands on the ore that they so desperately covet. Long story short, and unlikely marine, Jake, who has lost the use of his legs, is sent into one of these Navii. He intends to spy on them to make their inevitable confrontation with the human military more of a massacre than a fight. But, as Jake immerses himself in the Navii culture, he begins to question were his loyalty truly lies. The majority of the movie is about acquainting the viewers with Pandora and its inhabitants, while the final 30-45 mins or so come across as a single high octane action sequence.

If this description seems long, it's because the movie itself is quite a marathon; clocking in at 162 min. But in this time, Cameron manages to create a believable second world on Pandora. The culture, the animals, they all fit into the "go green"message that seems so popular during our current global warming crisis. More than that, they manage to gel together to make an ecosystem, for lack of a better word, that fits together logically like puzzle pieces. Viewers can almost sense how the inhabitants of Pandora evolved together and that sense gives the aliens depth.

I can't mention the believability of Pandora without talking about the special effects of the movie. The CGI was seamless, blending the actors real features with animated ones. What amazed me the most, had to be the 3-D. What truly made it spectacular was the tiny details which were added to the foregrounds. For example, while in the jungle, gnats and flies buzzed in front of the characters; just as during a scene featuring an explosion small pieces of ash floated down by them. Yes, the wide expansive panoramas were breathtaking, but these small details made the scene seem so real that there were moments when it almost seemed like I was watching a stage play going on, rather than a flat image on a 2-D screen.

Let me just close this lengthy post, by saying that Avatar wasn't the greatest movie I've ever seen. In fact, I don't know if I'd even put it in my top ten. But, for a summer blockbuster the movie was quite entertaining, especially for a younger person who might not be familiar with Cameron's other works. Despite, the length and some of the heavy handed messages embedded in the plot, I'd recommend this film to anyone looking to sit back and kill 3 hours without having to think too much.

Concerning Blogging...

Blogging is a simple concept, so why is it so hard to think of things to blog about? I like to write and God knows I spend plenty of time in front of my computer; one would think the topics would just come naturally. The truth of the matter is, I live a pretty boring life surrounded by routine and normalacy. This makes the usual blog-that-reads-like-a-diary concept pretty hard for me to emulate.

Keeping this in mind, let me quickly explain what I want to do with this blog. First and foremost, I want to use this space to practice writing. I feel like since I left school it's a talent that has slowly withered and diminished. It's really one of those, "if you don't use it, you lose it," things and I think that if I can manage even a semi-regular posting habit here, I might be able to keep these skills sharp. If it does nothing else but get me to sit my butt down in a chair and focus on getting a few paragraphs out here and there, I'll consider this endevor a roaring success.

Besides that, I hope that this site will offer me at least a small degree of networking capability as well. I'd like to hear from other people like myself (ie. movie, book, and internet enthusiasts), to find out what you're doing, reading, watching, etc. I like to find new things and I think that this will be a great way to find out about them.

With all that out of the way, I have no idea what will be popping up on this blog. I foresee a lot of movie reviews/interesting stuff I hear about or read online showing up. I'm sure there will be the occasional personal adventure thrown in the mix, but probably not as often as I'd like.

So, if you're reading, let me know what you think. Advice, ideas, all comments are welcome. Hope you, whomever you are, enjoy reading this as much as I like writing it.

-J