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Monthly Archives: June 2018

It’s been about 200 years since I was current on Spider-Man’s happenings but I love the look of this trailer.

I don’t know if this is supposed to be in 3-D or not. There is a lot of RGB channel shifting, but it isn’t there all the time so I’m not sure.

Even with that nit-pick, I love-love the imagery and it’s got the fun dialogue that the Marvel hero movies have done so well.

I want to see this in a theater.

Riot Fest has a great interview with one of my favorite artists, John Reis. He’s the mastermind/frontman of some of my favorite bands (Rocket From the Crypt, Hot Snakes, Night Marchers) and he always has some sun-bleached So.-Cal. wisdom for people.

We’ve always just done things in a way that we would appreciate if someone else did them. If one of our favorite bands came through and did a whole tour of shows for free, that’d be so cool. We could afford to do it, so we did that.

The Hot Snakes are playing the Fest. The rest of the lineup looks ridiculous.

The Murderbot Diaries is a series of novellas by Martha Wells. They’ll all be published this year. The first two are out now, with #3 due in August and #4 in October.

As novellas, they’re an easy length and they don’t get bogged down in too much worldbuilding arcana. It was a nice change from The Luminaries.

The premise of the first book:

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

The fist two are good reads. It’s not genre-defining fiction or anything, but there are some really cool ideas and it’s written well. I’m looking forward to the rest.

Thumbs up.

My current one-rep max on the bench is 275lbs. Here I am training with 265 on the bar and 30-35 pounds of assistance from the suspended bands. It is a little tricky to get the bands perfectly balanced, but a 2-pound difference between the sides isn’t a dealbreaker.

This exercise with the reverse bands and a paused first rep (“reverse” because I’m using the bands to assist the lift rather than add resistance to the lift) train a couple of things:
1. speed – with the bands helping you lift from the bottom you can experience moving heavy-ish weight quickly
2. explosive movement from the bottom – it’s different from speed, the pause forces you to “explode” into the up-motion instead of using momentum from a bounce off of your chest
3. heavy weight in your hands at the start – a common mental block I run into when I’m benching is just how heavy a 100% or 105% lift feels at the start. The bands allow you to feel the full weight at the top but then assist the movement through the range of motion. It’s a trick you’re pulling on your brain (which I continue to fall for) and a confidence builder.

As always, 10,000 thank-yous to everyone at The Weight Room for all of the coaching, programming, and support.