I must apologize for my apparent inability to maintain a steady schedule of updates, but everyone can stop worrying as I am returned, alive and well!  So much has happened since I last wrote, I’m not sure where to begin..

Karl and I are back from our trip to Buchanan County, Virginia!  While we were gone, Zach and Mike took it upon themselves to arrange several guest music picks and they even kept up the ElCycle podcast with a sort of “guest cast.”  We have since resumed normal podcasting one day late with a wonderful guest, the always-brilliant Ellen!  We’ve been married for eight years and have six children.  Anyone interested will be able to hear more from her here in the near future…

I will have more to say in my next post, but it’s late.  Goodnight, er, well, “Goodmorning!”

-Shane

PS - I missed you guys! 

This past Friday I was lucky enough to see the Dark Knight midnight showing and I had this to say:  The Dark Knight Is One Hell of a Night.  I really cannot emphasize enough how totally ass-kicking-awesome it was.  Highly recommended.  Go see it.

In other news, Joss Whedon’s internet musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has come and gone.  Whedon and several others were inspired during the height of the Writer’s Strike to create something without the aid of the big studios in order to prove to them that quality productions were possible on a low budget.  I, for one, thought that Dr. Horrible was fantastic.  Unfortunately, those of you that missed it will either have to purchase it on iTunes or wait for the DVD release.  You can read more about that from fellow ElCycler Zach at this location: Internet Musicals.

You haven’t really heard me rant or rave about video games yet, but E3 happened recently.  I have to say that I am rather dissappointed in Microsoft’s plan for the new Xbox 360 Dashboard update.  It’s juvenile and alienating to us, for lack of a better term, more “hardcore” players.  Normally I wouldn’t exactly count myself among that crowd, but I certainly don’t fall in with the “casual,” family gamers.  At any right, Microsoft is being a little too silly for its own good.  I’m hoping to see that change before the update rolls out.

-Shane

PS - Sorry no fancy shmancy new podcast this past week, half of us were out of state…  Hope you enjoyed the aptly named “emergency” podcast and even if you didn’t, we’ll probably be back up to normal operating parameters this Friday.

Okay, so I spent most of yesterday night/this morning creating the latest iteration of the main page at ElCycle.org.  It’s not the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, but it ain’t all that ugly either.  All the links are nice and organized and it’s a lot cleaner.  I think you’ll like it!  Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme some feedback (sing song voice)!

-Shane

We’ve consolidated our Video Game and Cinema review blogs into one “Multifarious” blog.  We realized that we really weren’t using either of them to their full potential and in this way we would be able to review more than just the two catagories.  You can read all about it here…

-Shane

There has been a lot of inner discussion, turmoil, and a number of hostile military takeovers here at ElCycle.org in recent weeks.  I know that I haven’t been on the up and up as far as keeping with my blog is concerned, but I’m working on it.  Several new podcasts out now, with a number of special guests!  We’re looking into revamping the site design as well.

I have to tell you about something that’s really got me excited.  Mike recently purchased a screen capture device that allows one to take the audio/video output from say, an xbox, and send that to a computer where it can be fed through any number of alternate dimensions and transformed into video.  I’m looking forward to collaborating with Mike on some sort of machinima project (machinima: clips, videos, or entire films created using footage taken from video game engines, in a nutshell).  I’m a gigantic geek and I love it.

I’ve really gotten back into webcomics of late, or rather I’ve really found myself spending far too much time in front of the computer scrolling through the internet…  Two recent discoveries:  Overcompensating (which, I still have to finish reading, there are a lot of archives…) and Bear & Kitten.

PS - Be on the lookout for new changes in the near future…

PPS - The site was actually down for about twenty minutes to a half of an hour today, but I contacted technical support and they were able to resolve the issue quite quickly.  Something about this or that fucked up with our “htaccess” file or something, I’m unclear on the specifics…  At any rate, it’s fine now!  Righteous!

-Shane