Welcome to Muscle Park, a relatively-new theme park in the relatively-new Odaiba area of Tokyo.

Muscle Park is dedicated to all manner of physical and mental gymnastics, but in a good way, and without any uncomfortable locker room moments. Why did we go? Muscle Park has a special training ground for Sasuke, which you may know as as Ninja Warrior! (If you watch G4!) If you've never seen the show, I highly recommend dropping it on your TiVo. It's an amazing physical challenge / game show involving a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses. The first course looks mostly fun. The second course looks mostly really hard. The third course looks mostly impossible. And to give you an idea of how challenging the fourth and final course is, Sasuke has run for twenty seasons, and only two people have ever actually won. (Cultural note: can you imagine how quickly, say, Deal or No Deal would have been cancelled if there had only ever been two winners in 10 years? But it's genius: when someone fails you feel it in your gut, and if someone wins it feels like you've just watched history unfold.)

Enjoy! Mike eats a giant burger! Which actually wasn't that giant! Dave actually tackles Sasuke! And does way better than I would have! A local shows us how it's done! Despite getting a splinter on the hunging tree tumor!


(Here's a YouTube mirror, just in case.)

Hey, here's something you've probably already seen!

Earlier this year I gave a talk (my first public presentation ever, actually!) at Johnny Rentzsch's intimate and engaging C4[1] conference in Chicago. Despite nervousness, it was really great fun. We had just recently finished Coda, and with one hour to fill and a lot of Coda-related things still swirling around my mind, I pretty much just started talking. What followed was a whole lot of hyper-warp thoughts about all things Panic.

I almost didn't post the video of it here because I think, subconsciously, this blog is a kind of cyber-vacation from work stuff, which explains why I talk about junk food and post dumb photos all the time. That said, I realize that you, dear reader, might actually be interested in these kinds of behind-the-scenes Panic things every now and then. And my parents probably haven't seen it either. So, uh, please enjoy!


Bonus Content! Here's my complete C4 Presentation.keynote (6.91 MB) file for your interest. Follow along! And here's that Grid.psd (52 KB) file — I believe it's the document I used to demonstrate my vector shapes+layer effect technique in Photoshop.