To be clear, I am not a photographer and have no desire to be one! I’m enjoying the heck out of snapping pics of sunrises and ‘outside’ while out running however. I honestly find something new to marvel at every time I go out. It’s a big part of why I’m pretty sure running on a treadmill will never work out well for me.

The running is going great here in Cinema Fromage land and I absolutely love it, currently piling up around 16 miles per week. So glad to have finally made myself take that first step! My first 5k happens on September 3rd and I can’t wait. I’m sure there will be some pictures of that.

Total Mileage:
Running Year to Date: 90.13 mi
August to Date: 47.1 mi

As you can see, the bug start to sink in at the beginning of this month!

I’m still walking too, I’m up to 237.22 miles for the year!

Until next time…

It’s not suprise to anybody that things here at old Cinema Fromage have been….stagnant. I’ve updated sporadically and the fire’s just not there behind the old keyboard. Starting this site back in 2005, I was excited, enjoying life and enjoying the admiration and stuff from you readers and other peers; it was pretty great. It was pretty great for quite a few years. But, as often happens, times change, priorities get shifted and interests just start to fade.

It’s a hard thing to go through, years of putting your heart into something only to slowly watch it waste away. Really, that’s where I am these days with Cinema Fromage. I don’t want to let it die; I love it too much. I still plod away on the keyboard regularly; it’s just moved to pursuing writing in a format that you’ll get to see, just some other day and in a different format. I still love my horror movies, but the awe and wonder just aren’t the same. I just don’t have time. That leaves me at the cross roads of what is this site for, and why do I continue to pay the bills?

Over the past few months, I’ve taken to bettering myself on the physical front. Weight was becoming a problem, so I took to the streets to fix it. That is to say, I started walking a lot and eventually, started running. The weight is doing pretty awesome right now, and not really the point. The point is, I’ve spent quite a miles with nothing but myself and my over spinning brain mulling things over. (Note: Exactly 250 Miles to date!)

More often than not, especially here lately, I find myself stuck on the future of Cinema Fromage. These days, it’s obvious that my attention has be turned near fully to the realm of Podcasting. I’ve three solid shows (I think so, anyways!) that I love doing. These show’s aren’t going anywhere; I’m still going to be churning out the Hammer Love with Derek and Scott on 1951 Down Place. I’m still going to be the loveable PR bear over at Bloody Good Horror, just not as bear like. I’m still going to be putting out Dad and his Weird Friends as well. But none of that really has to do with Cinema Fromage.

To be frank; I’ve lost any real desire to churn out movie reviews in the written form. I had passion for it, but I don’t know that I had any kind of great talent at it. I started to feel the burnout a good two years ago and since then, the reviews petered out and here we are today. While I do put in a lot of podcasting work, there are sites for those shows out there and posting about them here? It’s a bit repetitive. That leaves the big question; what do we do with Cinema Fromage.

I’ve thought many times that I’d use it as a personal blog, especially with trying to slowly kick start a writing career. Every good author needs a solid site. I’ve even taken a stab and doing such a thing here, but then I get self conscious about the idea and think ‘this is supposed to be a horror blog, nobody wants to read this stuff’ and then….I quit. Those ideas always start to die out as soon as I begin to violate some unwritten horror blogger code that exists solely in my brain.

With all this time on hands to mull things over as the rest of my body does all the work, it started to dawn on me that maybe it’s that hang up that I have that’s holding me back. Maybe, that nugget of an idea that thinks of Cinema Fromage as a still active horror blog is what keeps me from transforming this blog space into something different, something more personal? Eventually, this line of thinking lead to the idea that maybe it’s time to put the idea of my separate little horror blog to rest.

And well, here we are. Putting Cinema Fromage, the horror blog…to rest.

With that out of my system, here’s what I can tell you happens from here. CinemaFromage.com? It’s still going to be here. I’d like to think I’ll be posting a lot more here soon too. Hell, it’s probably going to even look the same because I put a lot of work into this template and I think it looks neat! The content however, will be different.

As I spent my hours racking up 250 miles, I returned a lot to where I see myself going as a blogger and what exactly I should do. I kept coming back to the idea that these days, I don’t think of myself as a horror blogger so much. I think of myself as more of an old school raconteur, a guy who likes to tell entertaining stories, keep people interested by whatever whim I happen to stumble across and that’s when it hit me; why not just go back to just telling stories.

Sure, I’m still going to talk about movies from time to time. I’ll even talk about books, TV shows and all sorts of stuff. Hell, I’ll probably even do more actuall horror blogging over at Bloody Good Horror! Cinema Fromage here is just going to morph into something bigger and better, something a bit different for me. After trying to be a writer, worrying about keeping up specific content here, preparing for three different podcasts and trying to be with my family as much as I can? It all adds up. This way? I can excel at the others and use CF for the fun times.

So please, feel free to stick around and see where this new idea leads. I’d love the company!

Friend, cohort and confidant Derek M. Koch from over at the Mail Order Zombie and from some other spiffy little podcast I heard about called 1951 Down Place has released his new Kindle e-short “Granny and the Hole”! Derek’s been working on this for a bit, so it’s exciting to see it on the shelves! I’ve had the pleasure of reading it already, so I can say…you’re gonna like it.

“Granny and the Hole” is available exclusively on the Kindle at the moment and will cost you a mere $1.29. That’s a bargain!

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DEREK M. KOCH’S SHORT ZOMBIE STORY “GRANNY AND THE HOLE” RELEASED FOR KINDLE

Derek M. Koch, producer of the long-running zombie movie podcast Mail Order Zombie, released his zombie short story “Granny and the Hole” on June 3, 2012. The story, a tale of a man who refuses to let death stand in the way of a relationship between his mother-in-law and his daughter, is available for Amazon Kindle as part of the Kindle Select program, or for purchase for $1.29.

In addition to producing Mail Order Zombie, Koch has directed an award-winning zombie short film, appeared as a character in other authors’ zombie stories, and has seen his own zombie stories previously released in other publishers’ anthologies. “Granny and the Hole” is the first story released by Koch’s Black Sombrero Publishing.

“Granny and the Hole” can be found on Amazon.com at http://tinyurl.com/grannyzombie. “Granny and the Hole” will be released for other e-reader formats later this year.

About Derek M. Koch

Derek M. Koch lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, his cats and his zombie movie collection which forms the basis of the award-winning podcast Mail Order Zombie (http://www.mailorderzombie.com). The movie collection is for the podcast. His wife is “patiently” supportive. The cats are waiting for dinner. He can be found online at his website Plan D at http://www.derekmkoch.com.

It’s story time boys and girls! Here’s a brand spanking new serial that *may* get woven in between the ongoing episodes of “Trouble Gum” here on CF. Give this a read, if you’ve been around here for awhile, these faces may not be all together unfamiliar .

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Long Time Gone Part 1: Unfamiliar Faces

Clomp, clomp, scritch, scratch, the stout man and the burly dog at his side trudged in silence over distant hills. The man’s shoulders hung low with an unseen weight, his back bent into the pressing breeze, away from the sun that set behind. The dog walked with head slung low, nose pressed to the packed dirt beneath, its ears cocked forward as he snuffled away in concentration.

The duo spoke not a word, nor even spared each other a glance. Yet it was clear in their matching strides, the matching dour looks that rode upon their faces and the way they moved as one that the two belonged together. This man that stood just a hair over six foot tall and stared into the distance ahead with steel black eyes that saw forever would on occasion reach over to give the dog’s sagging ear a quick but gentle tug. The dog, standing nearly to the man’s waist with a chest as broad as a wine cask, thick black fur that stood patchy at best would pause in his nasal search to touch the mans hand with his nose. Nothing more passed between the two.

On and on they marched through the grasses and hills outside the Village Noble, their path always straight ahead and never straying. One foot in front of the other they marched, never pausing to gather their bearings or for a bit of respite and rest.
more…

As you can see, I’ve been slacking off here on ye olde blog yet again, but for good reason this time. I’ve been making some pretty major changes and embarking on a long ass haul to lose weight. Some years ago, I went through some therapy to deal with a newly diagnosed anxiety disorder and it helped. Part of that therapy was choosing some problem areas that I myself identified and fixing them. The first of those problem areas? Smoking. I smoked a pack a day easily, so I tackled that first. That was a year and a half ago, so I’d say I definitely won that fight. I feel pretty great because of it! The problem with it though….I replaced the smoking when I felt nervous, agitated, etc….with food. So…a year and a half later, I found myself at 351 pounds and miserable again.

Here we arrive at change number two decided in those therapy sessions a few years back; it’s time to drop the weight. Around three and a half months ago now, I started exercising in the mornings and cutting out some of the bad stuff from my diet and it worked for the most part. It wasn’t on anything too strict or detailed diet wise though. Around a month after I started making some minor changes, we received a general bulletin at work that our in house clinic was starting a new weight loss program called F.U.S.E. and they were taking applications and surprising even myself…I didn’t hesitate. I applied on the spot and around a month later; I was in.

Once our group sessions started, I was assigned a weekly group meeting, a health coach for one on one session and regular nurse and dr. visits throughout the 10 week program to track progress and such. At first it was a bit intimidating, but I stuck with it. It was also a bit shocking at first too as when I met with my health coach the first time, the first thing she told me was, “I’m not going to give you a diet.” The catch is…this program wasn’t just a weight watchers clone or something like that. This program I found myself in was in fact much like therapy all over again. Their goals are to teach you how to deal with things like emotional eating, how to overcome barriers and set reasonable goals to keep yourself motivated. Once a realized that this was in fact what the F.U.S.E. program was aiming to do, it clicked for me and off I went.

Now, I’m down 33lbs so far and feeling pretty great. I still have a long way to go, like a bit over a hundred pounds to go as a matter of fact. But that’s okay. It’s a long haul and I’m getting my head on straight to be able to prepare for it. It’s still not easy, but I’m staying positive and I still have my health coach to turn to when staying positive starts to break down. Just yesterday, I found myself starting to worry over small stuff such as my calorie intake (I’m eating around 1800-1900 calories a day as opposed to the 2230 my tracker tells me I should eat) thinking that maybe I was eating too little and possibly hurting myself. Staying after group to talk to my coach for a bit cleared that right up. She simply said you’re eating enough, its working and you feel fine; stop over thinking it. Just like that, I had confirmation that I wasn’t hurting myself, so I was able to pull my head out of the fog of reading to much into every health blog I find and now I’m set to just keep on trucking as I’ve been doing!

So now, back to focusing on the positive stuff. As you can see in the picture above, I noticed getting dressed this morning that my belt has four distinct notches in it. That’s four times now I’ve had to tighten my belt! I’m starting to learn that sometimes when you don’t see the numbers drop on the scale, they’re starting to drop elsewhere, so don’t panic! This week, I had my mid-program checkup; I’ve dropped 3.5″ on all of my measurements (.5″ on my neck) and my BMI dropped by 3.5. Pretty shocking! So between the help of a coach and seeing positive trends like that, I feel like I can get back to normal life a bit such as my writing, reading and podcasting. The whole weight loss thing had kind of taken over my life and distracted me from these other things but now that I see that I was in fact over thinking it; I can just stick to the routine that I’ve built up because those 33 lbs are proof that it’s doign just fine.

In light of all this, I’ve had a number of people ask me how I’m doing it, so I’m happy to share. My writing’s been stagnant, but I’m kind of getting into a groove here, so blogging about this weight stuff is a good help to great the gears so to speak. Yah? Yah.

Anyways, I’ve upped my exercise significantly. I started out with cardio only, but as of last week, I started incorporating some weights as well. I’m pushing 40 and was living the life of a lazy nerd, so I’m not pushing a whole lot of weight. I make lifting those 15lb dumbbells sound like an Olympic event though! So now, the typical day looks like;

Roll out of bed! around 5:15am
Eat breakfast! This consists of two pieces of toast, two servings of egg beaters and cereal.
Ride the exercise bike! I stretch for five minutes first, then I do 25 minutes every morning and the bike is firmly planted directly in front of my computer monitor! Netflix is now my bestest early morning friend ever! So far, I’ve watched the second season of Supernatural, the first season of Breaking Bad, the first season of Sons of Anarchy, The first season of Star Trek Voyager, all of the second season of Game of Thrones so far and right now, I’m on the second season of Sons of Anarchy!
Shower/Get Dressed! I sweat like a mofo! It’s also cool cause I’m finding I can wear close stashed at the back of the closet again!
Eat some more! Before heading out for the day, I eat a Clif Bar to help recover from the bike while having another cup of coffee. I’ve always drank my coffee black, so I didn’t have to change anything there!
Grab my lunch and go! Here’s a big key moment, at least for me. I take my lunch, cause it’s easier to stick to the diet. The catch is; I pack it and log it the night before. I log all of my food at MyFitnessPal. This is highly important! It makes you accountable and it’s the only way you can be sure of your calorie intake! There are other sites for this too, they’re all handy so pick your fave. So, since I eat the same thing for breakfast every day and my lunch is already logged, I don’t even think about counting calories until I get home and get ready for dinner. So….doesn’t feel so much like a diet!
Snack time!I eat frequently. If I had a big workout the night before, I get hungry by the time I get to work. Discounting that, I always get hungry again around 10:30am or so. So, I eat! I’m big on Apples and Banannas right now, so that’s generally my snack. Sometimes one of each, sometimes just one. They’re fruit, so it’s all good! They *do* have calories, but I’ve already logged it, so who care? (See how that works?)
Lunch time!Lunch is generally good sized. Today, I have a turkey sandwich with light mayo, some Special K Sea Salt Cracker Chips (30 of those bad boys in one serving!), yogurt, cottage cheese and a ‘Nanner. Some days I eat this every day of the week, some days it gets switched up. I like cherry tomatoes a lot so sometimes those are in there. If I cook chicken for dinner the night before, I throw a couple extra on the grill for lunch instead of a ‘sammich. Once in the swing of this, this leaves me pretty stuffed.
Snack time! Again!I get a rumbly in my tumbly about 3-3:30ish. So, back to the crack fruit….er Apples! Sometimes, I crave something salty, so I go to the Smart Pop microwave popcorn. It’s aiight, though it’s no movie flavor butter. A full back is only ~200 calories though, so it’s cool. Due to the salt though, this isn’t an everyday thing.
Dinner!Dinner is a tossup. It’s almost always a meat and a veggie, sometimes pasta. It’s also almost always 400-450 calories too. Thankfully, Colleen is an awesome cook, so this is generally pretty tasty too!
More Exercise!if it’s not a weight day, I do extra cardio. It’s either another 25 minutes on the exercise bike or a three mile walk. It all depends on the weather and my own whimsy. I’m a fickle beast, what can I say!
8pm Cutoff!With my coaches urgings, I do my best to not eat after 8pm. If I’m hungry again post workout or something, I eat a light snack, usually an apple or bananna again, sometimes popcorn. As my coach and program teaches me, it’s best not to eat after 8pm but if you’re hungry…eat. Just eat right! And don’t beat yourself up over it, it’s not the end of the world.

So…that’s what I do. I’ve added in weights on Monday (arms) Tuesday (legs) and Friday (chest). On these days, I generally only do one cardio. In another post, I’ll detail what the weight routine looks like but if you’re curious, come join me on Fitocracy! (It’s fun, you get achievements for working out!) Generally, my calories break down to 550-600 for breakfast, 500-550 for lunch and 4-450 for dinner. The rest is snacks. The biggest thing I’ve learned and the coach had me share with the group yesterday is that shopping right is key! As you can see….I eat a lot! It’s just low calorie!

Again, I’m not fitness guru by any means. This is just showing what I’m doing that works. It’s also a way to break the ice and get my lazy arse writing again! I plan on blogging some more of the process here as it helps me to feel accountable and less likely to slack off. The positive reinforcement helps a ton too! For now, I’ve rambled on long enough, so enjoy and feel free to comment!

Until next time, if you touch my apple, I’ll break your fingers.
Also, I can’t spell banana.

-C

It’s been some time since I’ve mentioned it last, but you may remember that I have a third podcast with my friends Brother D and Need a Nickname Scott over at Mail Order Zombie. The show is called 1951 Down Place and it’s dedicated to Hammer Horror! With the release of The Woman in Black coming from the newly re-birthed Hammer Studios this weekend, I figured it would be a good time to start sharing my love off Hammer with you all.

Today, our firth episode hits the feeds with our lengthy discussion of “Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter”! This is a great episode, if I do say so myself. Then again, I’m biased as I’ve named “Kronos” as my third favorite Hammer flick of them all. We try and go fairly deep on the information side of things with these podcasts, so there’s a lot of information we’ve dug up from production notes, film makers and the like.

Check out Episode 5 over at the 1951 Down Place Website and please, let us know what you think! You can leave your comments at the site or email us through podcast@1951downplace.com or even give us a call at 765-203-1951!

Since I haven’t shared all of our episodes here at Bloody Good Horror, here’s the list of Hammer goodness available to you over on the feed:

Episode 1: The Horror of Dracula
Episode 2: The Curse of Frankenstein
Episode 3: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Episode 4: The Abominable Snowman

That right there, is the 41 chapters I have mapped out for a writing project. I’ve got a pretty good feeling about this one and now that I have a road map, it’s not quite so scary. All the same, this will be my biggest writing endeavor yet!

Wish me luck.

Not to get over excited…but this is the most fiction I’ve churned out in ages. Feels good too.

I’m not just a podcaster, I’m a listener too! That sounds pretty ‘infomercial-ish’ doesn’t it? That’s okay. In addition recording three shows, I listen to quite a few as well, dedicated to any number of subjects. As you can imagine, a big podcast topic for myself is books. Enter the Sword and Laser Podcast!

Hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt, S&L puts out a new episode near weekly, chock full of book news, book discussion and more. Being familiar with Veronica Belmont from her days on TekZilla and Revision3, it was initially her name that drew me in. It was the ease that her and Tom worked together and the good discussions and handy info that kept me around. My favorite part of S&L has to be their calendar and new segments. Genre book news can be scattered all over the internet depending on their publishers and Veronica and Tom do a good job of pulling all the interesting stuff together. Their book discussions as great, but as of late their reading books I haven’t gotten to as of yet, so I tend to gloss over those.

In addition to a great podcast, they have a thriving Goodreads Community with a lot of good discussion threads as well. I’ve found a lot of information on book releases and recommendations from those boards alone.

For a moment of fawning fanboyism, you could say that Veronica & Tom’s work on Sword and Laser is what inspired me to start Dad and his Weird Friends. Enjoying their fun of being able to geek out on a good book, I figured I wanted to do the same! And since they already had a great formula, I tried hard to come up with a concept that complimented that as opposed to borrowed from it.

The Sword and Laser Podcast. If you like the books we’ve been covering on Dad and his Weird Friends, you’ll like this one too.

This past Christmas, I received a shiny new Kindle Fire and I was pretty ecstatic. Having received the newly named Kindle Keyboard the previous year, I was already a full blown member of the Kindle Cult.

I’ve been eyeing the new tablet since that exciting press conference that Amazon put on last year and have been planning on getting once from the start. My quests up front though were a bit conflicted. The biggest question of them all; could I give up reading on e-ink. That’s a tough call to make as I happened to feel that e-ink revolutionized ‘electronic reading’ already. It was easier on the eyes and the battery life was amazing. Another question I had; would I actually be able to use the Fire as a full fledged tablet. Internet browsing, games, apps, etc. etc…Would it satisfy over other tools such as an iPad or a bunch of Android tablets? And the final question…would the weight and battery life be a factor. Having spent a good two weeks with the tablet now, my questions are now answered and over all…I’m pretty thrilled with said answers.

Tablet Vs. E-Ink

My biggest concern going in was if I would still enjoy reading on Kindle Fire. As you can see with the podcasts and everything else…I read a lot. Normally, you can guarantee I’ll get in at least an hour of reading every day, more commonly up to two hours in a full day. So it was a pretty major thing to work out.

By default, I wasn’t in love with reading on the Fire. It wasn’t horrible by any means, but reading black text on a glaring white background is a definite adjustment when you’re used to a year of reading on e-ink. Thankfully, this is a quick and easy fix though. With a couple of clicks, I was able to adjust the display style to white text on a black background, which was a good fit for myself. (You can also set to black text on an off white background, but the black was the magic ticket or me.) With the options dialed in, read was nice and I was good to go.

Keep in mind; these are all a matter of personal taste, so your mileage may vary. You could be perfectly fine with the default settings and I know in the case of my wife…it was fine for her as well. After reading a book or two, I noticed another problem that was starting to creep in with reader; it was heavy. When compared side by side to the Kindle Keyboard, the Fire has a huge weight difference. This is to be expected since the device is packing a lot more hardware in there, but still and adjustment all the same. I always read in bed before falling asleep. Lying on your back, holding the Fire up to read, it starts to weigh down over time. This is easily remedied by shifting position, but it was a problem I never had to deal with on the Keyboard.

With all of these considerations, for straight up reading, I wound up going back to the trusty old Kindle Keyboard. It’s light, it’s e-ink screen is great and hard to pass up. Really, there is nothing about the Kindle Keyboard (Also known as the K3) that I would change as far as straight up readers go. It goes with me everywhere, so weight is a factor. Another big factor? I can read to my heart’s content and still only have to plug-in the K3 once every other month for a charger. With heavy use, the Fire lasts me a day.

Now, having said all that… don’t you dare walk away thinking that I wound up not liking the Kindle Fire. That’s not the truth at all. For a straight up E-Reader, I prefer the classic K3. When looking at the Kindle Fire as a tablet? For that function, I’ve been nothing but happy.

The Tablet

For starters; I’m not a user that would consider a tablet a ‘need’. When contemplating a tablet, I’m thinking pure luxury item. I want to browse the web, I want to play games and I want to watch movies. For those items, the Kindle Fire works great.

Paired with the ‘free paid app every day’ program at Amazon, I’m to the point that I have games lined up in my account that I haven’t even downloaded yet. From what I have played, the games all run quite well on the Fire’s hardware and make for a good time. Some are buggy mind you…my mahjong game that you see in the top picture, it decides to crash out at random every now and again. I’d place that blame on the developers and not the Fire itself.

For movies, I’ve yet to pony up the $80 a year for the Amazon Prime account, so I rely a lot on my Netflix account. Again, this works great. Paired with a nifty Android Video player app that I found called BS Player, I can now play all my local divx and MKV files straight from a shared folder on my PC as well. Without transcoding too. (< — That’s a big deal.) The video playback is surprisingly good, even on 720p encoding videos. Mix in the gesture based controls, and I’m pretty happy.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Fire’s Silk Web Browser and I’ll be honest…I don’t really get the technology. I.E. I don’t know what’s supposed to be special about the Silk Web Browser. That’s okay though. For my needs of browsing forum boards, reading blogs and stuff like that? It works pretty great. It’s fast, though no faster than say… the browser on my phone, but still fast enough.

Okay, I’ll be honest… It works pretty great reading web comics in bed.

In The End

Ultimately, the Kindle Fire; it’s a great tablet for $200. I’m not going to be jumping into a $600 iPad any time soon and frankly…I don’t really need to. The Fire covers my needs, centered around media consumption, quite well. The Fire could have some use in my day job as far as productivity and such, but again, it’s not a need. Many in the corporate world are in love with the status symbol of an iPad when they’re in a meeting, but my cell phone works just as well for that, so I see no need to lug the fire into a conference room with me. I’m not too worried about remaining a two device man with my Kindle Keyboard and my Kindle Fire…both server specific needs, and they serve them pretty damn well.

You’ll have to pry my Kindle Keyboard from my cold dead fingers though.