July 2020 weight loss report: Down 2.6 pounds

July was like June in reverse. Instead of being up 2.6 pounds, I was down 2.6 pounds. My body fat also dropped by half a percent and actual fat itself by half a pound. I am up three pounds on the year, but that’s down from a peak of nearly six pounds.

I am still fat.

But all signs are trending in a positive direction now and I’ve made real progress on curbing ye olde snacking, so I am reasonably confident the weight loss will continue.

I’m not going to aim for anything crazy like dropping below 170 by the end of August, but at least such a goal is no longer implausible.

Stats:

July 1: 177.4 pounds
July 31: 174.8 pounds (down 2.6 pounds)

Year to date: From 171.8 to 174.8 pounds (up 3 pounds)

And the body fat:

July 1: 23.4% (41.5 pounds of fat)
July 31: 23.1% (40.5 pounds of fat) down 0.5 pounds)

Everybody do the dinosaur

In my quest to draw more, I asked for a subject and was told to draw a dinosaur. As a kid, I drew approximately five million dinosaurs–and this was almost two decades before Jurassic Park.

Here’s an example of one I found in an old sketchbook. Is Godzilla officially considered a dinosaur? I’m not sure. But you know what they say, great artists steal. This is one of four drawings I did detailing my take on the Godzilla story, inspired by watching every Godzilla movie from the 1950s on KSTW’s Science Fiction Theater, noon every Sunday. Those movies were terrible, and wonderful.

I don’t know why I had Godzilla frozen in a glacier, but it seemed like a cool idea (ho ho). I considerately recorded the year he emerged, which means I was 14 when I sketched this particular masterpiece of terror.

My Godzilla still has small arms, but they are like bodybuilder arms, so he obviously worked out before getting trapped in the glacier.

Disco was at its peak in 1978, but I would argue we’ve had stranger years since.

Here in the strange (and undeniably more horrible) world of 2020, I drew this quick sketch of some generic dinosaur in Procreate, using the technical pencil brush. The only fixing I did was to erase some of the extraneous lines. It’s not bad for a quick sketch. But no glaciers. Or background of any kind. Sad dinosaur walking a barren landscape.

Book review: The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech

The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech: Computer, Consoles & Games by Peter Leigh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Retro Tech provides just what it says on the tin. Starting with systems in the early 1970s, it provides a summary of virtually every video game console and personal computer released up until the debut of the original Xbox in October 2001.

Each summary includes a generous number of photos, sometimes including controllers or oddball accessories, or more mundane things like the power supplies. Leigh offers both an historical overview and also his own personal assessment on each device, which at times stands in contrast to how I saw some of the systems, accounting for the differences in reception between the UK and North American (and in particular U.S.) audiences.

Each summary concludes with a look at three games from each system: The Must-See, the Must-Play, and the Must-Avoid. A lot of the Must-Avoids are typically obscure fare (no, E.T. did not make the list for the Atari 2600–though it does get mentioned alongside the “winner”).

Leigh keeps the writing light and at times droll, never being afraid to call out lemons and questionable marketing of years gone by.

I was struck by the sheer number of systems that came out in the 70s and early 80s. It seemed that nearly everyone tried to get a slice of the video game pie before the famous crash of 1983. While there are systems that never sold well here in Canada that I was aware of–like the MSX computers, there are many listed here that I was utterly unfamiliar with, even leaving aside the UK-specific machines that never made it over here.

For anyone who grew up when these machines were coming out (as I did), this is indeed a heady dose of nostalgia. For others, it serves as a brief and well-illustrated history of the early days of video games and personal computers. In fact, my only real knock on the book is that each write-up only amounts to a page or so. I would love to see a more in-depth look at the same topic. As it is, I was able to tear through the book all too quickly.

Still, this was an enjoyable look back and an easy recommendation for those who would enjoy seeing the sometimes wacky products that came out in the quest for the early gamer’s dollars (or pounds).

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Photos of the Day, Late Edition

These were taken over the past few days, but I was too lazy/indolent to post them right away.

Fun fact about the first shot: I used Pixelmator Photo on my iPad to remove an out of focus telephone wire from the sky. Yes, this image is not true to life.

But it looks nice.

These will probably grow into horribly sour crab apples or something. I’m not a fruitologist, so don’t quote me on that.

Delicious* Rowan berries!

* If eaten uncooked, the parasorbic acid will actually cause indigestion or, if you’re especially lucky, kidney damage. Per Wikipedia. (I didn’t sample any.)

Book review: How to Sketch

How to Sketch: A Beginner’s Guide to Sketching Techniques, Including Step By Step Exercises, Tips and Tricks by Liron Yanconsky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Book review: How to Sketch

This book does a good job in covering all the basics when it comes to learning how to sketch. Author Liron Yanconsky brings an amiable style to the subject as he introduces everything a new artist will need to know and need to have. Starting with the correct mindset, he covers some core concerns and requirements, such as accepting and embracing imperfection (you’re learning to sketch, after all), and the essential quality of being curious and seeking variety in what you sketch. He moves on to suggested materials, some basic techniques on how to use your eyes and even how to hold a pencil.

From there, he covers more specific aspects of sketching, including:

  • Perspective
  • Light and shadow
  • Tones and Textures

The final part of the book consists of working from included photos to produce full sketches of people, landscapes and more.

I suspect that at least some may become discouraged as they try to replicate the excellent results Yanconsky shows for each exercise. At times the sophistication required to accurately capture the scenes feels a bit like those old “Learn to Draw” ads that went from a few scrawled lines in the first panel to lavishly illustrated drawings in the fourth panel. Yanconsky addresses this in a way, urging the new artist to focus on sections, to build a sketch piece by piece when there is a lot to draw. His enthusiasm for the topic certainly helps.

As someone who can draw but not really draw well, I found the first half of the book, with its straightforward lessons on the aspects of sketching, to be quite helpful. While I may never been a sketching whiz, this book has helped me in ways that my own bumbling around wouldn’t have.

Recommended.

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Book review: The Dream Interpretation Handbook

The Dream Interpretation Handbook: A Guide and Dictionary to Unlock the Meanings of Your Dreams by Karen Frazier

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a bargain purchase, using my two criteria for such:

1. Is the book on sale?
2. Is the subject interesting to me?

If the answer is yes, I buy and take my chances if I am not familiar with the author.

I came away disappointed here, for a few reasons. While the book is competently written and is logically divided into two parts, the first being some background and historical analysis of dreams, and the second being a dictionary that defines possible meanings to specific dream events/objects, it ends up having a little too much woo in it and also comes across as a bit facile.

As an example, it’s stated that if you dream about aliens, you may be feeling alienated. I mean, really? Many of the scenarios fit into this kind of literal interpretation, which may make “sense” but also doesn’t require an entire book to illustrate.

In the end I just wanted more and maybe that’s not realistic when it comes to dream interpretation. The author emphasizes repeatedly that you may want to check your personal frame of reference before seeking more universal symbols/meanings to your dreams. This makes sense, but it even further diminishes the value of offering dream interpretation. And a lot of it just comes down to “you may be anxious about [thing]”, unless it’s a dream in which you are flying, one of the apparently few positive dream experiences anyone has.

I have not read other books on dreaming, so I don’t know if this work is representative of the overall body of dream interpretation, and to give author Karen Frazier credit, she provides a decent list of other sources to check out.

Still, I didn’t feel like I got much out of this and can’t really recommend it.

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Book review: Ruined By Design

Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It by Mike Monteiro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mike Monteiro is angry, angry at design, angry at designers he feels are complicit in the design that has ruined things, but he is especially angry at Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg for their leadership at Twitter and Facebook, respectively.

In recent months (July 2020 as I write this; the book was published in 2019) both social media platforms have taken a few steps to enforce what rules or standards they may have, notably when it comes to the content that Trump posts, but I suspect these minor actions would do nothing to curb Monteiro’s ire—and it really shouldn’t, if you buy in even a little to his central premise.

That premise, presented with enthusiastically crude language, is pretty straightforward: Designers have aided and abetted social media platforms into becoming wretched hives of scum and villainy, by simply doing the work asked of them without questioning it, by never objecting, by never “becoming the change.”

In the introduction, Monteiro lays out his take on the world in general and social media in particular:

“We designed the combustion engine that led to global warming (climate change deniers can just stop reading right now). We designed the guns that kill school children. We designed shitty interfaces to protect our private information. We designed the religions that pitted us against one another. We designed social networks without any way of dealing with abuse or harassment. We designed a financial incentives system that would lead Mark Zuckerberg to assert what’s good for the world isn’t necessarily good for Facebook; and lead Jack Dorsey to believe engagement was a more important metric than safety. Either by action or inaction, through fault or ignorance, we have designed the world to behave exactly as it’s behaving right now. These are our chickens coming home to roost.

The world is on its way to ruin and it’s happening by design.”

From here, Monteiro splits his effort between listing the many crimes committed by design (both literal and figurative—a go to example is the engineer at Volkswagen who was “just doing his job” when he programmed the software that would fake diesel emission test results—and went to prison for his efforts after the scandal broke) and offering possible solutions, with a mix of hope and humility. He doesn’t claim to have all of the answers, but he’s willing to put stuff out there, if only to get conversations started.

Framing design as a political act, Monteiro agitates for change from within (unless you work at Twitter or Uber, he advocates outright quitting those two companies), for designers to question decisions that will lead to bad design or worse, deliberately deceitful or malicious design, to find and work on diverse teams, to use the role of designer to stand up against dark patterns, ethically questionable decisions on handling data and so on.

Monteiro is a UX designer with over 20 years of experience and beings immense passion to Ruined By Design. It’s obvious he deeply cares about design and how it has changed the world for the worse. He admits he may lack precision in language—citing his use of “nickel words”—but his ideas are clearly presented, and argued in extensive detail. It’s hard not to root for what he calls for.

The book is aimed directly at designers and though Monteiro uses a broad brush to indicate just who might qualify as a designer, I am not part of this audience. The closest I get to design is choosing a font for the body text on my blog and I am assuming that I am not making the world an actively worse place by choosing Roboto Slab over Helvetica. But even though this book is not aimed at me, the arguments are so compelling and accessible, and apply to so much of what I interact with on a daily basis—that so many of us interact with on a daily basis—that I find myself recommending it unreservedly.

There is a lot to chew on here, and Mike Monteiro does an excellent job in both illustrating the problems design has caused, and the possible solutions that may mediate the damage done.

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Exciting heel update #2

It’s been four days since Tuesday’s heel tragedy. The good news is I can still walk and perhaps even walk and chew gum at the same time.

The bad news is my heel is still sore. Is it as sore? No. But it’s still sore, and it peeves me and continues to mystify me. But I went for a walk with Nic through Mundy Park today to take a bird picture (yes, we only saw a single bird. Well, actually, only one specifically in a tree. There was also a duck in the water.) and while my heel was starting to feel a little more sore toward the end, I got through the excursion without limping, curling up in a ball or demanding that Nic carry me out, and it is no worse for the trip out now, later in the evening and having been off it for awhile.

I was originally thinking I could run maybe as soon as this Monday (two days hence) but now it seem the end of next week is probably more realistic. Oh well.

Stay tuned as I suspect there are more heel updates to come. Woo.

Heel update: First and hopefully last in a limited series

When I went to bed last night I was sad because my left heel was still pretty sore from whatever mysterious thing happened to make it sore. I mean, I walked 19 km in just under three hours, but the right heel didn’t seem to mind, and I can’t recall the last time either heel objected to a walk so forcefully.

I regret to inform the six bots scraping this site that my left heel is still sore.

However, it is definitely improved over last night, so I am cautiously optimistic that I will not spend the bulk of my vacation hobbling around like an old war vet or a young protester after interaction with those supposedly there to protect and serve.

That said, I only walked to the store to get a few needed items, then another four blocks to meet my exercise goal for the day. The urge to walk more was approximately nil, which makes me sad, because I walk all over the place.

Tomorrow: Probably another update, hopefully the last.

As for vacation, the heel preoccupied my mind and body, so other than the store, I did a whole lot of nothing. I feel mildly guilty about this, so here’s a haiku about my vacation to make me feel like I did something:

Vacation

Take it to relax
But oh yeah the pandemic
Afraid to go out

Hmm, that wasn’t especially cheerful, was it? Or not cheerful at all. Maybe tomorrow, with the heel back to somewhat normalish, I will be more inspired to think in positive terms.