Surprisingly, my legs were not sore at all from yesterday’s bike ride. This surprises me. My butt, however, was pretty sore. This does not surprise me as it was starting to get sore even before the ride was over. The world’s most comfortable bike seat it is not.
After finally burning off some calories through exercise, I blew it all by pigging out on junk food today. I am bad. But I promise to do better for the rest of the week or I swear, I will eat a box of Pop-Tarts un-toasted.
For the first time in about a thousand years I rode a bike. Jeff and I had been planning on doing this for awhile and after Jeff grabbed me a helmet a couple days ago, we made our plans. Naturally the weather was brilliant all week up until our bike day. As we started out there was a low mist hanging in the air, brimming with the promise of rain. Fortunately the rain was light and only persisted for a portion of the ride. Still, lacking the titular windshield wipers for my glasses, visibility was not quite what I hoped.
We rode the 7-11 Trail, which despite the name does not feature any 7-11s, Slurpees or Big Gulps. This trail runs parallel to the Expo SkyTrain line and we took the train to Patterson, riding back through Burnaby and New Westminster. The vital stats were as follows:
Total distance: 15.76 km
Total time: 1:04 hours
Average speed: 14.8 km/h
Highest speed: 32.4 km/h
Much like my old bike ride home from John Sherman Agencies, the toughest part of the trip (a good portion of which is downhill when going from west to east) was the last few blocks before getting back. I am happy to report that even with my out-of-shapeness I was able to peddle up each hill without stopping. This was made even more impressive because of my natural tendency to shift gears down when I meant to shift up and vice-versa. I’ll get the hang of it eventually.
The bike I’m using belongs to a friend and co-worker of Jeff and it’s significantly lighter than my bike was. It also has actual suspension so when I ride it over a curb it doesn’t feel like it’s going to fly apart. The kooky racing-style gear changers (incorporated into the brakes) took a bit to get used to and there was one instance where I slammed on the brakes when I enthusiastically attempted and failed to switch gears. I remained on the bike and not over the handlebars, though, so hooray for me!
While I feel fine now, I did note all of the muscles that were burning during the ride and anticipate glorious stiffness come the morning. Still, I didn’t crash, the weather was not as bad as it could have been and I finally got a little exercise, so I consider it a successful first outing.
Remember how there were two asteroid movies that came out close to each other (Armageddon and Deep Impact) and two volcano movies that did the same (Dante’s Peak and the creatively-titled Volcano)? This past year has seen the same thing happen with alien invasion movies set in L.A., namely Skyline and Battle: Los Angeles.
I watched Skyline and it was mediocre at best. The effects were decent and the alien design was competent if uninspired (the usual weird organic/machine hybrids, much like those seen in The Matrix sequels) but the movie overall was limp. The opening has some promise — a series of mysterious blue lights drop down from the sky — but once the alien reveal is made and the assault begins in earnest the movie lumbers along with its ultimately uninteresting band of survivors trying to escape the luxury beachside tower they are holed up in. Inevitably their numbers get whittled down as they get plucked off/sucked into the light or the hungry maw of an alien one by one. When it was down to the young couple who have both been exposed partly to the magic alien transformation light I realized I didn’t care about their fate. It’s suggested that their partial exposure (and the woman being newly preggers) may have saved them and even though the man goes through the whole transformation and becomes a big glistening alien hulk thing with blinky lights for eyes, he still retains enough of his human self to save the woman from being turned into an alien snack. To what effect I don’t know, since the coda also establishes that the aliens have pretty much trashed every city across the world and a nuke dropped on L.A. only made them even more ticked off.
It was a better ending than uploading a virus into the mothership, so I will give the filmmakers credit for that.
As with so many alien movies, the reason behind the invasion is so much poorly-explained, unbelievable nonsense. It seems that humans are being caught and used to ‘hatch’ new aliens, which begs the question of what the aliens did before they arrived on Earth. It’s not even worth pondering more than that.
Thumbs down, although the lead actor was kind of cute, so on a scale on one to ten aliens, Skyline rates three aliens and one mutant alien/human offspring. For having a cute lead actor in a bad movie, Skyline rates a six.
This is cribbed from a couple of posts I made in this Quarter to Three thread but I may expand my picks further here.
Best Game that Works With a Gamepad But They Actually Mean an Xbox 360 Controller and Good Luck with Emulation and All the Voodoo Required to Get It Working With Your Logitech RumblePad and Oh Yeah Even With no Gamepad Connected it Flashes ‘Press Start’ on the Main Screen: Renegade Ops. Bonus: the keyboard/mouse controls are awful, too.
Best Alpha Game Investment This Year: Minecraft
The Why Do I keep Playing This Stupid Game, Anyway? Award: Bejeweled 2, which I play nearly every night on my iPhone when I go to bed.
I Never Knew I Could Get so Sucked Into a Portable Game Award (not counting Bejeweled 2): Dungeon Raid
Best MMORPG I Downloaded the Trial for But Never Actually Played: RIFT
Favorite Class in a Beta Test of Diablo III Before They Wiped All of My Characters *Again*: Monk. Huge electric kick to the face!
Blandest MMO Test That Still Has me Slightly Interested: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Lifetime Achievement Award for Worst-Looking Human Males in Any MMO or Possibly Any Game Ever: World of Warcraft
The You’re a Big Fat Liar Because You Promised Not to Add More Games to Your Backlog in 2011 and Did It Anyway Award: Me
Fuzziest Warm Feeling for Supporting An Indie Dev and the Game was Pretty Good, Too Award: Dungeons of Dredmor, made by the local Gaslamp Games.
Indie Game With the Name Most Likely to be Misspelled Award: Dungeons of Dredmor (not Dredmore/Dreadmore)
I am officially™ halfway through my Unfun You Can’t Run period. Hooray!
The ankle has not been bothering me in any way lately, not even a twinge to remind me of where it once hurt. I am figuratively circling December 19th — the 8-week mark — as a possible test with a short run. I will only do so if I am absolutely certain my (stupid) ankle is ready. Perhaps I will also add the condition that it must be sunny on that day, too. That will all but guarantee I will keep waiting.
Here’s another bit of poetry I wrote back when I was forced to do so in that creative writing course I took in college (you can see a couple of other entries here).
This is one in a series of poems I wrote using the title The Ride. Put together, the set of poems was like a concept album in handy text form. Or something. This ride is not as terrible as some of the others but it should provide some evidence as to why I did not go on to become a poet. It’s a love letter to the rollercoaster. Maybe one day I’ll try reworking it sometime to see if my poetic terribleness has changed with age.
The Ride (number eight)
Wooden girders challenge
dare, invite
I cannot resist.
There is a certain smell here
Something faint and not easily determined
Cotton candy wispy, its sweet scent
catching the breeze and riding away
Corn dogs and greasy tacos, a trace of dust
peeling up off hot pavement
and into my face
Memories of others who have stood here
fifty years before.
I queue up, handing a rumpled ticket
that has spent too long in my pocket
A boyfriend squeezes his girl,
laughing as she shudders
A spandex suit with a woman poured in
giggles with apparent excitement
A gang of boys, each trying to outdo
each other with trendy clothes and
unique mousse stylings, declare their
lust for the ride; this is the tenth
time they’ve been here today.
I step up to the gate and watch
as a train pulls in, its passengers
whooping and screaming and swooning
and laughing and sitting utterly still
with no expression at all.
The gate opens and I bravely slide into
the front seat. The woman in spandex
squirms in beside me and a
padded metal bar locks on our laps.
There is no escape.
The train clatters out of the station
and turns to the first hill.
A chain takes hold and we are tilted back,
lifted toward the sky.
An indefinable moment exists
when the train reaches top
There is no feeling of movement,
no sound as the car is released
from the chain
Only the sky, completely clear,
neither far nor near
Then my stomach lurches upward
and I let my arms fly
My tuckus rises out of the seat
and I wonder why people do this
But I know why.
The sensation is reversed going
back up; my organs bob in confusion
What have we done to deserve this abuse?
Wind roars and the car trembles,
seemingly more frightened than its occupants
as it lifts and falls, turns and
hurtles into deep valleys
All too soon it ends.
Distant and not so distant screams
whistle away, the train breathes more calmly
and we are back in the station.
A uniformed and geeky sixteen year old,
blessed only by a lack of acne, quickly
motions us away.
The spandex woman is babbling incoherently.
I think she liked the ride.
She asks if I want to go again.
My endorphins answer for me
and we queue up for another go.
With the release of Minecraft 1.0 our little multiplayer group has started over on a new world based on the number 3. After establishing a main base of operations beneath a floating island we set out on individual projects. Circuit is building a giant house surrounded by Minecraft’s patented Wacky Water®, Q has been making rail lines in the sky in every direction, Postal is making his usual assortment of towers and castles and elf has burrowed underground where he has constructed a fiendishly efficient monster grinder. I’ll document all of those in a later post but for now, here’s my first big project.
I was inspired by Q’s pyramid on the last world so I built my own on a 64×64 grid on the desert not too far from our main area. When it was done I decided, like an unsatisfied Pharaoh, that it was too small, so I built another one beside it on a 128×128 grid. Having completed the second and massive pyramid I am beginning to understand why it too the ancient Egyptians twenty years and thousands of men to build these things — and mine was only made of pixels! On the other hand the ancient Egyptians never had to face creepers, either. The pyramid’s outer shell was completed with only two creeper incidents causing minor damage.
This is the view from the high point of the sky rail line that comes out to the pyramids.
To the left you can see a stone bridge and path connecting to the main base, with the rail line in the center of the shot. Next up will be the pyramid interiors and everyone else’s kooky stuff.
Minecraft is strangely soothing as you work out the most efficient ways to build silly things. And smiting creepers is always good fun, too.
Here is my sad story. But it has a happy ending, so read on.
There were a couple of things I did wrong in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2011, the main one being that I didn’t really prepare at all. Sure, I had come up with a few ideas to choose from in October:
Last year’s unfinished project.
A story idea I’d been kicking around for 20+ years.
A short story idea that I felt would cork in longer form.
An idea that was nothing more than a neat-sounding title. Why not?
Why not? In order:
Unfinished project: Maybe it was unfinished for a reason! I scratched this one off the list pretty quickly.
Story idea 20+ years old: I actually think the idea is fine but the story is beyond the scope of a 50,000 word 30 day dash, which I will get to in more detail shortly.
Expanding the short story: the idea is a good one but it requires research. Too much research (see #2).
The neat-sounding title: Yeah, I’m going to write a 50,000 word novel in one month based on nothing more than a neat title. In a fever dream, perhaps.
And thus problem #1: not enough preparation.
November also turned out to be Health Hell Month for me or HHM as I like to call it. When I went to dinner at a friend’s I mentioned I’d been experiencing a sudden health issue. The first word out of her mouth: “Prostate?” Yes, I am a man in his mid-to-late 40s. Yes, the frigging prostate. And then other ailments followed, minor but annoying and I found myself taking a mix of antibiotics (the ones I’m not allergic to), anti-inflammatory agents and dealing with discomfort, outright pain and when everything finally seemed to be mending back together I caught a nasty cold.
Problem #2, then: stupid body.
Another significant issue I had was trying to fit my ideas to the format, the main reason for the deaths of ideas #2 and #3 as outlined above. I didn’t want to write an epic that would go on for 200,000 words then consider myself a NaNo winner when I completed the first 50,000. I have no problem with others doing this, but it wouldn’t work for me. I needed something that could be written quickly, succinctly and with the ending reached before November 30th. My 2009 project was perfect for this — some people get on a late-night ferry, monsters hop on board and a night of snacking and horror follows. Simple, direct. None of the ideas I latched onto this year fit into a tidy little box like the ferry ride of doom. My ideas were too ambitious, effectively sabotaging my effort before I had even started writing. Sure, I might have pulled off one of them somehow if I had persevered but the chance of that happening was pretty slim.
Problem #3 can be thus be thought of as having square pegs and a whole lot of round holes.
I had suspended work on the second draft of my 2009 novel to work on NaNoWrMo 2011 and in that first week of November I found myself wishing I was working on that instead of flailing about with the current contest. This is not the mindset of a successful NaNoian.
And so it was that my mind and body, working together, defeated my attempt to write a slapdash novel in 30 days. And that’s not such a bad thing, really. National Novel Writing Month is a great way for a would-be writer to light a fire under his butt, to get that motivation going, to get into that very simple habit of writing every day, instilling discipline and reveling in the sheer joy of banging out words. But in a way I think I’m already there and this year’s NaNoWriMo came as a distraction. I didn’t need it.
Perhaps I’m just rationalizing my failure but I am confident I don’t need NaNoWriMo anymore as a tool to get me starting to write. I’m already there. How about NaNoWriMo as nothing more than a fun way to crank out a quick book? Sure. But that’s not what I wanted to do during the 30 days of November. And so I didn’t. Not in the way I might have planned, of course, but the destination was the same in the end.
I look forward to continuing to write, whether it’s forum posts, this blog, a short story or a novel. And maybe next year if I really want to write a quickie novel, NaNoWriMo 2012 will be there for me and I’ll use my foreknowledge to actually plan properly. Assuming the Mayans were wrong, of course.
Yes, it’s been one glorious month of not-running. My weight at its low while running was 143 (that’s pounds, not kilograms — weight in kilograms as it applies to the human body is one of those things I could never quite wrap my brain around. It’s like a kilogram is too big so I could never properly relate it to what I learned using pounds). Today I weight 155 and I am fairly certain the extra weight is not from newly-developed washboard abs. Let me check. Nope, definitely not from washboard abs. In fact I have been quite naughty on my diet but have been taking steps to correct this of late. I’m hoping to avoid my peak non-running weight from earlier this year (157), so we shall see.
Thanks again, stupid ankle.
With no money for a bike helmet I am really hoping the friend of Jeff’s helmet can be found soon™ as riding is a way I can keep in shape without hurting my apparently delicate lower legs. There is still swimming to consider but I would still need to actually learn how to do it. I already know how to ride a bike and I’ve been assured my years of collective wisdom that one does not forget how to ride a bike. I would hope I am not the embarrassing exception to the rule.
I am still entertaining the idea that I might be able to run after two months, so I am planing on giving my ankle a good talking-to, followed by poking and prodding come mid-December. If all goes well I will try a short run. By then we may be knee-deep in snow but I’ll just consider that a bonus if I get tired and need to collapse, as a nice cushy snow drift would work well for that.
Has it already been four weeks since I last ran? Yes, yes it has.
And I hates it.
My weight has been slowly creeping up as I lose all discipline and self-control. I am becoming soft and squishy yet I know the ankle is not ready, so I must continue to bide my time and ignore those sweet, scrumptious donuts.
I am nearly but not officially ready to admit defeat with this year’s National Novel Writing Month. With 12 days to go, I have failed to light a spark on any of my attempts to write a novel. Part of it is poor planning, part of it is various distractions (health, work, fun stuff like that) and part of it is fear of over-committing to a complicated story that couldn’t be reasonably delivered in 30 days.
But as I said, I’ve not given up quite yet. I’ll have more to say in about a week’s time.
