Today I had some blood drawn for some standard tests prior to my check-up. It could have gone worse, it could have gone better. I’ll edit in the summary I write on Broken Forum. For now a haiku:
Draw some blood for tests
Fasting first leaves me woozy
Some pain then float home
Yes, Bejeweled is 10 years old and has been out for the iPhone (and iOS) for ages, so why review it now? Because I can!
And also because I have a scary number of hours invested in it, as it’s my go-to game when I tuck myself into bed but am too tired to read. Yes, Bejeweled is the equivalent of a warm glass of milk or sleeping pill for me, something PopCap probably won’t use as a bullet point in their features list.
In terms of presentation there’s nothing to really complain about here — the screen is bright and clear, controls work well and I’ve never noticed any performance issues. It’s a match-3 game and they are generally pretty hard to screw up. The one graphical failing is that the yellow gems, when they are turned into fire gems, look too much like orange gems.
The worst thing about the gameplay is the randomness. There’s no way to see what gems are coming up so you can only plan based on what is on the board at the moment and unless you’re in Zen mode the game will eventually give you nothing to match at some arbitrary point. You can delay the inevitable by keeping a hypercube in your pocket (made by matching five gems) because that matches with any gem adjacent to it and usually opens up enough of the board to present new combinations.
Compared to the now-pulled Bejeweled 2, this version (based on the PC Bejeweled 3) lacks the standard timed mode, which I enjoyed as a change of pace and replaces it with Diamond Mine, which would be more intriguing if the difficulty didn’t ramp up almost immediately. In Diamond mine you must dig down and uncover artifacts to keep the game going but because the random mechanics are still in place and you have a timer, it’s all too easy to quickly have no viable moves. This mode more than any seems to rely on sheer luck and the added depth of the gameplay is short-circuited by randomness.
Butterfly mode was added recently and it’s always nice to see new content show up in a game you already own. The idea is interesting — random colored butterflies appear at the bottom and move one row up each time you make a move. If a butterfly reaches the top it is eaten by a spider and the game ends. So far so good. But there are two problems affecting this mode. The first is the same randomness. Too much of the game is simply out of your control. Making matters worse, the number of butterflies increases very quickly, making it even more difficult to find viable means to clear them. On the plus side, it may actually make you better at the base game because you need to use all the strategies in Butterfly mode to simply keep advancing. It’s not enough to match three, you must also work out ways to get butterflies to collapse back down instead of reaching the top, create chain reactions to take out multiple butterflies and so on. It’s a shame there is no difficulty setting because the games are ultimately too short to be satisfying.
In the base game the addition of glowing gems, created by intersecting two groups of three, is a nice addition. Match a glowing gem to two others of the same color and you get a satisfying cross-shaped explosion. It’s even better when one triggers another. In fact, explosions may be the best thing about Bejeweled. Matching two hypercubes ‘fries’ the entire board and gives you the hypercubes back, too. This is part of a major improvement over 2. In previous versions it was very easy to accidentally blow up stuff you were laying out. In this edition explosions have been restricted to adjacent gems only, so you can be a lot more precise and if you create a special gem in an explosion it will still be there after. Who knew improving explosions would be the best thing in a Bejeweled game?
Profiles, stats, achievements and leaderboards (local only) round out the presentation and all are presented well. There is also the Blitz mode that ties in with Facebook but I do not play Facebook games because they make my teeth itch, so I can’t offer any opinion there.
Overall, this is ultimately a slickly-presented but shallow match-3 game. At some point the game will decide it’s time for you to lose. Sometimes it’s on the second level, sometimes it’s on the 14th. But as a ‘I’m in bed and kind of sleepy but would like to engage my brain in some small way’ Bejeweled is A-OK. It’s available on the App Store for 99 cents.
P.S. WHY DID I WRITE SO MANY WORDS ABOUT BEJEWELED? I DO NOT KNOW!
Distance: 10.02 km
Weather: Sun and cloud mix
Temp: 6ºC
Wind: light
Calories burned: 700
Average pace: 5:47/km
Total distance to date: 1090 km
With conditions about as good as you can get for the first week of March, I set off on my second return run today and I had a nutty plan.
I was originally planning on running 5Ks this week to work on getting my stamina back up but I felt surprisingly good after Monday’s run so I devised a plan that would encourage me to run a full 10K.
First, I set the actual Nike+ sensor to track a 10K run instead of 5K. I’ve done this before and nothing bad happens if you don’t run the full length, you just don’t get the countdown in the last km if you quit early and your run report shows it was set for 10K when you only did 5K, you wimp.
Next, I plotted my route. Unlike Monday I did not take the SkyTrain to Burnaby Lake. Instead I walked there, a distance of about 4K. Once there I chose to start out on the south side of the lake and would quickly reach a point of decision: I could either run 2.5 km, turn around and get the 5K that way or I could keep running to get the 5K and if I was too tired to continue could walk the rest. But that would put me halfway around the lake and mean I’d have about a 10 km walk back home (and no transit tickets or money to cheat my way out of it). So this would encourage me to keep running to…avoid walking.
And it worked!
As the chart below indicates, my pace was slower even from the start vs. my 5K on Monday but that was deliberate. I wanted to avoid cramps if possible and the more measure pace did just that. You can also see after the initial few km of ‘oh god this is what it feels like to be running again’ my pace moderated and settled down.
In comparison to my first-ever 10K on December 30, 2009, I was actually three seconds faster — not bad for not running one in six months (and considering that first 10K was just the capper on regular runs that had me going up to 8K).
Temperature-wise I didn’t need the gloves I took and the jacket was probably optional, though I wasn’t overly warm wearing it. The air still had that last kick of winter in it. As the title of this post suggests, though, it is now warm enough for the bugs to be back. I had to wave them out of my face a few times but had no intake incidents.
Chart:
| Mar 7 | Mar 5 | Feb 6 | Feb 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 km | 5:06 | 5:02 | 5:06 | 5:06 |
| 2 km | 5:22 | 5:17 | 5:15 | 5:21 |
| 3 km | 5:30 | 5:24 | 5:21 | 5:31 |
| 4 km | 5:33 | 5:30 | 5:25 | 5:37 |
| 5 km | 5:35 | 5:33 | 5:28 | 5:39 |
| 6 km | 5:38 | — | — | — |
| 7 km | 5:40 | — | — | — |
| 8 km | 5:42 | — | — | — |
| 9 km | 5:45 | — | — | — |
| 10 km | 5:47 | — | — | — |
Released in March 2011, Collapse Into Now is R.E.M.’s 15th studio album, coming 28 years after their first (Murmur, 1983). It also fulfilled their five-record contract with Warner and, as it turned out, was their last studio album period, as the band announced in September 2011 that they were ‘calling it a day’. Despite an interview around that time where Mike Mills, the bassist, had claimed relief at being free of the contract, Collapse Into Now doesn’t sound anything like a contractual obligation album. Instead, it is a fitting end to a career that spanned three decades.
Before getting to the album itself, a little background on the latter half of those 30 years is worth exploring.
First, this chart:
The last two albums are missing from the list but according to Wikipedia, the sales for them were:
Accelerate (2008): 350,000 in North America, combined worldwide sales of 627,500
Collapse Into Now (2011): 142,000 in North America (prior to the band’s announced breakup)
Out of Time is easily the band’s biggest success commercially and despite being a ‘dark’ album, Automatic did very well, too. The band changed course with Monster, going for a grungier straight-up rock approach but the majority of fans stuck with them. That changed with New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which (barely) failed to reach the coveted 1 million mark. The decline continued apace and didn’t reverse until Accelerate. Collapse Into Now sadly failed to catch on, performing even worse than the somnambulant Around the Sun. It’s hard not to imagine the tepid reaction factored in the band’s decision to break up.
R.E.M signed a gigantic contract in 1996 and at the time it was widely viewed as too rich but the band had proven their worth to Warner with multiple million sellers, so it seemed like a small risk at best. Two things happened, though, that made that risk much larger than it initially seemed. First came Bill Berry’s departure in 1997. While he left on good terms and went on to periodically play with the band, it created the first stirrings of break-up talk. It also coincided with a restlessness the band seemed to be experiencing. New Adventures has a number of good tracks but to me the album feels like an at times uneasy hybrid of the feedback-laden Monster and the darker, more acoustic sounds of Automatic. The impression is that of a band exploring and trying to find new things to stay interested and engaged in the process of creating music, with mixed results.
With their drummer departed the band seized on the chance to play with drum machines or to completely de-emphasize percussion, leading to 1998’s Up, an album that opens with the murmuring echo of “Airportman” and overall has a melancholy feel to it. The band shed most of the melancholy for the follow-up, Reveal (“Imitation of Life” is classic R.E.M.) but the arrangements were becoming ever-denser and elaborate, almost baroque (see: “Saturn Return”). By 2004 the band was adrift and Around the Sun, though opening strongly with “Leaving New York” is a muddled affair, none of the songs actually awful but likewise none distinguishing themselves in the mid-tempo morass that comprised the album. Sales cratered.
In 2008 they decided to strip things down and came up with Accelerate, a 34-minute album that lives up to its name, starting out with the propulsive “Living Well is the Best Revenge” and ending the same way with “I’m Gonna DJ”. In-between the album does slow down to catch its breath on a few tracks. Audiences responded by lifting its sales past Around the Sun. But something happened after that. It’s almost as if a large contingent of fans felt they had met their own obligations in supporting the band so when Collapse Into Now released, it debuted decently (#5) but sank quickly. (The negative-sounding album title and first track “Mine Smell Like honey” probably didn’t help.)
And that’s a shame (here comes the review) because Collapse Into Now is the band’s best album since 1996. It builds on the strengths of Accelerate by maintaining the energy and joy of that album while expanding the musical palette to include a better mix of songs and styles. Still exploring, the band reins in a lot of the excesses of the post-Berry era and for the most part delivers a worthy coda to their career.
Two of the same keys that worked on Accelerate are featured here — Mike Mills’ prominent backing vocals and keeping the percussion forward in the mix. At the same time the album breathes more freely than Accelerate so quieter tracks like the plaintive “Walk it Back” and “Oh My Heart” fit better as part of the whole. In a callback to their earliest albums Michael Stipe’s vocals are often pushed back in the mix. Not that he seems to mind, as he whispers, shouts and croons with enthusiasm throughout the record.
The standout tracks are the opening “Discoverer”, “Uberlin”, “Oh My Heart” and “It Happened Today”, all if which can easily stand beside the band’s best efforts. The latter features soaring, wordless vocals for much of the song, recalling a similar approach used in the chorus for “Orange Crush” from 1988’s Green. “Discoverer” is a speeding train of an opener, an energetic track that segues into the similarly up-tempo “All the Best” before pulling back for the simple acoustics of “Uberlin”. “Discoverer” reappears as the coda to the album’s final song, “Blue”, closing the circle and perhaps hinting at the band’s coming demise. “Blue” is a great example of R.E.M. going back to its older material for inspiration, with Peter Buck’s mournful guitar at the beginning echoing “Country Feedback” from Out of Time and Stipe’s spoken word performance calling back to the same album’s “Belong”. Heck, even Patti Smith shows up, providing ethereal backing vocals just as she did on “E-bow the Letter” from New Adventures.
In the end, the lack of commercial success for Collapse Into Now doesn’t matter much as R.E.M. is no longer an ongoing concern and the bandmates have vowed never to reunite. I wonder if it will some day become the ‘forgotten classic’ of R.E.M.’s catalog. It would be worthy of the designation.
Unlike most of the links I have listed under the My Links category, I am actually using this site on a daily basis!
While the name is a bit cutesy for my taste, MyFitnessPal is a fairly good tool for tracking diet and exercise and since I’m a wee bit off from where I’d like to be weight-wise, it seemed like a good idea to start using it. There is a thread on Broken Forum where a bunch of us have become fa(s)t friends and signed up. I was also having issues with the Livestrong app I had been using (and paid for), including an obnoxious issue where it kept popping up daily reminders on my phone, even after I had turned them off, so I was ready to make a switch.
MFP is much better-behaved and the website makes entering info easy as pie. Mmm, fattening, delicious pie.
Yes, I am back on the bandwagon again, the bandwagon being ‘writing something on the blog every day no matter what’. As always, this means some days will be what one might call content-light, while others will be a little meatier. I think I am dangerously close to mixing metaphors here.
We’ll see if I can stick to this tomorrow!
Distance: 5.02 km
Weather: Cloudy
Temp: 6ºC
Wind: gusts up to 50+ km/h
Calories burned: 351
Average pace: 5:33/km
Total distance to date: 1080 km
A funny thing happened a month ago.
I completed my run on February 6th and all seemed well. I had improved on my previous time and seemed back on track for a )hopefully) successful year of running.
The day after that run I was walking to the store to get a loaf of bread or BreadQuest as I like to call it. As I walked I felt a funny little twinge around my right ankle. When I got home I poked and prodded and discovered that the spot on my ankle that had been sore — and that I had just taken three months off from running to allow to heal — was every bit as sore as it ever was. Not wanting to risk further injury, I very reluctantly decided to hold off on further running until I could have it looked at.
This time I chose not to go to a walk-in clinic but to sign up with an actual doctor, the same one my partner has had for years — keep it in the family, so to speak. We had a consultation on February 29th and he told me the likeliest cause of the soreness was a small hernia. Unless it gets severe there is no specific treatment apart from icing it and basic monitoring. So I was cleared to run again. Woo!
Today I did just that. It was a chilly but sunny day and also windy as heck, with gusts over 50 km/h. I do not like running in the wind, so I waited until later in the afternoon, hoping it would die down. The good news is it clouded over in the meantime. Wait, that’s not good. As I headed out I quickly realized a single layer was insufficient and came back to grab my jogging jacket and a pair of gloves. The jacket was a good move, the gloves proved unnecessary as my route around Burnaby Lake proved an excellent windbreak due to the copious stands of trees alongside Cottonwood Trail.
The route I took:
My average pace of 5:33/km was down from my previous run of 5:28 but considering I’d been off for a month, that’s not bad (and better than the run prior to that when I came in at 5:39). At the 2K mark the cramps became fairly bad so I walked them off for 15-20 seconds and then finished the run without any further issue. The legs feel fine now, no soreness or pain.
I expect a little soreness tomorrow. And a good sleep tonight.
My next run will be on Wednesday if all goes well.
Chart:
| Mar 5 |
Feb 6 |
Feb 3 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 km | 5:02 | 5:06 | 5:06 |
| 2 km | 5:17 | 5:15 | 5:21 |
| 3 km | 5:24 | 5:21 | 5:31 |
| 4 km | 5:30 | 5:25 | 5:37 |
| 5 km | 5:33 | 5:28 | 5:39 |
Since I am not so much exercising the body at the moment (more on that in another blog entry coming real soon™) I have decided it is time to exercise that other flabby part of me: my brain.
I am going to start out simple with that old standby, the haiku. I dedicate this one to writing.
I shall write some more
To remove words from my head
And set them amok
Yes, I have been negligent in not updating the blog of late. I don’t have a good excuse, so this serves as notice that I shall post more regularly starting with this post here.
And then another tomorrow!
(Which will hopefully have more content than this one.)
Distance: 5.03 km
Weather: Sunny
Temp: 10ºC
Wind: none
Calories burned: 351
Average pace: 5:28/km
Total distance to date: 1075 km
Today I started my first full week of running and the weather was again perfect: 10ºC, no breeze and sunny skies. I did things a little differently by riding the SkyTrain to the Sperling/Burnaby Lake station and walking about 1 km to the Burnaby Lake trail, specifically to the bridge that serves as the unofficial halfway point of the 10K or so loop. I then ran along the north side of the lake, toward the Brunette River portion of the Central Valley Greenway, with the intent of doing a brisk cooldown walk for the 4 km remaining after the run.
All went according to plan and even though it still seemed to take ages for each km to be called out on the iPod, I managed to keep going without stopping, the cramps kept more in check this time.
As for the strobe light effect, there is a fairly long stretch along the north part of the trail that is nearly completely straight and the angle of the sun and proliferation of thin, leaf-free trees combined to create a rapidly blinking light effect on my eyes, constantly flashing like I was in a disco. It was almost seizure-inducing but had the neat side-effect of distracting me from the aches and soreness of being horribly out of shape, so it all worked out.
In other good news, I improved my pace by a good amount, knocking 10 seconds off my average pace.
Chart:
| Feb 6 |
Feb 3 |
|
|---|---|---|
| 1 km | 5:06 | 5:06 |
| 2 km | 5:15 | 5:21 |
| 3 km | 5:21 | 5:31 |
| 4 km | 5:25 | 5:37 |
| 5 km | 5:28 | 5:38 |
I decided to wait an extra day before running again for two reasons: first, to give myself an extra day of recovery after my first run in Quite A Long While and second, to get myself back into the Monday/Wednesday/Friday pattern I had been following last summer.
I walked the 3.5 km or so to the Central Valley Greenway but once there was put off by the appearance of a tractor and pickup truck trundling along the narrow roadway. Since the construction crews are going to be working there for a good long time I walked the extra distance to Burnaby Lake proper, my old stomping/jogging ground of last summer, back when my stupid ankle was not being stupid.
I planned for a basic 5K and conditions were ideal: it was a few degrees cooler than Tuesday but well above freezing and the sky was completely cloud-free. There were several moments when I could feel the actual warmth of the sun. Spiffy. I brought along gloves but removed them shortly after starting the run. This time freezing up was not an issue.
My greatest moment of concern came at the 1.76 km mark. The cramps had returned and unlike the band these cramps were neither musical nor fun. I paused the workout and walked for about 10 seconds, getting my breath under control, then resumed at a deliberate pace. I managed fine the rest of the way and reached that magical point where I knew I could do the total 5K. I even tasted a wee bit of that old stamina.
I expect my calves to be sore as all get-out in the morning.
The ankle still feels fine.
My overall speed, as mentioned elsewhere, can be described as ‘brisk tortoise’ with an average pace of 5:39/km. I deliberately started out a bit slower in order to minimize cramping and you can see a couple of impressively massive dips in speed as my out-of-conditioned body plodded on. But plod I did and in the last few km you can see how I hit my plateau and the pace flattened out just like it ought to (only about 30 seconds slower than I’d prefer). I declare my second run of the year a success.
Stats:
Total time: 28:23
Distance: 5.02 km
Calories: 351 burned
| 1 km | 5:06 |
| 2 km | 5:21 (+15) |
| 3 km | 5:31 (+10) |
| 4 km | 5:37 (+6) |
| 5 km | 5:39 (+1) |
(I’m writing this the day after the run to capture how my legs feel on…the day after.)
It was cool and a hard rain was blasting down from the heavens, as is often the case at this time of year. I waited and waited some more, aware of how much daylight I had left and how much time I would need.
By 3 p.m. the rain was still falling steadily but had eased up from moonsoon-like to merely light. I knew if I put off running again — I was already two weeks past my ‘all clear’ time frame — that I would keep finding excuses.
So I ran.
I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and shorts and definitely did not feel underdressed. My hands, in fact, felt like blocks of ice shortly into the run. If I run again in similar conditions I’ll bring along a pair of gloves.
I chose to run the Brunetter River portion of the Central Valley Greenway, a 2km stretch illustrated below via Google Maps.
I had planned on running 5K and the run started well. I had a spring in my step, I was listening to one of my most favorite songs evar (Guadalcanal Diary’s “Litany (Life Goes On)” and I felt good for just having made the commitment. By the 1 km mark my hands were numb, my lungs were ablaze and I was experiencing unpleasant cramps. None of this was surprising, really. Three and a half months is long enough to lose pretty much all of your conditioning. By the time I got back to the main gate I decided to call it quits with only 2K completed. While it’s quite a bit less than what I planned, it’s a start and I’m confident I’ll last longer next time (which should be Thursday).
As for how the legs feel: Goods new, everybody! /Farnsworth
The ankle is perfectly fine and I only feel some very light stiffness in the leg muscles. So far so good. Hopefully 2012 will be a good year for jogging, as long as the Mayans are wrong.
The meager stats:
1 km: 4:58 min/km
2 km: 5:16 min/km
Total time: 10:39 min. (woo, hardcore)
The first km is actually a pretty decent pace but the crash became very evident shortly after I passed the halfway mark and the reality of not running for 100 days caught up with me. But hey, even the 2K time is still better than some of my runs of yore so I’m still more fit than I was back in the pre-run days.