(sc)animu part 2

What I was actually intending to talk about on Tuesday was all the animu I've watched while I've been scanning.

Specifically I wanted to do a quick run through of the shows from the most recent couple of seasons that I'm either watching at the moment or watched a bit of and dropped. These are actually all via crunchyroll - a site I still dislike, but that I've gotten used to. I've actually also got quite a lot of fansubs I need to plough through too, but for the moment I've been concentrating on crunchyroll.

Gosick

The mysteries are duffers, but the relationship between the characters is interesting. It's also nice that it didn't go down the harem or even the fan-service routes. Not that I dislike either (au contraire), but it really wouldn't have worked for this show. It could do with introducing a Moriarty, though.

Hourou Musoku (Wandering Son)

I have to confess I've found this a little confusing - the anime dumps you right in the middle of things and I'm pretty sure would work 100 time better if you're already familiar with the manga (which, apparently, starts at the beginning). But it's a very sensitive, poignant story that's boosted by some staggeringly beautiful imagery.

Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? (Is this a zombie?)

This and the next show, Dragon Crisis are both based on Light Novels and it really shows - both are jam-packed with clichés and tropes so heavily used I could probably write them myself. However, I think over the years I've come to expect this from Light Novels, so my expectations have become suitably lowered, plus, and this is always a plus, they're available legally for free. If I was buying the shows, well, actually, no, I wouldn't buy them.

Dragon Crisis

Of the two, I think I prefer Zombie, because it takes itself less seriously, the fan-service is slightly better and the animation is more consistent. In Dragon Crisis you get bits of intensely good animation which have clearly been paid for by having entire episodes of people standing still and talking. However, Dragon Crisis does redeem itself by not really being a harem show. I think your mileage will vary, especially if you're a loli fan.

Level E

It turns out that Level E is a comedy/parody type show. Although I had no idea what it would be, I have to admit I wasn't expecting that. Neither was I expecting it to be so consistently good.

Beelzebub

Comedy is always the most subjective of things and unlike Level E, while a few things made me chuckle, the constant repeating of the same "baby cries and then electrocutes them" gag got very tedious, very quickly.

Rio Rainbow Gate

Oh dear. Looked like it was going to be a cheesecake fan-service show, and while that is there, it was weak, with poor character designs and cheap animation. The framing was also so cliché it was painful. this is one of those shows that's so average it's horrible - you can't even enjoy it for being bad.

Tantei Opera Milky Holmes

This really didn't do anything for me. It seemed to have a really jarring mix of fan-service and kid's-show style cutesy, but also it looked like it was going to involve mysteries (the "Holmes" in the title) but then didn't have any and was more like a crap magical girl show.

Demon King Daimao

I only watched one episode of this, as the crunchyroll is heavily and ham-fistedly censored. It seemed like it would be an okay fan-service / harem-comedy show without that, although the animation looked like a bit of a victim of a low budget.


I've also watched quite a lot of shows on crunchyroll that I've completed. I've decided to do more thorough reviews for these, almost certainly via this blog, rather than on trismugistus.com, but I though I'd do a bullet list and one sentence summary here:

• Giant Killing: Quite good, but flagged a bit towards the end. Also clearly a second season was intended.
• Asobi Ni Ikuyo: Didn't really get it. Is it meant to be parody? Poor one if it is. The ham-fisted fan-service censorship has the feel that it's meant to be a joke, but if so it's just an annoying one. Saved by a satisfactory conclusion.
• Occult Academy: Promising, but a little directionless.
• Omamori Himari: Enjoyable fan-service heavy harem show with a good conclusion.
• Chu-Bra: Rather weird - feels aimed at younger audience with a 'life lessons' style, but for perverts.
• Panty & Stocking: Meandering, unfunny, toilet-dwelling rubbish, frankly, until the demon sisters appear, and even then only really has flashes of quality.
• Fortune Arterial: When the vampire stuff kicks in it raises it above being a bit wet, but until then it's horribly dull. Even after it's not that much better. Rubbish ending.
• Time of Eve (Eve no Jikan): It's proper Isaac Asimov sci-fi stuff.
• Shinryaku! Ika Musume (Squid Girl): This is a fun, bubbly sort of comedy show, but I have to confess it all felt a bit aimless to me - if it had managed to get in some proper environmental stuff, which the first episode suggested might be a theme, then I think I might have liked it a bit more.
• Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai (The World God only Knows):- Manages to have it's cake and eat it - we get all sorts of moe tropes, but there's a clever, grown up element to it as well.

sherlock holmes

There was no rental DVD this weekend, so instead I watched the recent Guy Ritchie/Robert Downy Jr/Jude Law version of Sherlock Holmes.

This was actually my first proper Blu-Ray, having got my computer with a Blu-Ray set up a couple of weeks back (what a faff that was!) and I have to say it was, slightly surprisingly, a pleasant one.

This was slightly surprising, because I went in expecting not to like their version of Holmes. I'd heard talk of it being a "re-imagining" and that can be dangerous word. What I found was a rather entertaining and more faithful than expected version.

I can't pretend to be an expert on Sherlock Holmes. He's one of those characters where everybody knows who he is, but on the whole it's based mainly on acquired knowledge or the films they've seen. I do know that in films he's often presented as being older and less active than he was in the books. This is even more true of Watson, who's often depicted as being quite a lot older and fatter than Holmes.

In fact, when solving cases, Holmes and Watson were always dashing around and getting involved in fisticuffs. And Holmes of course is a master of disguises.

However, I'm not sure this was quite to the extent depicted in this film - there was clearly a desire to make Holmes something of an action hero, rather than spending all his time thinking about things and examining clues. Of course he does those too, but the focus is clearly on the running around and the fighting, rather than the thinking.

They've also tried to shoe-horn in a bit of a love interest and there's an interesting elevation of Watson to similar levels of deductive powers as Holmes. So they have changed stuff, but I think it all still works. The key is that this increased action and the sops to more conventional films all hang off a genuinely well thought out and executed plot with a reasonable mystery.

Visually and stylistically it all works - my first full Blu-Ray experience was good from this point of view.

If I was to make one criticism it would actually be with Downey Jr's accent. No, actually, that's not quite it - his accent is basically fine, my issue with more with how he's speaking.

For some reason they've gone for something akin to received pronunciation. You know all those old clips of people talking on the BBC where they speak in an oddly clear, almost accent-less way? That's received English.

Why I had a problem with this is because the whole point of it being received is that nobody actually ever spoke like that - it's an adopted style, so why would Holmes talk like that?

What also didn't help was that there seemed to be an attempt to include something of Johnny Depp's weird way of talking in Pirates of the Caribbean. This worked for that character, but doesn't make any sense for Holes.

It's a minor thing, really, but it did grate somewhat.

(sc)animu

This last few weeks I've been doing loads of scanning.

What's been good is I've really been sticking with it. Since the backlog started to grow I've had a couple of session where I did a few magazines, but nothing like I needed to in order to make a decent impression in it.

The backlog was getting really quite stupid - I had getting on for a years worth of magazines to scan by the time I decided to get my act together and by the time I got my new process flowing it had grown to around 15 months.

I've still got 15 months worth of new types, but for everything else I've taken it down to about 9 or 10 months. Of course, new types traditionally have the most images in them, so that's perhaps not quite as good as it sounds, but the main point is that I'm eating through the backlog at a much faster pace than I'm receiving new magazines.

In fact, my hope is that (barring any unforeseen problems) I'll be up to date by Easter. Given that Easter isn't until the weekend before my birthday this year, that's sounds closer than it is, but I think it's a goal that's strikes a good balance between realism and ambition.

I mean, even if I still have a few magazines left by then, all the bank holidays should give me the chance to finish them off. And there is a potentially big hurdle that could scupper my timings though.

That hurdle is the whole scan-stitching process.

My new scanning process is based around my new computer, which I ended up with after my games-machine update. I now use an A4 scanner, which means all of the magazine pages need scanning in two parts (all the Japanese anime mags are printed on pages larger than A4) and then using the automatic photostitch to stick them together.

Now I have been playing with my process, experimenting to see what works best in terms of input to the automatic photo-stitch thing in photoshop, but the results have been mixed. The main success has been that I've realised a lot of the pre-processing I've been doing is essentially un-necessary.

When I started with this new set up, I was making sure to crop and align each of the scans so that they would be 'easier' for it to stick together. However, it turns out that this is basically unnecessary - it doesn't appear to make a jot of difference to the end results.

This is good, because it's meant I've really been able to speed up the actual scanning. I managed to belt through 4 whole animedias in about a week, for example, which is really helping me catch up.

Except what it's also doing is creating a huge number of files that I'll then need to go back to in order to stick together and finish off. Now this would be okay, but it's a horribly tedious process.

But also, it's the type of job that can't be done while doing something else as well. While I scan I watch anime (which is what I'd intended this post to be about, but I've dribbled on so long I'm going to break the posts into two!), but I can't do that with photostitch. The actual automatic bit of the process is at that sort of length where it's not instant, but not long enough for you to let it run while you do something else.

But also, this is where the bad side to photo-stitch comes in - I can't for the life of me work out a way to get it to perform consistently. A lot of the time it's great, but then every so often it will just throw a total wobbler and repeatedly make a complete arse of sticking things together.

This wouldn't be bad if I could work out why and how to avoid it, but I can't. About the only thing that seems to consistently cause it a problem is when two images are quite simple (e.g. big block of colour), but even this doesn't universally cause it grief.

Anyway, the point is that I could end up in a situation where I simply transfer a backlog of unscanned magazines into a backlog of unstitched pictures.

mildly moist

At the weekend I like to go for several long walks.

In particular, I like to go for a reasonably long walk just after lunch on both Saturday and Sunday. I also try to go for a shorter walk on Saturday and Sunday morning, but this can be disrupted by my schedule or the weather or, to be frank, if I'm feeling tired or unwell.

However, these shorter walks are bonuses, and it's the main big walk that really counts. I've talked about them before, but roughly speaking they're always based around where I live, so that I can just grab my keys and my MP3 player and go. I like to do them without dragging loads of accoutrements around and by doing them around where I live I know I'm always a reasonably short distance from home should I need to go back.

Now one of the things I've been trying to do with the walks is build up my distance. In fact, distance is my primary concern, and I try not to clock watch. Of course, watching the clock is useful - walking faster burns more calories - but I don't tend to think along the lines of doing a 45 minute walk, it's more about doing a 5km walk, or whatever.

But if you think about it these aspirations are slightly contradictory - how can I increase my distance, but still keep within a reasonable distance of home? Well, I could walk round in circles, and generally speaking most of my routes do involve circles, but eventually you get into the situation of repeating the loops, which is boring.

As such, I've been trying to go down some new routes, which are also circles, but which are bigger circles. In particular, I've been exploring the roads that (broadly) lead down to Sainsbury's and Farnham.

However, I've hit a bit of a snag over the last few weekends, and it's to do with the weather.

This last Sunday I set off on my walk, but, at what I was intending to be half way, it suddenly started raining. And I mean properly raining. I got very wet, very quickly.

At one point I stopped and waited under a bus shelter, but after 5 minutes it was becoming apparent that it wasn't a quick shower. Indeed, it actually continued to rain until I went to bed, but it meant I'd have to head home. But of course I was half way out on quite a long walk. If I'd have simply turned round it would pretty much have been the same distance.

What made the situation worse this last Sunday was I'd only take my light coat and not my hat. When I'd set off it was sunny and the forecast I'd seen the day before had said it would be sunny all day.

When a similar situation happened a couple of weeks back, I at least had my heavy coat and my hat. On Sunday, my coat was rendered ineffective after about ten minutes and I got so wet rain was dribbling down my face and my glasses were completely obscured. It actually reminded me of the more miserable experiences of school sports.

Hopefully of course the weather will improve and it won't be an issue. Or at least, it won't be an issue until the summer, when, presumably, I'll be moaning that it's too hot :).

From my perspective at the moment, though, I'm praying for the warm weather to roll on. For now, I've had quite enough of all the bone-chilling weather and rain, to be frank.

the results and the future

So the last part of the plan was to set a target.

I started properly weighing myself on the 16th of August and, by a nice coincidence, the end of the year was exactly 20 weeks away. This was a nice round number and so I had my target date.

Also, since by BMI was 47.1, I decided a nice target would be to get my BMI below the morbid obesity line of 40.0. This, to be fair, was an ambitions target - to reach it I would need to loose a total of 3 stone 9 pounds. That equated to around 2.5 pounds a week.

Which is where I have to diverge from my original posts, because obviously I didn't actually make the target.

My target was 20 stone 7 pounds, giving me a BMI of 40 by the end of the year. However, as noted at the time, I didn't make this, my weight bouncing up to 21 stone 9, having reached a low of exactly 21 stone. So close, but no cigar.

However, I can now say that I have finally reached this target, as my last weigh in was 20 stone 5 pounds.

In my original post as designed I then gave some graphs and stats, but I think I'll remove those. I may to a longer review if I hit my next target. Certainly when I finally achieve a weight in the normal range I'll do a proper review of how my diet progressed.

What I will say is that, overall, the weirdest thing is that it's actually been relatively easy. The first month was the worst. I was constantly hungry and I remember more than a few occasions where I felt light headed.

But after that it got so much easier. The hunger calmed down - I now only get it occasionally if I'm late having my planned meal, and I think that's a pretty normal hunger.

Which isn't to say I no longer crave food.

One of the things this has revealed to me is I lust after food - high calorie foods in particular - like a junkie. The BBC website has a food section and I visit it all the time, reading recipes and dreaming of eating the glorious food.

The other thing is I boredom eat - if I'm bored, I have this tendency to fill that vacuum with food. Now if I was doing sensible snacking (on fruit, say) and my meals were smaller to compensate, this wouldn't be a problem, but I don't - I'll eat a chocolate bar because I'm bored and then still eat big meals.

I've even had to build this into my diet plan to accommodate it - there's several snacks (now, thankfully, all healthy ones) I have throughout the day.

Of course, I know I'm a long way off a normal weight, so although I'm hugely happy about hitting this target, it also means I need a new target.

Again, there was a lot here about my new targets, which have been a bit messed up by not hitting my original target.

I think the basic point still remains though - in order to squeeze into the normal zone I need to loose a further 8 or 9 stone. It would be nice to achieve this by the end of the year, but I think I need to be sensible, especially given my first target was so ambitious and I overshot it by so much.

I've therefore set a much more modest target of loosing about 2 pounds a week across the whole year, which obviously comes to 104 pounds technically, but if you think about it as being 7 stone that comes to 98 pounds, which means that my ultimate target for the end of the year is to be at around 14 and a half stone. This means I would still technically be fat, but that's a lot better place to be in than where I am right now.

More closer to home, my birthday is the 1st of May, so my first target is to get down to around 19 stone by then.

the plan

I think it's a pretty safe bet to describe myself as a nerd.

In particular I'm a scientist, having a degree in Physics. And that meant my plan was going to be one that utilised science. Or, to be more specific, I was going to do some research, come up with a plan - a theory - and to try out various methods to test it.

I've actually talked a lot abut this over the months, especially when I was starting out, so I won't go into too much detail. If you're interested you can look up the posts tagged with weight and walking.

What I will say is that there's a lot of stuff out there on the web, much of which conflicts. Obviously, there are loads of sites promising a miracle diet, but the basic point is that to loose weight you need to consume fewer calories than you use up.

What makes this tricky is metabolism, but perhaps not in the way most people tend to think. See, a classic argument of fat people is that their metabolisms are slower - if they ate the same amount as normal people, the argument goes, they'd still put on weight, as they're burning calories at a slower rate.

But that's cobblers - metabolism is mostly to do with the fact that we're warm blooded animals and must keep our bodies hot. Therefore, if you're bigger and have more mass to keep warm, this actually consumes more calories, so you have a higher metabolism.

As I say - it's complicated in the detail, but simple at the higher level. Since I was very fat, ate a lot a high calorie foods and did no exercise at all, I was gaining weight. By eating less and doing some exercise I would loose weight.

And that was the plan - I would devise a calorie controlled diet that worked for me and I would do some exercise. I would also set myself some realistic targets that meant loosing weight at a steady rate that was achievable.

The exercise proved to be the easiest to decide on - I would walk. I've talked a lot about the walking in previous posts, but what I thought I'd mention here is how far I've walked. As part of my plan and as a sop to my nerdishness I bought a pedometer and have noted down the number of steps I did every day since my first weigh in and I can reveal that I've taken a total of 997,555 steps. This equates to approximately 600 kilometres or 1.5% of the distance around the earth!

In terms of diet, my first attempt was pretty much just to switch to eating salads in the evening. Looking back on it, this seems daft, but at the time I thought it was genius. But after that first weigh in I put together my spreadsheet with my targets and to monitor my weight and steps and as part of this I did some calorie counting.

I therefore got the shock that what I thought was a diet was actually roughly equal to the recommended number of calories an adult man is supposed to consume - around 2,500.

See, this, it turns out, is one of the problems with fat people. We (or certainly I) have a distorted perception of what normal portions are. I'll give you a classic example - I used to regularly eat 3 Weetabix for breakfast, where the recommended portion is 2. I did this because of some perception that these normal portions were always "too small for a normal person".

Why ever did I think such a stupid thing? I now eat two and am perfectly happy with it, because what my diet has done is shrink both my stomach and my perceptions. And that was probably the hardest thing - the hunger.

For the first month of the diet I was properly hungry all the time. Now to be fair, I was experimenting with various things, but the main reason for this was simply that previously I had always eaten way too much and now I was eating too little, so it was a really big shift.

As for the last part of the plan - the target - I will discuss that tomorrow.

pandorum

Bit of an interlude for a review today, then back to the weight posts tomorrow.

Pandorum is full of plot holes. I'm going to go through a few and so the rest of the review will be spoiler heavy.

During the film it's suggested that the weird mutant creatures are like that because the "evolutionary accelerants" they've had put into their system have adapted them to the ship. On the surface this sounds okay, except there are quite a few normal people running around too.

Why has this evolutionary acceleration affected some and not others?

Especially since it's also made clear that the ship has been on its mission for a lot longer than expected. This gives time for those people to evolve, but raises even more questions about those that haven't.

This could be because those who haven't been mutated were released more recently, but then how come one of them knows the origin story and the others seem very experienced? Certainly given the lack of general food which has presumably been the driver that's caused the others to become cannibalistic, what are these normal people surviving on?

And how come the evolution of the other has actually seemingly devolved them into a bestial state? And how have they managed to become merged with bits of machinery?

It's also revealed that the ship has crash landed on their destination planet. However, gravity seems to be working in the usual and expected directions - none of the corridors slope, for example, despite the reveal shot showing them at weird angles.

This might be because of artificial gravity, and yet AG wouldn't work like that - surely the gravity of the planet would combine with the AG to still give canted angles?

Even if that isn't how it worked, this enormous ship has crash landed on a planet - surely it would have broken up? If it was somehow tough enough to survive, then how come a relatively slight impact on a glass window cracks it?

Also, the very end gives the feel of being some sort of triumph - as in, now they've escaped and all the others are dead, because the ship's flooded.

And yet, by flooding the ship they block access to any of the stuff they'd need to survive. Also, the film clearly shows big chunks of the ship out of the water, so presumably many of the others could have survived in those bits?

Seems more like they've leapt from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

Despite all of the above I actually still quite enjoyed it. The reason was because, despite trying to be all complicated with its plot, most of the film is actually sci-fi horror and is quite atmospheric and stylish with it.

I think it's a classic case of turn your brain off and you'll probably enjoy the ride.

bmi

But then came the big questions:

1. How much did I actually weigh?
2. How much did I need to loose?
3. 3. How was I going to do it?

Question 1 was a problem because I've not weighed myself in years. Indeed, I didn't even own a set of scales. I did, however, suspect that I weighed enough to be heavier than most scales weigh up to.

A normal set of bathroom scales maxes out at 20 stone. This, I knew, was a lot less than what I weighed - I'd weighed 18 stone when I was at school and still wearing XL level clothes. If I was now 4XL I had to weigh in the region of 350 to 400 pounds (ballpark 25 - 30 stone).

I therefore had to buy a set of scales that would weigh above 20 stone. It took me a little while to find one, but when I eventually did, on the 16th of August, I immediately weighed myself and found that I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds.

Fuck, that's big.

I'd often joked that I was "2 people" but it turns out this was scarily close to the truth, as the answer to the second question would reveal.

Question 2 is all about something called Body Mass Index ,or BMI.

A long time ago, some clever spod worked out a formula that allows you to combine your weight and height and come up with a new number - your BMI. This new number can seem arbitrary, but for me, this table really helps explain it:


So what this shows is your height (in feet and inches) along the left and the BMI along the top. The numbers in the individual boxes are your weight (in pounds).

What the table shows is that BMI is banded and has a simple interpretation - if you have a BMI of between about 25 and 30 then you're Overweight, but if it's over 40 then you're Extremely Obese as it puts it. Another name for this is Morbid Obesity, which is a way of saying you're so fat that, statistically speaking, your weight is almost certain to have extremely negative consequences on your health.

Guess what my BMI is? Well, firstly I'm 5 foot 11 inches tall and as noted above I weighed 24 stone 2 pounds when I first weighed myself. Well, there are 14 stone in every pound, so I weighed 338 pounds. That gives me a BMI of 47.1.

No surprise that I was over the morbid obesity line, but how far over might come as something of a shocker.

Or, to put it another way, to break through into the normal weight band I needed to loose a total of 159 pounds, or about 11 and a half stone. Which is why the joke I mentioned about being two people was horribly true. If I loose half my entire bodyweight from 24stone 2 pound to 12 stone 1 pound I'll be nicely into the normal weight range.

Indeed, what makes that slightly scarier is if you remember that it took me a while to get my scales and so I'd already been dieting for a while before I started weighing myself, so I don't really know what my maximum weight was.

But anyway, the point is there are two of me - inside this fat person there really is a thin one trying to get out!

But then there's question 3 - how was he going to do it?

I needed a plan.

before

I hit my first weight target on Sunday, so this week I'm posting the modified version of the things I wrote in anticipation of meeting said target before Chrimbo.

For as long as I can remember I have been overweight.

When I was young, this was simply on the scale of being plump, or, if you were less kind, fat. I remember a few trips to the doctor to ask about diets and I even remember the rather odd advice that if I didn't put on weight then, as I grew older and taller, I would kind of 'stretch' into fitting my weight.

I didn't do either of these and instead my girth grew with my height.

When I was a teenager I was starting to get into the territory of being obese, or, if you were one of my bullies, a fat fuck. It was only really at this stage that I actually started to be bothered about being fat. Before I hadn't actually cared, but now being fat affected how people perceived me.

But, and this is crucial, I never really had the desire to do anything about it. I dunno - it's difficult to explain, but even though I knew my weight caused people to make all sorts of snap judgements about me and generally regard me with disgust, I didn't do anything about it.

Why I didn't, I actually have no idea. I could claim that it was some sort of weird rebellion, but that wasn't true. I could say I didn't care what people thought of me, but that would be so far from the truth as to be silly. I could also possibly go for an argument that I was stuck in a cycle of knowing people saw me as disgusting and that made me miserable with the comfort eating that resulted only reinforced this viscous circle.

This would be closer to the truth, but it would also be ignoring a major factor - I'm greedy and I'm lazy.

That may come as something of a shocker - fat people rail against the stereotype, but whether it's generally true or not, it's certainly true for me. I could happily spend the entire rest of my life sitting down, watching telly, stuffing my face with junk food.

When I went to University I had entered, to use a stereotype, American levels of fatness. I had huge man breasts bigger than any girl I knew; I wobbled when I walked and people would stare at me in shocked disgust on the street.

And yet I still did nothing about it. In fact, the opposite happened - I grew fatter and fatter. After leaving university I eventually reached the point where no high street store sold clothes I could possibly fit into (well, I could buy socks, but it gets a little chilly if all you have to wear are socks). I therefore had to seek out specialist big clothing suppliers. I was introduced to the world of extra X's.

Most people are not aware that there is a world of extra X's, because they're looking at clothes that never contain more than the single X of XL or extra large. The world of extra X's goes further than this, starting with XXL and going up as far as 6XL. Yup. that's right - XXXXXXL.

I never quite made it that far, but I can assure you that I'm currently sitting here typing this in a pair of 4XL boxers and wearing a 5XL shirt. Admittedly the 5XL is because I prefer baggy collars, but the 4XLs were rather tight not so long ago.

Anyway, the real point here is that this last summer I finally consciously decided to change.

There's a line of thought with junkies and drug addicts that they won't ever reform until they reach rock bottom. For some, this rock bottom is so low that they unfortunately kill themselves before they get there. For others - those that relapse - they are stuck in some sort of half-way state where they never got that far down but managed to affect some change that keeps them bobbing up and down.

For those that truly rehabilitate, they hit the bottom and realise that they need to change and they make that change.

Now, I'd love to say that there was a conscious moment where I realised I'd hit rock bottom, but if there is I don't recall specifically what it was. What I do remember is that this last summer, not that long after my birthday (perhaps that was the trigger - reaching 33) I remember thinking something along the lines of "Why don't you actually go on a proper diet then, instead of just constantly thinking you should start loosing weight?"

And that's when I finally decided to start loosing weight.

day in lieu

So a few weeks ago I posted about I had spent my weekend working and then about how I hadn't been given any kind of time off to compensate.

This I put down to my main boss and said that my other boss would probably have sent me home. Well, that other boss accosted me last week and said I should take a day in lieu by way of compensation for the weekend.

Rather than let it slip away and be forgotten, I therefore took the opportunity and asked on Monday about having this Friday off, and my request was granted. So, I'm therefore not going to be in tomorrow and that means this will be my last blog post of the week.

I've no particular plans for my impromptu day off. I'll probably try to get most of the boring weekend domestic stuff done, like the ironing so I can then spend my time more enjoyable at the actual weekend. I've a feeling I might spend most of the weekend scanning, as I don't want to loose the momentum and that in turn will give me a chance to get some more crunchyroll under my belt.

Speaking of which I think I've decided to write some mini reviews of the shows I've watched on crunchyroll and post them on my blog. My main website seems to have ground to a halt - I got half way into the whole update thing and then lost interest.

the imaginarium of doctor parnassus

I seem to recall the reviews for Parnassus being fairly negative when it came out. I can't actually remember what about it they criticised, but I rather enjoyed the film.

I think if I were to pick on negatives I'd probably go for two. First off, the film was a little long - there could easily have been some snips made that would have tightened things up and not really lost anything. Secondly, the core story was perhaps a little simple.

The second isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that the film itself tries to be a little more obtuse and distracting than the simplicity of the basic story needs. I think really I'd have preferred it to explored some of its sub-themes and throw-away ideas a bit more than it did over the stuff it tired to put in to make the core story seem more complex.

I'm not sure the above really makes sense, but I was trying to avoid anything that would count as spoilers. I'm also not really saying it because I disliked the film, more that there was some really good stuff in there that isn't really given enough time. Which is a bizarre contradiction given what I said about the length, but there you go.

Where the film does excel, brilliantly, is in the creativity and visual flair. This will come as no surprise to anyone who's familiar with Gilliam and his work, but I think he's really outdone himself here.

The other thing I should touch on, I suppose, is the whole issue of Heath Ledger's death. I was a little worried going in that it would be obvious where Ledger died - as in, certain scenes would inexplicably lack him. Well, as it turns out this was true, but they also managed to tweak the film such that, story-wise, it works.

So while the bits where Johnny Depp, Jude Law and then Colin Farrell step into his shoes are obvious, that obvious transition becomes a virtue. Not wanting to give anything away, the change of person becomes part of the point of Ledger's character. Indeed, if you didn't know it was done out of necessity, you'd probably think it was intentional.

I've kinda running out of things to say, because I really don't want to give any spoilers, but I also really enjoyed the film, so I can't really criticise it. As such I'll just leave it here.

one more to go

I was wondering if I shouldn't make a bit of a confession.

The thing about these diet blog posts just recently is they always seem to revolve around such confessions. It seems every week I've put some new obstacles in my own path that's prevented me from loosing a big wodge of weight like I did last year.

This week's was actually one of the remaining problems from Christmas. Basically, I consumed the last of the free food my dad gave me. This was actually a huge packet of custard cream biscuits.

The confession wasn't that I sat down and ate them all in one sitting or anything, it was that I'd been eating them steadily across the week. What makes it a confession is I did this without compensating for the calories, so there's a good chance that my two pound loss could have been a three pound loss, and that would have meant I hit the target I keep going on about.

But I'm kind of bored of posts like that.

I've actually decided I'm going to try and eat the stores of food I keep. Again, not as a blow-out or anything, but over the next few weekends I'll have them as my meals instead of the more diety meals. It'll be a trickle feeding of bad stuff that should mean I'll still consistently loose weight, but it'll be on the scale of 1 or 2 pounds like recently, rather than the big drops pre-Christmas.

What I'm hoping to do is end up such that by summer I've not got all this food stored and then, with the days being generally warmer and lighter for longer, a return to my full on diet combined with more exercise should see me have a good summer.

A problem that might create is that I'm seriously starting to need some new clothes. My various trousers in particular have these weird creases in them where the excess of material gets bunched up because I'm having to use belts or tied drawstrings to keep them from falling down.

This is great of course, but I've been trying to avoid the issue since it's going to be expensive to get new stuff. Especially since in 6 months I'll probably need yet more replacements.

I went for a particularly long walk this last Saturday lunchtime as we had some very pleasant weather. I then went for a particularly unpleasant walk on Sunday as we had some really horrible weather. It was weird to have such extremes in such a short period of time, but I'm pleased I did lots of walking.

one or two then

So I've just gotten done sending out 140 e-mails.

Actually, it's a lot more than that in total, because I sent 40 on Friday as well, plus I've been replying to some of the people who already came back to me. But it was 140 of the standard e-mails this morning.

This is the part of my job I dislike the most, because it's so tedious sending them out, but it also get's really confusing. Because of how it has to be don, it's a lot of individual e-mails with individual replies, rather than some gigantic mail-merge. That means I have to reply individually as well as process anything they send back individually. I may well have to do some chasing for replies later as well.

It's all horribly tedious. A while ago when I was too busy to do proper blog posts it was because I was doing a similar job - it sucks up so much time it's silly.

What it does do is give you a fascinating insight into the world of e-mailing. I once heard that people only take in about 40% of an e-mail when they read it, and this sort of job really confirms that.

It's quite remarkable how many times people will come back having clearly not properly read what we want or what they need to do. Especially with things like this which are a little different to what we normally send them.

A classic example is people not processing dates - they ask when you want it for, even though there's a date on there, or they'll see Monday and assume you mean this Monday instead of next Monday.

I mean, I don't fundamentally mind - we all make mistakes - it's just because I'm going out to so many people, it sucks up even more time me having to answer their questions or correct them or whatever.

total wimpout

They've broken total wipeout.

Not irreparably so; not so much that it's unwatchable, but they've definitely managed to break it.

Or, more specifically, they've managed to break the ending.

For those that don't know, the basic idea with wipeout is they have a series of rounds and in each round they eliminate some of the competitors. For the most recent series, the sequence of rounds is 1) the qualifier 2) Crash mountain 3) Dizzy Dummies and then the final 4) the wipeout zone.

Now while there's never been a clear progression of toughness - rounds 1, 2 and 3 are difficult, but in different ways - the point is that each round is tough. And that's what they've broken - the wipeout zone, which is meant to be the culmination of the show, where only the toughest competitors get too, is now a piece of piss.

What makes this annoying is that it used to be difficult and they've steadily replaced all of the obstacles such that now they're basically all easy.

It used to start with the barrel run. This was difficult, because the barrels were huge. It's been replaced with killer surf, which can be tough, unless you're quick, in which case it's a piece of cake, and of course those that get to the final tend to be the quickest.

Next is a sort of seesaw balance beam thing, which is a piece of piss - no-one has vaguely even struggled. In the beginning this was a climbing wall with water gushing down that was genuinely tough.

Then is this obstacle course sweeper thing, which is about the toughest element, though even here it used to be a lot harder with people falling off all the time.

The last two bits are a rope swing and a spinning platform thing. To be fair, some people do struggle with this, but the old obstacle, which was a series of trampolines, was universally hard.

And that's how they've broken it - they filter down to the fittest, toughest competitors and then give them a (relatively) easy set of obstacles. The qualifier is now tougher than the wipeout zone!

You can even tell that by the times - people regularly finish the wipeout zone in less than two minutes (I wouldn't be surprised if we see some sub-one minute times this season), whereas two minutes is still a really good and rare time on the qualifier - it takes most people 4 minutes+.

I mean, I still enjoy the show, it's just they need to toughen the wipeout zone up again.

the parole officer

Well, this was a bit of a surprise, but not in the way I was hoping for.

I was hoping that it would be a hidden gem. I know it's received some mixed reviews, but I was kinda hoping, because I generally quite like Coogan's stuff, that I'd really enjoy it.

And I did basically enjoy it, but "really" enjoy it is a bit far past the mark. The reason I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped is rather unusual, though.

You might think, with it being a comedy, that I didn't find it funny, but, on the whole, I did find it funny. I have to confess the comedy was a bit of a mixed bag - there's a real mix of low brow stuff and clever and subtle gags. And while I'd say it was a weird mix, it does basically work and basically succeeds in giving you something for everyone.

It's also a heist movie in the tradition of something like the old Ealing comedies like The Ladykillers. So you might think that I didn't like this aspect of it, but actually I did. The heist is daft and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it's also quite clever and witty, so I enjoyed this aspect of it.

No, what took the edge of for me was big chunks of it didn't quite make logical sense. Now as I've said, the heist plot was silly and not realistic, but I'm talking about the internal logic of the film.

I'll give you a good example that also doesn't really spoil anything. Having got into a bit of a fix, Coogan ends up quitting his job in Manchester - he's running away, basically. He says that he's going to go back to his old job in Brighton. In the next scene we see him waking up having slept in his car in what appears to be the Lake District.

Now what this suggested to me was that, for whatever reason he's parked up in the Lake District to have a kip while on the journey back to Brighton. It's at this point he has a revelation and decides to return to Manchester. Fair enough.

But it's later shown that he has a house, which must be in Manchester. I'd thought, from how it was shown, that he'd only just moved to Manchester, so perhaps his house was in Brighton and he was in the process of buying one in Manchester.

But no, he has a house in Manchester and decided, completely at random, to go and sleep in his car in the Lake District.

I know that sounds like me over thinking things and it's meant to be a light hearted comedy, but that sort of stuff happens so often it kept jarring me out of the film as I kept going "eh?"

I'll give you another example - towards the end, Coogan's character runs into some of the bad guys. Now this is a coincidence in itself, but also, these criminals are apparently attending a Police ceremony where they're giving awards to their officers. Why the hell are they even there?

any loss is good

The weekend weigh in revealed a one pound loss.

This is not a huge amount and usually I'd probably express surprise at it, especially given that I did plenty of walking and didn't really go off the rails diet wise.

Except that I realised that actually I did. See, because I weigh myself on Sunday morning, the previous week's weigh in would not have fully represented my food splooge. The splooge continued all weekend - in fact, Sunday was probably the worst day.

That therefore meant that I'd started the week very badly and the rest of the week was partly about making up for that bad start. I'm therefore relatively pleased with the one pound loss, although it does mean I'm starting to feel like things are stagnating.

I dunno, I'm rather worried that some switch has been flipped in my brain that says "actually, we've lost loads of weight now, so let's stop". The reality is that I still have a very long way to go. Hopefully, this week, which has been going quite well so far, will set things back on track. I may even finally reach my pre-chrimbo target!

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I think I've discovered a new route to walk. It basically takes me down to the Sainsbury's at the big roundabout down the road and gives me some more options. I think I was beginning to get a bit bored of my old route, especially as it was a bit random in where it took me.

I've actually been thinking about walking to either Aldershot or Farnham and back. I'm actually pretty sure my big walks I do at the weekend are actually of a similar length to walking to Aldershot/Farnham (I live equidistant from both), but I've got a bit of a mental block when it comes to certain walks.

I think it's because I've done them so often by car, I think they're further than they are. One thing I do know is that Aldershot would be a lot more difficult to Farnham. While both would require going up hill, Farnham involves more in the way of gentle slopes that Aldershot, where you've got to go up some quite steep hills.

Which is all fine and good - going up hills is good exercise and just what I need, but I think I've got a nagging worry about going too far in one direction. My fear is that I'll give myself a blister or find I've walked too far and then have the daunting prospect of having to walk back.

My normal routes generally involve going in circles around where I live and all of them have options whereby I can cut my walk short and go fairly quickly home if such a problem arises (and it has). By going in a straight line to Farnham or Aldershot those options disappear. I can obviously turn around early, but it's not quite the same thing.

This is made especially worrying when you consider I don't carry my phone or wallet when I walk - I just take my MP3 player with audio books on, my keys and my pedometer (well, and my clothes, obviously).

But as I say, I think this is far more a mental barrier than real issue.

fantastic mr fox

Hmm.

I'm not quite sure what my final opinion is of Fantastic Mr Fox.

I should perhaps give a little background in that I was a big fan of Roald Dahl's children's book when I was young. I've never read any of his non-kids books and if I'm honest I only have fairly vague memories of the books I did read, but I do recall enjoying them a great deal.

My memory of the story of Fantastic Mr Fox was that the basic plot was of the fox in question as a master-thief who concentrated his efforts on three rather unpleasant farmers. These farmers then decide to kill him and end up trying to dig him out of his hole.

But Fox and his family dig themselves away from the farmers, who then set about besieging the hole. Meanwhile Fox discovers all the other animals are suffering to and eventually comes up with a plan that saves them all.

Now this story is basically there in film, but is embellished somewhat. This is not surprising, as the above story would make a better short feature than a full-length film. And I think, on balance, I liked and approved of the additions and tweaks.

The emphasis is changed a little, but not in a bad way, and the characters feel a lot more fleshed out and... well, grown up, and it's here I start to get a little uneasy.

See, the original book is for children. And this is an animated film (the stop-motion style really suits it and it works well) and, while being an animation fan I'm the first to argue that 'animation is not just for kids', I'm pretty sure this is aimed at a family audience.

At least I think it should have been - if you're adapting a children's book and using stop-motion, surely you're making a family film, right?

Except this doesn't feel like a kid's film. Now I don't mean that from the point of view of the story being too adult - while I do think it was grown up, I don't think any but the youngest of children would fail to follow the plot, although perhaps some of the themes are more suited to older kids. No, the problem is with the style.

And it's also here I run up against a bit of a problem, because it's a little difficult for me to explain.

You know how comedy often has labels you can apply? Slapstick is a good example. If a film is a slapstick then you know it's going to be full of physical comedy. Well, this film falls into a particular comedy style, but I haven't a clue what the label is.

Basically, it's a kind of knowing, ironic style, where jokes are delivered as asides, rather than proper gags. I'm tempted to say it's reminiscent of Woody Allen's stuff, but that's not quite it. As I say, difficult to describe, but my point is that it's not something I would associate with a children's film. It feels more like a film aimed at an older audience.

And that was why I was left unsure - was it a kid's film or not? I liked it, but it seemed like an odd adaptation.

you mean I don't have to work?

So this weekend I actually got a weekend and didn't have to work.

It was a pretty busy weekend as I had to catch up on stuff that I obviously hadn't been able to do having lost my previous weekend to work.

I had intended to 'relax' this weekend, which I'd mainly meant to be sitting and catching up with some of the TV I'd not found the time to watch. However, actually I went for some fairly long walks and also spent most of my time scanning.

I've really been making an effort to catch up with the scanning and have also been consciously making an effort to watch stuff on crunchyroll. On one level this is daft as I should really be watching DVDs so I can put them on e-bay.

On another it's daft that I've been paying for crunchyroll and not watching it. Especially now that CR has been showing just about every new anime each season, but some of them only for limited times. This means I've discovered quite a few series that I probably would have liked and had a legal avenue to watch, but that opportunity has now past.

It has, however, presented me with an odd problem. Because I'm so far behind there's a glut of stuff available for me to watch and I've found myself struggling to pick something to watch. Should I watch all the new stuff and 'keep up' or should I go for the oldest shows and work my way forward? Or maybe I should watch shows from recent seasons and that could be removed (I'm working on assumption that if a show's been up ages, the license means it will be there for a while yet)?

In the end I've ended up going for a bit of a mix - there's some new shows I'm 'following' (I think that's the phrase - my watching habits tend to mean I prefer to watch complete series all in one go), some old shows I've decided to watch ASAP and some more recent shows I marathoned.

I have to confess I'm still not a big fan of the CR site itself and the community aspect of it seems to be pretty much passing me by, but I have been finding the actual show streaming and watching to be a success. I guess having access to fast cable has its uses.

In terms of the scanning I ploughed through 3 Nyan types over the weekend, which is really good. I've actually only been focusing on doing the scanning itself. The whole thing of stitching the scans together will have to come later, my aim is solely on eating up the pile of unscanned magazines for now.

Plus the stitching process seems to fit poorly with watching fansubs - it wither takes too much active attention or is too short a process to fit chunks of anime around. Leaving it does mean I'm taking up huge chunks of disk space, though, so I may have to have a big session of just scan-stitching at some point, in order to clear some room.

just let me sleep

Big plan for the weekend is, to put it simply, to relax.

Today is the 12th straight day that I've been at work and I have to admit I'm loosing the plot a bit. What really hasn't helped is that the stuff I've been doing during these days at work is quite stressful.

Having worked last weekend in order to finish one bid for a framework, I've then shifted onto another bid for another framework. This one is nearly as important as the last one, and I've been feeling really worried that our offering may not past muster.

See, the problem is that this is effectively a re-compete for a framework that we used to hold, and I'm not at all sure that they want to give us a slot on the new version. My worry is founded on the fact that we didn't win hardly any work last time we were on the framework, so they may want us off to try and give someone else a shot at it.

So I've been really worried.

What doesn't help is that I'm now really tired and getting very inefficient and sloppy. I'm quite sure if I hadn't been here last weekend I would have finished this new bid by Wednesday, but I've really been struggling.

Hopefully I should finally cross all the i's and dot all the t's today, and then I can have a proper weekend of sleeping and (shock, horror) not working.

I might even take the opportunity to finally set up my Blu-Ray player and experience the joys of High-Def.

cream cake? don't mind if I do... several times...

Yes, as I hinted on Tuesday I had a seriously bad week, last week.

No, that's not actually true. It started off as a spectacularly good week - I stuck 100% to my diet and have also worked out a way for me to do a reasonable bit of walking during the week and I took full advantage of this.

See, I had that goal of finally hitting my first target weight and it was my initial aim to loose the four pounds needed to in one week, rather than the two dictated by my new plan.

The trouble started on Friday night. See, having had a super start to the week, from Friday night until Sunday night I totally fell of the wagon. And I really do mean that - when alcoholics use that phrase, you know it means that they didn't just have 1 pint, they went on some huge bender.

In my case I consumed several cream cakes and supermarket sandwiches (which are always deceptive as you tend to think sarnis are healthy, but they're not) and even several packets of 'normal' crisps.

It really was similar to a binge. And what made it worse was because I was spending all my time at work, sat on my arse, I wasn't doing any significant walking either.

The net result of this was that when I weighed myself on Sunday I hadn't actually lost a single pound. In other words, all that being good was then counter-balanced by my being bad.

To be honest, I've actually a sneaking suspicion that I would have lost one pound if I'd been able to muster the energy to go for a walk first thing Sunday morning. Normally, first thing Saturday and Sunday morning I like to go for a walk, but this last Sunday I was sufficiently shattered that I just laid there until it was apparent I needed to get up to go to work.

Previously when I've failed to do the Sunday walk I've then lost a surprising amount the next week, backing up my point that weighing yourself in exactly the same circumstances each week is highly important.

saw vi

The saw franchise seems to have disappeared right up its own fundament.

The problem is that over the series it's tried to develop a story, but in each film it also tries to have a twist. This stems back to the first film, where at the end it's revealed one of the people in it isn't quite what you thought he was (avoiding spoilers).

The problem with the first twist is it wasn't really that good a twist. It's actually hard to really call it a twist - it was more like a surprise than a twist. But the presence of this surprise seems to have led the makers to put in one or more twists in all the subsequent films.

But each film is actually a proper sequel, supposedly revealing more about Jigsaw and the saw world, so by this film we've ended up with a back story that's so convoluted it's gone beyond confusing. I mean, it's even gotten to the stage that Jigsaw almost doesn't appear in the films - he's certainly not the man directly responsible for a lot of the traps.

It also seems to have lost site of what the traps are supposed to be about. They're supposed to be trials where people's will to live is tested and thereby they become reformed - learning to treasure life because they see it's true value. In later films they seem to become more about pitching people against each other.

There's much more of a strand of people deciding each other's fates, rather than their own. And many of the traps seem unfair - they're either escapable or, like I say, pitching two people against each other with the outcome that one of them must die due to the others actions. In earlier films it seemed more like the weight of responsibility was on your own choices affecting yourself, rather than other people.

But as I say, the real problem is that the back-story has gotten so convoluted and complicated that unless you're a really big fan or you happen to have watched the earlier films recently, you don't really know what's going on. Certainly I've been getting rather confused by it all.

What makes this all rather understandable is that in the commentary for one of the films it's revealed that actually there wasn't any sort of a grand plan. Instead, they write the films as they come and either leave open bits for other films to pick up and do with what they want or they try to take a different view-point on something that's already happened in order to generate their twist and to layer the films in together.

You can therefore see how things have gotten so complicated - without that overall plan, they've written themselves into a bit of a muddle.

butterfly

My boss - the one I have to say I'm still rather resentful of for not letting me go home early yesterday - described the cause of a lot of the last week's stress as a "butterfly".

What she meant by this was that whenever something new and shiny came along, he was off, following it, rather than focusing on the things that needed to be done. So basically, instead of finishing off a job he was doing, or setting a prioritised list and running down it methodically, he only focused on the things that interested him or that appeared in his inbox.

This was a real problem, because the job he'd been brought in to do was work on a big new framework that could potentially be worth a lot of money over the next few years. So in other words, we want to win it and to do that you need to answer all the questions well.

So last Monday we had this session where we went through and looked at what was left to do. And there was loads - any question he hadn't fancied the look of he'd left and so we ended up divvying the work up between us.

And so I ended up having to come in to do loads of stuff over the weekend.

The thing is though, he didn't actually seem all that bad with the technical stuff, it was more that he just wasn't up to the job of holding multiple streams of activity in his head at once. He wasn't a manager, in other words.

Which was a shame, but also horrible for me as I spent huge chunks of the weekend working where I could have been doing other stuff.

I also seriously "fell off the wagon" in terms of my diet, but I'll talk about that later in the week.

more work? what a nice surprise!

A big part of me didn't think I'd be here this afternoon.

This part of me is rather optimistic.

It's the part of me that was hoping that, having worked all weekend, my boss would turn around and say - "Mark, why don't you pop off home a bit early?"

This part of me's optimism has come crashing up against the reality that my boss isn't that sort of a person. The other person who's sort of my boss is that sort of person. As soon as the last i had been crossed and t had been dotted on the bid we've been working on he would have sent me on.

This is because he trusts me and he knows how to manage people. He would also have us working flexi, since he knows that it's results and output that counts, not the presence of a bum on a seat. My boss doesn't. My boss doesn't have that level of trust or that level of understanding. To her if the bum isn't on the seat during the allotted hours, you're slacking.

And unfortunately the understanding boss isn't here today, so here I am, having worked something in the order of 15 hours over the weekend, still sat at work, waiting for 5.30 to roll around so I can finally go home.

Well, actually, I'm writing this blog entry. And I'll probably pre-write several other blog entries too. That's how I get my own back, you see - I do other stuff during the day. If I was able to work flexi, and my getting in at 8am meant I could go home at 4:30, then I wouldn't. But it doesn't, so I do.

What's made this all rather annoying is the fact that I shouldn't have had to work this weekend.

This is where I get onto what I was talking about on Friday, but more on that later, as I'll end today's blog post here.

shattered

This week has been absolutely horrendous, because we've been trying to rescue a bid and I'm absolutely shattered.

The presence of longer posts this week compared to last week has actually been something of an illusion - I was able to pre-write most of them before the poo hit the proverbial oscillating air redistribution system.

Today's, however, I've literally just slapped together, and I've not a lot of time, so I'll cut it short and then have a really big whinge session next week about what went wrong and why it's all been a bit horrible.

robin hood

Turns out I sort of lied when I said I would only do the one film I enjoyed that we watched at my dad's. The other films we watched were a film called Zathura, which is essentially Jumanji in space (it's deliberately that - the book it's based on is the sorta sequel to Jumanji, and you shouldn't think it's rubbish because I describe that way or because I'm not reviewing it - it was actually surprisingly good - it's just I need to get caught up) and the Russell Crow/Ridley Scott version of Robin Hood.

The reason I wasn't going to review this one was simply because I couldn't remember what it was we watched. A more accurate way to put it might be that it was sufficiently poor that I blanked it out.

The main problem with it, I think, was that it wasn't really Robin Hood.

Now actually the Robin Hood that tends to be thought of as being 'proper' Robin Hood isn't actually the original Robin Hood. The Hood of the original stories was an outlaw who robbed from the rich, but past that everything else, from the giving to the poor to being Earl of Loxley and Prince John and Richard the Lionheart - all that - is actually a later update.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they should have made that original story, what I'm really getting at is that they've made neither. They haven't gone back to that original source, nor have they made a new version of the more familiar rich-poor-currency-interface story.

Instead they've kind of taken elements and grafted them onto another story. If this were set in another time period and you changed the characters names, it might just have worked. It could have worked in the sense that you'd have had familiar elements that would have been references for you to pick up.

Instead, by calling it Robin Hood, you end up with something that feels like they threw something together around the themes.

It doesn't help that the story lacks any real compelling element to it (and unfortunately relies heavily on coincidence). For example, I'm not sure if it's deliberate, but they seem to be trying to muddy the waters as to who the bad guys are and quite what their motives are. Rather than the simple antagonist of the bad Prince John, there's something here about the French.

It even goes to the extent at the end of having the French invade. Only it's a pretty crap invasion and also... well, it actually looks like the D-day landings as covered by the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. And I mean it properly looks like them - the French apparently had very similar landing craft to the allies in 1945.

Which is a big part of its problem - why are the French even part of it and why are they staging a reconstruction of the D-Day landings in Ye Olde England?

It's just confused and confusing.

Oh, and Russell Crow's accent is all over the place.

nearly there

When I say nearly there, I mean I've nearly reached the target I set before Christmas.

Yes, it's the weekly weigh-in post and I've nearly made the official (well sort of) transition from being morbidly obese to just plain obese! Hoo... ray?

Anyway, the weekly weigh-in revealed a further loss of 3 pounds over the course of last week, which I was pleasantly pleased with. I've worked out that if I loose an average of 3 pounds a week then I should reach my next target broadly on schedule.

My next target is a bit looser than my original target. Basically I want to roughly get to the half way point between obesity and just being overweight by my birthday.

Hmm... This actually seems to be getting more and more complicated to explain without having posted those celebratory posts I was talking about last week. I definitely need to tweak those and get them posted. What I'm hoping is that I can loose the last four pounds I need to this week, hit the target and then post the tweaked celebratory posts next week.

Even if I don't make it this week then it will surely only be the week after, so things should become clearer in terms of what I'm on about with the weight loss targets pretty soon.

For now, what I think I will say is that my main intended target is to hit 18 stone by my birthday. However, I'm rather aware that this year Easter is extremely late - literally the week before my birthday. But also, this year I'm going to the British Grand Prix, which is in July.

The plan to go to the GP was hatched pretty late and has left me in something of a quandary holiday wise. With the lateness of Easter and the extra bank holiday for the royal wedding I'm unsure if it's a good idea to take time off then. See, the issue is that the kids will be off and I imagine a lot of parents will take the couple of extra days need to make it a proper holiday.

But also if I'm now going to the Grand Prix, should I take some time off then? If I do both that won't leave me with a lot of holiday, so what should I do about my usual late summer holiday?

The reason these are important is that my goals and plans were formulated based on Easter/birthday and late summer holiday, but now I have the British GP as another node point.

I need to have a think about it all.

iron man 2

There seems to be a great tendency in comic book film to produce over-complicated sequels.

The first film in a comic-book franchise always has to cover the origin story. If the hero has powers, it generally has to show how he got them, or otherwise show how he got to his default 'hero' position. This isn't universally true - in X-Men most of the heroes already have their powers, but even their you get some origins or at least explanation of what mutants are.

But essentially, origin stories are covered by part 1. Because this will take up a good chunk of the story, there will only be enough space for one villain.

Now when it comes time for the sequel, we've already had the origin story, so there's now a big chunk of time free for an extra villain or two - right? Well yes, but the problem is it's actually really complicated to do multiple villains, not least of all because villains also need origin stories.

What I'm driving at is that there's a tendency to overfill sequels with villains, rather than come up with a proper, emotionally involving story for the hero. So, a good sequel, like Spiderman 2, only has one villain - Doc Ok - but has an emotionally engaging story for the hero to replace the origin story. A bad sequel, like Spiderman 3, crams itself so full of villains that the hero's story dwindles to nothing and all those villains get short-shrift too.

Iron Man 2 somehow manages to not have too many villains, but at the same time still somehow manages to have too much stuff into it that it doesn't really work. The problem here, though, seems to be forcing too much into the hero's own story.

So you've got him being killed by his chest energy thing, giving up control of his company, running some sort of weird expo thing, exploring his relationship with his dad, being recruited (ish) by Nick Fury to the Avengers, developing his relationship with Pepper and even being responsible for world peace (!) ... and the list goes on. They've crammed the film so full of stuff for Tony, that all of it seems to get short shrift.

And the villain ends up feeling like an add-on simply because they needed an excuse for some special effects. This is especially annoying when you consider that the idea of the villain is closely linked to his dad. It could have been so much more involving.

But what adds insult to injury is that the most interesting thing about Tony Stark - his drinking problem - isn't really even there. Well, it's sort of there, but it's not clear. I think the problem was that they wanted to hint at it, but because it had to be a U/Pg film, they couldn't really include it properly.

So yeah, to be frank, it ends up being a big old mess, even to the extent that the sharp wit that runs through the first film is a bit lacking in this second film.

Shame really, because it looks great and the acting's great - the plot just doesn't quite work.

bits and bobs

Kind of a bits and bobs weekend this last weekend.

Which was good - after last week's huge physical exertions I didn't really fancy doing anything much. I got my hair cut, which is good, dumped a load of cardboard at the local tip and did some shopping and a load of ironing and those were pretty much all of the fixed tasks I had to do.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much spent watching telly, walking and scanning while watching anime.

I seem to be getting a bit of a backlog of telly shows and I was initially puzzled as to why, but I think it's to do with the time of year - there's always more of interest to me on during winter - and the fact I'm spending a lot of my time scanning. As discussed last week, the new scanning process is a lot slower, so although I'm spending a lot of time doing it, I am only proceeding at a steady pace with the actual scans.

I must confess I'm in two minds about this. A part of me thinks the results are sufficiently better that I should keep going, another part of me thinks that I'm so far behind that I should dust off the old scanner and use it to get caught up.

To give you some idea of the scale of how far behind I am, I need to scan one more nyan type and then I'll be a third of the way through 2010. In other words I'll still have 8 months of 2010 and everything so far from 2011 to do just in order to catch up to the present day.

Of course it's bound to take several months to get through them - more at my current pace - so that will add quite a few mags onto the back end.

I dunno - really am in two minds. Which I have to confess aren't helped by the fact that, in order to use my old scanner I will have to buy a new heat sink for my old computer. Due to what can only be described as a double-header of stupidity and incompetence, the old heat sink is both knackered and doesn't fit into the case my old machine ended up in anyway.

Trouble there is we're talking seriously old bits of kit. That does actually mean the heat sinks I looked at were really cheap, but also most of the models weren't actually in-stock.

I'm also rather worried that the photstitch thing seems to be really erratic, especially when it comes to posters. A lot of the magazines give away large posters and two of them - megami and nyan type - are almost nothing but posters. With the A4 scanner I have to break these up into at least 4 bits and sticking these together seems to cause real problems for photostitch.

I've a horrible feeling the best solution is going to be to scan magazine pages via the new method and posters via the old. That way I'll either be able to scan them as one like I used to or do them in halves so that only 2 bits need stitching together.

So yeah, decisions to make.

short sack and bides

I really need a haircut - I'm getting a serious case of mop-hair - so hopefully I'll get the chance to pop down the barbers this weekend and get a trim.

My landlord has been away on his winter holiday for the last two weeks and should be getting back today. Not sure what time, but I guess he'll back by the time I get back from work.

He actually went to Sharm El Sheikh, which is where they had all those shark attacks a while ago. I recommended avoiding swimming, as you would.

His absence was actually what spurred me into sorting through the boxes last weekend, as it can be rather disruptive with me leaving them all over the place, so I tend to like to use the opportunity of them going away to sort through them. Rather annoyingly, though, although he's been away for the best part of two weeks, his holiday only overlapped with one weekend.

He went on a Monday and is coming back today - a Friday, so that's only weekend. It'd have been better for my aching muscles (it took until Wednesday before I could really say they were feeling okay again) if I'd been able to spread it over two weekends.

The only other thing I've got to do this weekend is tackle the huge pile of ironing that's built up. This shouldn't be too great a task and I can watch telly while I iron, so it's no great shakes. What I'm hoping to do is more scanning, probably doing a few more animages.

If I'm honest I'm not wholly enamoured of the new scanning process.

Basically, the post-computer update situation means that I've now got a new, reasonably powerful PC running windows 7 as my regular machine. I've bought and installed Photoshop CS5 and a new Cannon scanner.

The big problem I had was that my old A3 scanner is not compatible with windows 7. But also, I was never really happy with the quality of the scans it produced. It was massively convenient to be able to scan an entire poster that the Japanese magazines give away in one go, but the end result was not that brilliant. It was also relatively slow and obviously quite cumbersome piece of kit. To be fair, it was a cheap scanner, so I shouldn't be too harsh given the advantages it gave me.

Anyway, point is that the new system involves using an A4 scanner, but making use of the photo-stitching tool that was introduced some time around CS2. The results are mixed.

First off, the scanner is a lot quicker and gives better image quality than the old A4 scanner. But I now have to scan every page at least twice - 4 times for the posters. The reason fro this (and why I bought an A3 scanner in the first place) is that all of the Japanese anime magazines are in weird sizes - they're all slightly bigger than A4, so you can't scan a page in a single go.

The net effect then is that scanning takes longer because although it's quicker it's not that much quicker, but also because I'm having to crop and save twice as many pictures.

However, there's also a whole new step where I have to load up the images and put them through the photostich process to stick them together. This obviously add a whole load of extra time, but also the results are really random.

Sometime you load things up and set it going and the results are perfect. Other times, they're rubbish. Most of the time they need some manual tweak - a slight nudge of one of the pictures to get it to line up properly. And of course this is even more time consuming, but also can be very frustrating.

So yeah - it's a real mixed bag.

inception

My dad has broadband from BT and as part of the package he gets a set-top box that has freeview on it, but it also gives him access to movies that he can stream. He has to pay for them of course - it's effectively a streaming rental.

Anyway, over the Chrimbo period we watched a few films, but rather than review all of them I thought I'd just do the one that was most entertaining, which was Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Obviously I'd been aware of Inception as it had quite a buzz about it, as they say, and I knew it had something to do with dreams. I should also note that I have a bit of a tricky time with Nolan's stuff - some of it I've really enjoyed, like Memento, other stuff I wasn't as impressed as everybody else seemed to be, like his Batman films, and then some I thought was rubbish, like Insomnia.

What I wasn't expecting from Inception was that it was going to be quite so complicated.

The film actually involves what are actually something like shared, lucid dreams - although they're still basically dreams, the people in them know they're dreams and can construct and manipulate them. This is already quite a complicated concept to get your head around as to how it works in the film, but later on they then go into dreams within dreams and things get really complicated.

By the end I think I'm right in saying you've got a triple-dream sandwich, where there's a dream within a dream, within a dream. It's complicated enough to write, let alone watch.

And what adds even more confusion is that this is all a mission to implant a thought in somebody's head, but to do so in such a way that they believe it's an original thought that they came up with themselves, rather than an implanted thought. Which is what the title is about - the inception of an idea.

So yeah - complicated, and so with the potential to be too confusing to understand. But it somehow manages to just stay on the side of the line that keeps it understandable.

I think part of how it does this is by treating the adults as intelligent people. So it doesn't feel the need to constantly explain everything - it does tell you stuff, but that's more about the mechanics than the fundamental plot or ideas. Instead it shows you the story and then lets you work stuff out for yourself.

So yeah, I thought it was really quite good - clever, with a good mix of action and ideas.

down, not up

I thought I'd switch things up this week and post reviews on Tuesday and Thursday, in order to help me catch up. I also think I've decided to do reviews of crunchyroll shows on here, rather than on my website proper. Actually, the whole website refresh thing has hit a bit of a brick wall, so dunno what's ultimately going to happen with the site.

Anyway, point is today I'm going to do the weekly weight post.

Last week I was anticipating a small gain or, at best, no change, but actually I had a two pound loss. This loss actually takes me below where I was before my chrimbo splurge.

I must admit I'm actually at a bit of a loss to explain the Christmas splurge. Or at least, at a bit of a loss to explain why the net effect has been so minimal.

Last time I went off-diet was when I had my holiday at the end of last summer. On that occasion I was pretty good for the beginning of the week and did lots of walking throughout the week, but at the end of the week I went seriously "off piste" and ate lots of junk. This had the effect of meaning the week was effectively nullified - I lost and gained nothing.

This last Chrimbo, I essentially stopped my diet, but exercise was partly scuppered by the weather, but also self-sabotaged by my being silly about not building up the distance I was walking. The point being that I didn't do a spectacular amount of exercise, ate fairly badly and have ended up roughly where I started.

My theory last week was to do with slow bowels, and I still basically believe that, but I also wonder if the decreased size of my stomach had a roll to play. See, while I was eating badly, I have to admit I was struggling to eat the sorts of volumes of food I remember eating pre-diet.

There were quite a few days where I'd eat a really big roast lunch (as previously mentioned I came back from my dad with way more roast stuff that I was expecting) and then I'd be so full I would only eat a little bit extra later on. The difficulty there is that the little bit extra would tend to be a few sweets or biscuits, so I dunno.

Anyway, I'm over-analysing. The point is I lost a couple of pounds and lesson learned - I won't make any sort of prediction about this next weekend. It could go up or down or stay the same.

paprika

Paprika was directed by a guy called Satoshi Kon.

Sadly, Satoshi Kon recently passed away. He was well known outside of Japan, particularly among anime fans, as a bit of an innovative genius. Satoshi Kon also directed a film called Perfect Blue, which was probably the first anime film I ever saw that told me anime could do proper films.

Well, that's not quite true - Akira was the first film to do it; Perfect Blue was the film that showed it wasn't a one off fluke.

Paprika has been on my rental list for a while, so when it recently turned up it was therefore tinged with a little bit of sadness.

The film does show flashes of that genius I was mentioning, but it's unfortunately not entirely a success. The problem, really, is it's shot through with a lot of techno-babble and a rather confused plot. The plot is also a little over-dense - it's adapted from a novel and has the feeling of trying to include too much in the time it has.

Paprika is essentially about dreams.

A device has been invented that seems to allow people to enter, control and manipulate their dreams at will. However, in doing so, the device also seems to enable a degree of mind control. The victims of this control then occupy a kind of waking dream state, where they're dreaming, but still running around - a bit like a kind of sleep-walking.

The good side of it is that this dream-world allows for a fluid grasp on reality that seems to suit animation and Satoshi Kon perfectly. The bad side is that the above plot is quite complicated and convoluted and there's a bit too much focus on the technology, and not quite enough on the people.

Which is a shame, as when the film is firing on all cylinders during the dream sequences, it's quite spectacular. Indeed, I'd whole-heartedly recommend catching it just for these bits alone.

There is one other criticism I would make, though - come of the voices don't really match the characters. In particular, the super-fat genius guy seems to have a too light, high pitched child-like voice and the main woman seems to have a bit too 'girly' a voice.

In the case of the fat guy, I think this is supposed to reflect his character, but both voices do just seem to jar with what's on screen. I dunno - it's difficult to explain, and these styles of voices are roughly carried over into the American dub, so I get the feeling it's deliberate, but for me it didn't quite work.

rain, rain

Rain, rain, go away, come back another day.

Not sure if this seems insensitive given what's happened in Australia and Brazil, but we seem to have been rained on constantly for weeks now. Obviously nothing like the scale of what they've had and they are massive tragedies, but this is my blog so I can only really talk about what's happening to me.

This morning's journey to work was horrible. We've had rain in some form pretty much every day for several weeks, but this morning it was really coming down. And given I set off for work in the dark and just when the traffic's starting to build for rush hour, you can guess why it wasn't much fun.

There's one part of the A31 in particular that seems to form a stream with even the slightest rain. Today it was like driving through a small river. I was actually overtaking a slow moving vehicle and managed to just be in its spray when we hit the river and my windscreen was completely wiped out by it. It took two or three swipes before I could see again, which was not nice.

I guess about the only good thing to say about it is that at least it's coming down as rain and not snow!

Oh - on that note, last weekend when I went shopping the snow had finally cleared from Tesco's car park. It obviously snowed some time back, and they'd piled it all up and the mound they created took ages to go - it was rather bizarre seeing it when it was turning mild and all the other snow had gone, but there was this big pile of nearly black snow.

This last weekend was predicted to be a little bit of a respite from the rain and although it did drizzle a couple of times, I took the combined opportunity of my landlord being away on his winter holiday to sort through some of the boxes in the shed.

My two main goals were to move some stuff that's drifted into my flat back out to the shed and to sort out the blue boxes, which contain my scanned magazines and artbooks. I did these, but it was incredibly hard work and I'm still aching badly today.

What I didn't do was sort all of the boxes. I'd hoped to make a complete list of what was in every box and to wrap everything up in plastic bags, but this proved to be just too much to achieve in one day. I did more than half of it, but when it got to dinner time and I was still way off I decided to quite while I was ahead.

On Sunday I also cleaned the car and, because it was flat-cleaning weekend but I'd been so busy with the boxes, I cleaned my flat then too. It was, to be frank, quite the painful experience as I really ached on the Sunday.

Anyway, at least now I've got a bunch of stuff identified to e-bay, so I can get that ball rolling. Well, assuming we're not going to get a sudden covering of snow as I seem to remember happened last year.

got ahead of myself

One of the slightly annoying things about not meeting my weight target is that I'd actually pre-written a whole load of celebratory posts.

I'd basically done a weeks worth that discussed how much I'd lost, how I'd done it and what the plan was for the coming year. Obviously these became rather scuppered, because I didn't actually meet my target (by some way) and so hadn't lost what I said and it somewhat ballsed up the plan for the future.

I think what I'll do is re-work these and post them when I do finally meet that target, as the target is a bit of a milestone anyway, since it represents a transition from morbid obesity to just plain old obesity. Still not a good weight to be, and there's some debate as to how accurate and representative the indicator I'm using is, but I think it's good to mark these things.

As I think I mentioned before Christmas, I did basically loose some 40 pounds, which is the best part of 3 stones, which is great, although it does highlight how big I was that this still didn't take me out of the morbid obesity zone.

I also completely failed to do a lot of the stuff I'd planned to over Chrimbo.

Usually, I try to ensure I do a back up of my electronic files when I have these holidays (usually I do it at Chrimbo, Easter and then my 'summer' holiday, which is usually actually more like an autumn holiday). I did do the essential backing up, but it's usually accompanied by some specific sorting and tidying as well as some redundancy stuff (having multiple copies in case both the original and other copies go tits-up).

It was this stuff that I failed to do. I also failed to watch much in the way of DVDs (anime or regular), which was another thing I'd decided was important. I'd thought I really should watch stuff, because at the least, if the weather stays improved I can start e-baying again.

But I didn't do that either. What I did do was sort of inspired by the back up and another thing I've been crap at - scanning.

Basically, the back-ups I did took absolutely ages - several days. The reason was because I've got so much stuff on my hard-drives it takes yonks to copy it all. But also, there's a hell of a lot of duplication, and some stuff in particular I know isn't properly organised.

The thing I ended up focusing on were my scans - all those scans I've done of Japanese magazines over the last 4 years. I thought if I could properly sort them out I'd be able to go through them and see what I could perhaps upload to animepaper and possibly even my own scan site.

The big problem I'd given myself was that I hadn't named things properly. A lot of scans were just numbered sequentially, so I couldn't search to see what Sengoku Basara scans I had, for example. But also, I'd been horribly inconsistent in terms of how I'd named things and then there was the age old problem of not being able to identify series at the time.

So I thought Id' go through and sort them. Only it turned out this was the job of weeks, not hours as I'd initially hoped. And that was with the discovery that windows 7 actually has some features that make the process pretty damn smooth.

Anyway, the point is I did manage to go through all the scans and rename and standardise everything but a small handful of stuff. And it seems to have done the trick a bit - I'm quite keen to get caught up with my backlog of magazines and have so far scanned 4 animages over the last week or so.

too busy

Again, just too busy to post yesterday.

Thought today I should make an effort and at least do my weekly weigh-in post.

Basically, I was rather stunned to discover I'd apparently lost 7 pounds. Having apparently gained 8 weeks over the Chrimbo fortnight, this means the net weight change since my last vaguely 'on course' diet week was a gain of 1 pound.

Now if I'd gone bonkers last week and done loads of walking and eaten nothing, I'd have sort of understood this apparent drop back. However, I didn't do those things, so I was rather stunned.

My theory as to what was going on is a little crude as it essentially revolves around bowel movements. You may want to skip ahead to the end.

The theory was that a big part of the gain was actually due to, shall we say "unprocessed", food in my bowels. Or, to put it more bluntly, having eaten a lot it was taking a while for all the waste to make its way through my system.

I know that may sound a bit odd, but I've always suffered from rather 'slow' bowels and am prone to constipation at the best of times. So going from a long term diet which involved pretty decent levels of fibre to a couple of weeks of eating a lot of not very good stuff it's not beyond the realms of possibility that I was afflicted with slow bowels.

Also, to get to the point again, I had really noticed a decline in the frequency and size of my bowel movements while on the diet (if you eat little, you're hardly going to do a lot of pooing) and then last week I was shitting for England. I was actually worried that I'd run out of toilet paper before I got a chance to go to the shops at one point.

So yeah, slightly bizarrely, my theory is that I had somehow managed to store, like, 5 or 6 pounds of poo. I know - doesn't sound very likely does it, but all I can say is that I've no other explanation of such a big increase and sudden decrease.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if I have another gain this week. I am now pretty much back on the diet proper, but at the beginning of the week there were still quite a few bad things left to eat. Actually, past tense is wrong there - there is still plenty more left, but everything else is suited to long-term storage (that is, they're frozen or tinned, or dried packets, etc) so I can consume them in a trickle and compensate for the calories a lot easier.

only tuesday, but...

I'm knackered.

Main problem is that I've come back to work and there's been so much to do. Talk about diving in at the deep end...

And it's kinda scuppered the whole blogging thing, both from the point of view of I've not got the time to do it, but I've also not got the inclination.

But there's also another factor at work. A factor that I always encounter at the beginning of a new year, or actually after a holiday. This extra factor is summed up best as "too much to talk about and not knowing where to start".

A good example is the small reviews I post about the DVDs I rent and watch. Since the last one I put on here I've actually watched 3 rented DVDs, with a fourth winging its way to me as I type. But also, while I was at my dad's over chrimbo we used his BT box thing to watch a bunch of movies, so I could also write reviews about them too.

But that's loads and so I don't know where to start, just like after every holiday. And then add to that I also don't have a lot of time nor inclination because of all the work I need to do and you can see why the blog unfortunately seems to be staling a bit.

well this is rubbish

Couldn't post on Friday and can't really post today either, because I'm horribly, horribly busy, which is totally rubbish.

There's absolutely loads on at work and all of it's time sensitive and rather critical, so I'm having to actually do stuff all day, rather than blog. I know - what is the world coming too?