giant killing

No rental DVD this last weekend and as mentioned the other day I had a rather crammed weekend, so I doubt I'd have been able to watch it anyway. I therefore thought I'd make good on something I've been threatening to do and post the first proper review of the streaming anime I've watched today.

I've written a few of these ready to post, but one of the down sides of me catching up with the scanning and also pushing myself to watch anime DVDs when I can as well as the streaming stuff is that I'm getting a huge backlog of things to review.

Association Football, more commonly known in some parts of the world as simply Football or by the abbreviated form soccer is a game I have something of a spotty relationship.

Fundamentally, as a game, I don't really have any problem with it. I can see that it's a game that involves a fair old bit of skill and talent, and those are things I can respect.

As a game it's got a pretty simple set of rules, which is never a bad thing. Games last for a reasonable 90 minutes and have plenty of opportunity to entertain and both the league and cup structures provide long-term interest and tension.

But I've never been a fan of the culture that surrounds football. I don't like it's tribal-ness. The moneys involved are grotesque, the players often appearing more like spoilt children than grown men. I also don't like it's ubiquity. I don't like the fact that whenever you get to the 'sports' bit in the news, actually it's 90% football and 10% everything else (if that).

Giant Killing, if you couldn't tell, is about football - a giant killing being a phrase often used to describe a small team defeating a giant one.

Well, no, I'm not entirely sure that's correct. You see, while Giant Killing is set in the world of football, the actual sport itself is depicted more like a giant game of chess. The amount of thinking the players do and the effectiveness of the long-term tactics they use is not like any game of football I've ever seen.

I don't mean the people involved don't actually think, it's more that the action often tends to flip into slow motion, yet the players are still thinking at normal speed. Also there's a weird way in which the coach never really tells people stuff, but instead kind of sets them up so that they have to realise they answer themselves.

And of course, they often manage to realise just in the nick of time, which adds drama, sure, but can you imagine someone like Alex Fergusson behaving like that?

Overall I did enjoy Giant Killing, but this it's-football-but-not-quite-football feel to it may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Also, obviously being about a football team across an entire season presented the makes with some problems. To start with, the anime is quite in-depth, but around half way through it starts skipping multiple games. This is entirely understandable, but means the pacing shifts quite dramatically.

And while the start of the season suggests some pretty clear goals (as it were), the anime finishes a long way before those are even close, let alone concluded. My guess is the hope was that they'd get a second season, but I'm not sure if they will, so it could be one of those shows without a proper end.

australian gp

As mentioned last Friday, it was the Australian Grand Prix this last weekend.

I actually found the whole weekend kinda... I dunno, stressful feels like the wrong word, but basically I seemed to have so much to do anyway and then adding in watching all of the practice and qualifying and the race itself meant the weekend was fit to bursting. Plus of course I lost an hour, as mentioned yesterday.

A big part of the problem is that I seem to have found myself with the weekends where I clean my flat aligned with the F1 Grand Prix weekends. I'm pretty sure that last year it was the other way around - the non-flat cleaning weekends were aligned with the F1 GP weekends.

This also has other knock on effects in terms of timing. On flat cleaning weekends I do my food shop on the Friday evening after work, but I hadn't really planned it through properly and did quite a big shop. Usually I'll just get the few essential bits and then use a self-service checkout so it's quick, but this time it wasn't so it was quit elate before I got back.

That then meant that I didn't have the time to watch both Friday practices in the evening, and there was a bit of cascade effect - stuff got pushed back and then other stuff got pushed back. It was all a bit of a mess really.

Anyway, the race itself was okay.

Australia can be a bit hit and miss - sometimes you'll get a great race with all sorts happening, and other times it can be a bit processional. I'd say the race this last weekend was somewhere in between. A few things happened, but it wasn't up there as one of the best ever.

I think also there were hints that these new ideas they've had about the adjustable rear wing (or DRS) and brining KERS back could be a bit of a bust. It's too early to completely write them off, but the anticipation that suddenly they would be overtaking all the time was proven to be something of a false hope.

I dunno - I think the problem is that both are relatively subtle effects and so the impact they have is difficult to notice. In the American Indycar series I understand they have a proper "push-to-pass" button that is a lot clearer and they can press it a limited number of times per race and it's obvious to spectators.

Both KERS and the DRS have graphical displays when you're in car, but it's not like a big light flashes on the car itself. Also, clearly this last weekend even the combo of KERS and DRS isn't that huge an effect. Certainly it seemed to help on a few occasions, but the tussle between Massa and Button showed it's probably not as clear cut as all that.

What seems like it might have the biggest impact is the new tyres - the Sauba cars both managed to go quite a long way on their tyres compared to the front runners, but the fewer pit stops they needed meant they were up in the points.

I'd say if we're going to introduce Mickey Mouse "fixes" instead of addressing the real issue of the car's huge reliance on wing-generated downforce then it should be much clearer and have a more significant impact than the DRS and KERS, like the tyres.

clocks

Sunday morning was clock moving day.

Well, you're free to move your clock any day of the week, but Sunday morning was when we adopt what I believe the American's call Daylight Saving's Time. This is a remarkably succinct summary of its purpose and typically we have a slightly less meaningful name for it - British Summer Time (or BST).

The "time" part in particular makes it sound like an official proclamation that now summer has begun, whereas actually it's the same sort of time as in Greenwich Mean Time.

Which is all a round about way of saying that the clocks went forwards by one hour to take us onto BST, rather than GMT. The basic idea is that it means the evenings are lighter later.

It's always fascinated me how daily life is kinda skewed towards evening, even though mid-day 12:00 GMT is set at the exact moment where the sun hits its peak. So there are an equal number of hours of light before twelve as there are afterwards, yet by common consensus life is skewed into the evening.

The average working day is a perfect example - it starts at 9am, three hours before mid-day, but it doesn't end three hours after mid-day, instead it ends 5 or 6 hours after mid-day. We don't all get up hours before we go to work, but we do all go to bed hours after we finish work.

This of course is behaviour that's been enabled in part by technology, but even before that I'm sure it was also the case - probably since people learned to make fire.

Anyway, I'm blathering - the point is that the move to BST ensures that it's lighter later during the summer, thereby allowing people to be more productive later in the evening. Also, as an interesting side effect, it actually reduces electricity demand, as people don't need to switch their light son until later.

This is partly what's behind calls to take us permanently an hour forward. The idea is that we would go forward, but then never go back.

This is appealing in some respects, but it does cause me concern, as light in the evenings is something that makes it difficult for me to get to sleep. For example, where I currently live I have white curtains and there tends to be quite poor at blocking light. This means I've ended up pinning black bin bags to the curtains to block out the light.

When we get closer to the solstice I'll really be struggling - it'll be too light for me. So while the idea of moving to BST permanently would probably be okay, if it still came with a daylight savings shift, it would be something of a disaster for me.

In other words, if we still put the clocks forward even after the shift (so, in other words, we moved to GMT+2) I'd really have a lot of problems getting to sleep.

F1 season start, take 2

So this weekend sees the Formula one season get going after the cancellation of the Bahrain GP.

And events in Bahrain have kinda backed up what I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. A country where dozens of peaceful demonstrators are shot to death and neighbouring countries with equally despotic leaders are asked to send troops in to crush the rebellion doesn't really sound like the sort of place I want my sport to be endorsing. Unless it resolves in the direction of giving the people greater say in the running of their own country, I think we should be staying away.

Anyway, at least the Australian GP should be going ahead.

I've been trying to keep up with the F1 stuff during the off-season, though I tend to forget about it. The new cars look a little different - they've got a longer wheel base, to give them more room for these KERS systems. This seems to have manifested itself as a longer, pointier nose on most cars, which seems a little odd, but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

I must say I'm not sure about the whole re-inclusion of KERS as well as this rear-wing idea. KERS was okay as a concept, but they way it was implemented when it first came in seemed to make it a bit of a damp squib. If it had been a done more simply, such as they could only use it to overtake, and it had been more powerful, I think it would have worked better.

And the rear-wing idea seems to be even more complicated - you can only use it if you're within a certain distance of the car in front, and only on a designated straight, but not within x laps of the start and they can't use it to defend. I've a horrible feeling we're going to see a few people hang around behind the car in front until the very last lap and then use it to blast past and get points they don't really deserve.

What's more annoying is these all seem to be sops to the real problem that the cars have become horribly reliant on aerodynamic down force, which prevents them getting close enough to each other. Hopefully the rule changes proposed for future years - the introduction of ground effect in particular will sort that out, though.

After going on about whether I would watch the MotoGP last Friday, the practicalities of the situation actually prevented me from doing so - I'd forgotten it was being shown quite late on the Sunday as it was in foreign climes, so in the end I recorded it and will have to catch up later on.

the punisher: war zone

This weekend's rental, Punisher: War Zone got a bit of a drubbing from the critics and was something of a flop at the box office.

However, I actually quite enjoyed it.

I mean, I don't think it was a particularly great film in the sense of being a deep story, but it basically did exactly what was written on the tin and I enjoyed it for that. I think also that a point made in the commentary track by the director was a good one and that many of the critics were probably completely unfamiliar with the tone and nature of the comics it was based so they kinda missed the point.

I think probably they did miss the point, but I'm not sure it's fair to expect them to make themselves familiar with the specific source material. To be frank, although I'd probably still say the punisher was one of my favourite characters, I've not read any of the comics in a very long time. In particular, I'm completely unfamiliar with the war zone comic this is essentially an adaptation of.

I think a big part of my interest in the punisher is the muddle of contradictions of the character. For those unfamiliar, he's basically bent on revenge after mobsters killed his family. And yet, unlike the rest of the Marvel canon, that revenge takes the form of killing criminals - and we're talking ordinary criminals, rather than super villains. Frank Castle is a mass murderer, but he's a mass murderer of people who break the law.

But for me there's all sorts of interest levels within that - where does he draw the line? Would he kill someone who parked illegally? When he's killing hardened mob bosses who the traditional justice system doesn't catch, you can kind of see it as justifiable, but what about a mugger or a junkie?

He has an appallingly fascist outlook, and yet he's supposed to have been a loving family man. These are the things that always interested me about the character, but they're not really explored in the film. The approach that tends to be focused on is that he really did love his family and is bent on revenge and wants to eradicate crime in order to make the world safe for other families.

This film follows that route, as I presume the comic did, and for what it is, it does work. And I think you really have to bear that in mind when watching it.

Although, to be fair, the film does have some weird contradictions in it. Early on, the mob bosses are depicted as weirdly stereotypical and when the Jigsaw character gets going he's weirdly camp. He actually reminded me a lot of Batman's Joker character and there did seem to be a desire to play it for laughs, which did work, but wasn't quite what I was expecting.

I dunno - a character like that can be a really fine balance, but I think the difference is that the Joker has that maniacal humour built into him, whereas the Jigsaw I knew was always just a really mean bastard.

so what to do?

I've dedicated the last couple of days to trying to understand why I've been self-sabotaging my own diet.

I'm not entirely sure I articulated it very well, but the basic point is that I've been really noticing the weight loss this last few weeks. Before Christmas I personally was a little surprised by the apparent lack of difference, but in the last few weeks there have been a lot of signs.

The most apparent one and the one that I think scared me into comfort eating (I think that's what I've really been doing - I don't think I've actually been engaged in self-sabotage, it's just that's the net effect) was the changes I can see in my reflection, but there have been others. These have included the fact that all of my clothes are really loose, the fact I've started to be able to feel the structure of my underling muscles and bones beneath all the flab when I rub or scratch myself and the fact I can now walk quite long distances at a good pace and that there's much less need for recovery afterwards.

I think it's probably my dogged sticking to my exercise routine that's actually compensated for the comfort eating I've been doing, so I don't think there's any problem with that side of things. If I'm honest, the walking can seem like quite chore some times, especially if the weather is inclement, but I'm always glad I went for a walk when I get back.

So the bit I need to fix is the eating.

In particular, I've been tending to splurge out in the evenings and generally my eating has gone a bit wonky at the weekends.

For the evenings I think the fix mainly comes down to the application of willpower. It's how I managed to get myself to start this process and it's how I need to get myself out of it. I do think I might start adding in some extra fruit during the week nights. Wednesday lunch I pop into town in order to do some domestic stuff, including popping into Sainsbury's to get any bits I need.

This opens me up to the temptation of buying bad stuff (usually from the bakery section, baked goods being one of my real weaknesses) but I think instead I'll try to buy some healthy fruit or, in particular, salad stuff.

Now that the winter seems to finally be lifting, we're getting into salad season and I think this is also a key to the weekend as well. I mentioned before I was trying to eat up my stockpiles (this was probably the start of the whole comfort eating thing, though I didn't realise it) and I've been doing this at the weekends, so I need to shift the focus away from these and on to salads and things of that ilk.

While I like salad it's not something I find I can really eat during the chillier months. There's something about that combination of cold food and cold weather that turns me off, but if the thermometer keeps ascending then I think I'll be okay to make the switch.

the different me in the mirror

As mentioned yesterday, I've been sabotaging my own weight loss.

I think the root cause of this is actually something that I've been thinking about for a while now, in that I look different.

As I discussed in my set of posts about how the weight loss was planned and started a few weeks ago, part of the reason for loosing the weight is a desire not too look so bad. I don't want to be a fat blob any more - or, at the very least, I don't want to be a morbidly obese blob anymore; I'll decide if I mind being a simply fat blob when I eventually get there.

Anyway, the point is that loosing weight obviously changes how you look and this is a part of why I want to loose the weight.

Back when I was in uni doing my Physics degree, one of the subjects we covered was something called Fourier analysis. I won't try to explain this, but the prof explaining it mentioned that he had a theory that we all have mental Fourier filters.

These filters act on the image we see in the mirror, in order to kind of "smooth out" the bad bits (clearly this is for normal perceptions, not those with things like Anorexia). This he suggested was why most people can look at themselves in the mirror, but instantly hate seeing ourselves in photos - in a mirror your image is reversed, so your filter is based on that reversed image.

A simpler way to think about it is that the things we see in the mirror every day we get used to.

Now as I mentioned a few weeks ago I've been fat for most of my life, so my filter is processing out that fatness. I don't see a blob in the mirror, but I do in photos (oh boy do I).

Having lost what amounts to around a fifth of my entire body weight these filters have therefore started to be presented with a similar problem when I see myself in the mirror. I keep catching my reflection and seeing parts of my body that didn't used to look like that and because my filter isn't adjusted yet, it's oddly alarming.

You know, this is actually proving really difficult to explain, because I'm also fully aware that my initial blobness is entirely self-inflicted. If someone is injured and gets a big, nasty scar on their face, it's a whole different ball game to if you spent your life sat on your arse eating pies.

My point is that even though those bits that didn't used to look like that are the beginnings of the changes I want to see I think they've also been alarming me in a similar way that the face-scar would. You can understand the face scar thing, because it's your brain alerting you to something you need to pay attention to - something could be wrong that you need to sort out. It's just my brain is doing that even though the underlying change is a good one that I want.

self sabotage

I think I might have been engaged in some sabotaging my own weight loss.

Over the last few weeks, while I have been loosing weight, the rate of loss has declined rapidly. And every week I seem to have some sort of reason for why this has happened.

But I'm used to this behaviour from me.

I'm quite good at the creation of reason and justification. It would be too harsh to call it lying as such, but it's in the same ballpark. I'm good at generating excuses. So my dietary slips have been written off as "unavoidable" due to various things.

And while these things have genuinely happened, as I say, it's more of the same generation of reasonable excuses that I'm so very good at. I suppose a familiar word for it would be "spin" - the presentation of facts in such a way that they support the viewpoint you're presenting, or at the least obscure the viewpoint you don't want people to see.

I think this came to a head in the later part of this last week when I released I was going totally off-plan with my diet. I ate loads of stuff that I really shouldn't, giving in to temptation several times. But what made it apparent I was making excuses for myself was that this time there really was no excuse I could come up with to explain it away.

I ate this stuff because I was slipping back into old patterns of behaviour.

Now depending on how you want to take it, I either was or wasn't punished for this. When I weighed myself on Sunday, I found that I had lost no weight - I again weighed 20 stone (well, I actually weighed exactly 20 stone, so may have gained that 0.2 pounds it showed I was under last week, but as noted, I rounded that up, so it was no change).

So I was either punished because I undermined the dieting/exercise activity I did that would have resulted in a drop or I got away with it in that my splurging on bad food didn't make me gain weight. Either way, it made my target of 19 stone by around my birthday a little more difficult, which is why I decided to do this "confessional" type post.

I think this slippage relates primarily to a weird affect I'm finding from the weight loss, which I'll continue with tomorrow

start of moto gp season

This weekend sees the start of the MotoGP season.

I'm rather in two minds about whether to follow the MotoGP season this year. The problem I've got is that it's going to add quite a few more hours of stuff to watch this year and I'm not sure I want to expend that time.

I've sorta been hoping that this summer would represent a bit of a "turning point" in terms of my unwatched DVD pile. I was hoping that I would roll on my new found desire to get stuff done that I've been putting to good use for the scanning into watching these DVDs.

I have actually been trying to watch some DVD stuff in the evenings and I've been doing okay, but my hope was that when it gets round to summer and interesting telly stuff dries up, I'll be able to use that time to make some sort of impression on it.

This hope is further boosted by the whole crunchyroll thing. Now that I've been tackling most of the new anime via the legal and paid for route of crunchyroll, I'm hoping that has a huge knock-on effect in terms of the DVDs or buy. Or rather, it will massively reduce the number of anime DVDs I buy (indeed, it may eradicate them altogether).

Of course, this will help me financially too - not only will I be able to sell stuff I've watched on e-bay, but crunchyroll only costs about £60 an entire year, and I can easily spend that every month on DVDs.

To this end, I've already been getting into quite a brutal mindset for the telly I watch at the moment. Once a week I like to set up all the stuff I want to watch on pre-record. This then allows me to take a look at the list and see how much of it there is and what stuff there is. If it's too much or there's some things on there I perhaps didn't like enough to keep them going, then I'll delete them.

Comedies in particular have tended to got the chop. I'm not sure if I'm becoming less tolerant, or I used to be overly-tolerant, but I've even found myself dropping things without completing the first episode.

So I think I'll suck it and see with the MotoGP season - give it maybe a couple of races and if it proves too much of a time burden or isn't that interesting, then I'll probably drop it.

weight loss

Some surprises for this weekend's weigh in.

The first was that, despite the extra pancakes on Tuesday and a gnawing fear that the previous weekend's "curry and chips" episodes would catch up with me, I actually lost 3 pounds.

Well, I say I lost three pounds, one of the other surprises was that my scales suddenly started weighing in fractions, so actually it was apparently telling me I'd lost 3.2 pounds.

This actually took me below 20 stone, which I think is what triggered the inclusion of the decimal point.

I'm not explaining this well.

Basically, when I got on the scales on Sunday morning, they gave me a reading of 19 stone, 13.8 pounds.

As I read the display my initial surprise was that I apparently now weighed under 20 stone, which meant I must have lost more than 3 pounds, because I weighed 20 stone 3 pounds the week before.

Then, as my eyes continued to scan across the display (it's a digital thing), I couldn't make head-nor-tales of it, since it seemed to be saying 19 stone 138 pounds. Then I realised there was a decimal point between the 3 and 8 so it was actually saying 13.8 pounds.

This puzzled me, since the scale has never shown decimals like this before - it's always been full stones and pounds. I therefore initially assumed it was an error, so I hoped off, reset it and hoped back on - same reading. Wow.

It then occurred to me that the decimals might have been triggered by the fact I'd gone under 20 stone - perhaps it starts rounding off when you go above that. Certainly this would explain why I'd never seen it before.

It then also occurred to me that if that was the case, I didn't actually know how much I'd lose, since I could have weighed anything from 20 stone 2.5 pounds to 20 stone 3.4 pounds and it would have still shown 20 stone 3 pounds.

In other words, despite apparently going below 20 stone, I'm going to be on shaky ground if I now start operating in decimal places, so rounding it takes me back up to 20 stone.

Still, it's nice to finally hit the 20 stone mark, and I'm now only about a stone off of my Birthday/Easter target, which is good.

kiss kiss bang bang

I'd always though that Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was a nickname the Japanese used for James Bond.

According to Wikipedia, however, it actually originates from an Italian movie poster for a Bond film, although I do know the Japanese use it. The point is that it's for Bond, and so I'd assumed this film would be some sort of secret agent thing. I mean, I knew it was a comedy, and I was right about that, but it turned out not to be a secret agent thing at all.

In fact, it's more of a film noire thing.

It also turned out to be a rather black comedy. And a surprisingly good one, as it raised more than a few chuckles from me.

One other thing that was interesting is that the film kinda plays with breaking the fourth wall. Basically, the narrator is aware of the audience and talks to them directly, but it's more like you're watching the film with him at home and he's chipping in with some comments.

So in other words, it's mostly as if he's on our side of the fourth wall; however, occasionally he'll interact with the film in such a way that he's both in the film and kind of like an omnipotent being as well. Basically, this is best demonstrated when he asks a couple of extras in the film to move out of the way so the camera can see something.

I've always been a sucker for that kind of stuff, so I really enjoyed this aspect of the film.

I also particularly enjoyed the way it plays with film noire conventions. I can't confess to knowing that much about film noire, but most of the tropes and clichés are sufficiently familiar to most people that it's understandable what it's doing.

But it still essentially plays it straight - the plot twists and coincidences aren't done in a jokey way, it's just that the film acknowledges they are things familiar to us all from years of watching movies.

The film is also a good length and is very well paced - you never feel it's bogging down or getting stuck and it manages to juggle its main plot and a whole bunch of subplots very well. Perhaps the only thing I'd have liked would have been a bit more about Val Kilmer's character, as he tends to turn up only when he's needed to advance a particular element of the plot, but that's not really a bigy.

About the only thing I didn't like about this was a complete lack of any extras on the DVD - there wasn't even a short featurette or trailers.

scanning or not

As with most weekends recently, I had "do lots of scanning" on my to do list.

However, actually I only scanned three things, although I did spend an awful lot of hours working on the scans. Basically, I realised I was rapidly running out of hard-drive space, espcially since I try to keep multiple copies of things, in case of drive crashes.

I therefore attached the stack of scans that I need to run through photostitch in order to stick them together. This is something I've not been looking forward to, although I think now I have a strategy for doign them that is about as efficient as it gets.

Basically, I run through them all, trying to stich them together as they are, with no processing at all. This is one of those tasks that becomes mechanistic, as in, click this button, type here, click that button, wait a moment, check the result, click here, type there, rinse and repeat.

The key part is that I've now managed to work out a way for the checking to be done as quickly and simply as possible. However, it's still the case that the bit where it's processing the scans is still too short for me to practically whatch anime, like I do when I'm doing the scanning. Also, it's not the sort of job that I can do both pretty much simultaneously as the checking does require my full attention.

Anyway, point is I run through the scans liek that, which succesfully sticks together probably 80%. One thing I did discover is that I appear to have missed a few scans, so I had to scan those. This was made slightly difficult as I did them a while ago and couldn't remmeber the scan settings I was using - I've been experimentign with the settings to see what reults I liked best.

With the remaning 20% the results can be very random, which has been the source of my main frustration, because I just can't work out why it's stumbling over them. And the degree of stumble seems utterly random as well - sometimes it will align things not quite right, but then other times it will horribly distort everything so that it looks like some sort of weird piece of modern art.

What I usually do at this point is close photoshop down, so it clears out the RAM (I've noticed it tends to fill up the RAM with junk like a total bastard). I then restart and give the remainder another go. This usually gives me good results for aroudn half that are left - for some reason if you give it a second go like this on some scans, it will make a much better go of it.

The remainder that are left need manual intervention and thankfully I seem to have now hit upon a method that works consistently.

It can roughly be summed up as consistent cropping. Essecnailly, what I do is pick a particular edge (so along the right side of the magazine, for example) and crop the images such that this edge is consistent and parrallel across the two images. I also try to trim off the very edge of all of the scans where the pages break across the page.

For some reason, this manual lining up combined with giving the program a "fresh start" seems to consistenly give good results. Of course, when you think about it I'm actually doing half the job of the program for the pictures, so it's not surprising it works, just surprising that the program falls over then doing it on those images, but not the rest.

I managed to process 4 Nyan Types and 3 animages over the course of the weekend. Now to be fair, if I'd been scanning I'd have speant more time doing it and I had alreayd processed a chunk of the scans for those magazines, but I think it takes roughly a third of the time to stitch the scans as it does to scan them in the first place.

That's adds quite a lot, but is better than I feared.

running costs

I think I mentioned the other day how I don't tend to focus on current events in this blog. Generally it's a fairly light blog about the boring stuff I get up to. However, since I count watching anime and reading manga amongst my favourite past-times and tend to think of myself as a bit of a Japanophile, it seems churlish not to at least acknowledge the horrible-ness that was last Friday's Earthquake and Tsunami.

Earthquakes are pretty horrible, but Tsunami's have to be one of the scariest natural disasters you can imagine. I mean, many other disasters you can protect against, or there can be sufficient warning to evacuate, but something like that happening so close to the Japanese coast meant a heck of a lot of people have unfortunately lost their lives.

Anyway, back to me and the petty concerns of my life.

Last Friday I put my car in for a service and MOT. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the car, so it past the MOT, but I did need some new brakes, which meant the total rose to a rather eye watering £440.

However, this is only the start of a couple of months of car related expense that's really going to hammer my wallet. Next up, I need a new set of tyres. This wouldn't be so bad, except that apparently my car is the only one that uses this particular model of tyre. That makes them slightly more expensive, but also really difficult to find. Really I need 4 new tyres and they're likely to be about £140 each with the higher VAT rate.

The next expense will be my insurance. This will cost me about £500. I could get it cheaper, but it would mean things like abandoning my no claims protection and increasing my voluntary excess. From experience, these are all things that sound un-necessary, but then if you have an accident it means it ends up costing you five times as much in the long run.

Lastly will be my car tax. This is the one I resent the most - why the hell do I have to pay a separate car tax, given the amount of tax there is on petrol? It's absolutely ridiculous. Especially with it being a flat fee. I mean, it is reduced depending on your carbon emissions, but the reality of carbon emissions is that it's actually more to do with how you drive, rather than the numbers in the brochure.

I mean, someone I know has recently got a hybrid, so has far lover car tax, yet he's only been getting about 43 miles to the gallon. I don't think I've ever gotten les than 45 miles to the gallon, yet my car tax is higher.

I can't remember how much my car tax is, but it's somewhere in the region of £150, so when you tot all that up, it's all going to set me back the best part of £1,750.

This isn't cheap, but a big part of the problem is that I've made a rod for my own back. See, the car I own is actually what was the top of the line, and that's a big part of why it's so expensive. If I'd had the bog standard model, the tyres would be at least 1/3rd cheaper, and the brakes would be drum brakes, which last a lot longer and are a lot cheaper. Also, the official carbon count would be lower, reducing the tax, and because it would fundamentally be a cheaper car I'm sure the insurance would be lower too.

routine

When I wrote Wednesday's pancake post, I actually meant to mention my weekly routine too, but it became one of those super-huge posts, so I thought I'd chop it in two and post the rest today.

Pancake Tuesday obviously represented a dietary divergence (given the chicken curry wasn't a disaster I'm also hoping the extra pancakes don't pox me up this week), but it also represented a break from a routine I've been trying to stick to these last few weeks.

I talked the other week about how I was cracking on with the scanning, and part of this has been achieved by doing scanning in the evenings during the week. I mean, I do most of the scanning at the weekend, but I've been boosting it with scanning during the week in the evenings too.

Essentially, the routine breaks down like this:

Monday, Wednesday and Friday are telly watching days and Tuesday and Thursday are scanning days.

On Monday I try to watch live telly. Generally speaking, the gadget show is on on Mondays, so I often watch that, but otherwise there's usually some telly that's on I want to watch, but if not I can watch something I recorded. I also bake bread on Monday, to have for lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday is a scanning day, but it's also the day I prep my washing to take to the laundrette on Wednesday lunch. I also tend to do the washing up that I've got (the diet means that I actually generate very little washing up during the week). Nowadays I watch anime on crunchyroll, but I used to watch fansubs and will have to start on them again as I'm getting quite a backlog of fansubs.

Wednesday is a telly day and I watch stuff I've recorded. A big advantage to doing this on Wednesday is I don't have the random bits and pieces I mentioned above, so I can watch a good three hours of stuff. I might put away the washing up I've picked up at the laundrette, but usually I save that sort of stuff for Friday.

Thursday is another scanning day and again I'll also do any washing up. Again, I watch anime on crunchyroll while I scan.

Friday is a telly watching day, but it's also a day when I do a bunch of chores, so I won't necessarily watch that much telly. Typical things I'll do include putting away my washing, cleaning my work shoes, prepping stuff for the weekend and the next week. All pretty boring, but y doing them Friday evening, I don't have to worry about them come the weekend. I'll also sometimes do my food shop on Friday - this kinda depends on what mood I'm in, how busy the weekend will be and how much I need to buy.

It's quite an efficient routine. I'm quite the fan of imposing routine as I find it helps me achieve things. I mean, I've been getting so much scanning/animu watching done I'm actually generating backlogs of scans to process and reviews to write, as mentioned last week.

vanilla sky

Vanilla Sky is a remake of a Spanish film called "Abres los Ojos" or "Open your Eyes".

Well, actually, in the commentary, the director, Cameron Crow, keeps calling it a cover version. This I think is partly because he's big into music (he used to be a Music Journalist), but also because, from what I've heard, it's almost identical to the original.

I have to confess I wasn't quite as impressed with Vanilla Sky as I think it wanted me to be. Now whether this is due to the original story or something they did (or didn't do) in this cover, I don't know and I wouldn't say I actively disliked the film, but I did find it to be a bit lacking.

I think my big problem with it really was that it lacked ambiguity.

I know that's a bit of an odd thing to say, because if you do some searching around there appear to be quite a lot of theories as to what's happening, and I can see most of them, although I think it's actually fairly clear what the intended truth is, no my problem comes at the end.

I'm going to have to get into spoiler territory here, because the central crux of the film is existentialism - what is reality and how do we know what's real? In this case, the reality is being contrasted with dreams, or more specifically a lucid dream, which is where you can control your own dream.

Anyway, the point seems to be that the main character David ends up in a Lucid Dream and quite where that happens in the narrative of the film seems to be the source of the debate as to what's going on. But to me, what would have been (and is always) a more interesting take on this sort of existentialism is the possibility of whether things are real or not.

So was he really dreaming or not?

The film leaves little doubt that yes, he was dreaming and it's only really mysterious as to when that happens and also whether he wants to stay in that situation. I therefore found it unsatisfying.

But also, I was a bit troubled by the central theme of the film. The "message" (if you will) of the film seems to revolve so squarely around looks it seemed a little distasteful to me. I think it was meant to be about accepting who you are and that looks don't matter, yet it also seems to undermine these as well. Similarly, is it about someone who's narcissistic, yet also hates himself for being narcissistic? If so, why, in the end, does it seem to validate the narcissism?

Oh and for a sci-fi nerd kicker - if you're in cryogenic suspension (that is, deep frozen), how can you dream? And even if that were possible, if you're in cryogenic suspension for a very long time does that dream keep repeating on a loop? And how would they know there was a problem?

pancake day

I think, technically, pancake day is called Shrove Tuesday and precedes Ash Wednesday and the beginning of lent.

Lent, I believe, is meant to be the period of fasting Christians go though before Easter. I think it's something to do with Jebus wandering the desert. I believe the idea was that pancakes were a way of eating up stuff like eggs and milk before lent.

These may or may not be right - I don't do religion, so I could well have mixed up some stuff.

Anyway, the real point is it's an opportunity to eat pancakes (or really what most people tend to have are the thin crepes, rather than the thicker pancakes or some recipes). I love pancakes, and have them almost without fail for my Sunday (treat day) breakfast.

My pancake recipe is a bit divergent from the normal recipe. There are plenty of recipes for pancakes, all of which involve eggs, flour and milk, but the difference with what I do is decrease the amount of egg and milk (which I also thin with water). This reduces the fat content, but also means the resultant pancakes are a little thicker than usual, which I prefer. Essentially, my batter ends up being like double cream, rather than single cream as is the norm.

In recent months I've tended to have the pancakes with fruit. When I do my main food shopping, which is usually Friday evening or Saturday morning, I try to buy berries. One of the things I found when researching my diet was that, on the whole, berries have very few calories.

So strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries - I can eat loads of them without much fear of ruining my diet. Well, so long as I tear clear of any sort of accompaniment, like cream or ice cream or sugar. But then I love berries on there own, so I don't mind that.

Actually, one thing I can and do like to do is chuck a load of berries in with a sliced up apple and poor on a low-fat yoghurt. Sort of like a very simple fruit salad. Obviously, this does make the calorie count noticeably higher, but then it's also pretty much a meal.

Anyway, point is I've tended to team my Sunday pancakes with fresh fruit. However, back when I first started this tradition I actually used to generally have lime juice. I know the normal accompaniment most people think of is lemon juice and I would have that too, but I prefer limes to lemons, so I would normally have that (you can buy bottles of the juice).

So last night I reverted to having lime juice, as obviously I didn't have any berries. But what it did dredge up in me was memories of when we were kids and my mum would cook up a batch of pancakes for pancake day. What we used to have then was orange juice, freshly squeezed from actual oranges. I remember it was a really nice combination, so this weekend I might buy an orange or two (and a juicer!) and have that for Sunday.

curry and chips

The weigh in this last Sunday revealed I had lost one more pound.

Not a huge amount again, but I was actually somewhat pleased by this, as last week I ate several rather bad things.

The first bad thing I ate was a curry, which I had on Thursday as I went out for dinner. Curtailing my eating out activities has been a part of the diet, as generally most eating out involves quite a lot of calories.

I could probably have limited the calories if I'd had a vegetable curry and avoided having a naan and those poppadoms where you dip them into the sauces and a sorbet for dessert. But I didn't do any of those things - I had a Chicken Rogan Josh, one of those naans that has the coconut in it, several poppadoms liberally dipped and a lemon sorbet.

It was, to be frank, an enormous feast that I'd probably have struggled to eat even pre-diet . I guess on the upside it was so big I was rather full for and so ate less around it, but that was somewhat hampered by the fact that Friday involved a pub lunch at work to celebrate someone's birthday. And I had gammon, egg and chips.

So yeah, quite a bit of pigging out last week, unfortunately, so I was rather pleased that I'd still managed to loose a pound.

I do wonder when I have these slips what would have happened if I hadn't slipped. I mean, it seems fairly certain I would have lost more weight, but how much? Are we talking not enough to show up or several extra pounds?

I dunno - I guess what I'm saying is that I ended up with a weird mix of feeling - pleased I'd still lost weight, despite going off-plan, guilty that I could have lost more, puzzled as to whether I could eat a curry every week and still loose weight, but then worried about how long the diet would last if I did that and only lost 1 pound a week from now on.

f1 pause

So this next weekend should have seen the start of the 2011 F1 Grand Prix season with the opener in Bahrain.

That, of course, is not happening, what with all these foreigners demanding stuff like freedom or expression and free and fair elections - I mean, the cheek of it! It's all very well trying to throw off your oppressors and all, but interfering with the F! season is quite beyond the pail.

I'm joking, obviously, but it does somewhat highlight one of the other problems with Bernie's rush to get to different places around the world. Part of the reason is clearly a desire to expand the sport's fan-base and to give manufactures, sponsors and brands access to new and developing markets.

I've no real problem with these ideas, as they make some sense, but it has created a few issues. One of my main one is that most of the new circuits are poor, not least of all because Hermann Tilk designs them all and while I wouldn't want to say he was entirely the reason for them being rubbish, it can't be a good thing that exactly the same person designs them all.

But the problem highlighted by the Bahrain GP is Bernie's apparently eager willingness to go for dodgy regimes. I mean, if you look at a list of the newer circuits, a good chunk of them are happening in countries that lack freedom for their population and/or have appalling records on human rights. What seems to distinguish quite a few of them is the willingness by the person or people in charge to blow huge wodges of what you could argue should be the people's money on having their own GP.

Now don't get me wrong, F1 is an expensive game, especially nowadays when safety has to be so good and their are demands for high-end facilities. In a sense, F1 has become a victim of its own success in this regard. My main point is that it's a real shame that this therefore means that all the dodgiest parts of the world are the only ones who seem to be able (or should that be willing) to spend this sort of money.

that wasn't what i wanted to talk about

How posts end up being about something else.

Generally speaking I pre-write my blog entries.

I do this for a variety of reasons. Among them are the fact that some days I have a bit more spare time than others; the blog isn't structured such that it follows something on a daily basis - I very rarely mention current affairs, and when I do it tends to be in a more considered, after-the-fact way and it gives me a chance to self-edit and spell check.

What I find interesting, though, is the fact that despite pre-writing them in this way (I have a word document on a USB stick I keep it all on) and therefore, in theory, planning out what I want to talk about, I end up writing blogs that don't actually do this.

This week is a classic example.

Monday's blog was supposed to be about how I ended up with a mild case of jogger's nipple. Jogger's nipple is, as the name suggests, an ailment that affects joggers and is to do with how their shirts rub against their nipples as they run, chaffing their nipples and causing them discomfort.

I got a bit of that on my Sunday walk, but the reason was because of the rain. I got so wet that my shirt really chaffed my nipple and caused me said ailment. And that meant I had to explain about how heavy the rain was. But then I realised I would have to start with how come I was so far away from home that I got that wet in the first place.

By the time I'd written all the pre-amble I'd gone over a page and realised I was into too-long post territory.

What makes this worse is that really I was going to use the jogger's nipple to explain about how last week I seemed to spend the whole week either injured or injuring myself. I whacked my foot, did something to my urethra, bought some new shoes which rubbed my heals quite badly and my legs ached like bastards from Friday until Monday.

This was meant to act as something of a pre-amble to the fact that I only lost 1 pound last week. Hardly surprising as I therefore couldn't do my usual exercise and wasn't as strict with the diet as I can be (I didn't go nuts or anything, but did have a few little treats to celebrate reaching my first target).

As I mentioned yesterday, Tuesday was supposed to be about talking about the new anime season. I think this is the first season I've ever really followed anime shows as they've been broadcast, used crunchyroll properly and watched anime on my computer legally.

But the thing was I felt I should firstly briefly explain about my new scanning process, because I've watched it all while scanning. But that meant I gave myself the opportunity to talk about photostitch, which has become a bit of a pet frustration/rant topic of mine, because I just don't understand how to get it to produce consistently good results (oops - nearly went off again there).

So yeah, it can be funny sometimes how, even though I plan and pre-write I still end up going off-topic.

(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?