fate of the websites

I've decided to cancel the current hosting for all of my websites.

There were a host (ho ho) of reasons for doing this.

Partly it was to save spending the money. None of the sites were hugely expensive, but given how little use I currently make of them it's like pissing money down the drain.

Another reason is that the company they were registered with and that provides the hosting was rubbish. I don't know that the new company I'm switching to will be any good, but it will be a clean break. Customer service was particularly poor at the old place.

Also, the hosting was of disparate types and accessed through different means and using different tools (despite all being the same company - another reason I'm not keen), which made things very confusing. This gives me a chance to consolidate it all into one place.

I'm going to kept all of the domain name registrations, which I've also transferred to this other registration place. I fully intend to revive trismugistus.com at the very least, but not for a while - certainly I won't even think about it until I've finished the magazine scanning, which I see as my main hobby priority for the immediate future.

I'll probably see if I can't get the sites to redirect to my blogs, but I'm sure there'll be lots of feet dragging over the transfers and cancellations. Making it easier for customers might encourage them to change things, and then they'd loose your money!

I've also decided to get my own broadband again.

Piggybacking on my landlords cable is something of a double-edged sword.

The upside is that when it's running smoothly, it's super quick. I can get download speeds somewhere in the ballpark of 10meg, which is super groovy.

Unfortunately, the download cap is pretty stingy - when you've downloaded about a gig it throttles the connection back something chronic. Of course, from my point of view it's still pretty quick - going from 10 down to 2 is a big drop, but 2 is as quick as I've ever had using telephone landlines. So the net effect of this doesn't bother me too much.

What does cause me problems is that the connection regularly flakes out. I'm used to this of course - loosing synchronisation is quite common on landline broadband too (I was more surprised that you get it on cable too) - but the problem is that the modem and router are obviously in my landlords house.

So if he goes out or it's late at night or early in the morning, I have no internet. Also part of the reason he suggested me using it was because he hardly uses the internet, so even when he's in he may not notice. And I also feel I'm being a bit of a nuisance constantly knocking on his door just to ask him to reset the modem/router.

I have actually noticed just recently that when I set a bunch of torrents going the connection dies very quickly. I've in the habit of setting them going before I go to work and leaving them going until I come back, by which time they've finished. I'm not sure if this is some deliberate move by Virgin to cap me in another way or just coincidence, but it is rather suspicious.

And it also means I feel a bit guilty that I'm now regularly killing his internet. As such, my new plan is to get a fairly basic phone line broadband. I can use it for torrents if that is what's causing the problem and it also means I've got a back up.

Not that it proved simple either of course. Turns out that when I cancelled my landline broadband back in September last year they never properly released the line. And to make things more complicated, the ISP was bought out by Talk Talk, so I spent ages trying to find out who to talk too, let alone getting it sorted :/.

resident evil afterlife

There have been a number of attempts at 3D in film.

In the past this tended to rely on people having to wear differently coloured glasses (typically blue and red). The film would have both versions on it in different colours, but the filters would filter out one colour for each eye, giving a composite image that when combined by the brain was 3D.

This technique tended to be quite unpleasant for long term usage as was demanded by a film. Although the different views received by the brain were a good representation of 3D, the different colours was the thing that made it unpleasant.

Another big disadvantage was for those of us who where glasses. Us specy-types would really struggle with having to wear the flimsy cardboard glasses in conjunction with our normal glasses.

The more recent attempts have also used glasses, but the actual techniques have been slightly different. They again rely on a filtering process, so that different images are presented to each eye, but in some systems they use polarization and others they use a physical filter that flicks between each eye.

Apparently this has more satisfying results, because there's not the problem different colours going to each eye. I say apparently because I've never seen a 3D film. The reason comes back to the glasses - the newer versions seem to involve bigger glasses that fit over the top of your real glasses and I really don't fancy that.

Why do I mention all this? Well, Afterlife was shot in 3D and it suffers from the classic problem all 3D movies have when you watch them in regular old 2D. See, in action films you've always tended to get heavily designed sequences. This is inevitable because things like stunts and fights needs careful planning.

Well, what tends to happen in 3D films is you get an extra layer of planning where things are also worked out in order to give maximum 3D impact. But when you watch in 2D this just gives you a weird "slowed down", plodding feel to the scene, which is never good in an action film.

The actual plot of afterlife is okay, though it continues the slightly disappointing creep the series has undergone from horror to the aforementioned action/adventure genre. Also, since I've not played any of the Resi games since the second one, there's a lot of bits where I get the feeling those familiar with the games will go "oh, that's the thingy monster" but for me they're just other monsters. The zombies also feel like a bit of an afterthought - they're there, and they do play a roll but mostly it's about other monsters and humans, since with humans you can have proper gun fights.

As a stand alone film I think it works better than the last one, extinction, which was kinda dumb, but I'm not sure I'd really recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with either the games or the previous films.

post holiday round up

Got a bit better sleep last night, though I'm still tired as I'm effectively running at a deficit, but I thought I should post about what I got up to over the last few weeks and during my holiday and that.

As is my usual way, I put together a gigantic to do list / schedule thing. And as is my usual way there was way too much on it.

Usually with these lists I make two errors. Firstly, I underestimate the time things will take, and so think I can cram in more on any given day than I can, but also I'll usually make some fundamental error that then scuppers everything. That big error in this case was not allowing enough time for 'fun'.

By that I mean generic entertainment of any kind, be it watching telly or going out with friends. For some reason I put enough stuff in the schedule to (more than) fill all the available time so when it came to it I didn't have that time available because I was busy enjoying myself, if you see what I mean.

One thing that did surprise me, though, was that over the Easter weekend I'd assigned to giving my bedsit a spring clean and I managed to do this in the time. Usually with these sorts of cleans they're a classic example of my underestimating the time, winding up taking way longer than I think. But no, actually I managed to fit it all in, no problems.

The same can't be said about my main objective for the holiday, which was to get all my 2010 anime magazines scanned. To be fair, this did start well, as I scanned a load of mags in the first couple of days. However, I basically filled up my hard drive as a result and that meant I had to spend quite a lot of time processing the scans (using photostitch to stick them together).

This did give me an opportunity to play with photostitch and I've worked out how to make it give good results when it runs up against a scan it makes an arse of. I also think I've managed to tweak my technique such that it makes an arse of far less to start with. The root cause seems to be that at the edges of the scanner the bending of the page causes a brightening and a distortion of the image. So, by trimming that away, it does a better job. However, you still have to maintain enough overlap for it to work, so it's a bit of a black art.

I also established that it will work perfectly well with jpgs and that I can save the initial scans as maximum quality jpgs, stick them together then save the result as high quality jpgs and the end result is indistinguishable from my purer original method.

Of course all these took time and with my other errors over time allocation I'm still a fair way short of scanning all the 2010 magazines. I've basically got 3 new types (which always has the most things to scan) and 4 animages (which is always the easiest to scan) and then 2010 is done.

Of course that then means I have to move onto 2011, but assuming I get the above done by the middle of the year that will mean I'm effectively two thirds of the way through my backlog. Which gives you an idea of just how big the backlog was.

insomnia

I don't really suffer from insomnia.

Not as a proper condition like people know it, where the insomniac is plagued by an ongoing inability to sleep night after night.

I do, however, occasionally suffer with the odd night where I can't get to sleep. Sometimes it goes on for a couple of nights, but eventually my usual sleep routines will re-assert themselves. I think this is an occasional thing for most people.

I think it's probably more a symptom of stress or some other psychological effect. Certainly when I get a dose of it, as I did last night, the root cause seems to be an inability for my brain to 'shut off'.

Usually I'll lie there with stuff going around and around in my head, consciously aware that I need to clear and becalm my mind in order to get to sleep, but also unable to stop the whirlwind of thoughts that plague me.

The cause I would guess last night was my return to work today. I don't think it relates to any specific worry - I wasn't expecting anything specifically bad, troublesome or difficult to crop up, we're talking more an elevation of the general anxiety I carry about with me every day.

Which is why the thoughts I couldn't shut off weren't really about work. I think - it's a little difficult to recall what they specifically were now, but I remember thinking about the Turkish Grand Prix and also a lot about how I hadn't managed to do everything I'd set out to during holiday. I'll talk more about those later, I guess.

As a result of the insomnia, today I've obviously been rather tired. Generally speaking I'm one of those people who needs to get plenty of sleep or I feel awful all day. The weird thing I find though, is while I'm having the insomnia - lying there, thinking - I don't generally feel tired. The tiredness comes when I wake up after the short amount of sleep I do manage to get just before I wake up.

Normally, once I realise I'm having a bought of insomnia I usually get up for a bit and do something. This is never much more spectacular than read or, more often, bimble about on the web. I'll also usually make myself a cup of hot milk with a splash of honey.

It wouldn't surprise me if the official advice is that these are exactly what you're not supposed to do, but I find if I lie there continuing to fail to get to sleep I get increasingly annoyed and that makes it worse. If I get up for a bit and in some way try to draw a ling under the preceding hours I've found I sometimes then succeed in dropping off.

It wasn't wholly successful last night, but then I guess that's part of the nature of insomnia.

shinryaku! ika musume (squid girl)

When the main character in Squid Girl shows up, she talks a lot about how she's going to invade the human world and take over. The reason she gives for this is that humans are polluting the oceans and generally make a bit of a mess of the world.

The BBC recently ran a series called Human Planet. Interestingly, the idea of this was something along the lines of treating humanity as if it were the subject of a Nature Documentary. The episodes were divided up into the various habitats of the world (so, deserts, oceans, the frozen north, etc) and it showed some example so the strategies people use to survive.

I found the series to be a weird mixture of both fascinating stuff and appalling stuff. It was like for every clever idea or thing we've come up with, there was an example of us raping the natural environment - often, the two were one and the same. One of the things it tried to emphasise was that for most of the environments, the people were broadly in balance with the surroundings.

So, where they killed a whale every bit of that whale would be used and they'd only take a handful every year - sufficiently low numbers not to have an impact. This was only not true when it got around to modern, city-based living and things like mono-agriculture that are needed to support it.

Overall, I actually found the result a little depressing. It kinda backed up the notion that we're like a plague upon the planet.

I raise this because I think it may well have coloured my feelings about Squid Girl, which I watched at around the same time.

See, my problem was having turned up and given the feeling that it would at least involve some sort of environmental message, instead it was simply a daft comedy. Not that there's anything wrong with it being a daft comedy - it did raise quite a few smiles from me, after all - it's just it would have been nice if it had slipped in a few little environmental things as well.

I mean, okay, she spends quite a bit of her time picking up trash on the beach, but that's about the extent of it. Indeed, the overall theme of the show is more about how she becomes good friends with the humans she meets and how she almost abandons her squid-ness to become human.

In other words the sub-text was almost the exact opposite of what I was expecting - it was about how great humanity is.

Not that I was expecting it to come down badly on us, but tackling a few "issues" wouldn't have gone amiss. Even if it had avoided stuff like global warming, it could easily have gotten pollution in there. Heck, it could even just have been more head on about the rubbish on the beach.

chu-bra

Chu-bra is a very odd show.

In structure it's a bit like one of those cartoon shows for younger or teenage audiences where the characters experience problems and issues and thereby help the audience realise they're not the only ones having those problems. So, for example, they might enter puberty or have their first relationship with the opposite sex or hey, maybe the same sex - you get the idea.

But it's about underwear.

The title - Chu-bra - is one of those Japanese abbreviations like Cos-Play where they've truncated words to get it. So where Cosplay is Costume-Play, Chu-Bra is Choose Brassiere, as in choose your correct underwear.

The central character is a young girl who seems to be obsessed with underwear. In particular, with her friends and helping them pick the right underwear.

Now it should be noted that this does make her odd in the anime. She's not positioned as having normal interests that go un-remarked and occasional mileage is made of her essentially being like a lecherous old man.

Similarly there's a degree of weirdness over the ages of the characters - they're pretty young and the art style does emphasise their youthfulness. It isn't going so far as to be properly peado-bait or loli stuff, but there is some fan-service. Depending on how you generally feel about that sort of thing, it could easily be too much, but I dunno, it's not generally presented in a sexual way (the main character is oddly innocent) unless a point is being made or there's a gag to be had.

And don't let me hood-wink you - the series is about young girls and underwear.

But as I think you can tell I actually kinda liked it, but not for that reason. My liking it came back to the first point I was making about how it's like one of those 'growing up' and 'issue's shows and if you take it in that context, it hangs together rather well.

For example, it also explores things like friendship, first love, loneliness... as well as panties.

I dunno, there's a point to be heard that it's indefensibly pervy, but at the same time it's surprisingly well done.

asobi ni ikuyo (bombshells from the sky)

I make no bones of the fact that I enjoy fan-service. Indeed, it's a big part of the reason I watch anime.

I use that term in its broadest sense. By fan-service I mean everything from gratuitous gun-play, through giant mechs and on down to the flashing of female flesh. Generally speaking, though, the term fan-service is most normally trotted out as a criticism aimed at the amount of gratuitous nudity in a show.

As I say, I've no problem with it myself, but I will happily acknowledge that this kind of thing has gotten quite extreme in recent years. Indeed, nowadays, fan-service in regular shows has started to blur the line between soft-core pornography and mild titillation.

The reason for this escalation is to ensure sales to the Japanese Otaku. Piracy has been having a big impact over there too and one of the ways to help sales has been to push the level of fan-service that little bit further.

Why do I mention all this?

Well, it's because the increase in nudy bits has led to a bit of a problem with TV broadcasts. There's a lot of misunderstanding about how the anime market works in Japan. One of the things that most people don't know is that most anime is shown very late night on TV and that the producers often pay the TV companies to air it, which is backwards for most telly.

They do this because, in effect, the TV screening is a gigantic advert to get the otaku to buy the DVDs and Blu-Rays (well, plus all the figurines, bath-towels, hug pillows and other merchandising that's produced as well). So you've got a situation where they're screening it on TV, but they need to ramp up the fan-service to such a degree that it's not really broadcastable.

The answer is to censor the broadcast version. However, there's a tendency for this censoring to be extremely ham-fisted. Sun-rays, steam or even little "stickers" will be slapped over the naughty bits, but in such a way it's obvious they're artificial additions (I'm not sure if this obviousness is part of the approach, or just a hallmark of a low budget or what). You can therefore get the otaku interested and sell them uncensored DVDs, but still show it on TV.

It's probably still not clear why I mention all this - the reason is because there is no uncensored version of Asobi Ni Ikuyo, but it still has the ham-fisted censorship. So why?

Well, this cuts to the heart of my problem with the show.

See, I think it's meant to be something like a parody. It's meant to be taking the piss out of shows that do that. But where it becomes a problem is it appears to be trying to have its cake and eat it too. It's trying to give you that fan-service for the same reason, but also criticise it.

And it does this throughout - you get what sometimes appear to be parody elements, but often presented with a kind of affection too. I found it horribly confusing and more than a little annoying.

The only real saving grace is the ending, which resolves in a much more satisfying and definite way than is usual for harem shows.

easter

It's the first of the long bank holiday weekends from tomorrow.

Unlike half the country, I'm not taking next week off, so I'll be in work on the Tuesday to Thursday. I'm kinda hoping that they're really quiet as we've been so busy at work it's been stupid.

My plans for the Easter weekend are pretty boring.

My main intention is to do the whole swapping over of spring and winter clothes from the shed and also to give my bedsit a bit of a spring clean.

Actually that's not fully true. As per usual, I've put together a big old to do list/schedule thing and I've been way too ambitious about what's actually achievable in this one weekend. So I've also got it down to do all the backup stuff and to sort through my scans and other images (these make sense since I keep the backup drives in the shed) and to sort through the audio books and animes I need to burn. Plus I've also tentatively got giving the car a clean in there too.

But then I've also decided to do a roast to use up the hunk of meat that's been in my freezers since Christmas (part of the spring clean will involve defrosting the freezer, so a perfect time to use it) and getting my haircut and...

This is clearly way too much, but then it wouldn't be one of my holidays if I didn't have unrealistic expectations as to how much I can do in a day.

I was actually thinking that I might use the next few weeks to catch up on my reviews. I've written quite a few reviews that I should really post on the blog, so I may use the next few weeks to get them up.

I've actually been thinking I might get rid of all of my websites and just keep various blogs going. It seems daft having some of the websites and I'm perfectly happy with how this blog operates. It's a hell of a lot simpler to update, for example.

I'll probably hold onto my trismugistus.com domain, but just not have an actual website.

like a bloody see-saw

Well, as seems to have become the "pattern" recently, I can't quite figure out why this week's weigh in revealed what it did.

That revelation was that I'd apparently lost 1 pound, despite having eaten lots of very naughty stuff at the birthday celebrations on Saturday. That was also adding on to the fact that on that Saturday my pedometer registered fewer than 1,000 steps.

Usually at the weekend I try to go for a short walk in the morning of around 3,500 steps and then a longer walk in the afternoon that take the total squarely over 10,000 steps. So doing less than a tenth of that meant I was not burning many of the additional calories, or helping to maintain a high metabolism or any of that other useful stuff exercise does.

I did go for a particularly long walk on Sunday afternoon to try to compensate a bit, although that was obviously after I'd done my weigh in in the morning. Also, because I obviously got back very late I actually had a lie in on Sunday morning, rather than go for a walk, so the net number of steps wasn't really increased.

Anyway, obviously a loss is always good, so I'm not complaining, but in terms of my target of 19 stone by my birthday I'm quite a way off. My birthday is in 2 weeks and I'm 11 pounds away, which is unfeasible and would probably be a little dangerous to loose that much that quickly.

Luckily, I've obviously got lots of days off coming up, so I can do lots more walking and a brief blip for the actual day of my birthday aside, I should be much better placed to control my food intake.

Unfortunately, my proper holiday is after my birthday, so the real opportunity for doing some serious walking and dieting is technically after my target date, but I don't think it would be too bad if I got reasonably close to 19 stone for the weekend after my birthday.

I am definitely going to have to buy some new walking shoes, though. My current pair, which aren't very old at all, are already starting to fall apart. To be fair they were quite a cheap pair and I have gotten a lot of use out of them, but still, it would have been nice if they could have lasted longer. I should also probably get some new walking socks too - my current pairs have all got holes in.

I'm going to have a couple of sessions to get stuff for the Grand Prix later in the year, so I'll just add these to the list.

chinese grand prix

Well, as mentioned yesterday, it was the Chinese grand prix this last weekend.

It was another action-packed, non-stop race. I seem to recall the Chinese is normally one of the better ones among the newer circuits, but I don't recall it being quite as intensely busy as this year.

It seems pretty sure then that this increase in stuff is as a result of all the changes that they brought in for this season. The biggest impact seems to come from the Pirelli tyres, which have been specially designed to be nice and grippy for a relatively short period of time and then to "fall off a cliff", dramatically loosing grip.

This means that if you're on a newer set of tyres you'll stand a chance of catching and overtaking your opponents. And that means two things - firstly conserving and being kind to your tyres can pay dividends and secondly that tactics such as making sure you're on the right tyres at the right time become very important.

Now the first of these could potentially lead to an element of endurance racing. We've seen that Sauber have consistently managed to do fewer pit stops and this has meant they've tended to end up being higher up the order than you might otherwise expect.

Of course you could argue this leads to less exciting racing due to less overtaking, but actually I don't mind this, because a big part of F1 has always been the tactical element. The difference now is that the tactics can be played out in lots of different ways and involve the driver and dynamic decision making.

The problem with what happened to the tactical element in recent seasons is that all the teams would run simulations and computer models and all come up with the same results. Also, because bringing in your driver slightly later than the other guy was often the way to go, it meant things were predictable. Now, if he comes in sooner than you he'll have a lot more grip and may overtake you - it's more dynamic, more interesting.

Which again comes around the first point of conserving and being kind to your tyres. This weekend showed that Lewis Hamilton was able to create an advantage for himself by saving a set of fresh tyres for the actual race instead of using them in qualifying. This didn't detract from qualifying, but it did make things more exciting in the race.

It also involves the driver in the tactics more and again adds complexity and interest. I guess a way to think about it is that there are now so many permutations and options for drivers and teams that the predictive, simulation element of the tactics becomes much more difficult and less certain - it's not necessarily going to turn out as they'd planned.

These are all good changes that have really helped. It remains to be seen whether they'll only really enhance the racing at certain tracks. Australian didn't benefit so much, so I'm guessing some other circuits won't, but they do seem to have actually had the desired impact this year.

One weird thing though is it does actually emphasise the point about aerodynamics in a weird way. The cars have become so reliant on aero-based grip that clearly a much less artificial way to affect the racing might have been to give them bigger, fatter tyres.

Increasing the mechanical grip so that aero doesn't matter as much might have been a simpler way around it. Especially since they seem to be unable to find ways to really curb the aero.

two hours my arse

So, as mentioned on Friday, something a little different this last weekend, in that I went to see a friend whose birthday it was on Saturday.

The day's festivities started with me baking some chocolate cupcakes. These turned out okay - I was a little worried I'd make a mess of them as, with the diet and all, I've not done any baking in well over a year. The chocolate butter cream icing was the thing turned out to be the most difficult - I had to look up the recipe as Id' completely forgotten and when it came time to pipe it I had a bugger of a time remembering how to do a piping bag.

While I was baking I also watched the qualifying for the Chinese GP, which I'll talk about more tomorrow, but it meant I didn't set off until about 11. Google maps had the journey time down as two hours, but I dunno how they work that out.

The M1 was closed (and it still partly closed) due to a fire, so traffic was heavy in places, but also the widening work on the M25 which seems to have been going on for years was still poxing things up. But then even on the way back when there was no traffic it took be more than 2 and a half hours, so I dunno how they work it out, but it's clearly not realistic.

Anyway, the day itself mainly involved watching movies. Specifically we watched the Poseidon adventure (the 70s one), Hackers and a film called Lady in White.

I've seen the first two of these, but clearly not as many times as everyone else. It reminded me actually of when I was a student and how obsessed we all were with the Python films - many of us could quote the entire script, but I wasn't that familiar with these films.

I remember the Poseidon adventure as mainly being about the capsizing of the boat and the escape. That was obviously the main part of the film, but I was surprised by how much before it there was and how random it all seemed.

I mean, I think the idea was it was supposed to be a cruise ship, but most of the passengers seemed to be using it almost like a ferry - going to specific destinations. All of which were in the med, but almost everyone was an American. But on top of that there was apparently this 'company man' (boo, evil corporations) who was ordering the captain around (famously, Leslie Nielson before he moved into comedy) because they wanted to break the ship up and it was running late.

So it's taking all the passengers, yet it's on its way to the breakers. Weird. weirder still was the captain's obsession with ballast. It reminded me actually of the towering inferno, where the "company men" are responsible for cutting corners, which causes the fire in the sky scraper. There it makes sense as the cause, but here the 'company man' and the ballast thing seem irrelevant in the face of a giant wave hitting the ship.

I'm pretty sure I've ranted on here before about the sins Hackers commits in terms of its depiction of what computers can and can't do, though not specifically in regards to that film.

The last film, Lady in White, was a very strange beast. It was a really weird hybrid of a movie, being part ghost story and part murder mystery, but it also had some really odd stuff in it. A good example of this is that at one point the main character is strangled, but his near death experience seemed to involve him flying towards the sun, which seemed very random. There was also this weird thread to it about racism, with a "well the black guy clearly did it" attitude from the police that seemed like quite an afterthought.

The thing I found most odd about it was the tone. When I was a kid they sometimes used to show films on Friday afternoon in the kids TV slot. These were films squarely aimed at children and also had a strong "made for TV" feel. Well, this seemed very much like one of those films, but equally there was stuff in it that didn't really seem kid friendly - I mean, it was essentially about paedophile / child murderer :/.

Anyway, I had fun. The food was particularly good, with a home made pizza and delicious brownie cake.

weekend plans

This weekend I'm doing something a little different, as I'm going to see a friend who lives all the way over in Cambridge as it's her birthday.

I've not seen her in what must be years, so it will be good to see her again. I'm planning to make some fairy cakes to take along just as a sort of little gift and to add a few more calories into the mix! Part of the reason I described last week's weight gain as a disaster is that I'd been planning this Saturday as a "day off" from the diet, so I'm expecting the goodies this weekend will have a similar sort of impact.

It's also the Chinese grand prix this weekend, so I'm going to be thoroughly busy watching that as well.

I seem to recall China is an okay race. Apparently it has the longest straight on the Formula one calendar, so we'll have to see how the DRS fairs.

I'm also rather glad I couldn't be bothered to swap my summer and winter clothes over last weekend, as it's gone decidedly chilly as this weeks gone on. Hopefully it'll perk back up again, though - I'm definitely going to make the switch come Easter, so if it's a cold summer I'll be annoyed.

Saying that, though, last weekend it really was a bit warm for the clothes I had available - a pair of shorts would definitely not have gone amiss.

not just bad

But really fucking awful.

This week's weigh in was an absolute disaster, as I'd gained 4 pounds.

To be fair, this wasn't an unexpected gain, given that the week turned into a bit of a nightmare, diet wise. This doesn't make it excusable, just understandable.

I mentioned last week that I'd been feeling tired on Sunday, so hadn't gone for a walk in the afternoon (which was likely the start of the problems that caused the gain) and that this fatigue had continued on Monday. Well it actually continued on Tuesday as well, despite getting a good night's sleep and Wednesday too.

This worried me a bit and I don't know why, but I thought that perhaps I should each some more as, if more sleep wasn't solving it, perhaps more calories would. I also was slightly worried I might be suffering from a bit of anaemia. Generally speaking my diet almost makes me vegetarian and I've been worried that the lack of red meat was possibly leading to a bit of iron deficiency.

Therefore, on Wednesday I bought some high calorie treats as well as some red meat to have at the weekend. As such, I was thoroughly prepared for a weigh in that was unchanged or maybe up one pound.

The increase in calories did seem to work, by the way, Thursday I felt much better and while I can't be sure the lack of red meat had any impact, I certainly feel good today.

But then the other problem happened. Basically, on Thursday, a work colleague came in and announced that on the previous Friday, which she'd had off, she'd actually gotten married. We're talking eloping / getting married in Las Vegas type level of suddenness and surprise - they'd told nobody except parents and the people that acted as witnesses.

But she'd also bought a cake in, which I obviously had to have some of so as not to be rude. So that was a problem.

There was also talk of going to the pub for lunch to celebrate, which was fair enough, but I'd understood she wasn't going to be in on Friday, so it would be on Monday or Tuesday. But she was in on Friday, so we went.

The pub didn't have a hue menu choice, so I ended up having steak and kidney pudding, which is hardly low calorie.

But of course I'd also brought my packed lunch in, so I had to have that for dinner or it would have gone off (it spent all day in the car on one of the hottest days of the year yet, so wasn't in the best of shape when I looked at that evening). And that of course meant I couldn't compensate by not having anything in the evening.

So yeah, bit of a disaster, all told.

clash of the titans

Something a little different for this week's rental - a Blu Ray.

Having recently set my PC up with its Blu Ray player, I thought I'd add a few Blu Rays to my rental list, and the first one that's turned up was Clash of the Titans. I figured action stuff would probably be a good use of high definition.

I knew Clash of the Titans was a remake of a film from the 1980s which involved Ray Harryhausen stop motion effects, but I must admit I didn't know it was direct remake with the same name. Id' sort of imagined that it was one of these more modern remakes where they're only inspired by or they use some bits and not others.

But actually it's pretty close to the original film, which is in itself basically an adaptation of the best bits of the Persius myth of ancient Greece.

If I'm totally honest I don't think I liked this film as I remember enjoying the original film. Now obviously it's a long time since I saw the original and I'm sure special effects wise, and despite a great affection for Harryhausen, this new one is much more visually stunning. But I dunno, this felt a little lifeless and some bits of it didn't really make a lot of sense.

Of course, those may be hangovers from the original film, but I think they were more to do with the tweaks made to this version. A good example of this is, with the Kraken due to come and destroy the city, how come all of the residents don't bugger off?

I mean, if you knew a huge, scary sea monster was going to come and flatten your city and kill everyone, wouldn't you leave? Now if there hadn't been much time or if some sort of guardians had been put around the city, this would have made more sense.

In the original film, the set up was slightly different - the Kraken was there to eat Andromeda or destroy the city. For this purpose she's tied to a rock way outside the city. From memory this was done by common consent with only Perseus trying to save her. So in other words, there's no need for them to run away, because they know Andromeda's sacrifice will protect the city.

In the new film, she's virtually kidnapped by a band of what are roughly religious fundamentalists who decide to sacrifice her to save the city basically at the last moment. She does go willingly, but she's tied up in the middle of the city. This also means the kraken makes its way into the midst of the city and half trashes it.

So, in other words, apparently everybody is hanging around just waiting to die.

And it's things like this that which took the edge of to me - more to do with problems with the internal logic and quality of the story telling than anything else.

road works

There have been a lot of road works around my local roads recently.

The first lot are gas works in the estate where I live. These have actually been on the go for ages. It turned out that this was in no small part down to the fact that the contractors hired to do the actual work went bust.

I'm not at all sure what they're actually doing. They only seem to dig bits of the road up and from looking in the holes, it's mainly around the actual junctions. So, if you've got the main gas line going down the road, where you have the branches to take gas into people's individual houses - those are the bits they've been digging up.

This also means they seem to have worked their way along the pipes, digging up small bits like that in sequence. This means that while there's been general disruption for ages, the specific bit that disrupts each house only lasts for a short while.

So when they did where I am, they completely blocked off the road for about 3 days, so I had to park in the estate, but then they moved on further up the road.

As I say, it has been a general pain, though, as there's bits you have to avoid and cones and barriers and machinery all over the shop.

The other bit of road works that's been a pain has been some way down the road. They appear to be putting in some bits for pedestrians to be able to cross the A325 close to the first of the big roundabouts.

At first I thought it was more of the gasworks, but then it became apparent it involved pedestrian crossing elements. I've been a bit cagey with how I describe that, because the place where they're putting it in is actually a rather busy part where both sides of the road are dual carriageway. However, it doesn't currently look like it will involve any sort of pelican crossing or traffic lights to actually stop the traffic.

I know from experience as it's where I often walk at the weekend that crossing these roads on foot is tricky so part of me is keen for them to put proper crossings in, but I'm very mindful of the fact that without lights or a pelican crossing, it won't actually make it any easier to cross.

The part of me that has to drive that way to get too and from work is also mindful of the fact that traffic already queues around there, so sticking in lights for pedestrians won't really help traffic flow. To be fair you don't see that many pedestrians around there as it's kinda in the middle of nowhere, so I think I'd prefer if there was a proper crossing with lights.

It does make you wonder where they get the money to pay for these things, though. I mean, gas I guess is private companies nowadays (although it wouldn't surprise me if actually it's coming out of the public purse - that's how a lot of these "privatisations" seem to work) but the pedestrian crossing has to be public money.

Not that I fundamentally mind them doing the work, it's more that if the country is so cash-strapped at the moment, surely that sort of money could be better spent. And if they have to do work on the roads, I'd have thought repairing a few more potholes would be a better use of the cash.

malaysian grand prix

So this last weekend was the Malaysian Grand Prix.

As I mentioned on Friday, I couldn't remember if it was a good one or not, but when I saw the circuit I realised it was one that can produce some interesting races. It's the worst race for the drivers from a physical point of view, as it's so humid, so you can get lapses in concentration.

Also, the circuit has some tricky corners where the drivers might make a mistake, giving the possibility of overtaking. And finally, the weather can produce a bit of randomness, as rain is quite frequent. Of course, some years it's torrential and has delayed races/qualifying and I seem to recall one year the race being stopped as it was too heavy.

So yeah, it can be a good one, but also this year we have all sorts of new toys Firstly there's the Drag Reduction System or DRS, which is actually a moveable rear wing. The idea is that by tilting a part of the rear wing you reduce the amount of drag, allowing the car to go faster. This small speed boost is intended to help and encourage overtaking. The implementation of it is complicated, though, as they've tried to do it so that the teams won't just be able to use it all the time, like they do with the KERS.

KERS is back this year, which is essentially a version of regenerative braking that you get on some newer road cars and can give a little speed boost. This can be used for around 6 seconds or so per lap, and unlike the DRS, it can be used anywhere. This is it's flaw, really - for those that have it, it essentially just becomes a routine thing used in the same way and the same place every lap, defeating it's supposed purpose as being like the old turbo boost back in the turbo days. Also, there's no particular penalty for using it under the new regs - if you don't have it, you just have to put ballast in the same place.

Finally there's the new tyres, which are designed to be quite grippy for a short number of laps and then to suddenly loose grip - phrases like 'falling off the cliff' have been used. The intention with this is that some drivers will be kind to their tyres and so they'll be grippy for longer, requiring less stops, but then other drivers will get more out of their tyres and be able to catch up while they're still grippy, so maybe having a stop will be better for them.

Last time at Melbourne, these new toys didn't really seem to impact on the racing. The track was quite cool and so the tyres didn't seem to do quite what was expected. Also the DRS seemed to not give quite what we were expecting. However, it was suggested that this was in part due to its positioning - on the corner it activated, it was difficult to get behind another car and the straight wasn't long enough and the following corner not helpful enough to really help overtaking.

In Malaysia, the straight used is huge, with a preceding corner that worked better and a following corner that was already a reasonable overtaking spot. As such, DRS really did seem to enhance the racing.

Also, the tyres seemed to work as advertised, being good for around 15 laps or so and then really degrading - you could clearly see people making up a lot of ground because they'd got fresher tyres, and people were finding it difficult to defend because they had poorer tyres. So yeah, I think these two worked, though DRS I think is going to be highly circuit dependent. It will suit some, like Malaysia, but not others, like Australia.

KERS I think is still a bit naff - it needs a different approach, making it more powerful or restricting how and when it can be used. As I say, the current version just because a fixed thing used every lap in the same place.

malaysian grand prix

It's the Malaysian F1 GP this weekend.

Being in Malaysia it's another one that's on at weird times, which I tend to find is a bit of a double-edged sword. It does mean that I can basically watch it at my leisure, but it also means there's a very good chance that the results will be spoiled for me. Football seems to be the only sport where they warn you the results are coming up.

I don't actually remember whether the Malaysian GP is usually a good one or not. My general feeling about most of the new circuits is that they tend not to be very good race, but there are a few exceptions.

I don't really have many other plans for the weekend. It's a bedsit cleaning weekend, so that in combination with the GP and the usual walking and scanning stuff is likely to absorb most all of my time. Part of me is hoping that the warm weather persists into the weekend, but another part of me is hoping it doesn't get warmer.

With all the sorting out and re-arranging of stuff I had to do I decided to put all my summer clothes and summer bits (like desk fans and the gubbins for my air conditioner) out in the shed. The idea was to operate a swapsy system where when it comes warm I can put stuff I use in winter out in the shed instead.

This is okay in theory, but with Easter being so late and the sudden-ness of the shift to warm weather, I've ended up with the annoying situation of having my winter clothes in the warm weather. I was debating as to whether I should go through the boxes this weekend instead of waiting to Easter, but I'm not sure I'll have the time or that I can really be arsed.

I guess an important point to note this year will actually be that I'm going to throw away quite a lot of my winter clothes. I've lost sufficient weight that most of them are too big, but many of them are also in pretty bad shape. Buying clothes is not something I do a lot of, not least of all because sizes big enough to fit me (eventually that'll be "the old me", I guess :/) are not cheap.

I'll probably be hanging on to t-shirts the longest, I think. Hugely baggy t-shirts will look daft, but at least they won't fall down like hugely baggy trousers. Thinking about it, I'll actually be able to start using all the old printed t-shirts I used to buy but that never fit me.

But also thinking about it, I've a feeling I may have to buy some shorts - there are obviously shorts in my stash of summer clothes, but I'm guessing they will also be rather loose. This whole weight loss thing could become expensive - I guess it's the flip-side to the reduction in cost of my weekly food bills. But at least when I get down to more normal sizes, regular clothes can be bought pretty cheap, thanks to the sweat shops of the world. God bless unrestrained capitalism.

not so disappointing

In last week's weight update post I was disappointed at a 1 pound loss.

The disappointment was mainly due to the fact that I'd pretty much stuck to my diet and done the exercise I normally did, yet I'd only lost 1 pound.

However, I continued with the same basic approach, sticking to the diet and doing my usual exercise, but this time the weigh in revealed I'd lost a huge 5 pounds.

I'm clearly very pleased with this, but again more than a little puzzled as to why this same pattern keeps happening. The pattern I'm referring to is that one week I only loose a little bit and then the next week I loose a lot.

I noticed this happening last year as well, and I don't know that I'm worried about it, just puzzled. It's odd, and suggests there's some sort of two week cycle to things, but what things I don't know. Especially since in the week I lost 1 pound it felt like I'd lost weight, but then last week when I actually lost 5 pounds, it didn't feel like anything changed.

I'm actually tempted to switch to weighing myself fortnightly, but I also know I couldn't go that long without checking.

Still, I guess an average weight loss of 3 pounds a week is pretty good, even if it comes in the form of a week disappointed and a week delighted.

The next major event on the horizon is the Easter weekend, the other bank holidays and the holiday I've got booked. This is a major event diet wise as my next target is reaching 19 stone by my birthday. With the 5 pound loss I'm now back on schedule to reach this, but it might be close.

However, this is also important as I'll have the opportunity to do lots of walking, which will hopefully help me kick-start my attack on the next target. It's not a proper holiday in the sense of going anywhere, it's more a much-needed break from work and an opportunity to do stuff like sort the shed and give the bedsit a spring clean.

animu fansub catch-up

No DVD rental this week either, so I'm posting a fansub viewing summary thing.

Having been focusing on crunchyroll I've been building up something of a backlog of fansubs so I tried to have a few session where I focused on them, as the hard drive I use to hold them was getting a bit full. The good thing about the rise of legal streaming is of course that a lot fewer shows are only available via fansubs, although it can be a bit puzzling as to why certain shows don't get picked up. OAVs are perhaps the most obvious thing that streaming doesn't lend itself well too, so a lot of the fansubs I've got are OAVs.

Anyway, I've done one of my summary thoughts things on the sample of eps I watched.

Freezing

I have to say I'm not sure I quite see what all the fuss was about. I'd been given the impression this was going to be full of balls-out Guro (I think that's the term - fetishization of violence and gore), but actually it's just a slightly more gory version of Ikki Tousen or Queens Blade. It didn't massively appeal to me, but equally I'd probably watch it if there was a cheap box set.

Infinite Stratos

This seemed to receive quite a drubbing in the initial reviews I read of it. I can kind of understand why, because it was very generic stuff filled with all sorts of stuff I've seen loads of time, but even so, I didn't hate it. I think the difference here compared to Okami-San or even Rio: Rainbow Gate is that the stuff it's rehashing is core to the sort of stuff I generally enjoy in anime - action, mecha fighting, fan-service. Not that it was great, just distinctly average.

Fractale

I've only the one episode to go on with this, as it was announced for streaming by Funimation very quickly and a) Funi's streaming is appalling; b) the rights don't cover the UK anyway and c) fansubbing licensed shows defeats the point. I have to say I had mixed feelings - the artwork was lovely and the fantasy world created seemed interesting, but it did smell very much like a remake of Laputa. Now Laputa is obviously great, but I dunno, seems a bit lazy.

Okami-san

If I was guessing, I'd say this was based on a light novel. I can't be bothered to actually check, but it has those hallmarks of re-using tired old clichés and an overly familiar tsundere main character. One thing I did really hate about it was the use of a narrator who talks over the top of the onscreen characters, which is just horrible to read in subtitles. If it were available via streaming, I'd probably watch it, but I wouldn't buy it.

Kuragehime

This one seemed interesting. It appears to be very much a girl's story and had the feel of being quite predictable, likely involving the ugly duckling main character finding love with, well, it would be a bit much of a spoiler to say with whom, but despite what familiarity I could enjoy it. All anime seasons are awash in shows that are aimed at men, so stumbling across the ones aimed at girls can sometimes give me a rose tinted view due to the contrast, but this one did seem like it would be good.

Bakuman

I've actually started reading the Bakuman manga. It's by the same team that did Death Note, which I both loved and hated. So far I've been enjoying the Bakuman manga more than I thought I would, so I was expecting the anime to be good too. I wasn't disappointed and if anything I think it improved slightly on the manga. Because of the style of the writer, the manga tends to be very wordy, and animation really helps even this out, plus they've made a few tweaks that do genuinely improve things.

Star Driver

From what I watched Star Driver seemed to be a very typical shounen show. It also seemed to be infected with a type of problem I hate, where all sorts of bonkers fantastical stuff happens and everyone just accepts it. This can sometimes be ironed out by having a narrator essentially explain it's an alternative world or by having the other characters explain everything to the main character, but here it just dumps you in without even bothering to try to explain stuff. Also, the main character seemed to win his fights so easily it made you wonder why the bad guys are even bothering.

Seitokai Yakuindomo

If you know what a double entendre is and whether you find such things funny, then you'll pretty much know whether you'll like Seitokai Yakuindomo. It's essentially a gag anime (I've not checked, but it feels like it was probably based on a 4-panel comi - it's certainly structured in that style) where the characters twist everything so that it becomes a double entendre. Well, and one of the characters is very small, so there's lots of gags about her being confused for a grade schooler.. What kinda makes it work is that the idea is that it's about a boy going to a school that used to be all girls and is now co-ed, so they're all girls and they're fixated on sex. As I say, if that sounds like your cup of tea, you'll like it (I broadly did), but otherwise probably not something to check out.

Megane na Kanojo

Megane is Japanese for glasses. I've no idea what the Kanojo bit means, but the first episode was about a girl with glasses and according to the description of the series I read, the other eps are too. The ep I watched was rather short (less than 15 minutes) and I'm not sure it's meant as a taster for a proper series, but it seemed okay to me. It was essentially a romantic comedy, but I get the impression each episode is different. About the only thing I didn't like was that the boy didn't like girls in glasses, which is diametrically opposed to my own viewpoint, but there was a good reason he didn't like glasses, so it wasn't a biggy.

i forgetted

I forgot to post a blog post yesterday.

No particular reason. I did get wrapped up in some stuff at work, but I could probably have made the time, I just forgot.

It was a very bitty weekend, doing all sorts of odds and sods that generally didn't take very long but also aren't particularly interesting.

For example, I put a bunch of stuff on e-bay. This meant taking it out of the shed and sorting through it and taking and editing photos and writing the description and posting them up. None of which, as I say, is very interesting, but it took quite a while to do, all told.

I also spent quite a while editing together scans with photo stitch. I'm not sure I'll actually follow through with it, but I had the notion of processing all the scans I've done so far. I basically scanned the last magazine that means I've now finished two thirds of 2010. Or, to put it another way, I've done up to the end of august-2010.

This seemed like a fairly good point to stop and do all the stitching together. I've already done quite a lot of it, but despite spending several hours at it I probably only got through about a quarter of what I've got to do. I was pleased that photo stitch only threw one wobbly during that time, though. Why it worked fine for so long I still have no idea, though.

I also watched a lot of telly. In fact, I basically watched all of the recorded telly I had saved up. Well, actually I've still got the entire third series of Being Human to watch, but I'm deliberately leaving that for the Easter and other holiday period at the end of this month.

The amount f new telly also generally appears to be thinning out a bit. I'm very hopeful that the summer will be minimal in terms of telly worth watching and I'll use the time to watch animu.

At the moment, while I'm watching a lot of stuff, most of it has been via crunchyroll. I've also been downloading a handful of fansubs as some series either aren't available in the UK as streaming (boo) or nobody has them for streaming (double boo). I'll probably do a round up of fansub stuff tomorrow.

So yeah, bit of a rubbish, bitty weekend. To be honest, I think I did a bit much, as I felt knackered all yesterday and am tired today too. I also didn't go for my afternoon walk on Sunday as I was feeling knackered.

new phone

I got a new phone recently.

I've never really been one for mobile phones. To me they're a tool with a specific job - making calls when you're away from a landline - so all the gizmos like cameras and web access and all that crap has always been of little interest to me.

I'm also rather of the opinion that phones are a classic case of the companies generating the requirement where none really exists. Or to put it another way, they push the consumers down certain routes, encouraging them to get all these whizz-bang gizmos that obviously push up the price.

They've created the situation where people feel they need the latest phone, even though there was nothing at all wrong with their old one. And of course the phone companies can get away with charging a fortune for the privilege.

Anyway, point is my contract came up for renewal and as per usual they called me up asking me if I wanted to renew. Because I've had my current contract so long she said something about not really doing contracts any more (didn't get this) but it meant I had very limited options - I could either get loads more free minutes and texts or a new phone.

I don't use anything like the number of minutes and texts I currently have and to be fair the battery was starting to get a bit flaky in my old phone so I said to replace the phone. However, because of the aforementioned feature-creep, I couldn't just get a simple phone, I had to get one with some extra stuff, including a camera and web access.

Oh, I'm sure you can get bog-standard, basic phones - probably by getting a pay-as-you-go from a supermarket or something - but not as a package with a contract like I need. TO be frank I did also used to quite like the stunned looks my ancient, old fashioned phone used get whenever I whipped it out.

The new one is quite nice, though. I mean, it's not a smart phone or anything, but it looks fairly modern. Something I am surprised about is that it's actually slightly heavier than my old phone. I dunno if this is a deliberate thing and it could be lighter, or just a reflection of the increased gubbins, but it was a surprise.

I have to confess I've only taken two photos with it and haven't even looked at the web or the other stuff. I haven't even bothered to see what, if any, games it's got on it. Maybe I'll be converted, but as I say, I'm pretty sure they're just fundamentally of no interest to me.

Plans for the weekend are mainly to get stuff finished off. There seems to have been a useful decline in telly shows I'm interested in, which should give me the chance to watch things I have recorded.

I've also been trying to get the old e-baying going again after the terrible winter put a rather definitive brake on. I think I've pretty much decided that I'm going to sell everything.

No, that's not quite true. I've decided that once I've paid off my hire-purchase (A.K.A. loan) on my car next year I want to see about moving and it would a lot easier if I had a lot less stuff. And that means a combination of e-bay, the tip and 'using up' all the stuff I've bought and haven't watched/read/played.

a little disappointing

If I'm honest, this weekend's weigh in was a little disappointing.

I've mentioned before how I tend to struggle with understanding why I lost what I did and this last week was a classic example.

In the previous few weeks I've been going a bit off-plan, culminating in a week where I ate loads of crap and I spent several posts last week discussing how I think I was self-sabotaging/comfort eating. Well, this last week I really tried to put into practice my conclusions.

Or, to put it another way, on both Wednesday and Friday I bought salad stuff and had salad by way of adding something different to my diet. I was also okay last week with walking, as I didn't have any excuses in terms of walking at lunch and doing long walks at the weekend. Indeed, this last couple of weekends the weather has looked distinctly perky - this last Sunday I could almost have broken out the shorts.

And the result was... just a 1 pound loss. Which was disappointing.

Now, to be totally fair I did actually slip with the diet. On the Thursday I bought some really naughty chocolate chip cookies.

But that was literally it - otherwise there wasn't a single foot wrongly placed and I can't believe that all the exercise I did and the lower number of calories of my general diet was cancelled out by a few cookies.

I should be pleased, of course, and I am pleased that it represents a continuation of the downward trend, it's just I was expecting more. It honestly felt through the week like I was back on track. I even felt that my current work trousers were feeling a little bit slacker than when I first started wearing them a few weeks back, though I could easily have been kidding myself.

I dunno.

I haven't lost heart and I wouldn't be surprised if I loose a more normal amount next week as I've so far been sticking to my diet again this week. I'm more frustrated at the lack of predictability to it all. It's like I keep feeling the hint of some patterns in there somewhere, but whenever I think I've got it all worked out, I get a week like this week and suddenly I realise how random it all seems.

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.