it still hasn't ended

So yes, the second problem my landlord hit me with.

Despite the months of notice I'd given, "their decorator" had booked a holiday for the exact same week I was away. I still don't get what they meant by "their decorator" but either way I offered to take the week before instead. Only they couldn't do that week either because they were apparently going away for two days.

Which made me even more confused. I mean, apparently their decorator wasn't going to be away that week, but he also wouldn't be able to do the work because they would be away for two days. Given how small my room is (and we're just talking the bed/living room here) it seems bizarre he couldn't do it in the available time.

Anyway, the upshot of this seemed to be that they would have to do it themselves during the week I was away, but because it would be too big a job they would a) have to scale back on it and b) have to do the prep work before I went.

I didn't really mind a, but b poxed me up for multiple reasons.

First off, I'd have to do all sorts of furniture moving so that John could get access to the walls on various days, but also the secret of the bed would inevitably be revealed.

The secret of the bed is that I'd destroyed it. To be fair, it was a really cheap bed, but also, the real problem was of course my huge bulk. For years I've been propping the underside of the bed up using piles of magazines (it's become what I do with all those Japanese magazine I buy!) and there's no way I could loose enough weight for the un-propped bed to support me in that sort of timescale.

Plus of course it gave me somewhere to put the magazines. So now I needed to move all the boxes with magazines into the workshop all in one go as well, and then switch to using my fold-out settee bed thing and tell my landlord to get rid of the old bed.

And that's what I had to do this last weekend - I spent all day Saturday moving furniture around, cleaning the mess I discovered underneath and moving crates and crates of (heavy) magazines into the shed.

What makes this all even worse is that my computer table where I have my computers is a total nightmare. I actually have several machines from where I've upgraded over the years and (pack-rat tendencies kicking in again) I've never disposed of the old ones, but there's also all the peripherals like the printer and scanner and speakers and monitor, etc, etc, there too.

So I've now got a kitchen full of cables and crap while I wait for my landlord to do the bit next to the computer. I requested he do it first, but given how long it took him to empty the shed, Christ knows when he'll get done.

And even when he is done, if I put it all back I'll then have to move it all again before I go on holiday so he can do the actual decorating.

But then there's another factor - the shed is likely to get quite cold and damp over the winter, so if I'm going to sell my stuff I need to do it now. And that means torturous hours of taking photos, prepping and uploading e-bay auctions, then parcelling stuff up before finally lugging it all down to the post office and standing there blowing my entire lunch hour getting the stuff sent.

Now I've posted before about how tedious and rubbish e-baying is, but the scale has now become bonkers. Last Sunday I had more than 40 auctions end while I spent literally all day posting more than 70 more. Now not all things sell, but (and I've actually been kinda impressed by this) nearly 60 of those 70-odd did sell.

To put that in perspective, normally I sell around 20-25 things in one go. And I never have big amounts across multiple weeks. I mean, maybe I'd sell 30 items across 3 weeks if some of them didn't sell and had to be re-listed. I've more than doubled that in two weeks, and all while I've been doing all the other crap too.

So, given how my muscles are still aching and we're nowhere near an end point, you can see why I'm moaning.

when will it end?

I'm a bit sick of this now.

I'm pretty sure I've discussed most of this before, but the difference now is that I'm thoroughly bored of it all.

Basically, a while back, my landlord asked me if he could get into my place at some point to decorate. This would obviously need to happen while I was away, to avoid me having to sleep in a room of stinky fumes.

Okay, it took me a while, but I arranged a holiday for the end of September/beginning of October when I could pop down and visit my Dad (his birthday is early October) and also have a few days off. I informed my landlord of this well in advance - months and months ago, in fact.

But there was an attendant issue - I have so much stuff that was packed into so many boxes, my room was basically like some sort of warehouse. So, my landlord also wanted me to move all the stuff up into the attic.

This meant I was faced with the Herculean job of having to sort through all the boxes and decided to either keep, throw away or sell everything. My preference of course was to sell as much of the stuff as I could. That way I would earn a bit of money back and also it would alleviate the pack-rat tendencies I have which were a big part of why I'd accumulated all the stuff in the first place. If it's going to a good home (or even a bad one), I'd be able to let go much easier than if it was just going into the bin.

I therefore hatched a plan. I would go through all the cardboard boxes, deciding what to chuck away and also repacking everything into plastic stacking crates. I'd also be careful to make sure that 'keepers' got put together and 'sellers' got put together. Once complete, these would be lifted up into the attic and from there I could sell stuff at my leisure.

I had several months to do this before I went on holiday and my landlord would redecorate while I was away.

A perfect plan and phase 1 went well - I sorted through it all, repacked it, chucked quite a lot of stuff and put some of it in the attic and was awaiting my landlord's help in putting more of it up. Only that didn't happen.

Instead, I got called in for a chat where they dropped a bit of a bombshell.

First off - and most importantly - was that my stuff represented a "fire hazard" and therefore couldn't be kept in my room or go in the attic. Instead, it would need putting in the "workshop" (actually a big shed). A space would be cleared for me, but, given the fire hazard status, I would have to move it all right away.

But this also meant that accessing individual boxes would become very complicated. The attic meant relatively good accessibility to all the boxes, but in the shed those at the back would be difficult to get at. So that meant I had to resort it all to maximise convenience. Also, because people could look in the shed, I'd need to cover stuff up so it couldn't really be seen.

So I got ready for the big move, but then had to wait ages while my landlord failed to clear the space. I was therefore completely in limbo, where I could have been using the time productively.

This meant that instead of the couple of boxes a day I'd hoped to do over, say, a week, I had to move all the boxes in a single day. But also, because the boxes had taken up so much room, I'd had to rearrange the furniture in my room to make space.

And this is where we get into the other problem my landlord hit me with.

Actually, having typed all this out, it's way too long, so I'm going to break it into two - more tomorrow.

furniture remover

This weekend I need to further the thing with sorting out and boxes and stuff.

I'd have done it last weekend if I wasn't so tired, but the next phase is re-arranging the furniture to take advantage of the space I've gained through moving the boxes into the shed. This weekend is an ideal time to do it, because it's a scheduled cleaning weekend anyway, so when I move the furniture I can have a bit of a clean and it's just a more complex routine, if you will.

I've been wearing short-sleeved shirts for most of this week, even though the weather doesn't really justify it. I think it's something of a last hurrah to summer before I pack the shirts away again and get out the long sleeve shirts. And who knows, this time next year, I may have lost so much weight that the shirts look silly on me and I have to get some more.

I'm getting way ahead of myself, obviously, but I'm slightly worried about that aspect. It's not going to stop me, but because I am so big I am worried I'm going to have to buy a lot of clothes to match the slimming process.

There's also a Grand Prix this weekend, although I believe it's the Italian, which is Monza. Monza's often a bit of a dull. It's a very high speed circuit and doesn't have very many corners, which makes it difficult to overtake. In order to control the speed a bit they've also put chicanes in over the years and chicanes also kill overtaking.

Still, this year has been so good that even some of the usually dull races have been interesting, so you never know.

my name was earl

Over the last week, as part of my efforts to watch stuff I've got on DVD, I've been watching My Name is Earl episodes.

I really liked the first season of Earl and the second season is okay. The whole long-term arc of Joy stealing the truck didn't quite work, but it was still firmly focused on the list.

However, season three seems to be where it all went a bit wonky. The first part of season three takes place in prison, and it's really hard for Earl to really cross a lot of things off his list when he's in prison. I also seem to recall, though I've not go that far with the DVDs that later on he ends up in the comma, and if it's hard to cross stuff off when you're in prison, it's almost impossible when you're in a coma.

And that's where it went wrong, I think - Earl is about the list, not being in prison and comma dreams. I can kinda understand it, because when you have a list to tick off that tends to set a finite length to your series. The problem of course is that the show was cancelled after the fourth series, so rather than have a plan of "we'll finish the list by the end of this season" and wrapping it up nicely, it ends without ending.

Maybe I'll warm to it a bit more this second time around.

Also, I forgot to mention yesterday about the diet side of my slimming programme.

What I've been trying to do is stay below an absolute limit of 2,000 calories a day. In practice, I'm generally a couple of hundred below that in terms of counting. I'm also pretty sure that I'm over-counting, so perhaps I'm somewhere down around 1,600 calories a day on a good day or around 1,800 on a 'bad' day.

I'm actually deliberately over-counting, partly in order to be safe, but also because if I think I've hit 1,800 then that acts as a good break. An example of the over counting is that I count my daily yoghurt (very good for digestion - everyone should eat yoghurt, but you don't need to bother with those fancy pseudoscience yoghurts, good old fashioned normal yoghurt is where it's at) as 150 calories, where a labelling inspection suggests that, depending on variety, it's actually around 113-121.

This over counting/rounding up also has the advantage of making the maths a lot easier. It's a lot easier to add things up if everything is 150, 250 or 600 calories, etc.

Also, I've discovered a bit of a weird phenomenon now that I've reintroduced bread to my lunch. Basically, when it gets to evening I'm virtually not hungry. I often just have an apple, my juice (I'm fining it's really tough hitting the five a day thing on the diet) and my yoghurt and that's basically it. I tend to spread these out rather than having them all in one go, but generally I won't get peckish until just before bed and it's odd, but I quite like going to bed on an empty stomach now.

It's all a bit odd really - when I kicked this off, I was really struggling with a rumbling belly making me feel bad and occupying all of my attention, but now I almost quite like a bit of hunger. It almost makes the food taste better.

The only thing I am still struggling with is that I enjoy having a really full belly. To me, feeling stuffed after a meal has always been a part of enjoying a meal and that's the hardest thing to resist. I don't think I've ever in my whole life left an empty plate (assuming I like the food) and I know that's what normal people do - have leftovers because they're full. Well, I've never full enough to do that.

good news, everybody!

So there was no DVD rental this last weekend either. It sometimes works out that way, and to be frank I don't think I would have had time to watch it anyway.

I thought therefore I'd talk a bit about the weight and walking thing (that makes a change, huh?).

First off - the best bit. I lost another 2 pounds!

Unlike last week when I was pretty convinced I'd gained, I had thought I would loose some, although I wasn't sure it would be 2 pounds again. To put that two pounds into context, a bag of sugar weighs a smidge over 2 pounds. If you pick up a bag of sugar, it's not so heavy that you're straining, but it's a weighty thing, so you get a good feel for how much that represents.

Also, as noted last week, each pound of fat holds around 3,500 calories and that would broadly appear to track with my pedometer readings and my diet/calorie count.

I'm still not up to the mythical 10,000 steps-a-day, but hen I have the advantage (1) of being fat, which actually helps on that front. Each step for me is like a normal person carrying a big heavy rucksack with them, so if I was doing 10,00 that would actually be more like - I dunno - 12,500 for a normal person.

I've actually been debating whether to put my step count on here or not. See, the problem is I believe the counter is not accurate, but I think it's not accurate because it counts steps when I'm doing things like driving. So, weekdays it's quite a bit over because of driving to work, but weekend there's little to no driving, so it's much more accurate, but I also have more free time, so do more walking.

Now you might think the solution would be to take off the pedo when driving or whatever, but the problem was when I try that forget about it and either leave it at home or in the car and things get really inaccurate.

Also, since I now know these things I can generally compensate and they also give me a flavour of what I'm doing. I basically reckon my actual step count is about 20% less than what this pedometer shows, but even taking that off I'm still on my targets.

I'm also hoping that the extra stuff I'll need to do in lugging all my e-bay wares about will help bump up my exercise over the next couple of weeks. I've got a bit of a hankering to really push the boat out and do loads of walking over the next couple of weeks, although I have fears of more blisters.

I think I'm feeling like that because at the end of the month I've got a holiday and am going to visit my dad - part of me thinks it would be really nice if he notices I'm slightly skinnier. Another part of me thinks if I get my hopes p that he will and he doesn't I'll feel a bit crushed.

Even if he doesn't, it's my plan over the week off to really put in the miles and do a lot of walking. Hopefully when I visit him I'll get a new set of walking boots as there's quite a good shop near him. I can then try and break the new boots in a bit.

a better mood

So I'm feeling a lot better today.

The problems yesterday were a bit of a collective coming together. I think if it had just been one or two I'd have been okay, but all together meant I wasn't impressed.

First off, I was tired.

The tiredness stretched back into the weekend. Basically, as mentioned last week, my landlord wants me to move my stuff into his shed. However, he'd utterly failed to clear the shed and didn't seem to be progressing it at all - I even had to prompt him to actually do anything.

This was particularly annoying because it was them banging on about fire hazards. Anyway, he eventually finished on Saturday and knocked on my door. He then had the cheek - the very temerity - when I said I wouldn't do it then, because it was too late, to basically imply I was dragging my feet. Fucking cheek of the man.

Anyway, I therefore decided I would do it very first thing Sunday morning. It would serve as quite good exercise and needed doing and would also help get him off my back. However, I was a bit shocked at just how much there really was to do.

I've been careful not to overload the boxes as much as I can and had also worked out something of an order to put them in to avoid to many unnecessary problems as I e-bay the stuff, so it was pretty quick and efficient, but man it was hard work.

And to be perfectly frank I'm not actually finished - there's a whole bunch of stuff that really also needs to go out there. However, the problem has been that I've not had any room to manoeuvre. But the point is I moved everything I needed to at that time and it was bloody hard work.

But then, in the afternoon, I had a shed load of stuff to put on e-bay. And I'm not kidding here - I currently have 73 active auctions on e-bay. And that's with me having had 20-odd on from last week.

The 73 is a long way from representing everything I need to e-bay., but it represents probably 90% of the stuff that I can e-bay right away. A lot of the rest of it either needs me to watch/read/play it or actually needs throwing away.

I've actually been a bit surprised that so many of the thing I've put up have been selling. Especially the old comics - I mean, a lot of them are incomplete runs of comics from the best part of 20 years ago, and yet they're selling. Okay, they're not selling for good prices - most are going for 99p, which is on the borderline of being a loss - but they are selling.

Anyway, so all that was why I was tired - I did loads of stuff on Sunday. And that was on top of going for a really long walk on Saturday.

A really long walk that had resulted in a second blister. I don't know why, but when I started with the walking I didn't get any blisters, but then last week I got quite a bad one on my heel.

I decided that I should therefore switch shoes, as the blister might have been due to rubbing. I say might have been because sometimes I get blisters for other reasons, and I actually suspect that's what caused this one. Anyway, it turned out that the shoes I switched to rubbed one of my toes and caused a blister there too.

So yeah, the weekend was a bit rubbish from all those points of view. Especially as the time I spent doing all that crap meant I didn't really get any time to relax or enjoy myself.

So when Monday rolled around I wasn't feeling great due to the above, but I thought work would be relatively smooth.

But it wasn't smooth.

See, I've been rewriting a report that someone else did. The report she produced has good content, but the structure was poor and she has a rather... formal approach to language. In other words, she tends to write these enormous, run on sentences full of overly-syllabic words.

So I'd started rewriting it on Friday, which, by the way, we can't really afford to do as she's blown loads of time already (annoying, much of it on format and format is the thing we need to worry about least at this stage) and got in on Monday to find she's basically read the being-edited version and has sent a whiny, overly-anal e-mail about how we've messed it all up.

This is highly unprofessional behaviour to say the least and also meant the whole process took ages longer than it should, and as noted, we didn't have the time. Plus it put a cloud over the whole thing as it's not nice when you're halfway through a job like that to have the person look over your shoulder and tell you you've made a complete arse of it.

Not least of all when that person has, to be frank, done a piss-poor job in the first place.

So yeah, wasn't really feeling jolly and happy yesterday.

If the person hadn't been working remotely, cross words might have been exchanged.

unf

Not really feeling in the mood today.

Bit of a shit weekend and work is being a bit shit.

Plus (or perhaps, explaining the above a bit) I'm feeling tired and I've got a couple of blisters on my foot.

where did they come from?

Well that was a bit of a blow.

I've been prepping stuff for e-bay auctions all this week and one of the big ones was going to be my collection of discworld books. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sell them, but it's worth putting them up there.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sell hardly any of the stuff I'm going to put up, but once it's been up there for a bit and no-one has bought any of it I can feel okay about taking it all down the tip.

Anyway, what I generally do is prep the text of the auctions along with the pictures before I put them up, and since there's going to be so many, I've been trying to get a head start, where I would normally do them on the same day. And I've made a bit of an unfortunate discovery.

I've discovered that there are two discworld novels I've not read.

Now I knew there were discworld related books I'd not read - there are some books aimed at children, for example, and there's lots of spin-offs, like the science of discworld books and stuff - but I've not read those as I'm not hugely interested. However, these are both proper discworld novels.

The two in question are The Last Continent and Carpe Jugulum. It would appear that both of these books were released (presumably this means in hardback) in 1998, so somehow I've completely missed those two books. I'm actually at a bit of a loss to explain how I've missed them, to be honest, but it gives me a bit of a problem.

See, it doesn't make much sense to sell the books unless it's a pretty much complete collection. Plus, I'm obviously going to get those books anyway and there's also the issue that I've still not read Unseen Academicals, which is the newest book, so I should read that too.

All of which is great from one perspective - yay, more discworld books to read - but annoying because at the pace I read it'll be a couple of months before I've read these new books, even if I start immediately. And that means I can't clear stuff as quickly as I'd hoped.

This process is also being hampered by the fact that the bloody shed hasn't been cleared. I mean, why drag me in and go "You've got to put your stuff into the shed immediately, because it could explode in some horrible fireball of death any time!" until you've actually cleared the space in the shed? All it does is massively inconvenience me, because I don't know when I'm going to have to do all the moving.

Plus, I put a bunch of boxes right next to the door in anticipation, which means they're right in the way and I don't know if I should move them out of the way (I keep banging into them). I bet if I do move them, I'll immediately get the knock at the door to tell me the shed's cleared.

a weird effect

Despite being a bank holiday weekend, I didn't watch any films.

Part of the problem was that I was without a rental DVD, but also, as discussed, I had the sudden problem of box sorting and moving to cope with, so I didn't have as much free time as I'd thought.

Which isn't to say I didn't watch anything - I actually watched loads. First off there was the Grand Prix of course, but I also finished off the first season of Code Geass, which was spectacularly good. I also even started watching the second season of My Name Is Earl.

I'd forgotten that Earl was so good in those first two seasons. My memory is that seasons 3 and 4 really seemed to loose their way, so it was a pleasant surprise to find season 2 was really good. Well, it starts good - I watched it on TV, but I've not got very far with the DVDs so it may be that it tails off - I can't remember.

Anyway, the real point of this post was to make up for the lack of a review by talking a little about the whole weight thing yet again.

I know, it's kinda boring already, but I thought I'd mention some of the weirder things.

First off, I keep having bouts of feeling really amazing. In the very first week I was really tired all the time. I put this down to the combination of suddenly exercising where I'd done nothing before, but also I was having real problems sleeping.

Well, the sleeping seems to have sorted itself, so that may be the reason, but I've generally been feeling really good and some days I feel amazing. I'm used to feeling awful - most days before I started this I would feel down and tired all the time. Even if I'd had loads of sleep, I'd still feel knackered. But now, even on the days I'm not super high I still feel pretty good.

I can only really put it down the exercise. Id' heard that this happened, but it's weird when you think about it - you feel like you've got more energy even though you're actually burning off more calories.

I also read something about how the whole weight loss thing works and suddenly I sort of understand it better than I did before.

Basically, one pound of body fat equates to about 3,500 calories.

Now, for an adult man, the recommended calorie intake is 2,500 calories. So, if you go on a diet that's 500 calories a day less, then 7 * 500 = 3,500 calories, so you would expect to loose 1 pound a week.

Simple.

And what's more, if you add exercise in as well and burn, say, another 500 calories a day then that's another pound a week.

Although that is where it gets more complicated - how much exercise (walking in my case, obviously) you have to do in order to burn that 500 calories seems to be the source of much debate.

more loss (thank god)

I was terribly afraid that when I weighed myself on Sunday I would discover I had gained weight.

My fear was born of several issues.

First off, when I did my first official weigh-in, I was shocked to find I'd apparently "lost" 5 pounds. However, this 5 pound loss was compared to the impromptu and not to be taken seriously measurement I did when I first got the scales.

There were of course many possible explanations - I was fully clothed when I first did it and it was at the end of the day, rather than the beginning, being very high up the list. I was also afraid that I'd made an error of some kind, however, I repeated the measurement and got the exact same result. But however much I counselled myself that it wasn't real, I was delighted with this apparent result.

So I was afraid that this time I'd be higher simply because I wasn't really as low as I'd thought I was, if you see what I mean.

The second issue was that I'd not really started the week very well both in terms of diet and exercise. I mean, it wasn't bad in the sense of sitting on my arse all day, eating 3 pies and 5 mars bars and washing it down with a gallon of coke, but certainly I seemed to be eating plenty and not getting hungry and I wasn't hitting my targets for the pedometer.

Not that the pedometer is proving particularly accurate. My best guesstimate is that it's about 10% inaccurate, but the main problem is that it's not consistent in its inaccuracy.

There was one day last week where I know for a fact I did more steps than the day before, because I walked around the field 3 times in the morning, rather than 2. The days were otherwise no different, yet the earlier day it recorded some 400 more steps than the day after.

But the real problem was that on both of those days the steps were well below the targets I've set.

So you see my fear - I wasn't sure about the first measurement, I'd not been as hungry as I had the week before and I'd also not hit my step targets. However, I was genuinely delighted to find I'd lost a further 2 pounds when I measured myself on Sunday!

Until my landlord dropped the bombshell, as discussed yesterday, I was really chuffed with this.

Well, actually I was still pretty chuffed, it's just that my focus was on the problem at hand. I guess the upside, though is that all that box moving and sorting I did was quite knackering. Plus on the bank holiday I did loads of walking (enough to safely put me above the 10,000 steps thing, in fact).

sunday, bleedin sunday

So this last weekend gone was the bank holiday.

I didn't really have a concrete plan of action, but it was my intention to do a bunch of prep work for putting a load of stuff on e-bay. On the Saturday this mainly involved going through boxes and photographing and weighing stuff.

I spent most of the afternoon doing it and was pleased with the progress. Sunday I'd pretty much earmarked for computer cleaning and sorting. My landlord wants to redecorate my room, so I wanted to start the ball rolling of tidying up the computer area, which needs sorting for several reasons.

My dad is also wanting to buy a new monitor, so I've been spending a lot of time looking through computer specialist websites and I kinda ended up getting the old system building bug. See, I'm also keeping track o the progress of the latest version of the Civ franchise - number 5 - and a while back they posted some system requirements stuff.

And, to be frank, the recommended system is a bit of a monster. Also, I'd started playing Anno 1404 again and was getting a motherload of Crashes-to-Desktop while it was saving (which is just about the worst time for it to crash). Although there's no patch to fix the CTD, some of the stuff out there suggests that more videocard RAM had cured the problem for some people.

In other words, there was a sudden impetus for me to update my machine. I mean, I also spent ages designing a dream system, but that would cost about £1,600 - £1,600 I don't have let me hasten to emphasise - so I also looked at tweaking my existing computers to boost performance.

However, an important part of this would be to finally update to Windows 7 and that means I'd need to spend ages doing "system sorting out" stuff, which is what I had planned for the Sunday. Also, it's good to occasionally clean out your PC case as the build up of dust that tends to occur is not good, so I was hoping to do that.

Instead, my landlord dropped a bit of a bombshell.

My landlord actually has a bit of a knack for managing to want to talk to me at the most inconvenient times - just as I'm sitting down to watch the Belgium Grand Prix, there's a knock at the door and they want 'a chat'.

Anyway, to cut a long story, there were 2 issues.

First off, my collection of boxes is now considered a fire hazard (given the damp problems I'd struggle to see a roaring log fire as a fire hazard in my flat, but never mind) so I need to move them all into the shed out the back.

And secondly, their decorator has booked a holiday right when I'm off at the beginning of October, even though they've known the dates for weeks.

This second point was where it got really confusing, because their solution seemed to be that they want to go into my room and start stripping the wallpaper in advance. I realised later that I don't actually understand how this solves the problem, unless they're saying they're going to decorate it themselves.

Even if they are, I'm kinda stunned that they're suggesting the small room I live in will take more than... ooh, two days to decorate (I'm going to be away for a week).

I dunno, but the basic upshot is that I had to spend the rest of Sunday and Monday sorting through all of the boxes - not just the ones that had stuff in I want to sell now. Of course, ultimately, I want to sell, recycle or throw away 90% of what's in the boxes, but I was thinking I'd have a month to do this and even then that I'd have time after the decoration as well.

However, if the boxes now have to go out in the shed that adds all sorts of complications, meaning it all needs doing as soon as is humanely possible.

summer bank holiday? really?

Well, this weekend is the summer bank holiday - the last bank holiday before Chrimbo.

I've got to say it's a bit of a misnomer this year, as summer has been a bit of a damp squib. There was a brief spell of hot weather early on, when my aircon came in very handy, but after that it's been a real mixed bag.

Just recently it seems to have rained a hell of a lot, but there have also been some sunny days and both really humid and surprisingly cold days. Over the last couple of days it's really felt like we're heading into autumn, rather than being the middle of summer.

And this weekend also marks the return of the Formula 1 circus, with the Belgium Grand Prix held at the famous Spa Francorchamps circuit. Spa usually produces a good race, and it's also well known for the steep climb up the Eau Rouge valley.

My sister and dad actually went to the Belgium Grand Prix a couple of years ago and sat in the stand at the top of Eau Rouge. They said it is incredibly steep - proper out of breath stuff. I wish I could have gone myself, but I've got the whole problem of spending huge amounts of cash on anime and manga that often prevents me from having proper holidays or doing anything that needs a large amount of cash.

I'm not sure how my walking regime will stand up to the whole Grand Prix weekend thing. I guess this will be the acid test.

more manga catch-up

So, yes, new stuff I've read:


Toshokan Senso: Love & War

I have to say I was a bit disappointed with this.

A while back there was an anime adaptation, as it's originally a series of Light Novels and I quite enjoyed what I saw of them, so I figured I'd pick up this manga adaptation. The premise for the series is a bit daft, but what I really liked about it was that it had some interesting characters. It was also pretty much a shoujo series, which was interesting as I'd always thought Light Novels pandered to the male otaku crowd.

Anyway, the problem I had with the first volume of the manga was that it was poorly laid out and difficult to follow. I've encountered this a few times with Shoujo stuff, where the panels aren't really logically laid out and speech crosses over panels in weird and confusing ways.

I think I'll give it one more volume, but if I don't like that I'll probably drop it.


Polyphonica: Cardinal Crimson

I was also really disappointed with this.

Again, I saw an anime adaptation that I quite liked, so I figured I'd pick this up. Well, it turns out that the adaptation and this seems to have almost completely different stories and the story here is really badly done.

I dunno - the whole thing is badly set up and not very well written.


Seikon no Qwaser

I wouldn't say I was disappointed with this, as such, more I was disappointed with myself for picking it up.

Basically, it's got one of those totally bizarre set-ups where the writer has just made up a load of old cobblers. But really this is just a framework for lashings of fan-service.

The reason for the self-disappointment was that I watched a bit of the anime version and new it was all a load of old toot, yet I bought the manga anyway. And I'll probably keep buying it.


Natsume's Book of Friends

You'll probably notice the theme now when I say that this was another one I saw an anime version of and enjoyed, so I thought I'd pick up the manga. However, unlike the above two, there was no disappointment involved.

Well, I say that, I have to confess I'm not the biggest fan of the artwork. Shoujo stuff can often be rather stylised - people are often lanky with oddly exaggerated features - and this is no exception. It kinda works for the ghosts that feature in the series, but for the humans I'm not so keen.

My main issue is with the faces, I think - they can look a bit pinched.

But what makes up for that is a very nice set of stories. The mangaka explains that the series is an occasional one, so while the same basic idea is across all the 4 stories in the book, they're actually pretty much independent short stores and each one works well.


Kimi Ni Todoke (From Me to You)

And this one too is a manga I picked up having enjoyed my sample of the anime. It's also yet another shoujo series - perhaps I'm getting in touch with my feminine side or something? I think really it's more a reflection of the fact that women do more reading than men and are, by some account, basically propping up the entire publishing industry.

But back to the manga. I think of the stuff I'm reviewing here, this is my favourite. It has decent artwork that is pretty much like most shoujo stuff, but unlike Natsume Yuujincho above, it doesn't go too far down that road. Also, the panels are fairly well laid out - certainly there's generally a bright and breezy feeling to the panels, which tend to flow reasonably well.

The real strength, though, is with the characters and the writing. The story is basically about someone who's been ostracised because they look and act a little scary. They're actually a really nice person, though, and the story is basically about them gaining friends and becoming more integrated.

To be frank, I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of story, so I'm probably biased, but I'm really enjoying it.

2012

I've kinda had a mixed response to Roland Emmerich's films.

I really enjoyed Stargate, Universal Soldier was okay for what it was, Independence Day was great as a giant B-movie, I enjoyed Godzilla, though recognise it's flawed and that a lot hate it and Eight Legged Freaks was trashy fun.

But The Day After Tomorrow, while having amazing effects, was awful and 10,000BC was one of the worst films I've ever seen.

Both of those two had the unfortunate problem of being scientifically bonkers, but unlike his other films they didn't compensate by acknowledging their daftness or by being purely 'genre' films. And 2012 got off to a worrying start on this front with the revelation that neutrinos put out by the sun were causing the Earth's core to heat up.

Oh dear.

However, while there is other such stupid science stuff in the film, it manages to keep this to a bare minimum. Instead if spends a lot more time focused on the characters and on showing the actual disasters that are going on.

Unfortunately, those characters are a little thin and a bit too stereotypical. The only thing that really works with the characters is that there's no Hollywood "evil" people, as such - you do get the impression that while some of them do bad things on occasion, they're equally capable of good things.

You also get the impression they've had a really good think about how the world's governments would actually go about trying to save the world. So while you do get some hint of "all corporations are evil" the counterpoint is made that how else could they have gotten the ships they use to survive the disaster made?

And problems like who do you save and when do you tell people also get some exploration. There's not a lot of exploration to be fair (in particular there's little thought given to extended families - almost nobody cares for or worries about anyone that doesn't appear on-screen, so with only one exception nobody is worried about their friends/parents/work colleagues, etc), but more than you might expect from a popcorn movie like this.

What you do get in spades is luscious visuals, stuff blowing up and getting destroyed on an immense scale and fistfuls of breathtaking CGI. Unfortunately, it does take the better part of two and a half from beginning to end and while I wouldn't ever say the film was dull, that's a very long disaster movie.

My overall verdict is that it's not quite as good as Independence Day, but it's a lot better than the likes of Tomorrow and 10,000BC.

The DVD also had a bunch of extras, which included a commentary, deleted scenes and, interestingly, an alternate ending that is, quite frankly, cheesy rubbish.

manga catch up

I don't think I've talked about what manga I've been reading for a while.

The truth is that's mainly because a lot of what I've been reading has been the continuing volumes of series. These have included:

• Biomega 2 & 3 - Tsutomu Nihei's art continues to impress, but unlike Blame it's not really work for me. I think its because the sparse style doesn't really suit the type of story.
• Black Lagoon 9 - this finished up the Roberta arc, which has been okay. I like the story and love the artwork and characters still, but Rei Hiroe needs to take a leaf out of Nihei's book and reign in the word count. If these two ever both hit a happy medium between the extremes they seem to operate at, they could rule the world.
• Gurren Lagann is up to volume 5 - this volume was pretty good as it had some original stuff that wasn't in the anime. I mean, it's not a slavish adaptation anyway, but this volume has some properly new stuff, and it's another where the artwork continues to impress.
• Which isn't something that can be said about DMC, where I also have to admit the charm has started to wear a bit thin, as it keeps redoing the same jokes and lacks a longer story arc. There are hints that there may be a longer and more developed story coming up in volume 6, though.
• And Gantz's art continues to be a bit flawed, but with a brutal story that makes up with. It's a little more frustrating reading it at a more normal release pace (we're up to 11 volumes, I think), but I'm still enjoying it.
• I'm also still enjoying Bamboo Blade more than I expected to. It's up to volume 5 now and is still going strong.
• Ichigo 100% is at volume 13 and continues to do what it does - lots of fan-service and a main character who just kind make his damn mind up (pick Aya, you moron). If I didn't know this series ended in 6 volumes time I'd probably be thinking about dropping it by now, as it's getting a bit repetitive - a good thing taken too far.

And speaking of dropping, there are a couple of other titles I've been reading that I'm seriously considering dropping. I'm unsure because they're okay, but also I'm not sure I want to keep spending money on them as they're all ongoing series:

• Dogs: Bullets & Carnage - I really enjoyed the prologue "volume 0", but the ongoing series is not really impressing me. The arts nice, but gets confusing during the many fight scenes and the story just feels like a big old mound of clichés.
• Asu No Yoichi: Samurai Harem - the problem with this is it's a giant cliché. Everything in it is a recycled idea and if it wasn't for the hawtness of the chicks It'd probably bore me (and even that is tainted a bit by having a really young girl who's subjected to just as much groping as the older girls).
• Hayate the Combat Butler - this is the toughest one to drop. I still really like it, but we're already on volume 15 and there are apparently 24 released in Japan and it's not finished. That's a lot of volumes considering it's basically a gag manga where the story is going nowhere (deliberately, mind - it's not really meant to go anywhere).

What's most annoying, though, is that there also appear to be some series I'm following that seem to have been dropped. I say seem to have been because for 3 of them I can't find any official announcement saying they've been dropped, it's just that it's been ages since last volume came out, they're behind Japan and you can't pre-order any future volumes:

• Tenjho Tenge is the most annoying of these. They recently published volume 18 in English and Oh!Great and then CMX basically announced it was stopping publication, only for Oh!Great to announce the end of the series at volume 22 - so there were just 4 volumes left! And with the recent clampdowns on scanslations I've no idea whether I'll ever get to tread the end of the series.
• Kurohime is the second most annoying, not least of all because it's Viz. I always thought Viz just pumped out volumes regardless, but the last volume they did in English was 14 and that was years ago and it's on 18 in Japan, so I guess they've dumped it.
• Yozakura Quartet got to volume 5 and seems to have stopped (it's on 9 in Japan), although I'm not too fussed by this as, while the art was gorgeous, the storytelling was piss-poor.
• Similarly I'm not badly miffed that Princess Resurrection seems to have bitten the bullet at volume 7 (it's on 12 in Japan) as, while I enjoyed it, it wasn't anything spectacular.

Those last two are releases by Del Ray, which is a smaller company, but apparently prides itself on catering to the hardcore fan. That also seems to mean not really telling people what's going on, so I'm not hugely impressed, and I wasn't that big a fan of there's to start with.

But generally this is the most annoying thing with manga - anime, if someone picks it up you can be pretty much sure they'll release the whole series (it takes going tits up to stop them), but with manga they can just drop it, so where does that leave us fans?

Christ, I've wibbled on! And I've not even started on the new volumes I read, which was the point of this post, so more later.

guess what today's blog post is about?

Yup, walking and weight loss.

I think I'm going to make it so that I have 1 day a week where I do an update about the weight stuff, a bit like the mini reviews. At the very least I can give my pedometer readings for the past week (it has a 7-day memory function, which is pretty cool).

If I'm feeling very brave I might actually give my weight, which would tend to suggest Monday or Tuesday might be the best days to talk about it, since I'll be weighing myself at the weekend.

Anyway, the thing I wanted to mainly mention was my brilliant idea to help me walk - audio books. If you're unaware, an audio book is literally a regular book read out by someone and recorded. We're not really talking dramatization, though - think father reading story to child before bedtime, only not in a patronising way.

Having hit upon the idea, I therefore signed myself up to something called audible, which is a kind of talking-book shop (as opposed to a talking bookshop - that would just be weird) done by Amazon.

I went in with eyes open - I knew the audible site uses a DRM proprietary format which has a file extension of "aa". This potentially meant that I couldn't play it on my MP3 player, but I did the research and decided that if worse came to worst I could get around it by burning to CD and ripping it from there.

I mean, the audible system does have the advantage of allowing you as many downloads as you like and by installing their software you can play it from your computer, but this would hardly be a help for listening on the move. And besides, burning to CD means I will have hard copies that (I think) I can listen to in the car anyway.

Anyway, I tested it out this weekend and truth be told it's a bit of a faff, but it's a faff that only needs doing once per audio book, and I'm not going to be buying millions of them. So yeah, I can cope is how I'd put it.

One thing I did get a shock over was the price of the audio books - they're very expensive. In most cases they're more than 4 or 5 times the cost of buying the paperback version.

When I thought about this it made sense - you're not only paying for the story, like you are the normal book, but also there's all that expense of getting someone (or several someone's) in to read the thing, and that can only add to the price. And an unabridged version of a book can be very long. I recently talked about reading Matter and the unabridged audio book for that is nearly 18 hours long!

However, what audible does is it works a bit like the lovefilm rental service, in that every month you pay a subscription fee and that gives you a credit which you can use to get one book. The subscription fee is only about £8 (I think - I forget, plus it's discounted for the first few months) and that's a good chunk less than most of the books I've looked at. But not all - some were only about £5 (older and shorter stories) so those are going to be better to buy.

yet more weight stuff

I know, yet more on the weight thing - I'm beginning to become a bit of a scratched record, huh?

Well, the thing I wanted to mention mainly was that I think my main problem is going to be time. See, I've basically come to the conclusion that exercise is going to be the real key.

Or more specifically, I need to walk myself thin. The change to the diet thing of not including bread has proven to be a real pain in the arse. I think I need to take a more level-headed approach.

After all, when I started looking at the calories, my discovery was actually that I was basically taking in the recommended 2,500 calories a day (well, maybe a little more or a little less, depending on the day), where I had thought I was taking in a lot less. The main reason for this was because I was eating an entire home-made loaf a day.

In other words, if I just stop being a fussy bugger and have that loaf across 2 days, even though on the second day it will be a little dry, then that essentially drops me below the 2,500 calories (although I will have to be careful what I put in said sarnis). I can still have "loaf replacement" in the evening, but it avoids the real hassle I've been giving myself of having to prep said meal replacement in the morning. That has the added value of freeing up a bit more time in the morning, so I can walk a bit further.

Also, my other thing is to be more careful as to what I eat at weekends. I wasn't really being very strict with myself at weekends, but if I'm more sensible then that shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, the point is that the pedometer has shown me (a bit like the scales) that the situation wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but there's a long way to go. Roughly speaking, I need to double the amount of walking I'm currently doing to make any sort of inroads. And really that's just to get me onto a normal amount - I then need to build up even more.

Which isn't to say I'm doing a lot at the moment, although I reckon I have already doubled what I used to do. Currently, I'm getting straight up when my alarm goes off and going for a quick 15 minute walk. I'm hoping to bump that up to maybe half an hour eventually, but for now I think it's an okay amount.

It then turns out that on some days of the week, when I have stuff to do at lunch, I already do a reasonable number of steps. The problem, however, is that most days I don't have anything to do, so I don't do very many steps at all. My current thought is that I can simply do a quick walk around the car park at the start of lunch and that will bump the steps up a bit.

Again, we're not talking about a huge distance or a long time walking, but the whole point is that it all adds up. So I can also maybe do the long walk around the car park thing again when I'm going home - again, only a couple of minutes, but every little helps.

The key though is going to be doing something in the evening, after work. My initial thought is to repeat my short, 15 minutes walk as soon as I get back.

But, as mentioned, the problem is going to be time. If I'm spending 15 minutes walking, then you can add on a good 10 minutes of faff (changing clothes, catching my breath, etc) as well, and I've already got massive backlogs of stuff to do - magazines to scan, DVDs and TV to watch, games to play, books and manga to read...

I guess the point is that doing those things instead of stuff that involves physical exercise is a big part of what got me into this mess in the first place.

that much, eh?

Well, both my new bathroom scales and pedometer turned up earlier in the week.

First off, the scales then - is my weight as bad as I'd feared? No - I weigh well within the limit of these scales. Does that really count as good news? Not really, no.

I'm not going to say what I actually weigh, mainly out of embarrassment, but also because I'm not taking what I measured as being a proper measure yet. The key to weighing yourself regularly is to set a day and time and to always measure it under the same circumstances (i.e. same clothes).

It doesn't really matter when those are, but the key is the consistent repetition, and I think the best time for me to do it will be at the weekend. So what I measured earlier in the week could be high or low - I mean, not to the extent of a stone or anything, but it's important not to go weighing myself randomly or I'll get all sorts of spurious readings that could end up disheartening me.

The really bad news side of things is that I really do need the extra weight measurement that these "fat bastard" scales go up to. In fact, actually, by the looks of things I need exactly half of the extra measurement they provide. If I tell you that standard scales weigh up to 20 stone then that probably gives you some idea of the problem I've got.

Not that the 20 stone represents a good weight you understand. There's something called "Body Mass Index" (BMI) and the idea of this BMI thing is it gives you an easy figure to work out how heavy you are. It's calculated using your height and weight and the idea is that it's banded, so if you're number is between x and y then you're a healthy weight, if it's lower than x you're underweight and if it's above y then you're overweight.

The most useful aspect of BMI is that that figure is consistent - if you're 3 foot tall and have a BMI of 20 then that means the same thing as if you're 8 foot tall and have a BMI of 20. Anyway, the real point is that in order to simply be classified as obese I need to get below 20 stone. At my current weight I'm what's known as morbidly obese, which is a doctory weigh of saying I'm going to kill myself by being this fat.

My first goal is therefore to get under 20 stone, and I'm hoping to do that by Christmas. It's a lot to loose and if I'm to achieve it I really need to stick with both the new exercise regime and the diet, but it's a steady loss. The key is this "lifestyle change" thing - not sitting on my fat arse all day, but regularly going for walks and generally increasing my activity levels.

Which is why I got the pedometer.

Apparently, there's quite a lot of evidence that they work as good motivators - when you can actually see how many steps you're actually taking, and knowing how many you need to do, it's not surprising it encourages you.

I've mainly been experimenting with it so far this week. Part of it seems to be accurately setting your step length, and I've been having a few problems with that. See, the difficulty is that when I try to actually measure it, I don't walk normally.

It recommends that you do a set number of steps (10) and measure that, to give the average. But the problem is when I do those ten steps I end up not walking like I normally do. I keep "striding" - taking deliberately long steps.

However, I think I've managed to get it so that it's about right now and it seems pretty accurate when I'm doing proper walking. That's relatively easy to check, because I can just mentally count the number of steps I take along a particular stretch and then see how many its recorded, and it seems reasonably accurate.

However, it seems to go a bit bonkers when I'm just bimbling. I was laying on my bed, watching telly and went to the loo and back for a piss and it recorded something like 40-odd steps. The actual distance is something in the order of 5 metres, so 10 metres there and back and my stride length is about 60cm, so it should only be about 16 or 17 steps.

I think the problem is because of the changing height and the weird movements when I'm wandering around in that way. I guess what that means is that I can use the pedometer to measure proper walking, but in terms of bimbling it's probably a case of take as a fixed amount every day.

synecdoche

Whut?

I have to admit I was contemplating leaving that single, misspelled, played-out-net-meme of a word as the entire review for Synecdoche, because it was pretty much my initial reaction. My problem is that since then it's kind of haunted my brain, occupying spare wetware cycles and leading me to either feel like I understand it or don't really get it in equal measure.

Part of the reason for this flip-flopping is that it's massively ambitious, but also massively confusing. It's also very abstract and has more than a touch of self-indulgence about it. If Kaufman is projecting (like all writers and creators) at least some of himself into the main character then what are we to make of things like the "Genius" grant and the fact several women seem to throw themselves at him?

But on the flip-side, he doesn't give that main character anything resembling an easy ride. Caden Cotard (more on that name in a moment) is a theatre director who, when we join him, is neurotic, physically falling to bits and married to a woman who wants out of the relationship big time.

From there on, things don't really get any easier and there's a melancholic, life is full of disappointment, regret, sadness, pain and longing feel to the whole film. Even when he gets this Genius Grant and is given an apparently limitless bucket of money to create whatever he wants, Caden fails to ever actually turn his proposed play into reality. A play is for performance to an audience and at no point does his play ever acquire an audience.

Instead, in its attempt to capture all of life, it becomes like the serpent eating its tail, acquiring ever more actors and layers such that there even end up being actors to play him on multiple levels - there seemed to be actors playing moments from his life that happened, as well as someone playing him as the director of the play.

Which is both clever and confusing at the same time.

It becomes even more confusing towards the end when the actor playing the director him is a woman. And when they do the graveyard scene of burying his mother, this female director decides to ramp things up into an at-once over-the-top but rather profound exaggeration that somehow works even better than the original. It becomes a weird statement that the female actor playing the director version of him is better at directing his own life by making it surreal in what is an already very surrealist reality.

I was struck actually by all sorts of parallels. There's a famous Shakespeare quote that runs something along the lines of "All the world's a stage and the people merely players" and that seems to be the play that Caden is trying to create. There's even one point where Caden says something to the effect that no-one is an extra - everyone is the lead character of their own lives.

Another parallel was with Tristram Shandy. In the Tristram Shandy books, Tristram is trying to write his autobiography, but every day of his life he manages to cover takes an inordinate amount of time to write. Therefore, he's acquiring more days to write about than he has the capacity to write about. Again - Caden's play expands to encompass life, but life is so big it can never be captured ("The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy").

And I feel like there's loads more - that name, Caden Cotard, for example. Cotard Delusion is apparently a condition where the person believes they are dead or don't exist or they have lost organs and in many ways, that's Caden - he's obsessed with death and how bits of him are either broken or not working.

But I didn't know that before I saw it on the internet looking up Synecdoche for this review. Which sort of encapsulates my dilemma about the film - there's bits during it that could have helped me understand that I was ignorant of, but as I discover them I understand the film a bit more.

So I'm left with the slightly weird situation of having found it a little boring and long winded whilst watching it, but slowly coming to enjoy it more some time after.

a ped-o-meter, not a paedo-meter

Following on from yesterday, I've also ordered a pedometer.

The idea with these little machines is that they count the number of steps you take. This is important because apparently, if you want to maintain an active lifestyle, you need to do about 10,000 steps a day.

This apparently works out to be about 5 miles a day, but it does include all the steps you take. So things like walking to the bathroom or walking out to the car are also included in those steps - it's not just steps of "deliberate" exercise.

Anyway, the point is that I'm pretty sure I must do less than a thousand steps. I'd be amazed if I'm walking a mile just bimbling around like I normally do. I've therefore ordered the pedometer to see just how far I'm actually walking.

I've heard that some of them aren't very accurate, but I guess even if it isn't accurate it'll be consistently inaccurate, if that makes sense. In other words, if it's always 10% off then it will still allow me to track increases, I just won't know the exact amount of the increase.

The reason I'm focused on walking is that it's apparently one of the best exercises you can do. It's relatively low impact, both in the sense that you're not subjecting your body to lots of physical impacts and also you're not making your heart work too hard. It's still a fairly reasonable cardiovascular workout though and is apparently very good for lowering things like pulse rate and blood pressure.

Also, apparently, your leg and bum muscles are some of the biggest in the body, which means that it's a good way to burn calories, rather than simply increase muscle mass like some exercises are intended to. By this measure, that apparently means cycling and running are also very good - probably cycling is the best given that it can be high activity without the thumping impact of running, but then I'd need a bike and I don't have one, plus cycling on the roads is something that pretty much fills me with abject terror.

However, with walking I also quite like the idea that it doesn't look like I'm exercising. Having a profundity of very wobbly bits, one of the things that I find off-putting about most exercise is that people will stare at me.

If I'm simply going for a walk I'm doing an every day thing and am just going somewhere, so people won't stare too much. Well, they always stare when you're as fat as I am, but they won't stare more, if you see what I mean.

Was that all convincing?

I'm hoping that by reminding myself of this sort of stuff regularly it'll stop me from giving up like I usually do.

walk the earth, my friend

I decided over the weekend that I was going to start walking.

A few weeks (or was it months?) back - roughly when the weather started to perk up a bit - I started doing walks on Sunday afternoons. This lasted for a little while and I even had what I thought was a really good route worked out.

The route was about 2 miles or so, which isn't a huge distance, but one of the key points about it was that the last stage involved a really steep bit of about half a mile. The meant it was quite decent exercise for someone who is horribly out of shape like me, but also didn't take forever.

However, my main problem I encountered was timing. As the summer got going I started to get a nasty clash - both F1 and MotoGP races tend to start at around 1 or 2 in the afternoon and go on for about an hour and a half. This was right when I'd made the slot for walking, so I kept finding myself making the "oh, I'll fit it in next week instead".

But of course I didn't, so I basically stopped do the walks.

So what's different this time?

Well mainly, my plan is to take a very short walk every morning. For about the last 2 years I've been getting up at about 6:45 and going into work very early. Quite why I do this when I spend that first hour basically browsing the web, I don't know, so instead I've decided I'll go for a short sharp walk first thing and not worry about getting in quite so early.

And it really is a short walk - about 15 minutes, so probably less than a mile. But that's part of the aim - by doing shorter walks for time being I'm hoping I can build up. My hope is that I may then be able to do a short walk some evenings as well.

I also think I've hit upon a strategy that allows me to basically replace my bread consumption during the week. I'll still bake myself a fresh loaf at the weekend, partly as a treat and partly as I can control what and when I eat a lot more easily at the weekend.

I'm still too embarrassed to say what I replaced the bread with, but I think I'm feeling okay about admitting I want to loose weight. Previously I was simply saying it was about being a "bit fitter" and while I still want that (it'd be so nice to go up stairs without getting totally of breath) I can admit that a big part of it is being morbidly obese (no matter how fit you are if you were giving a piggy back to someone who weighed the same as you up those stairs, you'd be out of breath too).

As such, I ordered a set of bathroom scales to actually weight myself and determine the extent of the problem. I know it's going to be horribly scary - the scales I've ordered are "XL" if you will and I've still got a feeling I'll be over their maximum weight. And I'm not kidding there - I genuinely think that even though they measure way above what normal scales do I'll weigh more than that.

little bit of a scan

I've not really been getting stuck into the scanning like I'd hoped.

The hope was that with my getting to the animage's, which relatively easy and quick to scan, I'd blast through them. The flaw is of course that the hope in question is entirely dependent on me actually sitting down and doing some scanning - quicker to scan they may be, but if I'm watching telly or reading a book, they ain't quicker at all.

I have done a bit, though, so I've done some mini-reviews of the fansubs I watched. I'm actually rapidly approaching the point where I'm going to run out of fansubs. I'm guessing I'll probably have a proper crack at the series that are on Crunchyroll until the new season rolls around.


Amagami SS

I wasn't entirely sure what to make of this.

It seemed to be one of those series you get occasionally that tries to do the more standard anime plotlines in a more serious way. The last one I remember like this was White Album, which seemed to be to be trying to be a harem show, but a kind of grown-up harem show.

So, in other words, the male protagonist seemed to have a bevy of hot chicks (idols, no less) in love with him, but it did away with the 'childish' fan-service. I didn't really like it and initially I didn't really like Amagami SS either.

I'm not sure if White Album was, but Amagami appears to be based on one of those girl-chasing/dating type games and so you've got that element of their being lots of girls around. However, the boy appears to really only be interested in the one girl. Well, I say that - there's something of a suggestion that there are going to be multiple 'arcs', but I didn't watch far enough to be sure.

Anyway, I guess the point is that this is a fairly gentle, fan-service light romance anime with a dash of humour. It didn't strike me as ground-breaking, but also didn't really offend me either.


Asobi Ni Ikuyo

Asobi seemed to be a bit of a mess.

The distinct impression I got was that the writer wanted to make a proper science fiction show with aliens and conspiracies and all sort of stuff like that, but it's also a fairly generic romantic-comedy harem & instant girlfriend type of show.

Whether this was because the writer genuinely wanted to combine the two, or he felt he had to include the harem stuff to give it appeal I don't know. It could even have been at his editors insistence (from what I understand editor's are pretty powerful in Japan). Or of course, because the anime is based on a series of light novels and I've expressed before that the majority of light novels are clearly generic crap, it could be because of that.

Anyway, the point is that the series ends up being a horrible mish-mash of the genres that just doesn't really work.

It also manages to completely ignore what are clearly story telling requirements. It's like when people are meeting the alien cat girl (oh no - more cat girls, like there haven't been enough of those in recent seasons!) no-one really questions that she's got cat ears and a tail (note that she's got cat ears and normal ears :/) or what she's wearing or anything.

And normally they at least try to give some reason why the cat girl likes the milquetoast lead, but here there's nothing - he's not specifically kind to her or anything, she basically just gets in to bed with him and that's it. There's also no reason given why all his friends set out to rescue her - you'd expect her to have done them a favour or been nice to them or something, but nope - they just decide to rescue her.

To add insult to injury, even though this is clearly meant to be a fan-service heavy show they're doing that horribly annoying thing of obscuring the fan-service really badly with beams of sunlight, etc. This therefore renders the only remaining reason you might have kept watching null and void. Especially since there doesn't seem to be an uncensored version kicking about either.

weird body stuff

I had a very odd moment on Tuesday where I suddenly felt extremely dizzy.

I don't specifically know what brought it on, but the last time I had this feeling it was because I was hungry and I certainly ate a banana and felt better, but that could have been coincidence.

I've actually been examining my diet at I've been slightly puzzled that I haven't been loosing weight. See, while I'm not on a properly controlled diet I have basically been living off of salad and strawberries and yet there's been no shrinkage of my waistline.

The thing I discovered was that bread is incredibly high in calories. See, a while back I got a bread maker with the intention of using it to bake fresh bread regularly that I would primarily use for sandwiches at work. Bread is one of the things I find most difficult to manage properly as a bachelor.

I hate stale bread, but it's horribly inconvenient to buy bread every day. Plus it's difficult to buy bread in sensible portions for a single person - loafs are too big and go stale before I finish them and rolls tend to be sold in packs that are either too small or too big.

The perfect solution I thought was therefore to get the bread maker and make bread when I needed it. The problem has been that even the smallest loaf it has a recipe that is actually quite big (and it takes 3 hours to run through). Plus, because it's home-made bread it goes stale really quickly, which means I've ended up baking a new loaf most weekdays, having half for sandwiches and then eating the rest along with my salad in the evening.

Well, as noted, my research revealed that bread is actually incredibly energy dense. So that small loaf I was making turned out to have more than 1,200 calories in terms of flour alone. When you add in the extra bits you need to make bread, like milk, it's probably more like 1,300 calories, which means that one small loaf is more than half of the daily total calorie allocation for an adult man.

So it's no wonder my weight hasn't been dropping - where I thought by having the salad I was bringing my calorie intake way below that 2,500 in fact I was probably only bringing it in line with it. In other words, previously, I'd been eating more than that 2,500, hence why my waistline has steadily crept up.

So I therefore resolved to come up with a solution, because this current situation is daft. And that solution has been to substitute the bread with something else that's a lot less calorie intensive, but is still quite filling.

I'm actually too embarrassed to say what it is, especially as I'm still experimenting. The weird thing, though, is that even though I hadn't actually started the proper substitution until mid-week I seem to have started feeling hungry like I was on a diet already. I mean, I've been feeling ravenously hungry almost continuously since the weekend, and it's not like I've been doing any exercise or anything.

Hence, I believe, the feeling dizzy. It's like it's totally psychosomatic - because I'm thinking about cutting down the calories, my body has decided to start behaving like it's on a starvation diet already and making me hungry, which is just bizarre.

confessions of a dangerous mind

If you happen to have seen my last Wednesday mini-review, you will have seen that last week's DVD rental was Human Nature, which was written by Charlie Kaufman. This week's rental was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which was also written by Charlie Kaufman.

I've had this happen before with the rentals - I particularly remember getting a whole bunch of films starring Jason Statham in a row, for example. I don't mind, as it can be interesting to watch films like that, but it does make me wonder how the LoveFilm system works.

Anyway, this review is meant to be about Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, so what did I think of it? Well, I thought it was okay.

One of the thing I enjoyed about the Kaufman films I've seen is the blending of realities and dreams and the messing about with perceptions. So in Being John Malkovich there's this whole thing of a messed up office space and a portal that leads into John Malkovich's head. Once in his head you perceive reality from his point of view until it eventually spits you out.

In Eternal Sunshine it's all about a guy reliving all the memories he had of a girl he fell in love with while those memories are being erased. In Adaptation you've got Kaufman himself mixing up the process of writing an adaptation of a novel and getting wrapped up in that adaptation itself.

I mention this because I was sort of hoping Confessions would also be like that. Human Nature seemed to suffer because although it was meant to be a bit like that as well, the reality it was grounded in was just plain silly itself.

In Confessions you've got a story about a TV producer who made a lot of successful game shows who then wrote an autobiography where he basically claimed to also be a CIA assassin. Surely that's ripe for all sorts of reality bending exploits, right? Is the assassination stuff a deliberate invention, or the working of a paranoid mind? Did it really happen or not?

But it's not done like that - instead, the whole thing is squarely presented as if it's real. And while that's entertaining enough, it also acts to undermine itself. I mean, let's put it this way - Chuck Barris, the guy who invented Blind Date (it was called the dating game in its original American incarnation)claims he's also assassinated 30-odd people and this is pretty much presented as being true in the film. How could that ever actually be true?

I actually read that Kauffman wasn't happy with how George Clooney (who directed it) had fiddled with the script, so I downloaded the script and gave it a read through. As is often the case with these things, it seems to me like some of the changed stuff helps and some hinders.

In the original script Chuck is a relentlessly unpleasant man and the film paints him as more strings to his bow, but some key points in the script, like him killing one of the Blind Date contestants are seriously fiddled with in ways that don't quite make sense.

Anyway, the point is I think it would have worked better if it had been more open-ended with more obvious use of is it fantasy or is reality type questions, but it does still work as is.

gadge

So a new series of the gadget show started the other week.

It's good to have the show back and it's a really long run - they're going to be going right up until Christmas time, which is around 20-odd weeks. They've even got a new presented - Pollyanna Woodward. She's very pretty, but she at this early stage she also seems quite bright and a good presenter as well - I find it a bit cringeworthy when presenters are just a pretty face.

I must say it's quite interesting that they're adding another presenter. By my reckoning that makes 5 on the TV show itself and then I believe there's a web episode presenter person too. I've never really had much joy out of 5's online thing, so I've never watched any other webisodes.

Anyway - 6 presenters and a 20-odd episode run suggests the show is going from strength to strength. Given the recent take-over of five and the resultant proclamations that they would slash-and-burn a lot of staff in order to make the station profitable I hope that means the gadget show is safe.

It'd be a real shame if it gets axed as there aren't really any other shows that do what it does. Plus less Suzy Perry on the telly would be a bad thing.

I ended up recording the last episode of Sherlock, because as mentioned yesterday I was more than a little tired this last the weekend. However, I have been doing some googling on it and there's been a lot of praise, which I would wholeheartedly back.

Hopefully that means there'll be a new series commissioned soon. And hopefully it won't just be three episodes. I can kinda appreciate that they didn't want to take the risk of having a longer run, especially with them each being an hour-and-a-half each, but the next lot needs to have more episodes in it - three's just not enough.

They could achieve that partly by making them each an hour long - not that the extra half hour is wasted, but hour long episodes (with maybe just the first and last being feature length?) would work just as well, I think.

I think what makes the show work is that it's got a really good grounding in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes but with just enough bringing it up-to-date to make it feel fresh at the same time. Plus the performances have been great too and the writing is pretty good - Moffat's first episode was particularly good, but then I've known he was an excellent writer for ages, so that wasn't much of surprise.

I also watched the first episode of "The Deep" over the weekend. It's taken an absolute hammering by the critics and I can kinda understand why. When I watched it I think I had my usual reactionary thing of "well, this isn't as bad as everyone says" but that doesn't mean I thought it was good.

I had a few problems with it. First off, the sub they're in is way too high-tech and looks more like a spaceship than a research submarine. Second, the crew doesn't feel realistic - they didn't really strike me as scientists, engineers or submariners. Certainly they don't seem to act in a professional way or to even use common sense or to think about things in a logical way. They also seemed to have found themselves in a bit of an over-wrought soap opera.

The only thing that makes it interesting is the science fiction elements and I've a horrible suspicion that these are only interesting because they're unexplained. When they are explained I wouldn't be surprised if those explanations are more than a little daft.

ooh, my aching back

See, this is one of my problems when it comes to weekends.

Last Friday I explained that we were having a clear out day at work. This basically involved going through lots of cupboards and either throwing stuff away, sending it for recycling or putting it on the burn pile.

As the name suggests, the burn pile is a huge mass of paper that one of the bosses is going to set fire too. It's not exactly environmentally friendly, but there's so much of it that they'd charge at the recycling centre, if they were to accept it at all.

The problem I was referring to was that I also posted on Friday about how I was going to go through some of the crates of stuff - the comics specifically - and get them on e-bay. But that was a stupid plan.

See, the clearout was bloody hard work and also involved a hell of a lot of bending down. This meant my back ached like a bastard on Saturday - so much so that I was hobbling about trying not to bend my back under any circumstances.

The stupid is because I should have thought about it properly and not made the plan to do that stuff. By making the plan and then failing to even get close to doing it, I end up feeling like the weekend was wasted.

Especially since all I really did was sit about watching telly and occasionally playing games. But if I'd really thought about Friday, I could have decided beforehand that that's what I would do and then I wouldn't feel guilty now.

Ah well. My back feels pretty okay now - there's still a bit of a twinge, but nothing like as bad.

clear out day

Today we're having a "clear-out day" at RED. I'm not sure what this entails so I've pre-written this as I'm pretty sure it won't involve much computer use in its execution. It's more likely to be about sorting through paper folders and chucking stuff away.

As I say, pre-writing this some way ahead, but it's my current plan to have another crack at the stacking crates I filled during my sort out. I don't think I mentioned it on the blog, but a couple of weeks ago I started going through the boxes of comics. I'm pretty sure that no-one will be interested in buying them, but I feel this is the weekend to get at least some of them up on e-bay.

Once I've established there's no interest I can then take them down the recycling centre and dispose of them. I reckon this should free up around half of the stacking crates and will be a big step forward towards finally clearing my life clag.

I'll also be looking forward to the last episode of Sherlock. I was a little worried about this, because, as the name implies, it's a modern reworking of Sherlock Holmes. It's being done partly by Steven Moffat of Doctor Who fame and actually turned out to be really good.

It's essentially a crime thriller series, but there's just enough Holmesy-ness in there to make it feel like Sherlock Holes, without veering into parody or anything like that.

And speaking of telly, the latest series of Top Gear finished last week. The preceding episode was a belter, so a hard act to follow, but this one sort of worked. My only criticism would be the un-necessary and obvious silly-ness in the challenge. The boys were tasked with buying cheap-ish British Sports Cars and given a number of challenges in the usual way (the whole challenges gets points and then tallying them up at the end, which, surely, is the whole point of the challenges, seems to have totally disappeared) but then in each challenge they had a completely stupid silly bit, like blowing a car up or filling it with water.

These were okay in the way blowing anything up is entertaining, but for me they undermined the point of the piece and again acted as blatant scripted moments.

matter

So I finished Matter, by Ian M Banks.

I should perhaps say up front that I'm really gorging to spoiler it in the below discussion, so if you've not read it and think you might want to, probably best to not read on.

If I'm honest, I was a little disappointed.

There were two main reasons for this. First off, given that the novel is well over 500 pages, it's a little disappointing that the "end game" feels really short and truncated and rushed. And second, that endgame kinda wasn't really worth it.

I think this novel is quite close in style to Excession. In excession, the Culture basically encountered an "Outside Context Problem". The idea of an OCP is something that's just so far outside of your perception of the world it causes more than a few problems. Banks apparently got the idea from playing the game civilisation.

To paraphrase - imagine you're a tribe on a beautiful continent and you've managed to work yourself up into a functioning society with a religion and the ability to build nice houses and do clever stuff like irrigation. You're also the dominant force on the continent - the other tribes are all either friendly or subjugated and everything's going swimmingly, thanks.

And then over the horizon come some big iron ships filled pale looking fellows that carry sticks that make a lot of noise and cause your mighty warriors to drop dead. Then they announce you've been "discovered" and you're all subjects of the emperor now and he's quite keen on gold tributes and these holly men would like to have a chat with your priests.

Well, that was all a great idea, but I didn't really like the Excession book. My problem was the pacing - there seemed to be tonnes of set-up and then the whole action part was compressed into half a dozen pages at the end. Plus, that end wasn't all that satisfying anyway.

And that's the exact same problem with Matter - there are hundreds of pages of what feels like build up and then the end is all wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am.

What makes this especially annoying is that quite a lot of that set-up period is wasted on blind alleys. For example, Ferbin goes looking for this guy who helped his father, but when he finds him, he can't help at all. It makes it feel like an excuse for Banks to just go on a few flights of fancy and come up with weird stuff to entertain. Think Tom Bombadill in LotR - totally pointless and un-necessary, but the author's having fun.

There's also a hell of a lot of stuff being layered in that I think is meant to explain what happens at the end. The problem is that this actually undermines the surprise of the ending. But also, even through there's so much of this setting up, the actual end still ends up with a whole bunch of unanswered questions.

So, this thing they dig up turns out to be an Iln machine that then tries to destroy the Shellworld.

Okay, fair enough, but why is never explained at all. Now that's not so bad, as it's a relic of an ancient race, and a bit like real archaeology you're left guessing (note that nobody really has a good guess in the book). However, what makes no sense is why the Iln put this Shellworld destroying machine on the Shellworld in the first place and didn't just blow the place up.

Why do that? And the place they find it appears to have been custom built to house it. Was that done by the Iln or someone else? If so, there's no hint of who did it.

There's just so many unanswered questions it becomes annoying. Now often Banks will cleverly use the Prologue and Epilogue to answer these sorts of questions, but here he doesn't.

I dunno, it feels like he wrote a 1,000 page novel and the publishers said "look - we can go to about 600 pages, but that's about it" and so he took a hatchet to the back end and it ends up kinda not working.

I don't actually think that's true - I think actually the short, truncated nature of the endgame is supposed to act as a deliberate contrast. Part of the feel of the theme of the book is about contrasting the different civilisation advancement levels and, like excession, when the relatively backward people of the Shellworld finally uncover this ancient, yet advanced thing the shift of gear is a way of emphasising contrast. Their problems, in a sense, are petty on a galactic scale, yet also no less important.

My real problem is it feels like he's re-treading old ground and also the old ground of a novel I didn't really like that much.

human nature

Oh dear.

I think I've made it pretty clear that I've really enjoyed the Charlie Kaufman films I've seen. Been John Malkovich was brilliantly inventive and funny. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was clever and genuinely touching. Adaptation was multi-layered and twistedly self-referential.

Okay, I'd only seen three, but then only six films he's scripted have been made. I therefore endeavoured to rent the others, and the first that turned up was Human Nature.

And it's not as good as the others.

The problem is that it's slightly too surreal. There's a strong surrealist element to all the other films of course, but here the surrealism is handled a little differently. In the other films, you can kind of believe them and the surrealism is in-built. In Human Nature the surreal element is not wrapped up in anything believable.

Let's put it this way - in Human Nature one of the central characters is a scientist who's obsessed with manners and is trying to teach animals to have manners. His basic theory runs something along the lines that if he can teach animals manners then eventually he can teach humans manners too.

This is plainly bonkers - he's human, his adoptive parents who instilled this obsession with manners in him were human. He ends up going out with a human girl whose manners he corrects. And how would he ever get his research funded?

Then you've got a girl who grows loads of hair as if she were an ape. In one bizarre scene she suddenly breaks out in song like the film is going to be a musical. But it isn't. She, apparently, becomes a writer, despite completely isolating herself away in a woods where, one assumes, there's no access to paper or a pencil, or a typewriter, or a computer, let alone a phone to call an agent or a post office to post her manuscripts from.

Oh, and eventually she decides to get electrolysis, but in the mean time shaves herself, but her boyfriend doesn't notice.

It's all just weird and there's not the aforementioned trick of wrapping it up in just enough normalcy to make you buy it. And you need to buy it, because the wider points he's making fall on deaf ears if it's just a silly movie of people being stupid.

biscuits

Isn't it funny how people can have completely different attitudes and approaches to the simplest of things? A classic example of this, I think, is biscuits.

Now for me, a stale biscuit is the work of Satan.

But, when biscuits do go stale, one of the changes in their character is a shift from crispy and crunchy to soggy and moist. This, fundamentally, is why I hate stale biscuits. A biscuit should snap when you twist it, not bend. That's why, despite all the chocolate and wafery-ness, a kit Kat is still a biscuit, where a mars bar is a chocolate bar. And why a Jaffa Cake is a cake.

However, I'm a great fan of the dunked biscuits. Indeed, when at home and given access to both tea (or coffee) and biscuits, I will inevitably enjoy a session of dunking one into the other.

There's an art to the perfect dunk. You have to time it so that the biscuit is suitably wetened, but not so much that it collapses and half you biscuit falls into your tea. But here's the contradiction - clearly, when dunked, a biscuit is very wet indeed, and I like this. But I hat stale biscuits.

An anti-dunker made this point to me and really they're correct. I was left floundering with the half-hearted riposte of words to the effect that "no, they're not the same" when really the difference is not all that great. But for me the point remains - dunked biscuits are good, but stale biscuits are bad.

If a biscuit has gone even slightly stale I will reject it like an implanted kidney. Biscuit staleness is caused by air getting to the biscuit - a biscuit will only stay crisp if it is protected from the moisture filled terror that is the atmosphere in general. There are several ways to achieve this. First off, you can buy a proper biscuit barrel. These have a little container filled with special moisture absorbing crystals that dry out the air in the tin when the lid is closed.

Alternatively, you can do what I do and ensure that the biscuits effectively remain properly packed in the wrapping the came in. To do this, you only open the biscuits at the top (not the entire pack) and then carefully seal them closed by twisting the loose wrapping and adding sufficient air-tight cling film to prevent deadly atmosphere contamination.

I'm very careful about the above and I know of nobody who likes a stale biscuit, so you'd think other people would be to.

But they aren't. At work, people will brig biscuits in and proceed to open the entire pack and put it into the tin we have. If this were a proper biscuit tin it would be okay, but it isn't, so as quickly as the next day the biscuits will have gone stale. And all they needed to do was take adequate precautions, but I guess they have different attitudes and do different things.

I mean, one person put some biscuits into the fridge. The fridge of all places! That's just asking for trouble. They weren't even chocolate biscuits.

odds and sods

Bit of an odds and sods weekend.

The Hungarian Grand Prix was on Sunday, but I generally also watch the practice sessions and qualifying as well as the build-up on the BBC. This means a Grand Prix weekend actually means roughly an additional 8 hours of TV viewing. To be fair, I often watch it only in the sense of having it on while I'm also engaged in other stuff too - especially for the practice sessions.

And when it's something like the Hungarian Grand Prix I'll also do stuff during the actual race too, using the PVR pause function to build up a buffer and skip-back if I miss anything important. The reason for this is that Hungary is usually pretty dull. It's really difficult to overtake - they call it Monaco without the buildings - and so it often processional, although it's apparently a good one to actually go to as a spectator.

It's saying something about this season that even this year's Hungarian and Monaco GPs have been quite good.

Another thing I did was lots of scanning. I've now finished all the New Types. Actually that's not at all true - I finished the New Types that I'd put together in a batch about 4 months ago, so I've still got all the New Types I've received since then to do.

I also unglued all the animage's in the same big batch. This takes ages, but once done I'm hoping my old memories of blasting through animages proves true and I can get them done surprisingly quickly.

Anyway, point is I watched some more fansubs while I scanned.


Hime Chen! Otogi Chikku Idol Lilpri

This is one of those shows aimed at little girls. And when I say aimed at, I mean I get the distinct impression it's aimed at relieving them of their pocket money to buy toys and stuff.

I have to be honest - I didn't really get much further than about half way through as it's just not my cup of tea. But then it would be a bit weird


Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru

I wasn't really impressed by this wither. Not because it was another kid's shows - let's put it this way: If it had said it was written by CLAMP, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Actually, I would have been surprised, because although CLAMP constantly (and annoyingly) recycle their character designs, they don't tend to recycle their plots. Which is to say, this is seemed to be pretty much exactly the same as CLAMP's X series.

It was also clearly a very shoujo series with a lot of bishounen, so you can see why it just wasn't my cup of tea.


Giant Killing

I think I might secretly be a sports anime fan.

Considering I don't really like the majority of sports, this is something of a surprise for me, but I can't argue with the facts. Over the last few months I've sampled a good few sports based anime and I've pretty much enjoyed them all. I mean Giant Killing is a football anime of all things, and I even enjoyed that.

To be fair, I think this is actually because the sports anime I've watched bear little to no resemblance to the actual sports depicted. I think there's a tendency for what I've sampled to depict everything as if it was a game of chess, rather than as the actual sport. So since I like chess, I'm using that as my excuse


Senkou no Night Raid

Surprisingly, this was the last anime (well, fansubbed anime) of the spring season I've watched and usually the last few shows I watch are the dregs - stuff I didn't fancy so left until last.

I knew next to nothing about Senko and was surprised to find it's a bit of a hybrid between a spy thriller and a psychic powers fantasy, all set in 1930s China. This is the only dodgy element - as I understand it, China in the 1930s was occupied by the Japanese and they were not a particularly pleasant occupying force, so I'm slightly worried there's a bit of a revisionist slant, because the Japanese aren't exactly being portrayed in a bad light.

Still, setting that aside this seems like an intelligent and engaging story, so I think on balance it gets the thumbs up.