Adjusted Reality

When I started this blog, I hoped to divide about half of the time to talk about game theory, game reviews, and the industry in general.  Well, as you can see, that failed.  I did some early, introductory posts on psychology in games, my previous life as a crazy gamer person, and mentioned games in a few random posts.  I had even had a goal to play one game a month and write about it.

However, just as other interests in my life wax and wane, I’ve just come to terms that my gamer fetish is definitely in a waning phase.  Of course, I regularly DDR, but that’s got the dual purpose of fitness.  I’d even go so far as to say that if it did not provide me fitness benefits, I probably wouldn’t play it THAT often.  I love me some Rock Band 2, but the horrendus allergies making singing sucky coupled with lots of nights out and not in have made playing it a very occasional thing.  I just have no desire to play an MMO right now beyond jumping into mine on a casual basis, I’m enjoying my friends right now who are not just pixels.  So, for the most part, I play some web games and we occasionally have a session of something like Little Big Planet or Fable or some other random game that we picked up, but nothing has grabbed us by the proverbial balls and made us play very long.

As for living the dream – well, the industry is in a sick sad state where people are either clinging to their jobs with clenched fingers, or being laid off and finding themselves competing with hundreds of other applicants for one job.  Everyone I know that has changed jobs has taken pay cuts.  Some have been unemployed for over 6 months.  I sort of have been ignoring the gaming news because it’s just too depressing.  Since I don’t plan to change jobs and my position right now has very little to do with staying on top of trends and the zeitgeist of the scene out there, I have sort of adopted a *hide my head in the sand* approach.

So back to happier, gamier things.  Enter Eternal Sonata.   This is the website’s overview, which I liked and stole:

On his deathbed, the famous composer, Chopin, drifts between this life and the next. In his final hours, he experiences a fantastical dream where he encounters a young girl facing a terrible destiny and the boy who will fight to save her. On the border between dreams and reality, Chopin discovers the light that shines in all of us in this enduring tale of good and evil, love and betrayal.

It’s a really bizarre premise for a game, but it works!  On the surface, it’s your standard jrpg (Japanese Role Playing Game), akin to the Final Fantasy series where you talk to people in towns, travel through the world running into beasts and fight them, and complete quests and progress through a linear story.  And, as is with all good jrpgs, you will inevitably get to a point where you advance through the story too quickly, it gets too hard, and you have to grind (fight creatures over and over just for the sake of getting levels and becoming more powerful) for a while.

The really cool and unique thing is that it’s a 3 player game!  One person navigates around the world, but once you jump into battle, you can assign all three characters either to one, two, or three different controllers!  So, Zliten, Mr. Pangryface, and myself can sit down and play together all day, and not have to either pass around the controller or stop every time someone has to go pee, nap, cook dinner for an hour, or whatnot.  It’s like playing an MMO with your friends, except those friends are actually on your couch with you.  I think if there were more games out there with this control scheme, I would totally be playing more.  This is the game for me and my crew right now.

Other cool things about the game – there are these huge, long… for the lack of a better word “picture sequences” telling the story of Chopin (the real Chopin composer dude) and his life.  The battles are turn based, but timed – so your turn is whatever you can do within the seconds it gives you.  For example, our party right now has 3 seconds to plan and 4 seconds to act, which means you have to be paying attention or you’ll miss your turn.  You can only move your character during this four seconds as well, so there is a lot of strategy involved (do I run in and position myself in back of the two monsters right here so I get maximum damage each hit or do I run up to the front where it’s closer and get more hits off, but they can block).  If that didn’t add a twist to the game this does – certain special spells only work in light, and some in shadow.  So if you want to heal, you have to run to the light and make sure your party is within range and spam it as many times as you can in your 4 seconds.  It sounds confusing here, but it’s actually pretty intuitive and they provide a lot of good tutorials on how to do combat.

The game is not without it’s flaws.  In traditional badly translated Japanese video game fashion, some of the dialogue doesn’t really make sense or it just doesn’t flow well.  It’s not too bad, but you can tell it originated from outside the states.  The voice over work in the cut scenes can be horrendous.  There are some story sequences that seem like they should have been cut scenes but they ran out of time.  Sometimes it seems like you stay…in…one…area…forever and are dying for  change of scenery by the end of it.   It’s also sometimes a little wonky when reassigning controllers to player 2 and 3, sometimes it just doesn’t stick properly.

However, it’s awesomeness totally overwhelms it’s flaws.  If you’re looking for a new RPG to play, and you didn’t pick it up previously (I believe it was 2008 title for the PS3 and a 2007 title for the XBOX 360), definitely check it out.  Considering we’ve logged about 15 hours in less than a week – I think that says something in and of itself.

Happy weekending, crazy kids.  What’s your current game of choice?  Anything dropping soon you’re excited about?  Hit me up.  See ya Monday, for another week of fun and games.  What’s in store?  No clue.  But I’ll be here wingin’ it, like usual! 🙂

So I started the recipe topic because I believe that eating healthy is not as hard as it seems.  There are plenty of fast, yummy, and nutritionally awesome (or at least acceptable because, come on, we can’t be angels all the time) things to make.  Most of the time, our culinary creations turned out yummy.  I wish I had a picture of the delicious curried shrimp and veggies over noodles I made on Saturday – it was awesome.  But it’s ok, because I will SOOOO make it again, and I think I really got the curry marinade down.

Last week, however, we definitely learned that there are some things you just can’t do, and not every recipe is a winner.

We have had “shifty bobs” on the meal plan for a few weeks now.  Technically, the first week it was shish kabobs, and then Zliten made it into “shifty bobs” because it sounded cooler.  So it has been said, and they shall henceforth be referred to as such.  Whatever they are called, they kept getting pushed to the next week because it’s too cold for the grill, or meat wasn’t thawed, or it was a lot of work, or whatever reason.  Finally, last Wednesday was shifty bob day.

Zliten lovingly put the meat, pineapple, and veggies into the marinade around lunchtime to soak up the goodness.  When I got home from work, they went on the grill, and came off looking like sex on a plate.

However, when we started to eat them, the beef was…mealy, and falling apart.  We both ate a bit, looked at each other, and said…”does this taste funny to you?” So, shifty bobs went into the shifty trash can, and we decided to make big mcveggie burgers instead.  They were super good.

So you get a double recipe in one, as well as a warning – do not let your pinapple mix too long with your meat!!!  It’s way too acidic to get along with your meat for extended periods of time.  Add it right before you grill or marinade the veggies separately.

Shifty bobs:

-Cubed beef (or chicken, or shrimp, or actually any meat you want)

-Bell peppers

-Onions

-Pineapple (optional, this is the first time we’ve made it with it)

Marinade:

-Stir Fry Sauce (kikoman ginger garlic is what I use)

-Rooster Sauce (give it a nice big squeeze)

-Newman’s Own Sesame Ginger Dressing (Lite)

-Garlic Powder

Take your meat and veggies, put them in the marinade for 30 minutes minimum (can be longer, as long as the pineapple is quarantined).  Skewer them, throw them on the grill, and we served it with rice.

Big McVeggie Burger:

-Two slices of bread, I used 40 calorie wheat bread.

-Two veggie burger patties, I used Gardenburger California Style.

-Two slices of fat free cheese (believe me, it’s fine for this, I usually hate fat free cheese too)

-Secret Sauce

-Sliced Pickles

-Diced Onions

-Shredded Lettuce

(Not so) Secret Sauce:

-A squirt of ketchup

-A squirt of mustard

-A dollop of low fat ranch

-A dollop of relish

Grill veggie burgers on grill surface of your choosing.  Toast bread.  Apply condiments in this order – bread, secret sauce, pickles, patty, cheese, patty, cheese, onions, lettuce, secret sauce, bread.

It’s not quite a big mac but it’s really yummy.

Calorie count for the shifty bobs varies depending on what meat you use, but the marinade and veggies don’t add much calorie-wise.  It’s well under 500 calories for a good few skewers even with a heaping cup of rice.  The faken-burger was about 400.

Even  if things don’t turn out quite right – at least cooking is always an adventure!

So I still had no idea what I was going to do here.  I have April’s plan in the bag already, and while I’m SUPER excited for it, February is not the right month for it.  March is always a month of sheer survival, since everyone’s birthdays happen in a 3 week window and the parties and revelry barely cease, though I have an idea there too.  This month is problematic.  It’s too cold and gets dark too early to spend a lot of time outside.  I really want to make another month of good progress – the closer I am to 150 by my birthday the better, because, as I said before, March is rough.

So I signed up for the Mardi Gras 5k tonight – woohoo, first race ever (not counting the 400 meter dash in 8th grade)!  I can run the distance in my sleep (for example, tonight, I ran the distance tonight after 15 minutes on cybil the arc trainer and an hour of weights), and I have run at least that far twice outside, but I’d like to work a little more on making good time outside.  My goal is under 30 minutes.  That’s more than feasable pushing myself on a treadmill, but we’ll see how it goes on race day.  The most important thing for me to do is finish, and have a time to improve upon.

So, I have a race to run.  I also did an almost-rest week last week, which actually ended up being a pretty active time, and found that it wasn’t the end of the world that I didn’t do heavy weights, skipped a few weight sessions in favor of cardio, and didn’t do intervals.  So, since I’m focusing on running a race this month, I’m going to give some of the rest of my program a rest, or at least vary it up a bit.

After much deliberating, this is the plan, which as usual, I reserve the right to change it at a moment’s whim:

Day 1: 15 minutes arc trainer, full body strength (at gym), 30 minute treadmill run

Day 2: 60 minute outside run, yoga

Day 3:  45 minutes DDR, full body strength (at home)

Day 4: 60 minute outside run, yoga

The week of the race, I will do a test 5k on Day 2, and skip day 4 since it’s race day.  I’ve eliminated one day of gym weights – my muscles seem to actually be doing better by giving them a week of recovery, so maybe a month of relaxing the weight training will do me good.  I’ve also eliminated my intervals for the month.  I’m sort of sick of them, and would rather start doing them again when I can run them at the track outside, and do real HIIT.

I am also going to try to participate in Charlotte’s challenge this month, because it will be good for my soul.  But I’m starting tomorrow…

I had a good friend tell me that he adopted a motto that served him well – it was, loosely translated, “If I have the time and the money, and it isn’t going to physcially harm me, I try to say yes”.  Essentially, if it’s just fear or laziness or insecurity holding him back from experiencing something new, he tries to shake it off and go for it anyway.  I figured this was a good way to live, and while sometimes my comfort zone and limits get the best of me (honestly, the laziness is usually what gets me), I try to take the chance and participate in stuff that could possibly be cool more often.

This week, I’d already turned down an invite to try an African dance class.  The lazy and crazy schedule monster got me.  Sure, I didn’t have anything specifically keeping me away from it on Thursday from 8:30-10:30pm, but I got out of the studio on the East Side at 5, had to go home which is North, and then would have had to go down South.  On top of that, it was an early in day Friday (or at least I attempted to make it one…sigh), so I would just be getting home when I usually start wandering to bed and such.  That being said, I felt a twinge of guilt I just didn’t buck up and do it.

Then, the invite came for a Friday nite Dance-a-thon at one of my favorite bars, the Creekside Lounge (it was actually a new space next door called Creekside Live, but I didn’t know that until we got there), and the motto rang out in my head.  At first I was like, eh, I’ll go, sounds ok, and over the next few days I got more and more excited until I was literally pumped to go dance for hours and hours.  I made sure I was wearing my comfortable shoes and had layers to peel off as it got too hot and/or put on if it was cold (didn’t know if it was inside or outside).  I was totally set.

We walked the 5 minutes to the bus stop, caught the bus, walked about a mile and got there and I got my wristband and scoped out the place.  There were free red bulls but since I don’t drink caffeine very often, I wanted to hold off on making myself crazy.  Finally, around 9:45 the contest started and, sadly, the girls that invited us didn’t show up on time so I was the only one entered.  Everyone took turns dancing with me, keepin’ me going – I think I tired out about 3 different shifts of people.  Soon it was 10:45, 11:45, 12:30…and then they soon figured out they needed to eliminate people, so they started saying you not only had to be dancing, you had to be dancing hard.  A very drunk Zliten came up to talk to me, and I was dancing, but not quite so vigorously, and I got my wristband cut at around 12:45.

While I was a little disappointed, I was also happy.  I wanted badly to pee, have a drink of anything, and to hang out with my friends who had sort of gotten tired of dancing – and sorry folks, pretty much in that order.  I had intentionally only had sips of people’s drinks and about half a redbull so I stayed somewhat dehydrated, simply because I needed to keep the liquid in balanced with the liquid out (sweating, not peeing my pants).  It’s not normal for me to be at a bar, at almost 1 am, and pretty much sober.  And, I missed my friends!  At least we got pictures!

I was pretty proud of how far I’ve come with many things, proved by that night.  Along with the obvious stretching of my comfort zone and overcoming the lazies to get out there, it’s a testiment to how much stronger and how much better shape I’m in than ever before.  Two years ago, the walk to the bus stop, the walk from the bus to the bar, or dancing for a few songs would have tired me out.  A year ago, I was impressed on my birthday I danced for about 30 minutes without a break.  Friday – I mixed it up on the floor nonstop for 3 hours, after doing at least a mile and a half walk.  Sure, some of the time I was just sort of keeping the beat and not going all out, but then there were points of the night l headbanged to Smells Like Teen Spirit, jumped up and down through all of Tubthumper, raved it up through some crazy techno, and got freaky deaky to some hip hop.  I wasn’t even exhausted at the end, just sort of “over it”.  3 hours is a long time to do anything!

And if you’re wondering – I totally counted it as a workout.  I was damn sore the next day.  The hurty-est thing on my body?  My arms.  Puzzling, I know.  The legs talked to me a bit, but my arms were WRECKED.

So, my fine interweb friends – your mission is this:  go out and do something this week that you don’t normally do or something you’ve been putting off.  If you normally get the beef, get the chicken.  If you’ve been waiting to try that new machine at the gym that’s a little intimdating, today is your day.  Even a little thing is good, but the bigger, the better.  I will always remember last Friday, even if the end of the night was a little fuzzy (again, remember, I’m a crappy role model).  It’s also the push I need to just go and sign up for that damn 5k TONIGHT instead of waiting for some mystical time in the future.  I’ve got the money, the time, and it’s not putting me in immediate danger, so I’m there!

Tomorrow I will be here to talk about the plan for the month, because sadly, I need to actually think about it.  This weekend was rough!  FYI, the first picture is pre-dancing, the second is immediately after dancing, and the third is right before we left the bar and scored a cab.

So I broke the shocking news early January that I was so happy with my fitness regimen from Decemeber, that I was sticking with it for another month.  The (small) crowd dropped their jaws in shock and awe.  Now for the results, prepare to not be very surprised at some things, and perhaps more surprised at others…

To recap, this was the plan as of January 1:

-Day 1 and 3: 30 mins interval run, 15 minutes on Cybil, full body strength.

-Day 2: 60 minute run, yoga session

-Day 4: 60 minute DDR session, yoga session

By the end of the first week, the plan looked more like this:

-Day 1 : Intervals, cybil, and full body weights

-Day 2: Long run and yoga

-Day 3: Outside Run (about 3-4 miles), either DDR or cybil, and full body weights

-Day 4: DDR and yoga

The last week and a half, due to allergies/just needing a break, it is now:

-Day 1 and 3: DDR and yoga

-Day 2 and 4: DDR and full body strength

I cannot run and snot at the same time.

So this has taught me a myriad of things.  First of all, I cannot ever do the same workout for 2 months straight or I will subconsciously revolt and develop allergies so I just physcially can’t do it.  Secondly, even if I think that I’m handling the exercise regime well, I need to make sure and schedule light weeks and breaks every few months, even if it freaks me out because that nagging voice in the back of my head is saying that if I skip a week of runs something terrible is going to happen.

Thirdly, DDR, done at the intensity I do it, is just about as sweat inducing as running, but somehow less tiring.  I’d like to believe that the hour long DDR sessions actually burn the 1200 calories the game says I do at my weight, but I think it’s probably on par with an hour of running, which is about 750.  When I run, I need at least an extra hour of sleep and regularly get tired around 11:30 pm (even on non-running days).  This week, I’ve been seeing at least 12:30 if not 1am and been sleeping in a little more.  Totally fine for my schedule on studio days which start at 10am no matter what, but not for office days – I can go in as late as 10am, but I like to get there closer to 8 so I’m off earlier.  In summary, if I didn’t really actually like running and want to get better at it, I could probably stop doing it and go back to DDR for the same calorie burn.

Weight Loss Progress:

Sadly, it seems like the exercise really means squat in terms of weight loss.  I am doing the same (or lighter) workouts this month, the only change I made was in my diet, and not a terribly drastic one – from approximately 1500-1600 calorie days most days (plus one untracked day – which at most was maaaaaybe 2300 calories, usually closer to 2000) to 1300 calorie days weekdays and 2000 or under calorie weekends.  This is a change of about 1000 calories per week, or approximately 143 calories per day.  Essentially, I’ve eliminated a snack each day.

This change was enough to break the frustrating cycle of premature maintenance.  I just couldn’t break that 162 barrier and now I’m regularly weighing in at 158.  This is a 5 lb loss this month, just as I hoped for.  This makes me happy and dance!  Although, it’s been anticlimactic since I had that huge loss the first week, and now the scale seems stuck, although I know my body is just adjusting to the changes.  If my predictions are correct, next week should be a stellar week.

So, though we cannot have nice (workouts) things for more than a month, I’m truly pleased with how January went.  It proved that the little subconscious fear I had that I cannot lose any more weight without taking drastic measures was just in my head.  Also, it proved that I don’t have to increase my workout intensity that often to maintain or lose weight.  Unless I want to.  Which I often do, but on less calories, it’s nice to know I can just coast a little.

Incidentally, I toyed with the choice in the middle of last year (once I really fell in love with running) of focusing on the athletic/fitness side of this, or focusing on the weight loss side.  I ended up endeavoring to do both, however, it is slowly hitting me that I might need to pick a side after all.  Once I hit maintenance it will be lovely to not eat to lose and have enough fuel to amp things up, but until then, maybe I need to back off the intensity a little (or at least not increase it so much all the time) until I am done.  To clarify – the most important thing to me for the long term is to be capable, toned, and athletic.  However, I am so close to settling the weight issue with myself in the short term, I think the answer might be to focus on that, and then give myself free reign to go wild after the scale is just a double check.

Just something to think about as I ponder February’s plan.  As in, argh! omg! I haven’t really thought about it and it’s January 30th, eep!  Anyone ever have to make the choice between weight loss and fitness pursuits, or am I the only one that seems to think they might be mutually exclusive?  Wanna convince me that I am a lovely and perfect snowflake just as I am, and I don’t need to lose more even though those BMI jerkfaces say I am still overweight for 9 more lbs?  Hit me up.