Year: 2012

Lots of high profile news stories out there at the moment …

I’m thinking mostly of the sport world. We’re seeing the usual childish antics of the football world but there’s also a massive story out there with cycling …

When our heroes fall, they tend to fall a very long way. It all depends on how high a pedestal we put them on. I’m thinking mostly of Lance Armstrong. 7 times Tour De France winner, a record now wiped out due to consistent, cynical cheating.

The really sad thing is that the cheating extends to all sports, although some sports have less integrity than others. Football is about the worst when it comes to integrity. The amount of cheating that goes on in professional football is unbelievable. And it’s the major reason why I don’t pay much attention to football. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good game to play but when you take it to club level, the attitude becomes “win at any cost”. In the case of football, the cost is all semblance of honour or fair play.

And yet the players are allowed to get away with it because they are on such a high pedestal that their fans believe they can do no wrong. Hence how an utter thug can become England captain.

We see it in other sports too, with the main avenue being drugs cheating.

Cricket isn’t immune, although it has improved with the advent of more television involved in the decision making. At international level, it used to be that batsmen typically would not walk when getting caught off a fine edge. That means they’re leaving it up to the umpire to decide that they’ve hit the ball and with the really fine edges, there’s so much doubt that the umpire will give the batsmen the benefit.

It’s not just the batsmen. “Bowling” has changed considerably over the past decade. There’s a legal way to bowl and many illegal ways to bowl. Mostly, the difference between legal and illegal is determined by how much the arm flexes. Too much flex means the player is actually throwing the ball. Why’s that bad ? Because it means the bowler can do very strange things with the ball, or because the ball comes down faster.

The original thrower of the modern age was Murali, who gave the impression that he threw the ball because of a deformity with his arm. It looks bent from one angle but straight from another. Couple that with the natural rotation of the arm and you get the impression that he’s throwing. No – Murali’s secret wasn’t the elbow deformity, it was extraordinary double jointed wrists. They let him turn the ball a huge amount and both ways, which is usually incredibly difficult.

I say incredibly difficult because I could actually do what Murali did too, albeit with much more difficulty because my joints are not nearly so flexible. That is, I had the natural offspinner that I could turn into a Graeme Swann style topspinner. Plus I had a finger-legbreak, which I could only bowl very slowly because it’s completely unnatural for the wrist to go that way.

But this is all beside the point …

Cricket’s been infested with throwing to a much higher degree in the past decades, because the national boards see it as a huge insult to their nation for a thrower to be exposed as a thrower. Andrew Flintoff, hero of England, threw the ball at times. Johan Botha threw almost every ball I saw him bowl in the T20 world cup.

It’s all about how high a pedestal we put people on. Sometimes that pedestal is so high, we ignore the deficiencies or the bad points.

And that brings me to : Jimmy Saville … The news over the last week shows that if someone is on a pedestal that high, it’s a mighty crash when they came down. Yet there’s no way someone could have done what he allegedly did without intentional support (not just the turning of a blind eye) from a lot of people.

I have to admit, while I watched programmes like Jim’ll fix it, I couldn’t stand the man. I had no reason for it at the time, outside of seeing what I believe I picked up on as a dismissive attitude. I suspect my instincts were picking up on what we’re seeing reported now. Instincts can be a powerful thing.

PS Back to the cricket – it’s sad that I only learned lots more variation after my shoulder wouldn’t support bowling. I used to bowl medium pace swing bowling but would also practice spin in the nets. I could bowl wrist spin (badly) and offspin (decently but not accurately). The offspin had a demonic topspin variation but I could also bowl that one that went the wrong way. Badly. As in, to make my wrist bend that way meant bowling ridiculously slowly. So slowly that in the nets, the ball tended to go so high it would hit the top of the net. And that’s high up …

Waaiit – I promise not to get too philosophical … That’s for things like politicians who say the wrong things about their game playing habits.

But first – a piccy :

 (Yep – it’s a Facebook yoink, it made me grin)

I’m in the early stages of a Mass Effect play through. It’s a role playing game that behaves much like a first person shooter. I like it, it’s a very easy game to play with lots of action and an engaging storyline. The first one is very free in what it lets you do too. That goes away somewhat in the second and third games which are more on rails.

And before I get sidetracked, the main role play aspects deal with Paragon and Renegade points. You earn these with the gameplay and dialogue choices you make. Save the Feros colonists ? Earn lots of good guy Paragon points. Choose the easy but bloody option ? Lots of Renegade points. In the second game, this manifests in scarring and glowy red eyes.

Point is – the game starts you off on a clean slate with no points and you earn them as you go. Having more points opens up new dialogue options. In ME2, you can only choose one particular character by having sufficient Paragon/Renegade points.

I like the theory, it shows a character growing over time as they get more experienced. But … what I’d to see is a third option. The choice to go through the game as a wide eyed innocent. Baby faced innocence and genuine naive idealism can be charming characteristics. You could say that it might give hope to see someone go through hell but still come out unscarred.

That option isn’t present in the Mass Effect games and I don’t think it has since the early days of the 3×3 Alignment system. That’s a drawback to the whole computer game system though, they’re dependent on programmed responses to limited scenarios. There’s no room or ability for the computer to interpret as it sees fit. That’s where pen & paper tabletop games come in, you can take the 3×3 grid of D&D and play it.

What’s the 3×3 grid ? Most pen & paper role play games are built around Chaotic, Neutral or Lawful combined with Good, Neutral or Evil. A paladin would be Lawful Good, a wizard could be Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Good depending on how you want to play it. Evil Clerics would be good at harming spells, Good clerics would heal people.

So – pen & paper – you pick your alignment on the character sheet and play something different anyway. Lol. Ah well. I tended to go Chaotic Good cos that’s probably what I’d like to be. I’m actually Lawful Good :

Good – hopefully people agree ? Even in games, I find it tough to go the Evil path.
Lawful – I have lots of little rules about how I do things. I’m a very chaotic thinker but the way I live and morality is lawful.

To finish up – I wonder if any game designers are thinking of a system where you could go a third path of Wide Eyed Innocent, with the Innocence points diminishing as you gained those Paragon or Renegade points ? The original Keela Danne was a lawful good cleric who I played as an up & at ’em but innocent. It was fun because of the way we could get the party characters interacting. Innocent 18 year old girlie cleric + cheeky gnome ? Potential comedy gold, especially when the third character was a hulking 7 foot orc warrior who would die before anyone hurt his Keela.

One more pic to close on :

Yep. Still thinking of iPhones, although post release Shinies hysteria has calmed down.

People often ask on a Monday : “How was your weekend ?”

I can give ’em a score this time 🙂

Actually, this weekend has been a fair bit of chilling out, punctuated by issues yesterday evening. To start off, the Crazie Boys went to see Looper on Friday evening. I’m honestly not quite sure what I thought of this one. It’s another well made and well acted film but scripts that mess about with time can be very mind bending.

Worth seeing ? Hell yeah. Not sure if I’ll rush out and buy it the way I did with Avengers Assemble though. (There’s no Black Widow in it). Talking of Avengers – I haven’t watched that one yet … Hopefully week after this one I’ll be able to take a break from watching recorded stuff and watch a blu-ray or two again.

One good thing about Looper is that it isn’t forcing 3d on us. I’d like to see the new Dredd movie but I’m not pandering to 3d for 3d’s sake. And … oh look, the Dredd movie is out of cinemas already. Similar with the new Resident Evil movie, I’ll watch that but won’t pay the premium in the movie theatres.

What about this Good / Bad thing ?

First score goes to the antibiotics : 1-0 to the good. They’ve really cleaned up my legs and most of the bad patches on my arms. They’re not 100% effective though, there’s still repairs to do on my arms and hands. It’s getting there. I just have to avoid doing anything to make it worse.

I am going to be smarter this time around though. One reason I think I got reinfected was because I may have come into contact with something that hadn’t been washed properly. My washing machine seems to be behaving itself better now (I have proof it works!) so that’s hopefully ticked that off. So I’ll be more intensive with the housework than I need to be.

Second score goes to the allergies : 1-1. Without really thinking about it, I picked up a packet of Iced Buns in Tesco last week. What are iced buns ? They’re white bread with icing … Nothing wrong with the icing (I hope!) but the white bread part seemed to set me off yesterday. I’m still wheezing a little today after having them for lunch yesterday.

So that’s the negative for the weekend, having to cope with compromised breathing for yesterday evening and most of today. It’s been no big deal though, it was nowhere near as bad as when I’d been contemplating getting dressed and off to A&E due to almost blacking out on stairs and the breathing not settling enough for me to sleep.

Yep – not as bad as when I was still regularly consuming white bread.

2-1 ? The last score for “Good” is the analysis coming out of the white bread :

No lasting damage …
It wasn’t nearly as bad as it was – so the allergy is cumulative
There was a definite reaction

Trouble with analysis like that is that the mind can make things happen if it wants them to. So while I did have a reaction on Saturday evening, was it because my mind expected a reaction and made it happen ? Or was it true anti-white bread reaction.

But – I got the reaction that I kinda expected, which confirms what I think is a prime cause for this summer’s breathing problems and quite possibly breathing problems over my last 3 decades too :-). It’s quite possibly why I always had trouble with alcohol too, it might not be the alcohol, it could be what the drink is made from.

Progress is always good. As is being able to take a shower without having to worry about damaging half-healed skin …

Too much info ? Lol 🙂 Ick-factor is less than 1% of what it was and I’d consider myself fit for cricket again if the season wasn’t finished already. (and it looks like I upset blogger with loose html code !)

Right – time to save the galaxy some more. I started off a full Mass Effect Trilogy run and I’m just about to save the base on Noveria.

One of the regular things I’ve been watching lately is Doomsday Preppers.

Not sure if I’ll keep watching it cos, to be brutally honest, it’s not that great. But I’m keeping going with it for now. Plus there’s nothing clashing with it (unlike Thursday when everything is on !)

I’ve always been curious about how things work. I’ve also always been drawn to disaster scenario stuff, movies like Armageddon (I watched Deep Impact again this week). Something I’m going to read again sometime (not reading much at the moment) is Lucifer’s Hammer, a novel by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, where a whopping great asteroid says hello to Planet Earth.

While it’s not that great a series, it does open your eyes to stuff you’d have to think about if Bad Things did happen. Stuff we take for granted won’t be available any more. Things like power, fresh water, food, possibly even sunlight, health services and definitely communications. Combine that with a high likelihood of crazy people randomly going around trying to get everything left for themselves and you get a scary situation.

Not sure if America would be safer or not so safe, they have a scary attitude to lethal weapons over there to the point where if there was no Police backup you would have to have an arsenal of weapons available just to defend your stuff from the crazy people who would have their own arsenal. But then again, the Preppers have access to unbelievable amounts of space over there.

But that’s (almost!) enough about a not great TV series. Except for a mention of one guy from the first episode. He was a herbalist who had the knowledge to get what he needed from the land, including food, material and medicine.

That last is the most curious item. The pills I’m on at the moment have already had a spectacular effect, ick-factor is now 1% of what it was 2 days ago. Awesome. Damage isn’t repaired yet but the big patches look a bit less angry with me. But … I’ll be happier when those patches start to reduce in size and I do need to stop attacking them ;-).

Oh where was I ? Pills + Herbalism – there should be something out there that I should be able to add in as a mild anti-inflammatory in lieu of anti-biotics that may help with the health in general. Herbalist guy was picking up leaves with salicilic acid, which is aspirin. Natural remedies or medicines are all over the place, you just have to know where to look and what to avoid …

Planning ?

Apart from the Doomsday stuff, which I’ll be ignoring in case scary stuff really does look as if it might start up … I’m having to plan timings …

This dose of pills have a particularly confusing set of instructions on when to take them :
“take ONE CAPSULE FOUR times a day” – fine, no confusion there
“Space the doses evenly 60 minutes before food” – ok
“or on an empty stomach” – wth does that mean ? lol
I’m going by the instructions on the last course of antibiotics (same pills, same dosage), which said to leave 2 hours after food instead of that meaningless “or” and “empty stomach” thing. What it means is planning, ideally :

6am, 12 noon, 6pm, midnight.

Apart from the early one, that works well with my daily cycle. I can leave lunch and dinner until 1pm or after 7pm. It actually works pretty well for dieting discipline, as it gets you in the habit of following a 3 munchies a day cycle with much less snacking.

Today it’s gone a bit weird – I didn’t get moving today until 9.30am (late night + disrupted sleep) so it’s 9.30am pill, 2pm pill (4.5 hours) and the next pill to come at 7pm for an 8 o’clock dinner and then the last one at around midnight.

What that really means is : I’m starving !!!! I had a minimal breakfast and it’s just turned 3pm. I can snack again 🙂

I wonder – biscuits or apple ?

PS I should probably avoid the iced buns in the cupboard. Although it would test the white bread allergy thing – lol.
PS2 Another effect of pills – I have bony ankles again ! Yes I know. Small things and impressions and all that.

I’ve not said too much about my health (cos I hide it in case people worry) but …

As the few of my friends who know I’m struggling with a skin issue have suggested, I’ve finally gone to see the doctors !

Yep. Finally.

The condition started last year and stopped me playing cricket for the second half of last season. At the time, I thought it was an ulceration on my legs partly caused by damage they’ve had over the years. And with a bit of research, ulceration is something that takes a long time to heal …

The doctor fix back then was antibiotic pills and cream and for a while, they helped a lot. The damage was healing up (slowly) and was repaired enough to just about let me play a few games of cricket this summer. But … it suddenly reversed and over about 1 week, the patches were back and about as bad as before.

Hence – change of diet.

Green stuff, half a litre of orange juice a day and backing that up with multivitamin supplements. That seemed to help too, as it stopped the damage getting worse. Trouble is, an infection had got back in and bad patches had spread to my arms and upper left leg. (Self inflicted …)

So – I did a bit more Deep Thought and identified a few things that might have been causing the problem – I may have to cut wheat out of the diet entirely as I suspect that’s what the cause was. I’ve gone back to just brown bread at work, brown bread toast at home (for as long as the butter lasts) and I’ve cut out the lazy fat sarnies I’d occasionally have as a dinner.

Anyway – I could no longer ignore it and bit the bullet and headed off to the doctor’s this lunchtime. (Why is it I always get the slow doctor ? lol)

Result – diet pills and antibiotic cream again. It was what I expected and I’m happy with what I’ve come away with.

Fingers crossed it makes the damage go away 🙂

PS They’re not really diet pills, they’re antibiotics but the condition last time was 2 hours after food and 1 hour before food, 4 times a day. That’s 4x 3 hour no food gaps per day. No snacking !

Noooo …

I haven’t been getting ambitious in the kitchen, although I saw some pictures of cakes earlier that looked incredibly tempting …

Been watching lots of sport this weekend, as well as making a bit of a dent in the recorded stuff on the box. There’s 2 massive events on at the moment, although I have my doubts about one of them.

Cricket has another world cup going at the moment, this time it’s Twenty20 games. That’s actually a very similar format to what I play, although they have daft rules in like needing to have a certain number of players close(ish) to the bat. We don’t have the rule, although it works out similar.

International T20 games are hard to predict a winner before the game. In longer games, it’s possible to rebuild if the side loses early wickets. T20 can get dominated by the ball very easily. I have mixed thoughts about whether or not it’s good to watch, as the games can get one sided (and therefore boring) very quickly.

Anyone could win this tournament, now that we’re in the “Super 8’s” stage all of the sides can beat any of the other sides on their day. That makes it far more interesting than football or rugby tournaments where you’d only put money on 2-3 or 4 sides out of 16+. Football and rugby world cups have far too many poor sides in, which makes the early stages extremely tedious.

Anyway – there’s been a bunch of cricket matches on this weekend and I’ve mostly watched them … That is, I’ve typically had the pictures on (or cricinfo commentary) with the sound off so I can listen to either music or :

Ryder Cup’s come round again.

I don’t watch much golf, although I wouldn’t mind trying it out again to see if it helps my shoulder and back stay loose and useful. That’s another thing that has to be on hold though until I can rely on my legs and arms again. Soooo much is waiting for my skin to recover. I think it is, steadily and slowly … I just have to give it the chance by avoiding self inflicted wounds.

Ryder Cup is something special. It comes around once every two years and is a matchplay tournament between 12 Americans and 12 golfers from GB & Europe. It can get very tense …

And that’s an understatement.

I’ve got it on at the moment, Europe have just drawn level at 10-10 with 8 games to go and need to draw 14-14 to retain the cup. It’s going to be compelling viewing over the next couple of hours. Compelling enough for me to hide behind a popcorn bucket ? Maybe 🙂 Although I did have popcorn the other night while watching a bunch of Stargate SG-1.

But while I’ve watched lots of sport this weekend, that’s not really where I’ve overdone things. All things in moderation of course. That is, except for grabbing more music for the library.

I’ve been enjoying listening to game soundtracks lately. And went a little berzerk acquiring more today. The damage today is another 133 songs, which will take 10.4 hours (stats from iTunes) to listen to. That’s adding to another 139 songs over the last couple of weeks. Not all game soundtracks, I was impressed by Lisa Hannigan’s first album (Sea Sew) and Proms Fever made me buy a Last Night soundtrack.

The last 3 months has seen no less than 593 tracks join the library …

Perhaps that’s overdoing it 🙂

PS Since stealthing my wifi network, there’s been Zero interference. That’s going from at least one router reset per day to no resets in a few weeks now. Kinda proves that there’s a naughty person out there trying to stop me listening to music ? LOL. At least I haven’t had to spend cash to stymie them 🙂

Yeah – I’ve not put many updates in lately …

The reasons for that are usually something like having something on my mind, being worried about something, being distracted by something or just plain not having that much to talk about.

Not so sure about that last one, cos when I get my teeth into talking about something, it’ll end up being Wall Of Text like usual. Although I have been struggling for things to work as triggers to start me off.

It’s not even so much the being distracted by things, although I have been watching a lot of Youtube from peope like the Yogscast, Totalbiscuit and Omfgcata/Jesse Cox (not so much of the Dodger these days). There’s a few things I’d like to get distracted by 😉 But I need to get healthy again first.

And that’s probably what’s really on my mind and the thing I’m worried about. My legs last year decided to steadily get worse and worse. I thought I’d figured out how to make them better but just as the cricket season was closing down, they erupted again. Like to a state worse than last year in only a week. Hence the big shift in diet to include green stuff.

I have to say, I’ve appreciated that change of diet – although I have to watch out so that the grazing on apples doesn’t continue into grazing on biscuits. Having the apples = good, grazing on biscuits = bad.

I haven’t had a repeat of the bad breathing issues lately which suggests I figured out the cause – it was one of :

Wheat allergy (most likely)
Bacon/Ham allergy (less likely)
Work related stress (very likely)

I’ve cut out the sources for the wheat allergy, with brown bread being fine to eat and white bread leaving me struggling to breathe. Looks like it’s white bread that’s the trigger. I’m hopeful that I can start having the bacon again. Bacon Good.

And the prime cause for the work related stress moved out of our team a few weeks ago. He was an ok guy but we’re still feeling the consequences of ill thought out actions and will do at least until we rebuild the relationships with our contractors (the ones who actually do the work). Hell, we should have had a key document out for our 6 ships by now, instead we have barely gotten out one due to his interference.

Axe to grind ? Hell yeah. He was an ok guy but professionally he was a wrecking ball.

And now you’re probably thinking : yeah, there was a definite cause for work related stress. And that’s without me passing on most of the stuff that was going on. I’m one of those people who is utterly dependent on their self confidence. To have the confidence surgically dismantled at every turn is tough to take. And yet I did, because I’m also the sort of person who doesn’t let a bastard win. The worst thing about it is not knowing who I could talk to about it, because of all the Chinese Whispers going on.

What’s this health thing though ?

I have to get the discipline to leave my legs along (and a couple of other patches). I think they’d have healed by now if I didn’t keep scratching them. Perhaps a series of hefty gaming sessions is required so that I don’t think of the scratching ?

I’ll get back to doing more updates soon. But that’ll be when I’m less focused on trying to see why my legs aren’t better yet. I think they are improving – I just need to leave them alone enough to give them the chance.

I have several like that………….

Lol from Facebook :

Made me chuckle 🙂

What compels us to do stuff ?

I’m in a bit of a weird phase at the moment with the gaming. I have a bunch of games that I’ve bought recently but haven’t played yet and a much bigger list of games that I never finished. And then there’s the others which I go back to time & time again.

I played my first session for a while of Guild Wars 2 last night and have to admit that I really didn’t enjoy it much at all. That’s a curious one, because when it comes to gameplay it’s mostly there and it is genuinely one of the better MMOs I’ve played. And that’s all-time, including GW1, City of Heroes (very meh), Eve and WoW.

MMOs hit that compulsion thing pretty hard. Especially Eve with its player driven universe. Eve is the best example of a game that compels its players to keep in there in order to keep up with what friends are doing. Eve has a fairly freeform party setup which allows up to 250 players to be in the same fleet. That’s up from a party of 5 in most MMOs or a raid of 25-40. So the more players you have in the fleet, the more powerful that fleet is. But one strength of Eve is that a small group of strong players with a fleet balanced across the ship types can and will take apart a much larger group of disorganised players.

So why don’t I play Eve any more ? Well – it’s 90% grind, 9% boredom and 1% sheer terror. There’s a lot of grind needed to prepare your character for pvp. Most of the pvp time I had was boredom as we didn’t find anyone to fight, with that 1% being when things happen.

The problem with the grind is that you find that you’re spending so many more hours in the game doing preparation work for what’s supposed to be the fun part. And that’s where a game starts feeling like a second job.

If a game is becoming so important that it feels like a second job, or it is becoming more important than your actual job : GIVE UP THE GAME. I see that at work too, where organising their fantasy football league takes more time than they put into their job (that cost us big time). I used to run the project’s indoor cricket team and we got consistently good results too, typically being 3rd in a league of 11-12. I gave up running that because it ended up taking too much time away from the day job.

No game is that important and if it is approaching that, you’ve become addicted to the point where the game is no longer entertainment. I guess WoW became that for me in the early days, although that was a particularly strange time. I realised what it was doing to me and gave up the guild leader position before something broke in my head.

I’m not feeling that compulsion with Guild Wars 2, although it is a better game than SWTOR.

That’s curious that – so many games tick so many of the right boxes but when it comes down to actually playing them, it feels like a chore after a while instead of fun. I’d put the following games in that list : all MMOs, Borderlands, Skyrim, Terraria, Mass Effect 3. And there’s a bunch more too.

Having a feeling of being compelled to keep up with the less enjoyable games distracts away from some of the unplayed games I have that I know would be huge fun : Beyond Good & Evil, Machinarium, Botanicula, Trine 2. And one I’m still looking at : Kerbal Space Programme.

So how about the games I do play way too much ? There’s usually a good reason for that.

Story – Deus Ex HR has an excellent story and I feel another playthrough coming … Similar with Mass Effect 1 and 2 (3 wasn’t so great).

Simplicity yet depth – Moo2 and FTL definitely have this. As does the ancient Neverwinter Nights which had me obsessed before the MMOs took over.

Mindset – Settlers IV.

Yep. I have a game that I’ll play just to put me in a particular mindset. If I’m needing a bit of mind numbing strategy, I’ll fire up Settlers IV. It’s a very slow Real Time Strategy and I have a build order that takes a very long time to mature. If my brain is buzzing, Settlers IV helps to calm it down. It’s nowhere near the best RTS type game but it works for me.

Not much gaming today though. There’s been F1 streaming from BBC (what the hell is wrong with Youtube’s playback ? No issues on BBC, yet continual whirly-waits on Youtube) and we’re currently at half time in the second cricket of the day.

Fingers crossed that England can overtake India’s total. It’ll finish just before I’m due to head out to the Wishing Well for drinks & munchies with the Eve crew. I’m done with Eve as a game but I still keep up with how the Volition Cult is getting on. They’re a good mob and I count a lot of them as good friends. I’ve managed to stay in touch, whereas the WoW mob showed how they got a little too addicted to that game.

Curious how the people in a game renowned for spies and politics don’t have a problem staying in touch but the people (Mercs) in WoW went a little crazy. But that’s a curious one for another day.

Right now – it’s England batting and me trying to avoid the compulsion to start off another HMS Iceangel run in FTL :-).

PS I also just picked up Alone in the Dark (1992 with its 2 sequels) and the two Independence War games from Good Old Games. Gotta find time to do more with those than just listen to the soundtracks.