Sleepypete's Pillow

Another one from the “Facebook made me lol” collection :

Definite lol from that one.

(Aside – now watching the cricket highlights and thinking “when did bowlers throwing the ball become an accepted part of the game ?”)

It’s getting close to that time of year when I need to start thinking about getting ready for the season. Previously, I’d rely on a combination of :
Natural Fitness (I’m a fattie but can still pull my weight around with little preparation)
Pre season nets
Running around at lunchtimes at school

These days the running around at lunchtimes and pre season nets don’t happen. Plus I’d be challenged to get as much quality training in with nets because of the shoulder issues. I used to be one of the first to turn up and I’d be bowling all through the session (except when it came my turn to bat). I’d get full value out of the nets time, it let me try new things out or groove my bowling action until it was ready for matches. I found my away swinger by accident but nets let me learn how to bowl it properly. I was literally one of the first to turn up and the last one to leave. (Half the team didn’t know where the light switches were)

I can’t rely on the natural fitness so much now, I used to be in Much Pain for about 2 days after the first game of the season. Much Pain time was closer to a week last year … even without doing a full allocation of bowling overs.

So what I need to do is to start getting miles into my legs. I have a good training circuit available for that, with a set of roads near my place set into a triangular pattern. I think that it’s maybe about a mile and a half. It should serve first as me walking around it, followed by jogging when more conditioning is back in my legs.

That’s what it needs really, the power is still there in my legs plus I can really feel the benefit of being a stone lighter. But … what’s cursed me over the years is lack of stamina and being prone to cramp. The diet has caused a bit of an imbalance that’s increased that proneness to cramp too. (It’s settling and going away)

But most of all – it’s motivation.

And the Pink Hat Project for the summer may well be the key to unlocking that motivation. Can’t rely on being chased by dinosaurs any more !

Hi Myxercise – welcome to blogging 🙂

Hopefully when I hit the lower limit of weight that I can get from just being disciplined with what I eat, I can learn stuff from you to help push the weight down & prep for summer cricket better 🙂

I agree Valentines Day is a Hallmark holiday. I am single, but when in a relationship, everyday should be considered special! Follow my blogs please! My blogs focus on nutrition and health, and I just started blogging. THX!

Can't remember the card thing at my old school … But then again, it was an all-boy school so having lots of valentines cards might have drawn it's own fire 😉

I hated it as a teen as the mean girls at school made you feel like a total loser if you didn't get loads of cards, however as I have got older I do the same as with Christmas. I blow a raspberry at the commercialism and do it my way.

I got very drunk last year – so much so that I had to have the next day off work to recover. NOT good!

We’re coming up to one of the nastier commercially driven celebrations of the year …

Yep. I mean Valentines’ Day. Kinda weird saying it’s a nasty celebration but that’s the way I feel about it after seeing what commercialism has done to it.

The idea – that one day in the year, couples do something special. It’s a nice idea but as with most Day’s, as soon as the market men get their fingers on it, it jumps out of control.

The problem – is that you’re made to feel obliged that you should be doing something on that particular day. If you’re not then you’re made to feel that there’s something wrong with you. Even worse if you’ve been single for what feels like forever, like me. You’d like to go out somewhere to let someone to feel special but there’s no willing, interested or interesting partners out there.

The reality – everyone else gets the need to head out somewhere on the Day, leading to the restuarants being totally crammed and tickets for things becoming difficult to come by. If you do get in a restuarant, you’re not in for a romantic intimate dinner, you’re heading for Sheep Dip dining where the restuarant want you out the door so they can get more people through.

It doesn’t lead to it being a good evening. Don’t get me wrong, some of the few memories* I retain of the time with Evil Ex are centred around evenings out. We make each other feel better by having a relaxed evening in each other’s company. But around Valentines Day, there’s too much pressure coming from the surroundings to really enjoy that time away.

*(time has eroded most of them but there’s also the lingering after effects of my brains being scrambled by a cricket ball)

Plan A for this year’s Valentines Day was to head over to CQ’s place for the evening to chill out with pizza and dvd’s. We’ll be doing that on Thursday instead when all the Crazies are available.

But I will mark it in my own way … Unless I get the shock of a better offer coming around I’ll be stopping in. But I’ll put up a music post with the soppiest songs in my library. Here’s a taster …

Phew ! Managed to go through the whole game satisfying the conditions for the achievements.

Won't do that again on purpose 🙂 (I like the Malik character too much)

Lately I’ve been enjoying yet another run through of Deus Ex Human Revolution. It’s rare that I’ll play through an entire game straight away after completing it the first time (variation is good) and it’s even rarer that I’ll play through one three times on the bounce.

Yet I’m currently going for the third run, albeit with different objectives. The aim this time around is to harvest as many of the remaining Steam achievements as possible and by the end of this run, I’ll hopefully only have just 3 to go.

Big targets this time :
Pacifist – Get through the entire game without killing anyone. This isn’t easy … I’ve had to do one set piece the bad way because there’s a massive chance that exploding a robot will also kill bad guys who you’ve already knocked out.
Foxiest of the Hounds – Get through the entire game without setting off the alarms.

(To do later : Beat the game on hardest difficulty, peek at all the items in Megan’s office at the start, see all the endings)

Going for those two achievements has added more interest to the usual play through and makes you appreciate the stealthy approach. The game rewards you for that, not in equipment (which is plentiful anyway) but in making your character advance quicker. Getting through a level without being seen gives more experience than knocking out all the bad guys. Knocking people out rather than going for the lethal approach gives quicker advancement too.

And by bypassing a lot of the bad guys, it’s also been less of a grind. The pacifist approach is a lot quieter than having a sniper rifle boom away across the level, making the bad guys come running.

It’s that Grindiness that’s key though.

I seem to be migrating to games that are built around dynamic stories. I like the progression as the game goes along. The story has to be fairly tight though, as really open ended ones like the X space games and Bethesda’s usual output tend to turn me off. I prefer grand strategy campaign games where the world is persistent, I didn’t enjoy real time strategy games where the strong base you built in Mission 1 would be irrelevant in successive missions. And some strategy games hugely resemble the grind through wearing down the game by attrition.

Bit like novels. I’ve given up on a few novels lately, because they resemble the grind that turns me off certain games. I’ve quit reading Star Wars books because the Yuuzhan Vong sequence got really unpleasant and definitely a depressing grind.

David Weber’s Honorverse books used to be a lot of fun, with fairly tight plotlines built around focused space battle action. They’ve gone very bloaty now though, with 1000 page books with nary a nuke to explode anywhere. The fun factor went out of them as the politics came in. I’ve been struggling with reading Game Of Thrones. Something needed to happen within the first 200 pages of sheer grind of character set up to keep me interested. (I’ll go back into Game of Thrones at some point). All I can say is that the script writing for the TV series must have been incredible to make it so popular.

Currently reading Stark’s War by Jack Campbell (aka John G. Hemry) which I’m enjoying. A trademark of Jack Campbell’s books is that they flow well and when the action starts, what you’re reading makes sense and keeps focus. A crucial key of science fiction is that it has to remain consistent with itself and the rules that it declares. Departures from that (David Weber is badly guilty here with magic new tech) make the reader doubt the credibility of the series.

Right :

Games – fun when they’re tightly focused around a well written storyline. Hopefully Mass Effect 3 will be a fitting conclusion to the series, avoiding some of the grind of the first 2 games.
Books – enjoying Jack Campbell (and sometime I must read one by Thumper), giving up on David Weber and Game of Thrones.
Games & Books – there’s more crossover now than people might think. Instead of reading what’s on the page, you’re writing your own variation of the story with how you approach the situations presented.

England’s in trouble in the rugby though, time to turn my attention back to that for the last 30 minutes.

A little bit of random telly I caught a while ago that now has me hooked is Leverage.

It’s not what I usually go for, there’s no lasers, jetpacks, teleporters or other bits of sciency-fiction technobabble in here. Just a lot of style and clever smarts in how it sets up the scenarios in each episode.

They also have a lot of fun with how the episodes play through to. The 5 main characters don’t necessarily totally like each other but there’s a lot of respect for each other’s abilities. It’s a series where the cast works really well together. But one catches the eye early :

That’s Beth Riesgraf who plays Parker. Very definitely a Bad Girl. She’s the thief of the bunch and certifiably crazy.

Maybe that’s why the twinkle catches the eye. She’s actually not that small but that’s the way it looks on screen. Perfection (even with the craziness) in a very tiny package (like a few others I could mention !)

Anyway – just really enjoyed watching the pilot episode again and I’m now looking forward to watching the rest of the series. Hell, I even bought season 2 unseen and I very rarely do that.

Here’s another character who joins in with making this a cool series to watch :

Very true. The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth.

PS Boy does surround sound make you jump out of your skin if gunfire goes off on the soundtrack taking you by surprise. Jeez !
PS2 Feeling a bit better today for some reason I can’t fathom. Must be the bacon sarnie in the morning and the prospect of the weekend to come.