Not much time for blogging lately, with other things going on. But since this'll serve as a blog entry, and let me think things over while I'm typing it, here I go.
1) My nice little part time (hours and pay) job updating the content on
diabloii.net, and filling up the wiki, and establishing the screenshots section, and encouraging the forums, and planning for some future day when Diablo III comes... has blown up thsi week since it seems almost certain that Blizzard is going to announce Diablo III at the WWI convention this weekend in Paris. Other staff members on the site have, in fact, said for a fact that that will happen, and I both believe and hope they are correct in that prediction.
Perhaps needless to say, this has caused the gaming world to stand up and take notice, and site traffic and attention is vastly increased. Blizzard has been posting
mysterious splash screens on their website all week; a new one each night at midnight, and as the images progress and the mystery deepens, the fan interest is spiraling ever higher. I posted the new images tonight at 12:15, went to the gym, got home at 2am, and there were upwards of 400 new comments in the forum, and more than 100 directly on my post.
This is starting to remind me somewhat of the pre-D2 days, when virtually anything we posted on the site would be viewed by 10,000 people in like, 3 hours. Hellgate:London never approached that level of activity/popularity pre-game, and certainly didn't once it was released, but Diablo III is doing it before it even (officially) exists.
This weekend is going to be interesting, when/if they do announce the game and release screenshots and information. I may need to make some new forums just to divide up the Diablo III comments and attention, since new posts are scrolling off the first page in just hours now, and that's with basically nothing to talk about but wild speculation over the enigmatic clues Blizzard is throwing forth.
2) I ordered a
furminator last week from Amazon ($20 there, vs. the ridiculous $40 they want at PetCo), it arrived this afternoon, and tonight I can safely say that it works as well as advertised. I have used it on Jinx several times thus far, for no more than a couple of minutes each time, and I could literally stuff a pillow with the hair that's come off of her. This photo is from the first go, and all that fur came off in about 45 seconds, and just from one side of her lower back. I later got a clump that would have burned out a clothes dryer from 1 minute combing the base of her tail, and removed a cabbage-sized tumbleweed from her neck and the sides of her face.
The amazing thing is that she looks exactly the same. Same coloration, same thickness, and she even feels the same afterwards. Perhaps a bit softer, but I can't necessarily tell the difference between this and how she feels after normal brushing, when her fur is all orderly and smoothed down.
The product literature claims that it removes the undercoat, and that does seem to be true, since the fur that comes off of Jinx is all blonde/light gray and monochromatic, while her actual pelt has dark patches and variegations. As best I can tell, it works by shaving/cutting the fur, but only down by the skin. The tines are very pointy and angled, and not very deep. They're maybe 5mm deep, and all angle to a V shape, which is beveled somewhat on the top side. So the longer, outer hairs get pushed to the sides, while the softer, shedding underfur gets cut off near the root. The larger models, for big dogs, come with replacement blades, but the smaller cat ones are just one piece.
It's damn clever, and quite effective. I get more fur with 5-10 seconds of this than I would with several minutes of brushing with a normal pet comb. They say not to use it if the animal has skin lesions or a rash, and not to go over the same area too much, but if it hurts, Jinx has given no sign. She purrs relentlessly when I do it on her neck and chin and cheeks; she always enjoys being brushed there, but she definitely enjoys the furminator more than a normal comb, perhaps since it scratches her better?
I'm going to get her more thoroughly tomorrow, and see if she actually looks/feels/vomits any differently once I've taken another pound of fluff off her. She doesn't hork up hairballs that often, but she does do so from time to time, and there's perpetually cat fur flying around my apartment, so it would be lovely to minimize those effects. Plus it's fun to unpeel her with this strange device.
This is not her post-furminating, but is a photo I took last week when I found how nicely she blended with a new fleecy brown blanket I got. I didn't think it would pair well with her color, but I think the brown and gray go very well together.
3) I'm taking a couple of months off of kali. I've not been for a few weeks, and as of yet I'm not missing it. The class has gotten very rarefied of late; lots of talking, lots of theory, and very little of what I wanted from it, which was practical self defense techniques, sparring practice, and playing with weapons. I don't mind if we do odd things, but I want them to involve sticks, swords, staves, spears, etc. Odd forms of open hand, while no more practical, don't interest me as much, and yes, that's an entirely personal preference with no real defensible logic to it.
I've been thinking about trying some other forms of martial arts, or even just doing something more brutish and direct, like some MMA (non-competitively) or kick boxing or the like. However, I've not sought out any such activities yet, and I'm not really feeling motivated to do so tonight. I'm not hibernating; I've been working out 4 or 5x a week, but haven't felt any real desire to fight or train.
One unexpected benefit of not going to kali for 3 weeks is that my back and hip are feeling almost normal. I complained some weeks ago about how my right hip had been growing very stiff, and radiating up into my back, when I stood around for a while on a hard floor. And the chief culprit was kali class, since our current studio has a concrete floor, and with all the lecturing lately, we'd had a number of nights with almost nothing but standing still. I knew that was aggravating my sore back, since I was always sorest Tuesday nights after class, but now that I've not done it for a few weeks, that's become very clear. I miss the combat and fraternity of class, but I do not miss being unable to get out of bed Wednesday morning, and limping until Friday each week.
4) Freed from/deprived of my martial arts outlet, which (some weeks) provided a pretty good workout, and no longer so burdened by a sporadically sore back/hip, I've been hitting the gym more often, and enjoying it. I'm doing very long cardio sessions; usually 20 minutes at a pretty high speed on the stepmaster stepmill machine (about 120 stories climbed in that time), and then 35-55 minutes on the elliptical (800+ calories, according to the highly-inaccurate digital readout), before an hour of weights, situps, etc.
I can't say that I see any big differences in my body, but one thing I've been experimenting with lately is the situp machine. My gym, like every gym I've ever been in, has
a bunch of these, and they allow you to do far more situps than you could just lying on the floor, or on an inclined bench. The upper back thingie rocks with you, so it provides neck and shoulder support, and part of the exertion is on your shoulders and arms. How you use it varies the load; if you really lift with your crunch muscles instead of using your arms and bracing your feet, it's far more exertion. The best is to stick your legs straight up in the air, or at least curl them up so they're not on the footrests, since you get much more strain on your stomach that way.
I've used that type of machine at the gym for years, and I used to do 50 or 75 situps on it when I went to the gym with Malaya a few years ago. I'd do that many straight, and then turn my legs so both knees were on the left or right, and do another 15 or 20 each way to get the sides of my stomach. I'd upped that to about 100 during the 5 months I've been going to my new gym, but was also doing a lot of reps on the "make it burn"
crunch machine, and using some other ab/torso machines too.
Last week I started to realize that I wasn't really getting tired on the sit up machine anymore. I was doing my usual 100 or so situps, about half with my legs up in the air, but I was just doing that many out of habit, not because I was too tired to do any more, which is why I stop doing reps on all the other machines I use at the gym. So I tried to do more, and did 250 one day last week, and then did 300 the next time, and followed that by another 50 to the left and 50 more to the right.
I don't recall exactly which day, but over the weekend I did 500 without pause, and then more to the sides, and on Tuesday I did 750. That was getting to be silly, not in terms of how many, but just in the time it took. I haven't exactly timed myself, but I do them a little faster than one per second, so it took me something like 10 minutes to do 750. Ten minutes doesn't seem that long when upright on a cardio machine, but when you're just rocking up and down on a sit up machine, it's a long time. I'm not used to being on any single piece of exercise equipment for longer than it takes one song to play on my ipod. Much less two or three.
That aside, I decided to see how far I could go tonight, and set 1000 as my goal. That was an arbitrary number, I thought, since if I could do even 300 or 400, I could theoretically do them forever. It wasn't like they were getting gradually more difficult every 10 or 15; or that my muscles were steadily, but very slowly, tightening up. It was just a mental thing; could I do situps for that long?
As it turns out, I could. I didn't time them, though I probably should have since I doubt I'll do it again. But it took 4 full Eminem songs, one of which was Stan, and that's about his longest song. At least 15 minutes lying there, nonstop sit up'ing. And yeah, I could have done them forever. I felt my stomach get tight after 30 or 40 with my legs up, but then I'd put them down on the foot pegs and breath deeply to relax my stomach, and after 10 or 15 situps I'd be back to a neutral state; neither tired nor straining.
My conclusion is that doing situps on that sort of machine is equivalent to doing a bench press with no weight on the bar. Once you get to some level of fitness in the relevant muscles, it's not really exercise anymore, and you can more or less do it forever. The problem is that since it's not a strain, you won't really improve your muscles by doing it. It's like trying to build up your legs by walking. I'm now thinking it's pointless to do more than a couple of hundred reps on that machine, and maybe not even that many, since they're not straining me. Other ab machines do, and there's a simple padded plank with footrests that I can't do more than 30 or 40 situps on without cramping up. I see some guys on there holding medicine balls, or 20lbs weights to their chests, so I imagine they could go infinitely on the situp machine too.
I find it interesting though, and surprising, that it's possible to get to a point where such a machine is no longer work. I imagine guys with really strong upper bodies feel the same way about pushups; their arms and chests are powerful enough that they can lift their own upper body weight an infinite number of times, and it's neither tiring, nor enough of a strain to let them build more weight.
5) Last week, on my birthday, motivated by boredom, ennui, mild loneliness/horniness, and a glass of exquisite dessert wine gifted me by my dad, I popped my own cherry by placing a spur-of-the-moment personal ad at an online dating service. I didn't have any expectations for it, so when 3 actual human women replied, (along with about 10 really lame, boring, and obviously fake spammers/scammers) I was pleasantly surprised. A week into trying to get to know them, I'm less pleasantly.
In my spontaneous state, I didn't include some of the basic personal ad elements, such as a desired age range. I would have gone something like 24-34, since like most men, I want a woman who is potentially younger than me, since like most men, I find younger women more attractive. I wasn't looking for a hook up, and physical attraction isn't anywhere near my most important criteria for a date, but there has to be some attraction to make it worth the effort to get to know a person, when romance is the potential end game.
Given my lack of specifications, I shouldn't have been surprised that two of the women were, as Chris Rock said, "
damn near forty!" Yeah, age is just a number, but both women were white, and not to be racist, but white women don't age well. The event horizon varies from woman to woman, but most white women go from MILF to cougar to granny in like, 3 years. Whether that happens from 28-34, or 32-36, or 35-40, you can almost see time taking its toll from day to day. White women in that range are almost better off accepting the inevitable, putting on 25 pounds, and aging gracefully, since the alternative is um...
this.
None of the women who replied to my ad were Terri Hatcher'ed, but neither were they women that I, in great shape and still semi-able to pass for 30, found real desirable. While contemplating the chronological doom that is my fate, I reflected on the downside of having spent so much time with the IG over the past 6-8 months. It's been fun, and she's good company and we're very friendly, but we're not destined for romance or an LTR, and more relevantly for my current dilemma, she's in her early 20s, is very pretty, and wears size 2 petite. And it's hard (impossible, in my current case) to go from that, to women who are more than a decade and a half older, even if they look fairly good for their age.
All is not lost on the personal ad front though, since I'm still corresponding with one woman who is but 32, and even if that doesn't work out I got my feet wet with this free ad nonsense, and saw the possibilities. There are countless non-free dating/singles sites with more quality control, more serious singles, and many more opportunities to find someone with a more selective criteria than "click here." And I might one of them later this summer.
I'm not sure how suitable such an activity is for blogging about. Such activities are definitely "blog material," but I'm wouldn't be doing it entirely on a lark and I'm not looking just for hook ups, and I'd have to/want to reveal my blog to any woman I was sincerely interested in. And me blogging about her, or other women I'd seen before her, probably wouldn't be a huge selling point. Nor would/will the comments I made in this post about white women aging in dog years, for that matter.
Guess I'd better find more Asian
girls women, eh? They're cuter when they're young, and better yet, they age more gracefully. Plus, by 30 most of them have escaped the controlling clutches of the "traditional" family they grew up in/rebelled against, and can start to live their own lives, rather than just doing what their parents want for them.
Was that five things? I think so, and it's too late to proofread or count now. I picked the number kind of at random, so it's nice if it worked out in the end.
Labels: dating, diablo iii, fitness, jinx, personal, pets
