Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

My Anglophilia continues with my new exercise program: The Walk. Six to Start originally created the interactive horror workout (no, really!) Zombies, Run!, wherein you work in your interval training by... running from zombies. The NHS approached them and asked them to come up with another interactive workout for people who need lower impact exercise. The result is an interactive spy thriller, where you have been mistaken for a deep cover spy and tasked to get a Very Important Package to Edinburgh. Only the terrorists have taken out all mass and personal transit with a massive EMP burst, so you're going to have to start walking... and hope you stay one step ahead of "The Burn." Playing the game is meant to take about 3 months -- during which you will walk the equivalent of the length of the UK.

The more you walk, the more you unlock.


Beats the everlivin' hell out of dropping little glass pebbles in a jar while I read Facebook!

Points:
I cannot believe that I redeemed all those AmEx points for things that are, essentially, exercise equipment. The wireless headphones and iPod nano have arrived, been set up & charged, and tested. The headphones are surprisingly comfortable, and not only worked on the treadmill, but as I ran back upstairs and to the back of the house as a test.

I am, however, amused at one little change. When I was a teenager, a "headphone adapter" was something you plugged a thick headphone jack into so it could work with the new thinner headphone slots. Now it's the other way around.

The nano (which is amazingly teensy) has, after only about 8 minutes of swearing, been set up to update from its own little corner of iTunes and is set to shuffle the contents of that "pool" of exercise songs that all have the same beat (which is now about 3.5 hours of music, promising an infinite variety in the mornings). However, now that I have the headphones, the TV and associated DVD/VHS players are back into play as well, which means that I think I'm going to work my way through my back catalog of classic Who episodes, which are also conveniently 25 minutes in length.

Note: I notice that the iPod website is no longer advertising the 2 GB nano now that the new video nanos have come out, which means that if you want one, they're probably about to become a bit more reasonable on ebay.

Yoga:
In just the fortnight I've been doing this, I've already noticed a distinct difference in my flexibility, even though I'm staggering through the exercises before the crack of dawn when I'm as coordinated as overcooked spaghetti.

The routine has changed slightly, in part to adapt some exercises that don't require as much coordination, and one that requires a lot more, as a little ambition is good.

( The new routine. Still so simple a fat, forty fangirl can do it. )

I'm off to check this interesting set of YouTube videos: Yoga At Your Desk, parts one, two, three, four.

( Two more exercise mixes )

I've only used the Tiger thermos-style bento twice and I already love it in a manner that would put me on a registry in five states. It's high quality! It's streamlined! It has two watertight containers! The containers are deep enough that you can layer things! (One of them has an internal container of cheese plus crackers plus some mini-3 Musketeers. The other two containers have fruit salad and "tomato pasta soup" [read: leftover spaghetti thrown in leftover tomato soup]).

Bundles of links, mostly swiped from fyrdrakken:
Bitchtastic review of The Devil Wears Prada, hitting all the reasons why I almost wrote a rant about the movie in my LJ when I saw it. She treated her job like a job, not like a social relationship. She accepted an assignment that her boss offered her, an assignment her boss decided she was better suited to than her colleague -- and this, in her own eyes and in everybody else's, makes her a selfish, backstabbing power-slut. Nobody would blink twice if a man did exactly the same thing -- but for Andrea, somehow it means she was selling her soul.

Huzzah for my friends; when I said "I'm going to drop off the face of the earth for X period of time to go back to school" they didn't pull the crap that Andrea's friends did when she dedicated one year to getting a job that would open all the doors she wanted opened.

seti_drd has a Martha at Torchwood story Left Unsaid. S3 finale spoilers. Not for the first time Tosh wonders who Martha Jones really is.

We killed smallpox. Will polio be the next scourge to fall?

Via a new member of crafty_tardis, a set of downloads to make paper printout tab A-slot B toys. Am linking to the whole page, as I know some of the members of the flist will be interested in the Justice League and Batman stuff as well as Doctor Who.

Never give an obsessive a new hobby (you may have noticed this about the whole bento thing.) Last night I skipped on just about everything I'm *supposed* to be doing in favor of fiddling with exercise mixes, to the point of testing one while it was fresh. And you know I'm not on the treadmill for the love of walking!

Two mixes, interchangeable songs, all the same beat. They work out to just about 1.20 miles each.

( Mix #1 )

( Mix #2 )

Speaking of songs, I urge all Americans on the flist to learn the lyrics to "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" The Post reports today that Nasdaq is set to launch tomorrow what its executives are calling one of the most significant developments on Wall Street in decades -- a private stock market for super-wealthy investors... Any private firm can list on Nasdaq's new platform, which is called the Portal Market, and raise money by selling stock to an elite group of shareholders. These companies would remain private and not have to make public their financial statements or submit to federal regulation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate accountability law.

Yet again, people are forgetting that things have changed since "the good old days" because 1) the days weren't good and 2) THE SYSTEM DIDN'T WORK!

"Ya had plenty money 1922..."


PS - I never know whether the response to some people in fandom is to grit my teeth and try to be not utterly snarky when I respond "just because you say This Is The Way Things Are, Period doesn't actually make them so, sweetie" or just pat them on the head and say "there, there, it must really suck when you tell people the Right True Way to think and see, yet they persist in having their own opinions."

I bought the all-star cast reading stories from "House on Pooh Corner" at Stratford (Fanfare Books, they had at least one more copy of both CDs) because it had Judi Dench (Kanga) and Stephen Fry (Pooh) on it, but the one who makes me laugh like a loon every time I hear him is Geoffrey Palmer's sardonic Eeyore. Highly recommended.

In honor of the Bollywood discussion the other day, I made a Bollywood exercise mix. The pace is quite slow - I did barely over a mile in 25 minutes - but it's a nice way to ease back onto the treadmill after a vacation. Only four songs, because Bollywood doesn't do short numbers:

1 - Kahin Aag Lage (Taal soundtrack)
2 - Chale Chalo (Lagaan soundtrack)
3 - O Rey Chhori (Lagaan soundtrack)
4 - Chaiyya Chaiyya (several soundtracks; mine came from Bombay Dreams)


FLIST ROUNDUP:

Fabulous Doctor Who Vid to "This is Not Your Year." Images for all new seasons. Downloadable here.
The Time Princess Sweet fluff of the Doctor telling his daughter a bedtime story.
Dark Aegis has a nice Britpick post for those of us who keep forgetting that there is no "gotten" in British English and that "pants" is considerably ruder on the other side of the sea.


THE LATEST LJ ANGST:
BubbleBlunder's open letter articulating the problems and questions the fans have with LJ
LJ's latest clarification/response (specifically mentioning the letter)

Nea's comment on the whole thing: nobody's really in the right here. LJ's team has done some real boneheaded things, *particularly* knee-jerk banning of legitimate expressions (breastfeeding icons) and in not warning and permitting people to take down stuff before lowing the banhammer. That one of their own has been mocking people is just the icing on the cow cake.

On the other hand, fandom by nature infringes on copyrights and trademarks, and "we've always done this sort of legally questionable thing and nobody complains" is not, in fact, a legal defense, nor is it an accurate statement. Cease and Desist orders were winging at fans who went over the line well before there was a world wide web; if the actors/copyright holders/Powers That Be bothered to dig us up when we were underground in the 70s and 80s, then it's all the easier for them to find stuff that's out in the open on the Web.

Do I think there ought to be a fandom exception? Hell, yes, I am a fan - I create and consume exactly the sort of things that they've been C&Ding and striking out for most of my life. But my "I want" doesn't change the law, and if I want it to, then I need to put my effort into *changing the law,* or arguing for a change in the rules based on specific precedents (of which there are many in the whole 6A thing; I knew the first set of strikeouts wouldn't stand because I'd been through the exact same thing with AOL back in the early 90s. The only difference is that the 6A thing happened faster than AOL's "ooops, we went too far" backdown.)

As for the seismic shift to other LJ-like forums... I'm not going anywhere. First, because I've paid to be here and I want my money's worth. Second, there is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that GreatestJournal and InsaneJournal and Journalfen and whateverjournal won't do *the exact same thing.*

ETA: The Terrible Secret of Livejournal, a post that repeats much of my point. The terrible secret of Livejournal is that a lot of fandom material is illegal.

It's not just incorrectly classified as illegal. It doesn't just "appear" to be illegal to people who don't understand. It doesn't just "resemble" illegal material. It isn't just "illegal to show to minors but perfectly okay as long as you card everyone." It's not "arguably" illegal under hypothetical assumptions that haven't been tested in court. It's not just against Six Apart's terms of service. It's not just disfavoured by Barak Berkowitz's personal taste. There exists material that may be in a grey area, but a lot of it isn't. A lot of fandom material really is definitely illegal to distribute; sometimes even illegal to possess.

I have got to give myself an LJ intervention. First I posted about once a month, then thought it was getting bad at once a day, and now I'm expecting to post at least links twice a day...

This is a great deal like knowing me in real life, as I Do. Not. Shut. Up! But attempt to make up for it by being entertaining and/or occasionally thought-provoking.

Exercise
At least I've finally gotten enough sleep. Having accomplished everything on the mental checklist, I can finally relax. That got me in bed early, which meant I got out of bed early with the energy to do the ( Dancin' on the Treadmill II mix )

Links
I found this a bit tl;dr, but it was recommended by Slacktivist and I have a lot of language geeks and political wonks on the f-list. George Orwell on Politics and the English Language

An extremely disturbing article called Super Slim Me about a reporter who dieted from size 12 to size 0 to see what it was like. She becomes depressed, obsessed with food, exhausted, the only date she has tells her she was annoying and boring because all she did was talk diets and food and was grumpy, the doctors tell her if she stays on the starvation diet she'll soon do permanent damage to her body... and all the women tell her she looks fantastic.

*amused snort* Chore Wars treats housework like D&D.

Bento
A side note on bentos - I'm not doing well on the "five items, five different colors," but at least I'm not eating completely beige food all the time either. It is becoming easier to fill the boxes now that I have leftovers all the time from the *other* boxes - last night I whipped together half a can of tomato soup (last dinner's leftovers), some cold chicken breast (leftovers from parents on Sunday), a portion of cherries (leftovers from groceries a week ago), and a chocolate pudding (because I have chocolate in the house always, why do you ask?) and ta-da! Last-second bento. (That needs a catchier title) It ain't pretty, but it's fast and cheap.

It seems to help me organize these sort of things if they're already divvied up in the refrigerator in small containers. Also, I'm discovering the amazing wasted space involved in using tupperware vs the compact snap-lid stuff from the Korean market

1/2 cup tupperware container - 3.25 inches in diameter with a tab that sticks out another .5 inch, 2 inches high, circular.
1/2 cup Bento container - 3.25 inch by 2.5 inch rectangle, 1.5 inches high.

I think over time I'm going to slowly replace all the tupperware, on the basis that it's going to be simply more space efficient to store in the cupboards and the refrigerator. Not to mention that once I've got the system really going, I can open up the fridge, reach into a basket, pull six different containers out, and really have bento-in-a-second!

The spam will be ending soon, I promise. I just didn't want to have a Prepare for Fair ad mixed in with the personal stuff.

Exercise
Well, I managed to make a workout mix so intense I couldn't keep up. Someone in better shape than I am might be able to do it, though. I'm going to have to work my way up.

( The Gaelic/Folk Mix )

Y'all might as well vote, I'm going to keep this up...
[Poll #1023613]


Aaaaaand we have our first asshole posting uncut, unwarned Harry Potter spoilers on a huge community with only the most tenuous of "But it's on topic, really!" connections. (Not going to bother with a link as I'm sure the mod will remove it, and hopefully ban the schmuck as well. ETA: Yup. Gone between my writing this and hitting "post.") No, I didn't read the list, once I figured out what it was. No, what I caught didn't ruin the book for me. Yes, I do think there's a hot place in hell for wankers who like to piss in the pool.

And frankly, yes, I think Bloomsbury and Scholastic should hang their heads over turning this into a circus for the last several books, because it's hardly like the buggers weren't selling in the first place. All those millions on "security," and newspapers worldwide are discussing how to download the sucker.

The only reason I'm not going offline is because I won't have time to read through the 4000 messages that would accrue by the time I finished the book. And I have faith in my f-list.

Exercise
I had no idea the 80s mix would be so popular! I expected with my f-list that the Who mix would be the runaway favorite.

Well, because I'm just that desperate to not do any more culling and had no good excuses, I went ahead and exercised to the 80s tape tonight. (Do not expect me to keep doing 2 a day - I still want to know what the termites are going to do to Sylv McCoy!) The next one will be tested Monday if I get any time to myself after Shore Leave and Tuesday if not, so there's more time to vote.

( The 80s mix )

[Poll #1021060]

Bento
Up until now, the fact that my original bentos are in thermos-style containers was a novelty more than a feature; their contents went from my refrigerator to the one at work with only a shortish commute between. However, tomorrow their claims to keep food cold for hours will be tested; rather than leave the con or stand in line for a reheated hot dog from the hotel, I'm going to pack my own lunch. Deviled ham sandwiches, cheese, strawberries, chocolate. Nothing that will go off if it doesn't stay cold, but enough to keep my brain sugar straight and keep me from knawing an arm off by late afternoon..

Also, note that Pampered Chef has a beast called a Cut 'n' Seal that basically turns sandwiches into little round pasties. (Their midsize scoop is just the right size for filling it, too.) This is the perfect size to chop into to fit into the round containers for the thermos bentos. I'm going to keep the leftover bread and toast it with butter and parsley to turn into breadcrumbs for the Bento TV mushroom cap recipe, which will be going into next week's lunches.

Bento & Harry Potter
Sad fangirl that I am, I'm trying to figure out what sort of foods would go into a Harry Potter bento for next Friday. So far, all I can think of is sticking wings on a small yellow cheese.

Presented without endorsement: I found these while surfing and have not yet checked them out. Each of these has a free podcast available at iTunes.
Marina Online workouts, music, more
Fitpod
Exercise Radio
Podcast Go! ooo, this has all sorts of tempting things!

Also for free on iTunes but not found on independent websites:
"Workouts on the Web"
"Mp3Gym"
"podercise"

Websites stumbled over while checking the above:
Workouts on the Web
Podnova.com's Workout on the Web

Can anyone recommend good DVD-ripping software so I can put the yoga and walking DVDs I have onto Wurlitzer? Preferably one that allows me to sample, as I only want two of the 20 yoga workouts.