Still Losing Weight

Yes, I'm very overweight. But after three weeks on my diet I have managed to lose 15 pounds so far. I'm walking for about 40 minutes in the mornings and evenings and watching what I eat (avoiding fast food which is full of fat and calories). I mainly eat soups, turkey sandwiches, grilled chicken fajitas, and other low calorie/low fat things. Hopefully I can keep losing about 5 pounds a week and make my goal of reaching 250 pounds by the end of August.

Tried The Game Rift

I played the 7 day free trial of Rift that you can download at: https://www.riftgame.com/en/products/mmo-free-trial/
After playing World of Warcraft for so long I was curious how Rift would compare. I found Rift to be an enjoyable game-probably the best part I experienced was an event where you fight a kind of epic boss (with help from npcs) to make it thru the first rift. Otherwise, gameplay was a combination of killing mobs and collecting quest items and talking with npcs. I would put it somewhere between Everquest 2 and WOW on the greatness scale. Unfortunately, my system is a laptop and my Internet connection is a wifi, so I had to play at the most reduced graphics settings. If I could play the game on the most state of the art system and with the fastest Internet connection I'm sure that the experience would have been better. But I used what I had so thats all I can judge from. 3 stars out of 5 for me.

Saturday Off Work

    I have the day off work today (& tomorrow) and have been watching The PGA US Open Golf with Rory McElroy in first place & trying not to self-destruct like he did in the Masters tournament. He's got such a huge lead that I doubt even he can lose, though it's not over yet.
    I've also been working a bit on my novella (Tymespell). I think that I have a handle on the story lines which I'll be writing about. It's basically going to be 3 separate but related stories that delve into the history of the Rysouri city of Tyme and how the forest of Wyrmewood came to be. I've already written a good bit about one of the 3 stories (involving the dragons of Wyrme) and have been working on one of the others (involving the humans who descended from the Rysouri from Wyrme). Later I'll need to finish up by writing about the Rysouri themselves in some way. If I can write about 10,000 words for each of the 3 stories then I think It'll be okay.
    A few days back I finally got my book to a reviewer. Hopefully it will be reviewed favorably and this will maybe garner some interest in me & my books. I wish that I had some of the "magic" that other writers have had (like Victorine Leiske, she's done fabulously with her first book).

Well LeBron You Didn't Win...Again

When LeBron left Cleaveland for Miami and put together his "dream team" people had all kinds of reactions; they hated it, loved it, didn't care, whatever. It just goes to show that just because you may be a great player doesn't mean that you have skills at forming a winning team. He may be happy playing in Miami with his friends Wade and the others, but has it come back to bite him? Personally I don't care much for the NBA, ever since Jordan retired, and could care less what happens. I've been to 1 NBA game in my whole life and it pretty much sucked. I don't find it a good sport to watch on TV either. It's just a bunch of guys running up & down the court, talking trash, and collecting their ridiculous checks. It's the only thing they know how to do so you can't criticize them-they got to make a living somehow. Truthfully there's no professional team sport that I would recommend, be it NFL, NHL, NBA, whatever. The college versions are still worth watching however, for the most part at least. But anyway, LeBron is still not a winner. And if he continues to think in the limited way that he has he may never be.

I Went to a Movie Friday

On my day off on Friday I went to see a movie that I thought the previews looked like might be good. I saw "Super 8". The movie harkened back to the time when the period of the movie was actually set (1979), and in my opinion they did a good job making it look like it was 32 years ago (back when I was entering high school). The Spielberg touch was very evident giving the film an almost "E.T."/"Close Encounters" feel which I liked. Overall I'd say that the movie was worth seeing. What I didn't like was the alien. It was computer generated like many things are in movies these days. It's something that I detest and something that you can tell is obviously fake. It's not that I hate computer graphics, I don't, but mixing live action with CGI I find is rarely done well, and this movie was no exception. It would have been better if the entire movie was done in CGI, at least that way it would all match (AVATAR did a great job with CGI, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a great film and was totally computer animated). I prefer aliens in a live action movie to be done by live action actors (for instance: the Predator from the Predator movies and many of the aliens from the Alien movies, though not all of them, were done in live action.) It just goes to show that it's not impossible to make a live action alien being. Also, one reason why I hate the CGI stuff is that invariably they move so fast on the screen that its all just a blur anyway. (Oh great, I paid $whatever to goto a movie to see blurry stuff on the screen. No thanks. IE: Transformers movies do that like every 5 seconds-blurry scene, blurry scene, blurry scene=wow what fun, not). It's a shame, but unfortunately I doubt that it will get any better anytime soon.

The effective "Whale Wars" show

I hate the show "Whale Wars"; not because I don't sympathize with their cause, but because they seem powerless to actually do anything. So, I say; they should go all out and really make a difference if they really believe in what they're doing. They've never made a difference from what I've seen in the shows (the only thing I've ever seen was that they delayed the whalers a bit). That's not good enough. If they mean business then: start ramming ships, dive bombing from that little helicopter, mining the seas, hire some Somalian pirates, or whatever. Otherwise, what's the point? As it stands the show is only about a bunch of guys who "really wish the whalers would stop & geez guys, please stop killing the whales." It's stupid. Asking them to stop, pleading with them, & the half assed ideas that they use have no & will never have any effect. I can see the point of the show, it's basically there to protest against whaling, but unless everyone else in the world gets on board & joins the whale wars crew & other protesters, nothing will ever come of it. I don't see it happening-most people are too busy with their own lives & whales just aren't important enough.

Losing weight

I'm in a contest to lose weight over the summer (June 1 to Aug. 31) and am competing against an unknown number of others around the country. It's through my workplace O'Reilly's Auto Parts and the winners are determined by % of weight lost, not total pounds lost-so I guess a lighter person could lose fewer pounds than a heavier person and still win, just as long as their % is greater. I started at 316 pounds and hope to lose about five pounds/week to end up at around 250 pounds by the end of the contest. If I could do this, I would have lost about 20% of my body weight, which is a pretty good effort. My strategy so far is to walk for about 30-40 minutes in mornings and evenings, eat as little fat as possible (no fast food), mostly eating things like soups, lots of veggies/fruits. I think that I'm on track so far as my weight after 1 week is 310. So I've lost about 6 pounds after the 1st week.