i look bad

Randomness for 12/11

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1) A motorcycle with a track instead of wheels, from 1939.

2) Do people gain weight during the holidays? Science says no, not usually.

3) A six-year-old tries to guess the plots of classic novels by their covers.

4) How much we care about Star Wars, graphed over time.

5) Look at this Instagram (Nickelback parody) Video. Not only have I never knowingly heard Nickelback once, but I have never been to Instagram. I still laughed at this.

6) Why is ‘w’ pronounced ‘double u’ rather than ‘double v’?

7) Author Christopher Priest shares his opinion of Robert McCrum, an associate editor of the Observer.

Reuben Salad

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The boy didn’t like it, but my wife did. I’ll be updating the recipe for next time.

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It’s fancy potato chips at the bottom, then lettuce, then corned beef, then sauerkraut, then swiss cheese, then thousand island dressing. I may heat the cheese next time so it’s more melty–the residual heat from the meat and kraut didn’t do it–but overall it was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.

Best in small doses, I think.

Tomorrow is my not-birthday

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For new or forgetful folks, the not-birthday concept is pretty straight-forward: my wife and I have the same birthday, which sucks, so I moved mine back a month.

What this means: omelet with oven-roasted potatoes for breakfast, pizza at some point, possibly a bottle of quality beer.

Then, on Monday, I’m starting an unjuice fast. Health-related stuff behind the cut. Continue reading

Willpower is not a virtue

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And by “not a virtue” I don’t mean that it’s a vice or it’s something awful. I mean, it’s not a wonderful thing that people have or don’t have.

Okay, so, I’m an NPR-listener. Yeah, I often hear this expert or that being interviewed… so many of them that they sometimes run together. Sometimes I’ll hear something that sticks with me and I have to go back to find it again. Like this interview with David Eagleman.

What Eagleman said, for those who don’t want to click through to the show, is that our brains aren’t this unified thing. We, ourselves, aren’t a unified identity. Different parts of our brain want us to do different things: Lose weight, exercise, sleep in, work hard, order the fries, watch that TV show… We’re full of conflicting impulses.

This is certainly true of me. I have long battled with myself over all sorts of indulgences, and different parts of me fight in different ways. When I get up early to work on my book, I feel a sense of accomplishment. When faced with the opportunity to eat something I shouldn’t, I feel a sense hopeless despair.

And in recent years, it’s been a tossup which part of my brain[1] would win, except for the despair. Hopeless despair has been a trump card in my life; I have a hard time beating it.

However! Lately I have stopped looking at myself as a complete whole. Lately I have tried to recognize that there are several different personalities living inside me, and that my brain plays dirty tricks on my to make me do things I shouldn’t. In essence, I’m accepting the fact that my own brain is often my enemy.

I’ve talked about this before: It can be hard to say no to food when the despair hits. It can be hard to get up early to work when I know I need sleep, too. But for the past few weeks, I have not been using willpower to win these internal battles. It might look like willpower, but it’s not. What I’ve been doing is keeping my goals in the forefront of my mind and treating all impulses that get in the way as an enemy attack. It’s not willpower to refuse to go over to my enemy camp.

It’s been working, too. For me, I mean. I don’t know how well this would work for anyone else.

[1] If you’re thinking of “parts of my brain” in an anatomical sense, you’re being too literal. I’m talking about competing impulses.

Randomness for 6/27

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1) If you’ve played Minecraft, this will crack you up. Assuming you have a soul. Non-Minecraft players might also be amused. Video.

2) A picture book you hope you’ll never have to give to a little kid in your life.

3) Nessie is real, the KKK were good guys, apartheid was neutral, and other lessons taught in tax-payer funded “Christian” schoolbooks.

4) What filesharing studies really say.

5) R-rated movies re-imagined as children’s books.

6) I’ve never worn a hoodie, but I’d be tempted by this, no matter how stupid I’d look.

7) Investors sue movie producers for fraud over “One of the Greatest Box Office Flops of All Time”

Randomness for 6/20

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1) 25 Ways to Tie a Scarf in 4.5 Minutes. Whether you care about scarves or not, it’s an entertaining video.

2) The Stephen King story universe flow chart.

3) Creepy married actor hits on model during flight. She tweets about it, bringing him more fame than he might have wanted.

4) I guess if you’ve already spent the money on the photos, you might as well do this. Er, #35 is “special.”

5) Starbucks name fail.

6) Political attack ads in Westeros.

7) The ten most ridiculous rules in first ed. D&D. I see that no one will acknowledge the elephant in the room: armor class. via Mike Cole

State of the self, (not actually a weight loss post)

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So, you guys know I’ve been working on shedding the pounds, yes? I’ve always been a big guy (When I was a teenager I had a 44″ chest, and it wasn’t muscle or fat–it was all rib cage) so I’ve always tended toward the heavy side of the bell curve. Then I got fat for real and reached, at one point, 304 lbs. Cut for triggery talk of weight loss and gross picture of cholinergic urticaria. Continue reading