Cliff Hanger

hell, I spent 60 hours on the first game alone...

That's really depressing. I'm fairly confident I'll be one of the 5%, but that's less because I'm "special" or "dedicated" than because so much of my initial weight gain in my 20s was the result of being on SSRIs. But for friends who are working just as hard as I and don't have the unfair advantage of "my metabolism was shot to shit for fifteen years and without that disruptive factor my equilibrium weight is lower" I worry. I know at least three people who have been working WAY harder than me and eating better than I do, who have gained strength at roughly the same rate as I have (which I am assuming is average for a clueless idiot looking at beginner workouts in a vacuum), without the attendant weight loss. It's a lottery and it sucks.

OS #3: Well, that was fairly final looking and pretty nuts.

Ah, sorry. Cardio isn't going away, it'll be a fifth day. I didn't include it because it isn't something I need help with (I've been doing it over a year now) and because it's going to keep happening at my complex and not the Gold's. I had been doing lower body Machine weights with 20m of cardio/upper body with 20m/just cardio, 40m or more twice a week, taking Friday and occasionally one other day off but the 15 min hike to the gym limits my actual workout time a little more strictly. So cardio will probably only be dedicated one day a week for the time being.

Finally had my first "proper" workout under the tutelage of my serious-lifter friend on Saturday. 30 squats (10 each at bar, then 50, then 55), 30 deadlifts (all at 55 because after the squats, I couldn't seem to get the bar off the ground without some weight to prop it up), and 3x20 on the leg press at 25lb (which felt ridiculous, since I'd been maxing out at 100 when I was only doing simple machine stuff at my complex weight room). It felt like the self-directed, beginner machine workout I found on bodybuilding.com was utterly invalidated in an hour, but not in an entirely bad way. Got the Gold's membership, and this weekend I've got lessons in chest, shoulders and arms for Saturday and Sunday. I'm theoretically repeating the leg day on Thursday, but since my quads STILL hurt when I get out of a chair over 72 hours later I may save that for Monday or Tuesday. Goal is that by the end of July I'll be able to do enough different things safely that I can take a four-day workout schedule whether anyone is able to go with me or not. Jesus, I'm going to have to buy actual protein stuff instead of just eating a plain Greek yogurt before gym time, aren't I?

Read the first six of Superior Spidey yesterday and today on my commute and lunch. Very enjoyable so far; Slott has a really good handle on Ock as a horrible person who's trying to do good things but doesn't really get how fucked his moral compass is. He has understandable (though not justifying) reasons for every thing he does (with the exception of Massacre, most of his really awful acts to this point are based on specific emotional triggers that make sense for the character, and Massacre is a purely pragmatic and understandable act even if it makes the average cape reader's skin crawl). He wants to protect the innocent, improve people's lives with inventions and get rich doing so, and get the girl. He's just doing those things from the paradigm of an imperious, petty narcissist and it's clear he's gonna break more eggs than he saves. Overall thoughts: 1) Anna Maria is awesome, and watching Otto come over to demolish her and be immediately won over with her brains, charm and chef skills was great fun. I'm glad she's sticking around in Peter's supporting cast, but I feel REALLY bad for her. 2) Boy, sometime between the first time I saw her in a backup strip during the Big Time/pre-Spider Island era and now, Screwball got a lot more evil. Phishing off her paying customers? That's just not cool. (And is that supposed to be Robert Power as the Jester, or someone else? Because while Screwball's social-media-whore MO kind of fits with the DD villain's, he was always too genuinely nasty to stoop to pantsing JJJ for hashtag fame.) 3) The Massacre story was in general just brutal and difficult to read, largely in a good way. That dawning moment of terror right at the end, for someone who's so cold it takes him a minute to realize he's legitimately scared of something before Otto cuts it off sent chills down my spine.

So, um, today was pretty emphatically not the right day for me to listen to a story that starts with the Doctor so crushed and desperate for any sign of hope in the universe that he literally tries to get to the End of Time 'to see how it all works out', I think "Dark Eyes" is going back on the shelf for now and I'm going to listen to "Invaders from Mars" again instead.

Just when I swear I'm not going back until Hank Pym goes live in a year...

I've been playing enough of NFSMW the past week on both systems that I'm pretty sure I'd buy the complete DLC pack if it were cross-buy. But I can't see buying it JUST for PS3 or Vita, and I am sure as shit not shelling out $60 to unlock it on both sides.

I will be buying MKX on day one. I still remember being utterly shocked when I got my copy of 9 home and, after a weekend, realized that a fucking Mortal Kombat was the best new game I'd played all year. (LA Noire and others had eclipsed it by Christmas, but as of summer it was a strong contender for my GOTY.)

Finished Season 1 of Charlotte Pollard. Basically you get two space opera stories as bookends, with a horror story and a period piece in between, all tied together with the running theme of Charley trying to escape her "employment" as the Viyrans' organic liason. I'm still not entirely sold on the whole Viyran mythos introduced in the Sixth Doctor story "Patient Zero", and after "Blue Forgotten Planet" the way they go off the rails toward the end doesn't feel like a natural progression OR a cheat, it just feels like a thing that happens to raise the stakes. I enjoyed it well enough, particularly episode 3, "The Fall of the House of Pollard", but there's nothing about it to make it essential. And as before, the fact that they so carefully avoid mentioning the Doctor (beyond the vaguest, most lawyer-friendly fashion) or any races that appear outside the Viyran stories makes it feel like we're not just on the fringes anymore, but in a completely different universe. Catch it when it's on sale and you probably won't be disappointed, but I couldn't recommend paying $35 for it. Tomorrow I'll be listening to ep one of Dark Eyes; whether I continue through the serial or forcibly put on the brakes until I can afford the $200 or so to get the rest of the New Eight stories will depend on that first ep.

I was getting nervous as the episode went on, worrying there wouldn't be enough time to do the fight justice. When the fight actually arrived, it was pretty much pitch-perfect and I realized they could never have stretched it out longer than they gave it. There was no way to sustain the momentum. Our watch party FREAKED THE FUCK OUT generally when Clegane got up and stuck his thumbs in Oberyn's eyes, it was pretty great. (figure 35 people, 10 of whom had read the books) People were asking thereafter "what happens in a draw?", so I'm not sure if the intention was for Gregor to die or not; I kind of assumed he'd survived his wounds because he did in the book, but I'm not a good judge of...basically anything, especially visual. The different angle they took with Sansa was interesting, having her sign on to help Littlefinger because she's afraid of the alternative and tell everyone straight up who she is. I'm not sure where they go from here on that story, since Littlefinger's plan from the books seemed to rely on keeping Sansa in his pocket until Robin inevitably dies of something and only THEN revealing her as a suitable mate for Harry the Heir. Having shit from books 3, 4 AND 5 is getting confusing.

New Fallout and Mass Effect are the things I most want to hear about. If Sony hits the indie stuff as hard as last year, I expect to come away excited about some $10 and $20 games I've never heard of (just like last year), but as far as AAA games not launching the week after the conference are concerned, those are the only announcements anyone can make that will excite me.

So, does Jim Hammond belong to Fox because of the FF or Marvel Studios? Well, in the 70s someone having the rights to Hammond was enough to keep Johnny out of the New FF cartoon, but that's 35 years ago. So it's entirely possible but hard to say for sure. If they never use the name "Human Torch" and just do Jim Hammond, Android On Fire, they might survive.

He's playing Bill Foster.

On the bright side, it may not be the US list, and even if it is we're probably getting at least 2, possibly 3 AAA announcements at E3 for the full-year deal. Meanwhile, I'm not a big Pixeljunk Shooter fan (honestly, Eden is the only game in that series that I got much pleasure out of, and if it hadn't come out when I had JUST gotten my PS3 and only had MGS4, Bionic Commando Rearmed and GTAIV I might not have cared) but Dragon's Crown is something I have nearly bought every time it goes on sale and never quite gone through with, so that would make me very happy (Too bad it's not crossbuy.)

(Double-post so this will still show up if Matt looked at the prior one already) Actually, fuck that, no need to shell out money for decent-but-not-amazing stories. The minimally-spoilery version of Charley's general arc with the Sixth follows: EDITED: All edits are to add words and such that I left out in the first pass, because I was trying to figure out why my D key was typing Ns in Chrome but Ds in other windows.

At the very least, get Patient Zero and BFP. The other four are enjoyable (and "Brotherhood of the Daleks" is maybe the most utterly insane Dalek story not written by RTD) but those two specifically set up Charley's post-Doctor status quo with the Viyrans. There's one in between those two, but it's relatively skippable. (Shame you missed out on the $5 sale the day the Charlotte box came out, that's when I picked them up. Did I post about that here? I forget.) I'll be listening to the rest of the episodes at work this week, so I'll mention if shit gets really good or goes off the rails heavily, and whether they fill in any more of the gaps for Charley's backstory. After that, much as I want to get New 8th season 2 I think I'm more likely to circle back and do more First 50 since they're so damned cheap; I've got about half the Sixes now but only two each from Five and Seven.

Listened to the first Charlotte Pollard solo story today. Decent little space opera story about an operative trying to slip her leash, but honestly by the end of the Sixth Doctor stories she's evolved enough since her days with Eight that, along with the fact that they've moved away from anything associated with traditional Doctor Who (no races not exclusive to BF, etc., probably at least in part for legal reasons if they ever need to divorce her from continuity like Virgin did with Bernice for a while in the 90s), it doesn't always feel as familiar as it seems like it should. The Sixth Doctor stories are an absolute must, by the way; you'll be TOTALLY lost if you try to jump from "The Girl Who Wasn't There" or any other point that isn't "Blue Forgotten Planet." I can't really evaluate how a total BF newbie would come in; it feels like it would probably be easier for someone who's never "met" Charley than for someone who has but left off before BFP. The exposition felt like it covered most of the important stuff regarding her current relationships and tasks, but I already knew it all. All in all, it's okay. Glad I didn't wait til the price goes up on 5/31, though; $35 on MP3 is a little steep for the quantity provided (says the man who has been irrevocably spoiled by all the sales they ran from December to March, and has somehow managed to acquire the entire 8th Doctor Monthly Range run plus a half dozen others outside the $3 bin without paying over $5 for anything). It makes me fairly hesitant to jump on any of the other spinoffs, though, since a lot of those look very much like a character or two got created with the specific purpose of creating a tenuously-linked solo run. Charley at least had a good ten years worth of proper Doctor Who stories.

So my replacement PS4 came in on Saturday. It took three tries to turn it on, which of course wasn't a good sign, I set it up to download stuff and then left for about 3 hours. When I came home, it had turned off completely and wouldn't come back on. We are officially in "WTF?" territory here, and because my weekend schedule and work today wouldn't allow me to do so I get to call Sony *tomorrow* and try to get *another* replacement. But hey, I got my copy of Watch_Dogs today from Amazon!

Is uspect they're holding back in preparation for E3, whrn the headliner games turn over.

Every fiber of that being says I WOULD BUY THAT GAME, but then I remember that I'm the guy who can't read text without getting too close to the screen for a Wiimote to work. So, y'know, great idea, count me out.

I played 19 out of the 20 best games of the generation according to IGN, but I don't think I had as much fun with any of them as I did playing music that I don't normally listen to with plastic instruments. Am I crazy or did Microsoft miss the ball by not making sure there was a Rockband/Dance Central mashup with the launch of the Kinect. They could have had a much more diverse selection of music, and drunken dancing. Well, from their (and Harmonix's) POV, Dance Central was brand new when the Kinect launched. Trying to create an entirely new thing in Dance Central, then tacking it onto something that had recently gone from commercial juggernaut to relative failure in Rock Band would probably have seemed like unnecessary complications and needless risk from a dollars-invested POV. It feels like a great idea NOW, but in 2010 it was probably an unacceptable risk to the people allocating development budgets.

Looking forward to listening to "The Maltese Penguin" (the second Frobisher story, written by Shearman of course) tomorrow at work. Currently trying to decide whether I can justify $55 for season two of New Eight this month or whether to just say fuck it, plow ahead through Dark Eyes and come back to the BBC show when I have more cash in pocket.

FYI: per the Playstation Blog, this is your last week to 'purchase' Resogun as a freebie, as well as last year's E3 "headliner" games LBP Kart and Uncharted 3. If you expect to get a PS4 ever, go get Resogun from the PSN web store, you'll regret not doing so. I still haven't gotten to Uncharted 3 yet, so I can't comment on it; LBPK is...well, it's a kart game with a track builder. It's worth your $0, but I've never really latched onto LBP. I would expect XCOM to expire on June 10 as well to make room for next year's PS+ "headliners."