http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-setting-now-on-kotaku/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18609

Hey there! Wanted to comment on “Lowest Difficulty Setting” but missed before I closed up the comments? You’re in luck! Kotaku has reprinted the post, and their comments are open! Fire away!

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/journey-to-planet-joco-at-tor-com/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18606

Over at Tor.com, I’m part of a two-week festival of all things Jonathan Coulton, in a feature called “Journey to Planet Joco.” JoCo is starting a tour starting on June 1, and so I sat down to talk with him about those songs of his with a science fictional bent to them, a journey that culminates in a very special event: On May 29, we will debut a brand new song by Coulton. And this new song? It’s awesome (yes, I’ve heard it).

The first installment is up now, in which we talk about songwriting, story telling, and science fiction. You can hear an audio version of our interview or read a transcription. We’ll be talking every day through May 29th. Check it out and tell your friends. It’s as much fun as you can have with your ears.

Anything else I had to say about the Criminal Minds season finale is subsumed in ZOMG Reid knitted it himself!

He makes a pretty good Four.

Also, I'm glad they did the Emily thing the way they did the Emily thing; it's good to see Will but he should have known better; I'm pretty sure that UNSUB plan fails on usual the Evil Mastermind overclever subroutine of relying on a coincidence they could not have known about in advance; I bet that's Kevin's cousin; Penelope needs a Stern Talking To of the variety she just gave Morgan a few weeks back; I'm still the only person in this fandom who likes Strauss, but dammit I still like Strauss; and FASTER JJ KILL KILL!

Discussion in comments of parallels between JJ in Hit/Run and Hotch in 100 is open for business.

The following contains discussion of fitness, health, and weight issues. If that is triggery for you, please page down now!

Ob. Disclaimer: I absolutely support anyone's right to live in their body as they choose, at any size they find comfortable. This is entirely about me, and my efforts to reclaim my health and strength after half a decade of abusing and neglecting my poor body.

---

Well, I'm wearing a pair of jeans that, based on the brand and cut, must date back to 1987 or so.

They're Chic, size 14 tall, and in high school they would have been baggy on me. Now, they fit loosely except for the waist, which is a bit snug--but then, that happened when I was sixteen, too, though the jeans were size 11 then. This is because eighties jeans were cut to fit absolutely nobody except a young Brooke Shields. They do, however, still make my ass look fantastic, a characteristic generally not shared by modern lower-rise jeans, which make nobody's ass look good. Not mine, not yours. Possibly Jessica Simpson's.

But they do let one bend at the middle without pinching one's ribcage on the waistband, which I suppose is a win.

I guess that means I am officially back in my high school clothes, generously speaking. As I also have a black bat-winged sheath dress from Chico's that I loved in high school, and have been hanging on to for sentimental reasons. I might dust it off for an eighties party later this year. If only I had some slouchy elf boots.

I suspect I will save the jeans for eighties nights at goth clubs. I think I still have one pair of slouchy socks hoarded away somewhere... ;-)

This is all prelude to saying that I'm hovering somewhere around 187, and have been for about a month now with the usual ups and downs--but I'm obviously building muscle, because I seem to be shrinking. At one point a month or so ago I noticed I had obliques, there under the slack middle-aged tummy. This week, I noticed the top set of ab muscles. Also, my thighs are no longer getting in my way during most of yoga--that stopped after scott_lynch and I walked somewhere around 40 miles in three days of NYC. I can do Hero's Pose and Lightning Pose without cheating now, and my body doesn't actually interfere with my ability to do a lunge anymore.

It's still getting in the way of twists, and my biceps interfere with Eagle Pose, but that's not new. I'm a solid girl.

I can also wear most of my beloved old corp-goth work clothes again, justifying my hoarding tendencies. Two suits are a bit tight, but they were always on the skinny end of the rack. I had to move the buttons back on a green suit I love, that I had expanded a bit when I was gaining weight. It's a size 12.

I am facing the surprising possibility of shrinking out of my wardrobe again. In any case, look for a much better-dressed Bear at conventions this summer, since I love these clothes and don't have a dayjob to wear them to anymore.

Curiously, I'm about 17 pounds heavier than the last time I fit in these clothes, which tells us about the power of rock-climbing. Muscle is heavy!

My current weight goal is somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 pounds. Which should make the same size, roughly, as when I was in high school and weighed 150-ish. I was on track and field then, and at my most muscular before now, but I'm pretty sure my upper body now dwarfs what I had then. (Shoulders! They're awesome!) Also, um. Boobs. Some cup sizes have come to roost since then. Ahem.

So I'm less than thirty pounds from my goal, which is very pleasant. My body is behaving as it should; everything physical is so much easier than it was in 2004, when I couldn't walk a half-mile without agonizing pain (now I can run five 12-minute miles back to back); and I'm enjoying the reduction in back and joint pain and the ability to sleep comfortably on my side or back again without feeling like my own belly is crushing me.

I seem to be part of a coterie of SFF writers and fans on the "get healthy the old-fashioned way; move more and eat less crap" bandwagon, which pleases me. (personally, I have been following the efforts of Scalzi, Doctorow, Lynch, Sykes, Downum, Silverstein, Connolly, Buckell, and I'm sure a few others whose names are eluding me because it's time for lunch.) It pleases me because I'd like to see a lot of these people around for a damned long time.

I'm also noticing changes in appetite, which tell me my body is adapting to its new lower caloric demands. Two whole pieces of fruit is too much to eat with lunch now; I am contented with half of each (plus some protein and vegetables and brown carbs, of course). (I eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, about ten servings most days; I've finally figured out how to reach my RDA minimum of potassium, and it goes like this: a cup of fortified cereal in the morning (Special K protein plus, since I can't find Total Protein around here anymore), half an orange, a small banana, eight ounces of green coconut water, and half a sweet potato. Some strawberries or mango don't hurt either, or some beans.))

For those who are curious about how I did it (my doctor was, and she laughed out loud when I said, "Counting calories, restricting sweets and saturated fat, and getting off my ass!" She then replied, "So doing all the boring shit we tell people to do, huh?"), here's my plan, fondly called The Discipline:

It's a refined version of the Hacker Diet, which relies on good old thermodynamics to make things happen. I'm keeping my caloric intake around 1700-1900 calories a day, exercising for about an hour a day on average, drinking lots of water and not too much caffeine, avoiding refined carbs (mostly: I get 100-200 calories of "treat" a day, which could be a glass of wine or a beer, or a brownie, or... PRO TIP: Guinness is lower in calories than most "lite" beers, and tastes a fuckload better. Now you know.), eating roughly twice as many vegetables as the FDA suggests, and trying to keep my protein intake around 20% and my fat intake around 25%--and also trying to keep my protein intake above 100g a day without too much reliance on red meat, or meat at all. (I do use protein supplements--whey and soy, mostly.) I eat a lot of high-protein dairy (skyr!) and I try to limit myself to 100-200 calories a day from refined sugar, which is roughly 20-40 grams. Or, well, half a can of non-diet Coke.

Managing sodium intake is a killer. But I'm working on it.

Sleeping eight hours a night also pisses me off, but it seems to be necessary. I got six last night, and noticed the difference on my run this morning--I kept having to walk up hills I normally cruise up in second or third gear.

I also exercise six days a week--usually two days of climbing (with a little yoga); three days of running; one day of yoga. I also try to get in some vigorous outdoor time when possible--kayaking, hiking, walking the dog. Walking to the store. Picking up my jump rope for five minutes on an otherwise sedentary day.

As I said, one of the most successful weeks of the Discipline recently was when Scott and I were on Manhattan, eating every goddamned thing in sight. But we also made a point of walking two-thirds the length of the island at least once (Riverside to Chinatown, with side trips), and we walked as much as time permitted, otherwise. I know it sounds like my fitness routine is crushing, and seven or eight years ago, it would have crushed me. (Hell, I had the pleasant experience recently of putting in a Rodney Yee video that, in 2006, I could do maybe fifteen minutes of, and having the full hour workout be only just pleasantly challenging.)

But remember, when I started out, I weighed 285-290 pounds and could not walk a half mile. One good habit builds on another, it turns out--and I find myself drinking more green and herbal tea because black tea doesn't taste good after the first mug, and I find myself not hungry for seconds unless the food is exceptionally good, and even then not always. There's not actually a lot of privation; I just want more of what's healthy for me.

It's okay if I have a measured ounce of cheese on my beans and rice, instead of as much as I can fit in the bowl. It still tastes just as good! Better, since it's as easy to afford small quantities of really delicious food as it is large quantities of sort of icky food. And far more satisfying.

Who knew?

Which is so different from all my old pathological ways of dealing with food and drink that it's a little croggling.

Most of this, of course, is just basic health maintenance stuff, and not too hard once you get the hang of it. And it's not like I don't give myself days off: I will in fact have two or three drinks on a night out, for example. I'm fully planning on onion rings after archery tonight when I get dinner with the Thursday Night Shooters.

Just... not too damned often. And budget for it.

It's not the extremes that set one's level of health; it's the baseline.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

That was the afternoon I started teaching Colin to play the guitar.

It was more or less a dare. “I can’t play the guitar,” he claimed.

“Sure you can,” I argued back, and that led to me teaching him.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

After reading A Christmas Carol, I still had that great hulking book sitting there staring at me, so I went after it again and read the other novel I was still missing, Great Expectations.  This one is a more typical Dickens in that it starts small, then gains enormous scope when the characters pop up in London.  Less ambitious than David Copperfield, I still enjoyed it quite a bit, even though I found it enormously predictable (despite having a more ambiguous ending than his other neatly wrapped up works).

And this one, read from that volume, definitely gave me a sense of achievement, if only because of the weight of the book itself!

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/instagram_versus_facebook/

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/786/

The Facebook IPO happens tomorrow, and I have a question for my readers: If you use Facebook, are you still spending as much time on it as you did last year?

I was talking to a young Facebook user recently and asked if her new obsession with Instagram had come at the cost of Facebook time. Her answer was yes, and I got the sense that Facebook was for old people and Instagram was for the young. Ouch.

Instagram is a brilliant business concept. It strips out the best part of Facebook (Hey, look at my photo, friends!) and then makes improvements on that feature (Hey, look at my sepia-toned photos, friends!). In addition to besting the best part of Facebook, Instagram also improved on the worst part of Facebook: sketchy privacy. While a parent might ban a kid from Facebook for privacy reasons, Instagram is relatively less of a privacy issue. The keyword here is "relatively," since either service lets you post dumb comments and incriminating photos of yourself.

It's no wonder Facebook threw a billion dollars at Instagram, apparently to kill the competition by absorption. If I were Zuckerberg, and I noticed young people migrating from Facebook to Instagram just as I prepared for my IPO, I'd spend a billion dollars to make the problem go away too. I wonder if Instagram would have sold for something closer to $100 million if Facebook had already done its IPO. Timing is everything.

Readers of this blog, are you using Facebook less this year than you did last year?

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-setting-follow-up/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18603

It’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted the “Lowest Difficulty Setting” piece, and it’s been fun and interesting watching the Intarweebs basically explode over it, especially the subclass of Straight White Males who cannot abide the idea that their lives play out on a fundamentally lower difficulty setting than everyone else’s, and have spun themselves up in tight, angry circles because I dared to suggest that they do. Those dudes are cracking me up, and also making me a little sad.

There have been some general classes of statement/questions about the piece both on the site and elsewhere on the Internet, that I would like to address, so I’ll do that here. Understand I am paraphrasing the questions/statements. In no particular order:

1. I fundamentally disagree with every single thing you said!

That’s fine. It happens.

2. Your metaphor/analogy is good, except for [insert thing that commenter finds not good about the metaphor/analogy]

Well, yes. Metaphors are not perfect; it’s why they’re metaphors and not the thing the metaphor describes. Likewise analogies break down. I thought the “lowest difficulty setting” description worked well enough for what I wanted to say, but I don’t think it’s perfect. “Perfect” wasn’t what I was aiming for. And of course, if you don’t think it’s the right metaphor/analogy, that’s fine. Please, make a different and better one — the more ways we can make a general point to people who need to understand that general point, the better chance they will listen.

3. Your description should have put wealth/class as part of the difficulty setting.

Nope. Money and class are both hugely important and can definitely compensate for quite a lot, which I have of course noted in the entry itself. But they belong in the stats category because wealth and class are not an inherent part of one’s personal nature — and in the US particularly, part of our cultural sorting behavior — in the manner that race, gender and sexuality are (note “inherent” here does not necessarily mean “immutable,” but that’s a conversation I’m not going to go into great detail about right now). You can disagree, of course. But speaking as someone who has been at both the bottom and the top of the wealth and class spectrum here in the US, I think I have enough personal knowledge on the matter to say it belongs where I put it.

4.I’m a straight white male and my life isn’t easy! My life sucks! Your “lowest difficulty setting” doesn’t account for that!

That’s actually fully accounted for in the entry. Go back and read it again.

This one’s a stand-in for all the complaints about the entry that come primarily either from not reading the entry, or not reading what was actually written in the entry in preference to a version of the entry that exists solely in that one person’s head, and which is not the entry I wrote. Please, gentlemen, read what is there, not what you think is there, or what you believe must be there because you know you already disagree with what I have to say, no matter what it is I am saying.

5. What about affirmative action (and/or other similar programs)? It just proves SWMs don’t have it easy anymore!

Asserting that programs designed to counteract decades of systematic discrimination are proof that Straight White Males are not operating on the lowest difficulty setting in the game of life is not the winning argument you apparently believe it is. I’ll let you try to figure out why that is on your own. Likewise, anecdotal examples of a straight white guy getting the short end of the stick in some manner do not suggest that, therefore, it’s hard out there for all straight white men all the time.

6. Your piece is racist and sexist.

This particular comment was lobbed at me primarily from aggrieved straight white males. Leaving aside entirely that the piece was neither, let me just say that I think it’s delightful that these straight white males are now engaged on issues of racism and sexism. It would be additionally delightful if they were engaged on issues of racism and sexism even when they did not feel it was being applied to them — say, for example,when it’s regarding people who historically have most often had to deal with racism and sexism (i.e., not white males). Keep at it, straight white males! You’re on the path now!

7. I feel this piece is an attack on straight white men.

You need to re-calibrate your definition of “attack,” then, because it’s depressingly (or hilariously) out of whack. Suggesting all straight white men should be defenstrated into a courtyard covered with spikes would be an attack. Noting that straight white men operate at the lowest difficulty setting in life is an observation.

Otherwise, in a general sense,  when people point out the things straight white men get on credit (or don’t have to deal with), the unspoken part of that is not “and that’s why we plan to burn all you bastards in a big screaming pile when the revolution comes,” it’s “hey, just so you know.” Because you should know. It’s not about blame, it’s about knowledge. Stop assuming it’s about blame. Paranoid and hypersensitive is no way to go through life.

8.  You did not lay out in exhaustive factual detail, with graphs and charts, your assertion that straight white men operate at the lowest difficulty setting in our culture.

Also generally lobbed at me by aggrieved straight white men. And indeed I did not. Also, when I write about tripping over my shoelaces and falling on my ass, I do not preface the comment with a comprehensive discussion of the theory of gravity. For two reasons: One, it’s not needed because for anyone but committed gravity-deniers, the theory of gravity is obvious and taken as read, and two, that’s not the focus of the entry. In the case of the “lowest difficulty setting” entry, I took what I see as the obvious advantages to being straight, white and male in our culture as read. One may of course argue with that assertion, and some did in the previous comment thread, but I have to say I’ve generally found those arguments to be less than compelling (see point six, above).

9. In your comment thread with the article, you censored people who disagreed with you.

I indeed malleted quite a few people in that comment thread. Most of them disagreed with me philosophically on the issue under discussion. They were also being assholes. They were malleted for the latter, not the former. Who gets to judge when someone’s being an asshole here? Why, I do. Because it’s my site. A quick look through the comment thread in question shows that quite a few people, who disagreed with my ideas to varying levels of strenuousness, had their comments posted unmolested. That’s because they were generally polite to others in the thread, did not lead with their asses, and their comments were not generally dripping with racism/sexism/condescension/stupidity. This is all covered in the comment policy, which is linked to on every page of the site.

Now, people may be upset that in addition to deleting people’s comments, I also mocked them when I deleted their comments. But, you know, when you show up on my site and decide to shit all over the carpet, I’m not going to be nice to you. Also, this.

10. I am never going to buy anything you write ever again.

I don’t care.

11. Not every straight white man thinks what you wrote is wrong.

Of course. Noting that some straight white men are having difficulty accepting the idea they operate on the lowest difficulty setting in life doesn’t mean that all straight white men do, or that any particular straight white men will experience said difficulties. Alternately, there are a lot of straight white men who think my premise is wrong to a greater or lesser extent, but who can express that disagreement cogently, and even forcefully, without additionally coming across as a five-year-old having a tantrum because he’s been told he has to share his toys. Straight white men, like any group, have all sorts of personalities.

12. You wrote the article and pointed out the straight white men live life on the lowest difficulty setting. Okay, fine. What do I/we do next?

Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it? What I’m doing is pointing out a thing. What you do with that thing is your decision.

That said, here’s what I do: recognize it, and work to make it so the more difficult settings in life becomes closer to the one I get to run through life on — by making those less difficult, mind you, not making mine more so.

Thanks to a donation from rix_scaedu there is now a new verse in "Uneasy Things."  Johan and Einar discuss the change in alliance.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/16/things-that-pretty-much-suck/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18600

My absence from the Internet was a bit longer than I had anticipated today, for one genuinely depressing reason: I left my travel bag in  the taxi that took me to my hotel from the airport, and that bag included my computer and some other stuff (including my car key). So my day was spent procuring alternate computing resources (say hello to my new cheap netbook) and generally being a bit pissed off.

Before you ask: I have no idea what cab it was that brought me in, its number or anything else. If anyone in the DC area can tell me which cab companies use black cabs (regular cars, not limos) I would be obliged. Otherwise, I’m pretty much stuck hoping the cabbie who drove me around remembers who I am or otherwise uses the various clues in the bag (the computer that has my name on it when one tries to log on, the books with my name on the cover, etc) to locate me. Whiile not assuming anything about my cabbie’s honesty, let’s just say I’m really expecting him to be a super sleuth, although I’d be happy to be wrong.

In any event: DC, I’m not feeling the love, I have to say. That is all.