ecreegan

New Weight Watchers Plan

Thu, 07 Dec 2017 02:16:04 GMT

I tend to obsess about diet when I'm dieting. Which, now that I think of it, is probably part of why it's hard for me to maintain; I don't know how to control my food intake a *little*. Anyway, this is probably boring.....

Anyway. I'm doing Weight Watchers; have been since March. They've just changed the plan out from under me, still calling it Smart Points, but it used to be Smart Points : Beyond the Scale and is now Smart Points : Freestyle (Smart Points : Flex in the UK, and I think some other countries have yet other names.)

Smart Points : Beyond the Scale gave you X (minimum 30) daily points. Foods had a point cost, which was 0 for almost all fruits and vegetables to encourage you to eat them. Every day you spent 30 points, and it was use it or lose it. You also had Y (minimum 28) weekly points, and once you'd spent your daily points you used up your weekly points. (There are also "fit points" which you could set yourself up to eat, but I never bothered with them.) Finally, it had the notion of a "healthy day" in which you ate at least your daily points -3 but no more than your daily points +7.

Smart Points : Freestyle drastically enlarges the category of zero-point foods, mostly by adding low-calorie-density protein: all fish, eggs ("hen eggs"), chicken breast, turkey breast, all legumes, and fat-free plain yogurt (including Greek yogurt.) It also removed corn, peas, and lima beans from the handful of vegetables that have points. To compensate for this, they reduced daily points by 1/4. Weekly points aren't reduced, and there's a new wrinkle: you can now bank up to 4 daily points into your weekly points total. So Monday and Tuesday I ate only my daily points -5, and each day I added 4 points to my available weekly points. If I wanted a big splurge on Sunday, I could have up to 52 (28 + 6 * 4) points available for it. SP: Freestyle did retain the notion of a healthy day, but it's now your daily points -10 through your daily points +5.

I'm dubious about the notion of your points successfully measuring whether or not you've had enough to eat with lentils, eggs, chicken breast, yogurt, vegetables, fruit, fish, shellfish, and turkey breast all counting 0 points. It wouldn't be difficult to come up with healthy meals and snacks that get you enough calories and the right nutrients for absolutely no points. That said, there are a lot of foods I like a lot which cost points, so it's not as if I'd ever have a hard time technically having a healthy day for that reason. (Well, not at home. May get complicated when I travel. At home I have a container of individually-wrapped chocolates which I dip into for 2 points each, and I can go through a lot of points very easily and quickly.)

It remains to be seen how well I'll lose on the system, but it feels easier than SP: BtS. There are fewer things to measure and count and more things I just track by summarizing and noting the points spent. It's shifted what I eat slightly, but it remains to be seen whether I shift back or shift again or stay this way. (Eggbeaters -> eggs, breakfast toast -> breakfast black beans, ground 93% fat free turkey -> ground turkey breast.) I'll probably shift again to add more fish to my diet, especially at lunch.

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General Life Update

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 04:42:26 GMT

Robert is in third grade. Thomas would be in pre-K but he's going to unofficial pre-K in his home day care instead. He's already academically ready for kindergarten so we're perfectly happy with this. (Okay, it would be nice if our wonderful neighbor who runs a home day care got the half-day breaks, but Thomas is waitlisted everywhere along with her foster care / adopted daughter / adoption in progress / not sure the status daughter, so it's not as if that changes anything.)

Robert is doing okay in school. He's acting up less in class as he gets older, but now we're working on he has to do ALL the work. He's not doing okay in Sunday School, but they assure me he's so much better.

Mmm. I should resume feeding the kids multivitamins. We ran out of multivitamins and I stopped and we're no longer out of multivitamins and I haven't restarted.

I took the kids to the Museum of Natural History in February, in advance of my sister visiting and all of us going to see the dinosaurs. (We consulted and saved my boys' first experience of the dinosaurs and the big blue whale until her arrival. But the museum membership is about two visits, so I figured I'd get my money's worth of buying a membership, and buying it before her arrival meant we could take the boys there when it was too cold to play outside.) Anyway, with the dinosaurs off limits, then-second-grade Robert wanted to see the space stuff. I was horrified at what the Mars scale said -- oh, I was wearing a backpack and there was stuff in it, but I was still over 200 pounds. So that, and shooting pains in my feet when I first stood up (it was tolerable after a few steps), motivated me to start dieting, and I joined Weight Watchers (online only) in March. I've lost around ... well, our scale was broken when we started, but I was about 200 when I joined Weight Watchers and I was about 160 prior to Thanksgiving, when I gave myself 48 hours off. My feet are SO MUCH HAPPIER.

Kaz lost a little weight with me at first but has gained it all back and then some. He has an injured knee, which is functional but painful; the operation helped but was a disappointment, because it looked like it was going to help a *lot* and then it didn't heal quite right. He's got a second round of physical therapy authorized, which he says is helping. Part of the weight problem is that his stomach is acting up and coca-cola helps it a lot. I've just earlier tonight mixed up two tea infusers with herbal teas for stomachaches; we'll see if either helps, and if either is palatable without so much honey that they're as bad as the coca-cola.

I hadn't been to see a doctor for non-emergent stuff (that is, went when I needed something for a sinus infection) in years, and the eyedoctor / optometrist had been urging me for years to go see an ophthalmologist about my double vision and I'd been coping with the double vision (one eye is dominant so it wasn't as crippling as it sounds.) After losing a chunk of weight I finally went to a regular physical and the doctor said much the same, with more emphasis. The ophthalmologist referred me to an eye muscle specialist, who operated. I was expecting the operation to help. I was not expecting it to simply work -- she'd cautioned me that both overcorrections and undercorrections were possible, with undercorrections more likely in my case. But I went to see her the next day and she took the eyepatch off and I had a brief moment of double vision and then things snapped into focus and I couldn't even choose to see double. Closed my eyes and repeated the process, until after a few times my eyes snapped into focus correctly the first time (well, not instantly, but a normal unfocused / focused, without a double vision step.) I go back to work tomorrow.

Next week I have a lunchtime appointment with a podiatrist, hopefully to make me an insert. It's worth doing but I'm not too concerned about it -- losing 40+ pounds has made such a difference that if it doesn't get any better I'm still happy. He said the remaining problems are almost certainly arthritis in my high arches (specifically the right foot) but that he needed an X-ray to confirm before he could do anything. The X-ray did confirm, but I haven't seen him since; just got around to making the appointment when I was home from work recovering from surgery (not that I actually needed much recovery but the surgeon wanted me to rest and recover, and since I took vacation time to do it I don't have to concern myself with whether or not I was actually sick enough to justify all the time off.) Meanwhile, I've been wearing my Renaissance garb 2-button shoes a lot. The sole doesn't have arch support at all, but the leather molds around my food so it gives me slight arch support *exactly* where my arch is.

Let's see ... life recently has been work, reading, kids, family, designing a Marvel comics 1980s variation (a little fan fiction and a lot of plotlines for fan fiction), and diet.

Work goes okay.

The reading is 65% science fiction / fantasy, 10% nonfiction, 5% romance, 20% RPG game books. All estimations, of course. Everything either in mobipocket / Kindle for the Kindle or PDF (the game books) for reading on the computer. Mmm. I really should do daily Bible readings.

The Marvel comics 1980s variation is to pick a point (roughly December 1983), do an alternative to Secret Wars, and break continuity there. Things before that point are pretty much unchanged, things after that point are ... well, I've only reached 1986 and I'm only making significant changes to X-Men and New Mutants, but after the break point the old continuity has no inertia; if I have something I think works better or even something I think works as well that I prefer, I change it. (Marvel retains all rights, this is only for my personal entertainment, etc.) It's an interesting intellectual exercise, but does have a "too many moving parts" problem.

Diet -- well, I tend to obsess about my diet when I diet at all. Mind, I don't track very often, but I do think about things I eat or don't eat in Weight Watchers points (which often about to knowing I don't have a clue.) I've pretty well upended my diet: new recipes when I cook, different snacks, different choices of meals when I order out. Not everything is different, but most is, and pretty much all the old food I still eat I eat less (candy, pizza) or more (fruit) of now. I enjoy my food every bit as much now as I did a year ago, but there is a LOT of saying no to things I want and this version is significantly more work. I've joined some unofficial Weight Watchers related facebook groups, so I've been reading about the changes in the UK. Roughly, they reduce your food point allowance by 1/4 and make many forms of ultra-lean protein (beans, lentils, turkey and chicken breast, turkey breast, hen eggs, fish, nonfat plain yogurt, tofu, "quorn") cost 0 points the way (almost all) fruits and vegetables already do. Quorn turns out to be a UK meat substitute; I'm curious whether tempeh and/or seitan will be 0-point when they bring the same plan to the US food choices. On the whole, I'm looking forward to the change. I'm going to have to massage some food choices, but not counting points for some actually very filling stuff sounds great.

What else ... in five pounds I'm going to start attending meetings. I need to lose ten pounds *after* attending meetings to make lifetime and stop paying money. More importantly, I want the help maintaining the weight loss. I went down to a healthy weight before getting married and pregnant. Not really beating myself up for gaining a chunk of weight with the pregnancy, but it does mean I've never succeeded in *keeping* the weight off. The work doesn't end when I've lost enough pounds; the work changes to a harder-for-me-I-think phase.

I just had a lovely Thanksgiving; it was wonderful to see so many old family friends and talk to adults besides the handful I socialize with about things other than work. I missed my sister Susan and the Williams boys who couldn't come and especially the people in the Thanksgiving crowd who've died, but it was great as it was. I got two expressions of regrets that I didn't make the carrots that I'd made last year (I didn't make anything for Thanksgiving; I did the plurality of cleanup work Thursday night instead), so I guess those are a tradition now and need to appear next year and thereafter as long as they're eaten.

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Lentil Soup

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 03:32:30 GMT

1 cup black lentils
1/2 cup red lentils
1 set of celery stalks (1 head of celery)
2 carrots
1 onion
2 Tbsp cumin
1 Tbsp paprika
1 Tbsp italian seasoning
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp thyme
6 cups chicken broth
water as needed (I think I used 6 cups?)

Rinse the lentils, put them in the chicken broth, cook.

While the lentils are cooking, slice the vegetables and brown the onions.

Put the vegetables in when the red lentils have dissolved. Add more or less water depending on how much broth you want. Cook until the vegetables are at the desired consistency.

I change around the vegetables and spices and often use green lentils. Using the red lentils adds lentil flavor to the broth.

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Letting my LJ account drop

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 00:50:04 GMT

Well, rather than sign a contract written in a language I can't read, I'll just let my livejournal account (ebartley) go. I duplicated it here years ago, and I while I wasn't careful about always posting from here and letting it be duplicated, I hadn't been posting much there. I think all I had done in years was occasional recipes, and I have the ones I care about collected elsewhere.

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PBEM Game Design Challenge and Thoughts on It

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:53:17 GMT

I've been having some thoughts about PBEM and journaling game theory. One of my favorite people to game with has enough times where she can't game that I'm very hesitant to suggest she join games, or suggest that third parties join any two-person games we're playing. And I suspect everyone who has played any sort of asynchronous game has had a problem with someone whose timing didn't match theirs -- either feeling pressured to respond more often than was comfortable, or they feeling held back in starting other threads because this one wasn't ending.

So the resulting game design challenge is: come up with a game setting where it is impossible for one player to bog down another. Scene A and scene B can each take as long as they take in real life, and in the game world once they're wrapped the players can decide which happened first or if they happened simultaneously (the latter a necessary possibility if what's happening in one scene could theoretically affect the other.)

The first setting which occurs to me is a game where the characters are artificial intelligences capable of forking themselves and merging again. AI Alpha needs to be in two space stations simultaneously, so it copies itself into Alpha-1 and Alpha-2. Alpha-0 stays home. Alpha-1 and Alpha-2 travel to the appropriate space stations and return home; Alpha-0 does a merge so that it has all three sets of memories (staying home and going to both space stations) so that Alpha-0, Alpha-1, and Alpha-2 are identical, then deletes the others.

Note that with virtual reality, this setting isn't restricted to high technology: the AIs could be programmed to think of themselves as mages in a fantasy world, telepaths in any setting, whatever -- and the underlying virtual reality could support the illusion. Given players comfortable with the underlying setting, though, you could do pretty much anything in pretty much any style (i.e. moderated or GM'd, consensual or roll-based, whatever.) However, if the underlying reality is stipulated as AI and virtual reality, the game won't work unless the players are comfortable with thinking in terms of AIs, virtual reality, forking, merging, et cetera.

There are other sorts of characters which could logically be in two places at once -- gods in some mythologies, perhaps powerful telepaths, people with bilocation as a freak talent.

I can easily see a game where the characters are all gods, perhaps from the same pantheon, perhaps from rival pantheons, perhaps some of each. My instinct says the natural gaming style would be consensual results for most interactions -- that is, I don't think it would be wise for the game mechanics to decide when Athena or Ares win a fight with each other, but either win fights with Aphrodite every time, and either loses fights with Zeus every time. You could do GM'd if you can find plots for gods that aren't basically rivalries with each other. Moderated with a focus on character-character interaction and plots secondary and largely player-driven wound be easier.

A game where the gods are characters would default to being timebound to Earth - that is, Athena might be in three places at once, but "at once" would always correspond to a specific date and time. You could tack on something in the way of uncontrolled or semi-controlled time travel, or stipulate that when the gods separate pieces of themselves they don't fully control when the pieces rejoin, to work around that and decrease the need for scenes to happen in chronological order.

A game where all players are telepaths cloning their minds is harder. Doable, I think, but -- do you set it on the astral plane and have no real world to start with? (If so, you'd need players that are very patient with getting the game started, or lots of players, or both.) Do you set it on Earth with the accompanying increased timebinding ... perhaps with the limitation that you duplicate your mind and it travels through astral space to get elsewhere on Earth, and the duplicate may have a hard time finding its way home and rejoining you? I think that could work, if the players are all interested in playing telepaths.

A game where everyone has the ability to bilocate I'm not really sure what to do with. Maybe include in the bilocation ability the ability to remerge with the limitation that if you use that to teleport home you might remerge with your other self right now, or a month from now, or a year from now. Tack on limited communication (low tech level, or multiple dimensions, or separate solar systems united by the bilocation, or whatever) and you can easily meet the challenge; the potential genres could be anything, and so could the game styles.

All of the above ideas make the simultaneous threads work by limiting the character types. They could be interesting games ... but is it possible to make the challenge work by make the simultaneity a property of the setting rather than the characters?

In order to make a setting where everything can happen in any order, we need to break chronological time. This could be any universe which had a timequake that wasn't resolved, but I think things work best if this is a dream world. In an actual physical world things happening out of sequence prompt too many other questions which need to be answered in order to help suspend disbelief. In a dream world, this could be the normal state of things: two people dream about you simultaneously, and you're in two places at once; one dream ends and another begins, so A and B happen simultaneously, then D and Q, then C and F.

That said, I think an asynchronous game set in a dream world would work better if the dream world were broken. If you break the dream world, perhaps the characters aren't (or don't have to be) natural inhabitants of the dream world. You could design a game where the characters are all from the real world; all from any fictional world; full panfandom with characters from anywhere with or without fourth-walling privileges; or near-full panfandom with a preferred genre (that is, characters can be drawn from anywhere because reality has broken down and is recreating things from elsewhere or dragging them here when dreams intersect, but the dream world in question is being dream up by dreamers from one world in particular and that dominates the way the world works, both in terms of genre and in terms of the way NPC characters and abilities work (to take an extreme example, many worlds have faeries or elves, but they're very different from world to world; PC faeries could be from anywhere and be anything, but NPC faeries would be from the dominant world.)

Anybody have any thoughts on any of the above possibilities? Other possibilities to suggest?

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D&D 3rd, 4th editions

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:56:29 GMT

I've been having some thoughts about D&D 5th edition, and D&D 3rd and 4th editions as well.

When D&D 3.0 came out, I thought it was great fun and a great improvement. It wasn't actually my preferred style of RPG - I like more freeform and fewer crunchy bits - but it made sense, it was recognizably D&D, it had some support for non-combat activities in the feats and skills system and occasionally in the class abilities, and it was a distinct and clear improvement. All in all, it was a better system than I was expecting, and I really liked the way they managed to keep classes but not limit you to classes.

Furthermore, while old adventures would require a lot of conversion and old settings would require some, they could be converted, complete with characters. Take the old character classes, pick new classes for cross-class characters, pick skills and feats. I still love Planescape and Spelljammer from 2nd edition and I've never even played them, so I thought this was a plus. For settings, were I GMing, I'd even be willing to improvise a conversion -- have some stock characters in case of combat, but combat shouldn't happen that often, make notes as to skills you select for the NPCs as you go along, and play.

So for D&D 3.0, I had some discretionary income, and I went out and I bought a whole bunch of books.

When D&D 3.5 came out, it felt like the publisher was trying to turn a whole lot of errata into a new edition. Yes, it was better. But it didn't feel like D&D 3.5, more like D&D 3.1, and while I did buy the new edition I resented doing so. Still, the SRD was available and the product was an improvement, so I didn't resent it much. It was just a monetary complaint; D&D 3.5 had all the virtues of D&D 3.0 and slightly fewer flaws.

Then oodles of supplements came out for 3.5. The number of supplements exceeded what I wanted to spend on buying role-playing games - especially for one system that wasn't even my favorite - so I picked and chose what to buy. I had a friend who bought almost all of them, at least one more who bought more than I did, I could afford the ones I really wanted -- that was fine. I was unhappy about the power creep, however: most of the prestige classes seemed to be clearly better than the basic classes, and the later supplements seemed to have some unbalanced one. Still, there were no problems that couldn't be solved by a DM saying no as needed, and a lot of the material was cool. I was fine with it.

Then D&D 4 came out. My reaction at the time as "that's interesting, and it's different" and I bought the core rulebooks. I only bought a couple of supplements, though, and even though I'm in a campaign I haven't replaced my missing-somewhere copy of of the Player's Handbook.

I actually like D&D 4th edition and in many respects think it's a superior product to D&D 3, even D&D 3.5. It's more streamlined, better balanced, and so on. The skill challenges give explicit support for noncombat activities, and the skills system sees to it that everyone will have some noncombat skills.

However, in many respects D&D 4th is a streamlined wargaming system with role-playing rules. Imagine playing D&D 3rd without a map. It's a problem - you have to figure out who is affected by which spells, whether there are clusters of enemies for some feats, flanking bonuses, and the like. But it's not impossible. The GM can figure out the rough positions of the monsters, the players can make assumptions, the GM can let the players do a certain amount of scene-setting, and so on.

Now imagine playing D&D 4th without a map. Well, it's not impossible, because you can do pretty much anything without a map if you ignore enough rules, but all the above difficulties apply, and more. The whole mechanic of sliding and shifting becomes either unusable or subject to whim. Various race and class specific abilities (e.g. the elf's ability to ignore difficult terrain, the wizard ability which pushes back nearby enemies, etc.) are less effective or far less objective.

It's not that D&D 4th isn't at least as good as D&D 3rd in its chosen niche of combat-with-map and simple noncombat challenges. I think it's better in both respects. But D&D 3rd is better on the occasions you want to keep playing when you need to fill the table with dinner. The skill challenges of D&D 4th can easily be imported into D&D 3rd as soon as you see them, so that's more or less a wash.

Also, I think the lack of backwards compatibility hurt D&D 4th than it looked like at the time. Not only were all the recent 3rd edition purchases totally incompatible with the new edition, but the myriad D&D 2nd edition products were now incompatible instead of semi-compatible. I was expecting it, and my 3rd edition game (thank you for a wonderful game, crash_mccormick) had ended, so I wasn't upset, and I don't think it influenced my decision to buy only a few supplements. But I can certainly see why people who were in a game and having issues with the rules might go to Pathfinder for a few fixes rather than go to D&D 4th for a totally different game.

Also, if the new system isn't compatible with old material, why would you purchase and play D&D 4th edition instead of Pathfinder, another of the D&D 3rd edition variants, or any one of the many other role-playing games out there? Name recognition matters, and so do economies of scale, but the D&D 3rd edition had those too. And the D&D 3rd edition variants (Pathfinder, etc.) are mostly compatible with the old D&D 3rd edition books and each other and semi-compatible with the wealth of D&D 2nd edition books.

So Hasbro put itself in a position where its legacy materials helped its competitors' products more than they helped D&D 4th edition. No wonder Pathfinder became a major rival to D&D 4th edition.

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Just migrated my account to dreamwidth

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 17:01:17 GMT

Just migrated my account to dreamwidth (as ecreegan.) Cross-posting including comments for now.

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