The Pink Pigtail Inn has a post a while back: Questing for Immersiveness in MMOs. Elnia argues that MMOs are not about immersing yourself in the story. The story is told in so many fragments and with so many interruptions that trying to immerse yourself into it would be an exercise in frustration. You may get immersed in the gameplay of WoW, but the story itself is far likelier to be enjoyed outside of the game.
Posts Tagged exercise
Couch to 5k Complete!
Jul 24
Finish Line from Philo Nordlund
I have been wanting to try this out for a while and this year I decided to actually do it. The thing that motivated me to get started is that I found myself short of breath after little things such as going up a flight of stairs. By running, I was hoping to increase my lung capacity and it seems to have worked out well.
I found that weeks 5 and 6 were some of the hardest weeks of the program as it moved from runs of 10 minutes or so to 20 and 25 minute runs. My ankles were sore in the last two weeks, but with the rest days in between they seem to have healed up nicely.
Robert Ullrey’s C25K podcasts were extremely helpful. The rythm gave me something to follow as I put one foot in front of the other. I found his vocal cues encouraging as well.
I’m lucky in that I have some lovely deserted country roads to run along, so I was able to run barefoot. It doesn’t get much more minimal than that for exercise equipment! 
I’m not sure where I’ll go from here. There is enough warm weather left that I could probably make it to 10k before winter if I keep going. I’m thinking of trying the Freeway to 10K program.
If you’re thinking of taking up running, give the Couch to 5k program a shot – it worked for me despite my lack of running experience.
Perfect Push Ups Workout Guide: 35+ Exercises shows a LOT of push up variations. Some of these are almost scary to look at – the level of fitness implied by these push ups is amazing. If you’re looking for a challenge at any level of fitness, there’s a push up here for you!
(via Unclutterer)
What difference does 0.45-percent make? On a daily basis, none. On a yearly basis, it’s a lot.
I was listening to Scientific American’s rebroadcast of their interview with Dr. Atul Gawande, Atul Gawande Redux. He describes sitting in with one of the doctors whose patients had an extraordinarily high success rate. The doctor broke down the numbers for his patient:
“So when you experiment you’re looking at the difference between a 99.95-per-cent chance of staying well and a 99.5-per-cent chance of staying well. Seems hardly any difference, right? On any given day, you have basically a one-hundred-per-cent chance of being well. But”—he paused and took a step toward me—“it is a big difference.” He chalked out the calculations. “Sum it up over a year, and it is the difference between an eighty-three-per-cent chance of making it through 2004 without getting sick and only a sixteen-per-cent chance.”
Not eating that bag of chips is not likely to make my weight change. Getting exercise does not change my feeling of physical well being. Being patient with my kids isn’t likely to change the way I relate to them. Putting aside an extra $5 doesn’t change my tax bracket. None of this stuff matters.
The tricky thing is that it doesn’t matter except in a 0.45-percent way. 0.45-percent change is easy to lose in the background noise of life, but it adds up. We’re not tuned to notice that we were healthy two days more this year than last year, or that we’re 1% lighter, more energetic, more compassionate, or wealthier.
For me, the thing that works best to keep me going on 0.45-percent improvements is recording that I’ve made that effort. The most difficult thing about 0.45-percent improvements is that because the change is small, I stop believing that it’s there at all.
The Trash Caps – Warriors
Feb 24
Assuming I remember to make a trash tanking set, knowing The Trash Caps for Warriors will be invaluable. Actually, making a trash tanking set would probably be a good exercise for me.
Enjoying Life
Feb 5
I ran across this story while searching for the strawberry story for an earlier post. The key idea of the story is:
Whatever you do you must enjoy, or you may not do it. No matter what it is, if you find that you are not enjoying it, you must stop right at that moment.
I have no idea how I would live such a life. It’s strange to even think that way. It is an interesting mental exercise. Then I have to wonder, why am I not enjoying everything I do? If I don’t enjoy it, why am I doing it?
The Chain Breaks
Dec 29
Well, I made it 201 days of doing about 20 minutes of dedicated exercise per day. I went from June 10 to December 27, 2008. What broke the chain was discouragement.
With the holidays here my regular routine has been broken and I haven’t been feeling up to doing much. Doing the hundred pushups has been very discouraging. I made it up to 60 pushups with a few snags but nothing serious. I’ve been stuck at sixty pushups for about a month now and I just can’t seem to make it past that. I did my exhaustion test yesterday and once again only hit 60. I kept putting off giving it another shot and woke up this morning realizing I’d only done about 10 minutes of exercise yesterday.
I plan to resume my daily exercise, I’m just not sure if I’m going to continue the hundred pushups program. Doing the pushups is starting to hurt a lot, which is not at all what I want from a fitness program. The lack of progress is frustrating. Maybe I’ll pause my hundred pushups for now, do another exercise program for a while, then think about coming back to it later.
Vacation’s Over
Nov 24
Well, my long-anticipated vacation is now over.
There seems to be something about taking a vacation that causes big chunks of money to disappear. I took Thursday off, and my motherboard decided to die Thursday night and take the CPU with it. I was trying out an exercise ball as a chair and I managed to roll it into a corner of my open computer case. BOOM! That’s the second giant ball I’ve managed to run into a sharp corner while sitting on it. One of my minor projects was replacing the toilet seat and I managed to crack the toilet bowl. That required a late evening purchase of a new toilet. My dad kept asking me when I could come back in to work to finish off some reports and I lost a day and a half of vacation to coming in and doing them. By this point I was ready to pull the blankets over my head and not touch anything for the rest of my vacation. Fortunately the rest of it went much more smoothly.
We went out for lunch with some friends on Monday, which was a lot of fun. We talked about WoW and other things and had a fine time. I was able to borrow my computer from work, so apart from having to install Wrath three times, my playtime wasn’t hugely affected. By the way, as Justin reminded me, you don’t need to do the whole install if you can access a previous install – just copy the files over and create your own shortcuts. Jaimie and I managed to get the toilet replaced with a minimum of bother. I figured out the cause of my Wrath malaise and I’m having a fun time leveling again. Getting the kids out the door and being able to stay home myself was satisfying. It wasn’t quite as cheap of a holiday as I had hoped, but it was still fun.
Project Euler
Nov 10
Project Euler Exercises Your Mind with Mathematical Problems looks like something I’d like to check out. Heinlein once suggested mathematics as a great way to fill empty hours. I don’t have so many of those any more, but I have studied various bits of math on my own to fill up wasted time productively. Maybe this can be one of my projects this winter.
Push ups Two Weeks In
Oct 30
I’m making progress on my push ups. I’m up to 31 now. Only 69 to go!
Headed for 100
Oct 12
My daily workout program has been going well. I’ve stuck with it for over 18 weeks now without missing a day. For a change of pace, I’m going to do hundred pushups program for my strength workout. My initial test was a little embarrassing at only 19 pushups – I’d been up to almost 50 about 4 years ago. Ah well, I’ll get there.
The reasons I chose the hundred pushups are that it requires minimal equipment, it has a definite, achievable goal, and it fits beautifully with my current workout schedule.
Minimalist Fitness II
Sep 18
The exercise options out there fascinate me. Zen Habits has another post on Minimalist Fitness II. I haven’t changed the weights part of my exercise routine yet, but when I look at doing so I may try out Crossfit.
Zen Habits has a post on Minimalist Fitness: How to Get In Lean Shape With Little or No Equipment. About ten years ago I was stuck in Ghana with a lot of free time on my hands. I decided to put some effort into getting into shape with no equipment. Sadly, I knew little to nothing about exercise, so I didn’t manage to come up with a routine anywhere as nice as this one.
My routine as I recall it involved jumping rope for 15-20 minutes, pushups, and trying to bench press my bed. It wasn’t a great full body workout, but it was better than nothing. One morning I tried to bench press my bed and it fell apart on me. After I reassembled it, I quit that part of the routine.
I don’t think I could follow Zen Habit’s exercises as a number of them involve a chin-up bar which I don’t have or involve jumping. The room I exercise in has a sixish foot ceiling, so I don’t think jumping would be too good for my mental health.
Why Do I Exercise?
Jul 29
I’ve been doing some form of regular exercise since my early teens. Sometimes it’s been very regular and structured, sometimes it’s been very minimal. Why do I do it?
I don’t do it to be visibly physically fit. Pick any of the exercise programs that I’ve tried and my before and after pictures would look much the same. There’s only been one stretch where I did enough exercise and ate healthily enough to start to get into shape. The problem isn’t the exercise, it’s that I eat too much and especially that I eat too much unhealthy stuff.
I don’t do it for the rush. My exercises tend to be fairly sedate. I push myself, but rarely to the point of having sore muscles the day after an intense workout. It takes me about 30 minutes to bike 5 miles, I do beginner yoga, my swim speed was never that great, I reached the third beginner level belt in martial arts, and the most I was ever able to bench press was my body weight. At best, my improvements are incremental – nothing to get excited about.
I exercise because I feel better when I exercise than when I don’t. If I put in roughly 20 to 40 minutes of exercise per week, I manage to counteract a lot of the negative effects of my sedentary lifestyle. I rarely have lower back pain, I don’t have even the beginnings of carpal tunnel, I have very few headaches. If I neglect exercising for a week or two while following my normal lifestyle, I start to suffer. Exercise is simply one of the prices I pay for living the way I choose to live.
"His mother had often said, when you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it."
– Memory, Lois McMaster Bujold
Lifehacker has a post on The Best Tech Tools and Fitness Plans to Get in Shape. I’m particularly intrigued by shovelgloving. I think that it may be time for me to vary the weights part of my exercises and it looks intriguing. The one obstacle I can see is that our house (and especially our basement) has very low ceilings. If it doesn’t work out for me, I may try out the 100 pushups. Mind you it is early enough in the summer to try the Couch to 5K plan too. I love having all these possibilities to try out.
I managed to hit my goal of doing 4 weeks of about 20 minutes of exercise every day (excluding stuff like cycling to work, wrestling with the kids, and so on). I’ve been doing the Slow Burn exercises with weights 3 times a week for quite a while. Four weeks ago I decided to fill in the other days with AM Yoga during the week and PM Yoga for Beginners on Saturdays. I know that 20 minutes isn’t a lot, but I figure better 20 minutes that I do than an hour that I don’t.
Now to keep this up for another 4 weeks!
Why Do I Raid Lead?
Apr 7
Why do I raid lead? Because I enjoy it. End of entry, close your browser and go home. 
Okay then, why do I enjoy raid leading?
The first reason I enjoy raid leading is because I’m raiding with a great group of people. They come to raids on time, they have their consumables with them, they listen to directions, and they’re a fun bunch of people. If we had Illidan/Kael on farm and I was playing with a bunch of jerks I wouldn’t have nearly as much fun. The people I raid with are great but I could raid with them without being the raid leader.
I like being able to influence the whole fight. Prior to this, my raiding experience was on a holy priest. As a healer you don’t get to see a lot of the fight (especially in pre-BC raiding). You focus on your heal targets, keep them up and that’s it. As a raid leader I not only get to see the whole fight, I have to know what’s going to happen next, what’s going right or wrong, and be able to direct people appropriately.
I like being a key player in the raid. As I’ve mentioned, my main toons have been tanks and healers because of what they offer to a group. Being a raid leader adds an extra layer of usefulness. Without a raid leader to coordinate and guide the raid, the raid isn’t going to happen.
I like the power! I like being the one most responsible for a raid’s success or failure. Trying to figure out how to give a concise description of a boss fight so that everyone knows what their role is is a fun challenge. Organizing fights based on that night’s raid composition provides some interesting mental exercises. The buck stops here.
Raid leading is challenging, but it’s also a lot of fun. Sadly, I don’t expect this fun to last. If Wrath of the Lich King doesn’t come out this year, I’ll probably stop before the end of the year. Currently my exit strategy is when I stop having fun raid leading, I’m going to keep doing it for 1 month or until someone can be found to take my place.
Warrior Frustration
Jan 2
My warrior, Tristam, is falling behind the group I play with. I missed an instance due to tanking it on my paladin instead, I had bad luck with a couple of drop quests and I’ve fallen behind by half a level or so. I figured I’d go do a couple of battlegrounds for the daily quests, maybe pick up a low end quest or two and catch up quickly. Boy was I ever wrong!
Quests that were trivial on my hunter and easy on my protection specced paladin at level or above are deadly to my warrior when they’re a level or three below him. Battlegrounds are an exercise in frustration – run in, try to hit someone, die, rinse lather repeat. I reached exalted with Stormpike on my holy priest so I thought maybe AV would be more fun than the other battlegrounds on a prot warrior. No such luck. I need to lrn2pvp on a prot warrior or I’m going to be very frustrated, especially as I want to get the Gladiator’s Shield.
My warrior is terrific in instances – I rarely lose a mob and when I do it’s usually the secondary or tertiary target that’s been dotted a little too hard by the warlock so that it dies while running to him. As I’ve mentioned before, my warrior is much more flexible than my paladin in dealing with single targets – i.e. bosses. It’s just that outside of an instance my warrior is even more useless than a holy priest pre 2.3, which is frustrating.
If you need to have a warrior tank for endgame, seriously consider leveling Arms or Arms/Protection spec then switching over at 70.
Farming and Meditation
Dec 1
I recently decided that I needed two schematics that drop with low frequency off of mobs in Netherstorm. I hate mindless grinding. Without that “Ding” to push me on, I’m really reluctant to go slaughtering innocent mobs.
Debi: You’re a psychopath.
Martin: No, no. Psychopaths kill for no reason. I kill for *money*. It’s a *job*… That didn’t come out right.
– Grosse Point Blank
Somewhere I read a quote “MMOs are like mandalas made of murder.” When I can get into the mindset of treating it like an odd meditation exercise, I can farm for quite a stretch. When I hit that meditative state, farming is almost pleasant – the cares of the day are ignored and I just slaughter mobs in a state of no-mind. Oddly enough, that was one of the things I enjoyed most about real farming. For some tasks, you could just get on the tractor and drive all day, thinking long, long thoughts.
Serenity
Oct 3
Jaimie and I actually got out on a date and went to see Serenity on Friday. It was a good movie. I look forward seeing what people who haven’t seen the series have to say about it.
The movie was scarier than I had anticipated. I have to admit that I’m rather weak-stomached when it comes to movies that are even slightly scary. I didn’t watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the longest time despite my wife’s urgings because I thought it would be too frightening for me (it wasn’t even close to being scary). Looking back on Serenity, a lot of the scarier parts were done very indirectly – you only saw flashes of what was happening and your imagination filled in the rest.
As I commented on M’s Livejournal (definite spoilers), what made the Alliance dangerous is that they’ve decided that they know what will make people better and they decide to force people into the proper mold “for their own good” or “for the betterment of mankind”.
As C.S. Lewis put it:
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Anyhow, if you want to explore this theme further, Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch and Eric Flint’s Belesarius Series are good stories revolving around that idea.