Halfway there. Question Mark

So, I've not posted in a few weeks because I am doing NaNoWriMo again. Today is the halfway point - day 15 - and you can see by the little dohickey below that I have not written half the word count - 25,000 words. Man, this time is a lot harder. The last time I did this I was in college and my wife (then girlfriend) was in Denver and I was living by myself. This time I have a two year old and the dishes are just not going to go without being washed for a whole month. (Oh, I'm the dishwasher) So, wish me luck. Maybe also wish me a miracle because it takes me like three hours to write the daily word count of 1,667. At this point I will have to write a little over 1,800 a day to finish. Ugh. I wish Romney would've won. He was going to fix American and I think he would've started with increasing the hours in a day. Thereby, giving me more time to do what I want. Damn you Obama and your lack of time manipulation. America got it wrong. Oh why, oh why, did you get it wrong. Oh shit, I'm procrastinating now by writing random idiocy about the presidential election. Oh, and by the way, I'm growing a mustache for Movemeber. Go donate to prostate cancer research.

NaNoWriMo 2012

Hey, I'm doing NaNoWriMo again!

I believe the last time I did it was 2007 and I won/completed the challenge  I'm doing it this year because as I've mentioned in the past - I need a deadline to write or I just won't do it. Lowest energy state and all that.

Drop by and provide me some guilt - um I mean - ask me how my novel is going.

Safe House

In AMCs series The Walking Dead the poor unlucky bastards under the leadership of Rick Grimes have apparently been circling the prison all winter long only to find the damn thing and decide it would be a great safe haven.

The episodes this season have been great. I’m a lover of this genre so I tend to suspend belief of many things that any rational person would question in order to watch the show for entertainment (Such as a knife puncturing the head of a zombie as in my post Knife To The Dead Head).

So ok, you will take your only doctor on a room-to-room sweep of the prison, and oops, he gets his leg bitten and you have to cut it off. This makes for great TV and drama. This also makes poor sense if you want to survive.

If the goal is survival then I propose Rick and his group haul ass back to his home town (it’s gotta be closer than it would take to circle the prison for months) and hold up in his old Sherriff’s office. He got his initial weapon cache there, had a hot shower running off of a generator, and it is in a jail that will have a higher defensive barrier than just a house (but not a prison, of course).

Now, I know my suggestion would not allow the same drama, but, there has to be other drama there. Like Shane’s sister who dated Rick in high school and wants to split him further from Lori (Ha! I just made that up but it sounds good doesn't it).

Oh, and on a side note: I just read an article on NPR the other day about the closest humans have been to extinction. Apparently one study estimates that at one point the human race was down to about 40 individuals of mating age (Not counting children or the elderly) and that it bounced back (after several thousand or several hundred thousand years, I forget). That means Rick only has to gather say 35 more people and then they can just start their own society. Rick, I propose a 2:1 ratio of women to men.

I’ve been into knives for a long time. I bought cheap $10 knives from the shady carnies that came through at festival times as a kid and I’ve not stopped since then. Hell, last week I got a new Benchmade Nakamura S30V as my new gentlemen’s knife. It’ll be my new EDC for work. Oh that’s Every Day Carry for those of you that don’t read gear blogs on a daily.

Today, over at io9 they were profiling these Stone Age looking things.

Apparently this is part of a project called BC – AD. These tools are stone and plastic (and ect.) and were made using modern manufacturing methodology.

While I find these cool as hell looking, I lack the excitement the io9 journalist had. I don’t see any reason to get these outside of collecting them because you are a collector of such things. Knives should be functional first and foremost. One of my favorite knife quotes comes from when someone asked what the best knife, the reply was: The one you’re carrying with you. 

It needs to be a knife that is of such a size, weight, and functionality that you will carry it with you every day.

I would never carry these with me in any capacity and therefore they are just pretty paperweights. That aside, I would love to see something like this in action: How well do they cut? How do they compare in cleaning game with their modern counterpart? Ect and so forth.

Athletic Couch Potatoe

Clicking around to some of my daily web sites I came upon this interview with Gretchen Reynolds over www.theactivetimes.com in which she introduced me to a new term, “active couch potato”. Since I read the article I’ve changed it to Athletic Couch Potato and can't stop thinking about it. I think the term encompasses not only me but a large selection of our society.

An Athletic Couch Potato is someone who does active, even athletic, things on a routine, if not daily, basis. These athletic activities are things like running, going to the gym, dance classes, indoor rock-climbing and ect. I think you get the idea.

The couch potato part comes in because once those activities are complete many of us then just go home and plop down on the couch. Indeed, this term, as discussed by Gretchen Reynolds, even includes all of us that have these sedentary jobs that keep us in front of the computer screen all day.

In a response in the article, an interview, she says:

“Multiple, unpleasant things happen inside your body if you sit for hours, without interruption. First, muscles slacken and your spine bows. Because muscles are the body's major consumer of blood sugar, if you aren't using those muscles, you start to get a build-up of blood sugar, after which both blood sugar and insulin levels are out of whack, and you have the early makings of type 2 diabetes.

Meanwhile, your body starts to produce less of an enzyme that breaks down fat in the bloodstream. So you start to get a build-up of fat in the blood; it then travels to the heart, liver, muscles and, sadly, the backside. People who sit for hours have been shown to gain weight and be at much higher risk of diabetes, heart disease and premature death than people who stand and move around frequently.”

This said Gretchen goes on to say she was “…sorry to learn that exercise does not necessarily offset the damage of sitting.”

This thought is a little disturbing to me on a personal basis because I sit for hours on hours a day in front of the computer. According to the interview the answer is to simply stand up. Really that’s it, just stand up. The action of standing up gets things moving and will “pull sugar from you bloodstream and release enzymes...” and can possible reduce your risk for diabetes, diabetes, and obesity.

This interview was to promote Gretchen’s new book, The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can ExerciseBetter. The interview has more information in it on exercise optimization and continuing to exercise as you age but the thought that really stuck with me was of the “Athletic Couch Potatoes”.

So stop reading this, stand up, and start feeling better.

Stoked

I’ve been surfing since ’96 when one of the two guys I was living with gave me two surfboards. They were the short boards of the 80’s, resplendent in neon green and blue.

That summer, and for several after that, I took my licks trying to figure out how to surf without the slightest idea of what I was doing. Over time, I upgraded to a long board and have since then got longer boards and gone on surfing vacations. I’ve surfed everyday for months on end and up to three time per day when I was really feeling it.

That said, I still would not, could not, paddle out in the shit these guys are taking off in. 30 foot waves! Look at how heavy those damn things are. My biggest day was 15 foot at San O. I felt lucky to get out and back in alive. 

From Grindtv.

Strong Female Lead

So, I have a reoccurring desire to write a strong female character doing amazing things – think a female Raylen Givens. This question has popped up recently because I have imaginary conversations with my daughter about things I want to teach her latter. It’s during these conversations, and the desire to point to an example - a role model if you will - that I’ve come to find there is little in the way of strong female characters. No, what I find are Disney princesses - Damsels who need a rescue.

Well, in my daily web travel over to io9 I found this article on creating strong female leads. It is written by some guy Greg Rucka, who is apparently known for his strong female leads. Go over and check it out and let me know what you think.