| ~Help Kalgon is chasing me! |
[09 Nov 2009|03:51am] |
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music |
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26699. mind.in.a.box - Out of Time |
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Ultramega Ok! recording! It goes
Ryan8Bit - King's Quest V - The Wizard's Accord
Star Control 2 - To Mine the Heavens
Saibuster - Star Control 2 - Hyperdrive
Stemage, Chunkstyle - ActRaiser - Teddy's Bread
Includes rambling about adventure game history and getting soppy about Sierra games and Starcon2 music. NO SURPRISE THERE REALLY
it is true though hyperdrive can really get to me if i'm in the right mood for it, as well as the rendition of the sierra fanfare at the beginning of kq5. THE SIERRA FANFARE IS MY TEXT MESSAGE ALERT NOISE FOR AN EXAMPLE OF HOW SIERRA PERMEATES MY LIFE
I slept too much and now I feel all jittery and shaky and weird. bleeeeeeeeeeeh
I don't really have anything else for you right now, except that the annotated versions of the animated CAD episodes are hilarious. This one's a good example of the terrible animation/sound effects. SLIDE WHISTLE
and this one may make star wars fans hemmorrhage blood
i should get something to eat
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| Post #759: I'm just a lounge lizard, baby. |
[09 Nov 2009|02:21am] |
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music |
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Al Lowe - Leisure Suit Larry |
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You know the old adage about how once you learn how to ride a bike, you never forget?
Yeah, well, I wish that also worked for my Clarinet. I spent the weekend tinkering with it, and I feel like a humbled fool. ::Snorts.:: It's like I'm trying to play with fingers that are about as coordinated as ... well, something not coordinated in any way, shape, or form. Guess that's what I get for stuffing this thing into a box and never touching it from the start of high school (97-98) until now. Oiy.
But I am so not going to take this lying down. A long time ago, in a land far, far away, I was able to play pretty freaking close to this:
Given, with a clarinet, not a saxaphone. Though it's worth noting my sister was a saxaphone player in middle and high school, so maybe the whole jazz ensemble and instrument thing runs in the family, right?
So, yeah. If I can at least re-learn the Leisure Suit Larry theme, or the parts of it that were clarinet-friendly, then I'll die a happy man. Well. A contented man. Happiness is still a slick little sunuvagun that I'm trying to grasp at, but that can wait until the fall semester is over, and I'm not busy bouncing between even keel attitude, and suicide watch due to Statistics.
Nobody ever said getting back to cool, collected, and casual Mike would take just a week, after all. Much as that'd be great and all.
Anyway, this random spewing of words has now petered out, so it's off to bed I go. Hopefully. Possibly. Maybe.
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| ..uuhg... |
[09 Nov 2009|12:16am] |
...so yea.. I just finished a 15 hour shift at work. I'm tired. Goodnight world.
8am-11pm.
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| Man, I miss Ed, Edd and Eddy |
[08 Nov 2009|08:53pm] |
Which came to a bit of a surprise that a marathon starring those 3 dorks, plus a feature length movie, played on Cartoon Network.
Ahh good times indeed.
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| Facespace Invasion... |
[08 Nov 2009|01:14pm] |
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 lethargic |
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My family has found my Facebook page. The experience has been interesting.
Nothing against my family, it's just that with their discovery comes a surge of people I have no idea who they are. Yet they know me because they're some half cousin-auntie-momma's best friend who used to wipe my butt when I was little or got a good laugh when I was shoving my hands in their cleavage cause they thought it was "so cute". Both of those examples are real btw.
Also with this comes the revision of my page and being super paranoid about what I put up, if anything. Seriously, I never used the damn thing until recently. Like MySpace and Twitter, Facebook is just another outlet people utilize to get other people to validate their own existence. I hop on initially, but after a few weeks I get tired of it, finding no personal value in them. Nevertheless I have them, and considering my family can now hop on I guess I'll be using it a bit more. Therein lies another problem, I don't have much of anything to say.
I guess I shouldn't sweat it. I just won't say anything or reply to their comments. I've always felt very far removed from them yet very close. I dunno. To be honest I don't like talking about anything relating to myself much at all so in fact it doesn't have very much to do with them really now does it?
Phew!
Glad I came to that conclusion!
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| Biology and Chemistry Stuff (Increasing Placebo Effect) |
[08 Nov 2009|11:57am] |
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This message is mostly meant for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cortezopossum, rserocki (hmm, he deleted his LJ.. pity), and terminotaur.
There was a recent article on Slashdot ("News for Nerds") called, Placebo Effect Caught In the Act In Spinal Nerves. In the article pointed to they mention that evidence of the Placebo effect was caught in action when doing a test while monitoring the nervous system. They also mistakenly said the Placebo effect was diminishing over time when they pointed to an older Slashdot article that said the Placebo effect was collectively increasing over time (sloppy work by someone), called Placebos Are Getting More Effective. There is also the slashdot entry, Antidepressants Work No Better Than a Placebo (which has a very interesting comment discussion.)
At first I thought this was proof that the medication industry was finally going to pay for its hubris in creating temporary "medications" which are basically stuff we have to pay for the rest of our lives to temporarily "treat" something which really should be cured (that is, instead of directly ingesting or injecting the chemicals we need, our body should be autonomously creating them from food we eat). However the second article said that even a gene therapy was shown to not work. (I assume gene therapy is supposed to be involved in a permanent alteration of the body.) So this seems to suggest that a lot of medicine is starting to not work. There is also a general explanation of how the double-blind test was historically made the de-facto part of medical tests (i.e. the work of Henry Beecher).
There's a few things this stuff makes me suspect. One is that we need to understand the human body and the placebo effect better. We need to move away from any mystical or metaphysical mumbo jumbo and see the body more as a physical construct, however complicated. We need far more powerful equipment for monitoring what is going on in the body down to every molicule... we need to reach a point where we understand the body and can repair the body just as we understand a multistory apartment building and can repair an apartment building. I think the analogy of an apartment building can take one pretty far, because if we see "viewing" and "repairing" the body on those terms, and set our resolution at the molecular level, while we do see that there is a vast amount of information to be monitored and processed, we can also push past assumptions that have led to failure in the past... one being the seeing of the placebo effect as quasi-mystical, or something that is "mysterious" and "we'll never understand". Such conclusions are unacceptable.
The other thing that reading about the history of the creation of the Placebo idea and the instigation of modern pharmaceutical testing suggests to me is that perhaps we should avoid the patients input and output altogether... that is, have tests in which the patient has NO idea what is going on. Presumably this would eliminate the problem of the placebo effect altogether. After all, the people living in an apartment who may view the apartment as filthy and run down could be asked to leave, then a cleanup crew could come and fix up the building. The residents could return and see that the building is now improved. They would say, "I don't know what you did but it looks better." ... whereas if they had been around while the building was being repaired they might come away with a biased point of view even if the cleanup crew faked the repairs. Of course, by not seeing the repairs done, a shoddy job could be done and no real repairs made. However, that would be analogous to a doctor giving someone a painkiller instead of real treatment. As you can see it works both ways... the patient can be biased from observing the doctor at work, and the doctor can fake the treatment one way while the patient is observing, or fake it another way while the patient is not observing. But can the doctor fake the treatment if a 3rd party (not the patient) is observing?
Perhaps the placebo effect is a result of an over-emphasis on "self theory" which came out of the 60's - or from a buisness side of things, we may have taken the idea of "better customer service" (as opposed to cold impartiality) too far - perhaps the philosophy of "patient involvement" has reached it's effective limit, and the growing placebo effect is a sign of this? While patient involvement is extremely important from a human rights point of view, if the patient involvement is effecting the results by imparting a growing placebo factor, we clearly have a problem.
What I am suggesting is that the patient's input be bypassed and a 3rd person could be the observer in the "before" and "after" stages of treatment.. but this would only be effective if some kind of very complicated body-monitoring equipment existed that allowed the insides of the body to be "seen" and monitored all the way down to the molecular level (and it' not enough to "See" everything, you have to also know what is going on.)
Whenever I have to go to the hospital, some nurse or nurse aide wheels in a machine that they use to monitor my heartbeat, temperature, blood-oxygen level and blood pressure. Pretty low-level, low resolution stuff. Instead what we need is some kind of device that is non-invasive which shows what is going on in the body. I don't know exactly what frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum can reveal this information, but presumably it can be done, some day. Why not now? How close are we?
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| - Roadside Distraction - |
[08 Nov 2009|08:17pm] |
 Lineart (c) Misfitscribbles @ FurAffinity Character (c) Rexxwolfe @ FurAffinity Colouring by Myself |
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| Nekocon 2k9, Day Two: COMPLETE. |
[08 Nov 2009|07:24am] |
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mood |
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 awake |
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A little late, but I dozed off.
So, anyway -- Day Two: in which no money was spent in the dealers' room. Artists' Alley, however...
I went to the Kyle Hebert panel that morning. Let me say this: the man is HILARIOUS. XD And later that day, I get him to autograph my copy of SO4 and get recorded for his vidblog. So we're just shooting back and forth, until, and I can't remember how, he tells me I "lost the game".
After which, I let out this agonizing, dramatic scream for 15-20 seconds.
Caitlin Glass applauded after that.
So did the line.
Myself, however, I was so... um... "whoa" would be the best way to describe it after that, when I went to get Caitlin Glass' autograph, I was like "sign, please?"
Anyway... I saw an Emma cosplayer while waiting in line! Were I female, I'd have "squee!"'d.
I hit the Anime Radio panel after that, which is essentially Kyle and other voice actors reading from an old radio script. This panel was also a hoot. A+, would watch again.
Live-Action Whack-A-Catgirl was interesting to watch. Although, poor Neko-chan, always getting whacked. -_-;
Other than that, I went around and took a lot of pictures...
(...which will be added once I get back from today. =_=)
That's all, On to Day 3!
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| A Good Week |
[08 Nov 2009|08:24pm] |
Well, I had meant to fill journal-readers in on the overall plan for my training for the next ten months, but time is not my friend. Hopefully by the end of the week; there's just some information about how long I'm mass-building for, when I start cutting, how I'm targeting specific bodyparts and when etc.
In the meantime, I had to express how good a week it's been; my bodyweight's back up to 235lb, which I'm really pleased with - it's way ahead of schedule, and bodes well for my ambition to be very large indeed come the competition. The best thing about my current diet is dinner - 1lb of steak for dinner EVERY night. At current going, I'll have eaten a whole cow's worth of meat in... 2.5 years (I asked wikipedia). Kind of amusing to think that I am literally becoming 'the beef' :p
The other goodie from my week is that my barbell curls are now up to 70kg (155lb) for the first time. This is beyond anything I've put my arms through before, and they're responding really well. Getting the arm training 'out of my system' early on this time though, the focus completely changes next weekend and I start giving more priority to other bodyparts. First up - the chest. Let's see if I can beat my previous bench press records!
It's all rather fun and going well. Thanks for your support - there's a long hard road ahead yet though. Let's hope it continues to be fun.
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[07 Nov 2009|08:40pm] |
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Okay I need to STOP GOING PLACES for awhile and oh jesus 48 hour work weeks AWESOME
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