A Fighting Chance to Live

After taking a week and half off from work to basically do nothing but intensive field research on Dark Souls 2 (you can divert your judging eyes now), I'm struck less by the showpiece new additions to the series compared to the last game -its expansiveness, for example- than I am by the subtle, yet significant changes to basic rules and old movements. After mulling it over and testing as best I can the differences without taking that much more time off, I thought I'd go into some depth over a few of the aspects that I find the most interesting. I suppose you could also call this something of a review after a fashion, because I can't help but be picky with the minutia just enough to form some subjective opinions about how they make up the larger game.

Grab yourself a cup of coffee. This is going to be long.

Let's start with the new wrinkles in character building and growth. While the addition of respeccing your character is definitely welcome and fun to mess with when the mood suits you, it does serve to ultimately make the game easier as growth decisions can carry a bit less weight than in previous games. I'll come back to this a little later, but even though the amount of needed items to rebuild your Undead from scratch are finite through each new game cycle, it's a bit of a let down to know that a safety net is underneath if you really screw it up. As such, I've limited myself to respeccing only once when I went from a heavy melee tank to a a more lithe, but brittle sorcerer. Let's talk about both.

First, the addition of a few new and rejiggered stat parameters really change how a tank can operate in DS2. Equipment weight is no longer tied to the Endurance stat and is now entirely made up by the Vitality. This means that in previous games, a melee fighter or damage sponge could only logically be responsible for two stats; Endurance and either Strength or Dexterity for their preferred weapon choices (Vigor -previously Vitality in DS1 and Demon's Souls- for HP growth goes without saying for nearly every build). Now that there is separate stat to add levels to for effective movement in heavy armor, players that build tanks are now roughly on par with magic-tossing characters, whom previously had to deal with not only their magic school stat of choice (Faith or Intelligence) but also Attunement for spell slots. In practice, though, I didn't really find heavy characters to be as affected by poor movements as the previous games. Even at 95% of my equipment weight, movement wasn't slowed to the point of DS1's sluggishness, and even rolling out of danger would be of use, something that in previous games would make a character with that kind of pudge seem like a stumbling drunk.

Magic doesn't seem to have the heft of the last game from an overall damage perspective. Monsters, and especially bosses, rarely reel from the pain of getting pelted with your shot of choice. I can only assume that this was done to actually make the game a bit harder on these types of players (and one of the few instances of it, but again, we'll get back to this) since it wasn't entirely out of the question in DS1 to suit up in some of the heaviest armor you could find and just blast away at certain bosses with lightning bolts knowing they they were absolutely going down before you would. Still, the addition of Hexes, a fourth, sort of hybrid magic discipline between Sorcery and Miracles is the most significant change. Since I've only really messed with Sorcery at this point, I don't have a lot of opinion on Hexes quite yet, but I like that there isn't a starting class with Hexes in this game, and that a player has to do a little digging and very calculated stat building to use them correctly as many Hexes require both Faith and Intelligence to work. As a quick aside, the starting classes also lack a Pyromancer, too, which was probably a smart move. Plenty of speed run videos for DS1 prove that Pyromancy could get pretty beefy pretty fast, and make much of the early encounters a joke to solo.

Though it might still be too early to tell, perhaps the biggest addition to the game is the Agility stat, which is governed by growth in the Adaptability stat. Adaptability basically takes the place of DS1's Resistance stat, which was fairly worthless overall as it only raised poison and fire resistances, which can be easily mitigated by common equipment. Adaptability, though, raises the resistances of a wider variety of ailments like petrification and curses, but as the sole way to reliably raise your Agility makes it noteworthy. Agility, then, is the catch-all for how quickly certain basic functions take place like drinking Estus Flasks and rolling (even with heavy armor equipped). Since it's only been about two weeks since the game's been in the wild and the PvP metagame is still finding its feet, this might prove to be very important as the next several weeks carry on. I'll let you do you own research down the road.

Overall, it seemed as though the amount of souls needed to gain levels felt less than the last game, and a quick jump to the wikis proves this to be true (compare this to this). Since I couldn't find a way to easily power level  as in the previous games (though I'm sure the internet has. I like the way it is, so I'm just not going to check), I enjoy this wimping down of things as a fair way to balance the game. Grinding level by level from fighting enemies in the world was almost non-existent for me, though. All of my growth came from fighting bosses, which I also felt was well balanced, too; an added reward for a job well-done. Speaking of which, chests for loot are certainly more plentiful this time around, and especially after boss fights, so the rewards for beating them were tangible, too.

Let's move on to the engine. I don't typically care too much for the technical side of a game so long as it runs well, and this is something that From Software has struggled with to greater or lesser extent since Demon's Souls, though that game ran at a consistent frame rate outside of a few very short, specific spots. It's logical to assume that the old engine simply wasn't built to adequately run an interconnected world of the size of the first Dark Souls with how badly the Blighttown section slowed everything down to a slide show. With two games under their belt and a new engine constructed to scale with next-gen and high-end PC hardware, you would think that FromSoft has learned to make the aged PS3 and 360 sing at this point. Sadly, that's not the case from what I've seen.

While nothing within the game comes close to the stuttered mess of Blighttown, frame rates generally drop when the camera moves too fast and enemies or debris storm around you. The Havok physics work very well when you're in a confined space and are smashing through all of the tables and boxes in near proximity, wider open areas with this happening can stutter things here and there. Since this is a game where every minor encounter judged incorrectly can make for significant tension, a dropped frame here and there can certainly break your rhythm, especially if you're taking on three or four enemies, melee-style. Environmental stream loading is also slow to catch up to your travel plans, too. Run too quickly through a series of rooms and larger areas and the game will lock itself for a second or two until everything catches up. Typically, this isn't much of a hassle since you're probably just passing up anything of interest (or danger) if you're trying to move this fast, but for a new engine, this is a little on the strange side. All of this also comes at the cost of making your hardware really dance for its meals. Part of the reason I'm writing this is to give my poor PlayStation a break since just about everything in the game is constantly loading and pushing the disk around. Anecdotal evidence as this might be, it doesn't seem to be as bad as playing Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (which worked my system to the point that it sounded like a helicopter was going to land on my television), but after the 45+ hours I put into the game during week one and the dozen or so more since then, I'm fearing for the longevity of my PS3. Wasn't the forced installation when I loaded the game supposed to alleviate this?

Probably the most irritating hiccup, though, is how easily your PvE foes can cheese the physics of the game and pound you through a wall. On more than one occasion, I would slip outside of a doorway to let my stamina recover or to take a quick swig of my Estus Flask and have an arm reach right through the brick and pound me for a kill that, if we're being honest with ourselves, is cheap. Yes, it can sometimes work in your favor; a monster too large to fit through a doorway and stuck lumbering outside can be hit with distance-friendly overhead strikes from your giant club that should, logically, be stopped by the overhang of the door. Still, monsters and bosses always have a leg up on you with laser beams and swords mysteriously finding their way through solid objects and into your Undead's unsuspecting dome at a much more consistent rate. The Old Iron King fight in particular is hilariously strange for the consistently broken laws of physics, if not for being much harder than it probably was built to be.

This actually baffles me, really. While a lot has been made over the past week or so about how different (meaning, not as good) the game looks from the initial video unveiling of the game last year compared to what was actually shipped, anybody with taste will tell you that graphics are an ultimately minor component to a great game, especially if it runs well. Sure, it's not fair to say that Dark Souls 2 runs poorly, but a game of this size with a new engine built specifically to run it should be constructed well enough to at least solve the odd problems of its predecessor, which this engine only does most of the time. The better frame rate is certainly welcome and definitely handy, but the occasional dropped frame during heated fights and selective physics elicits a few more stink eyes than I would like.

Overall, the game does feel significantly easier than the last one. Enemies are certainly challenging and most of the bosses I fought were done in co-op just so I could see as much as I could in the time that I had, both of my character builds could easily take on just about everything with some forethought and deft movement (full disclosure, I spent more time as a tank knowing that I wanted to go through it pro-co-op). I'm certainly a different case than the green Dark Souls 2 player, though, in that I've got two games' worth of conditioning behind me, giving me clearer ideas on how to build effective characters and tackle most of the environments.

The addition to extinguish enemy respawns is controversial in this game compared to something like Lightning Returns (which handled it to great effect). Since every death in this series is meant to be a lesson, I suppose it's helpful when bad guys stop showing up after you kill them a few dozen times, but it takes away from the overall point of a game that wants you to learn from your mistakes. Granted, having the ability to reset them (and thereby make them more difficult) is a nice touch, I don't really find it to be necessary.

Having said all of that, NG+ is significantly harder than I was expecting. While enemies have their requisite 40-50% boost in stats that was true for the previous games, red phantom version of enemies are now placed in environments in key locations, and it completely changes the rhythm of the game. Imagine you're fighting a boss that you're pounding on because of the differences in your stats compared to the last time you encountered it. All of a sudden an explosion goes off behind you and now you're randomly engulfed in flame thanks to the two red phantom Pyromancers that spawned in the arena. It's actually one of the cool holdovers from Demon's Souls that are sprinkled through the game for those in the know (for you guys, imagine playing all the way through the game with a neutral World Tendency and then playing through it again in an unchangeable Pure Black WT. Totally different game). For those hunting trophies and achievements, the now super hard NG+ is a necessary pursuit since certain weapons and spells can only be found there, and fairly deep into it as well so you can't just play nuggets of it to get what you want. I haven't made my way to NG++ (or beyond) quite yet, but I'm a little terrified.

To compound this, you as a character will never overpower your enemies as in previous games. Though the Estus Flask can gain additional uses up to 12, and you can strengthen the amount of HP recovered to a level of +5, no way so far has been found to grow it past these 12 powerful gulps. That means that a thorough player can max it out in their first playthrough, making NG+ and beyond a much more daunting task. While the flask would also cap out in the last game, it was much higher and to a stronger degree, and something that couldn't be completed in one run of the game regardless, making NG+ easier on you (at least, incrementally).

Let's briefly discuss the death penalty, too. I haven't done a lot of research on this, but the idea of losing a portion of your total HP from one demise to the next seems to have been met with a fair amount of community consternation. At first, I thought this was an awesome callback to Demon's Souls, but in that game, going from Human form to Soul form gave other, subtler bonuses to a player even though they had fewer total hit points (specifically you would move almost silently and hit enemies harder, but I can't remember the exact percentage off the top of my head). These don't seem to exist in DS2, at least not that I've seen so far. More research is necessary.

I'll leave this to another time, but this taking of fan expectations and throwing it in their face is all part of the meta narrative established by the old Fire Keepers at the beginning of the game (they won't let you forget how often you're going to die and lose those souls). I expected nothing less, and wonky tech issues aside, makes Dark Souls 2 a very, very good game overall. Again, it's early, and the community still has plenty of mysteries to solve regarding what's really going on with some of the moving parts, but this is an exciting time to be a part of the game, so if you get a chance, find a wiki that you like and get involved.

Extinction Agenda

In playing through the dying world of Lightning Returns, you are constantly reminded that the population is on the fast train to doom town. Guards in one of the cities are always telling you how many people have been killed on any particular day, and most of the dialog serves to remind you that A: no new life has been born for half a millennium, and B: you're not going to save everybody, because you ain't got that kind of time. It's like a peak inside Sean Penn's soul; everything is coming from a dark, tortured place of pain and inner torment. The twist? It's also happening to the monsters.

And this is awesome.

In just about every RPG that's RPGed enough to RPG, there is an unlimited supply of bad guys for you to kill. Generally, this happens at random moments when you're not in one of the handful of safe locations of any given game. Sometimes you can turn this mechanic off, as in the still-superb-so-far Bravely Default. Most of the time, though, it's one random battle after the next in a death march from one boss battle to another (and I say that because I care).

Lightning Returns, though, is in a world where death is a real thing, and it's gonna happen soon. How can there be an infinite amount of floating evil flowers when nothing is being born? Answer, there isn't. Creatures can go extinct if you kill enough of them, ending with a climactic battle with a super powered neon pink omega beast that will make you remember its kin upon shedding that mortal coil. Of course it's all very video game-y in that it can all be tied to a late game quest and that killing these last-of-their-name foes yields high rewards, but man, what a cool concept. It's not only a nice touch that ties in this cockeyed world a little better, but it's one of the most elegantly unique game features I've seen in a game like this in a long, long time.

If only the rest of the game was so thoughtful. We'll come back to that, though. For now, I have to endanger some cyclops.

Let's just look past the fact that I've been absent for the past several days. This seems to be a month full of contradictions, broken promises, and as far as this past weekend has proven, high levels of idiocy.

But it's because of this idiocy that I've gotten the opportunity to essentially bum rush through Lightning Returns. While I'm not quite finished with it, I've found myself with four days left of the game's two week countdown to, essentially, chill out and watch paint dry. Sure, I'll be mopping up any errant side quests and such within that time, but because I'm a sinner and have read a little ahead of what's going on (which we can thank GameFAQs for), I've found that I've stumbled into a commendable amount efficiency. When I started playing it last Wednesday, this was not at all the case.

See, Lightning Returns is one of those games that makes a bad first impression. Aside from being narratively tied to what I can only call the worst (numbered) Final Fantasy, it's built on an engine that was never intentioned for open-world exploration, and it runs poorly. This makes the act of playing it sometimes cumbersome and other times straight up irritating, especially when your mashing a button and watching nothing happen on screen. The worst part for me, though, is that until you get several hours into the game, you just feel like you're playing it wrong; the daily countdown is intimidating and stressful, and the combat --as good as it is-- isn't really the easiest thing to grasp. The latter beef is made a little worse by the crazy amount of customization you're afforded by changing outfits. By day 3, I felt like I was drowning, and had even considered starting over on Easy mode so I could be a little smarter about my travel and work plans.

Turns out, that wasn't really necessary. When I finally finished off my first boss in the evening of day 3, the pieces had fit together in my subconscious just enough that I could better view the big picture of the game, and that gave me both a renewed sense of purpose and a battle plan for tackling the myriad tasks that LR set in front of me. That isn't to say that it's been easy going, though. One of the boss battles was stupidly hard, and even certain "normal" enemies are better avoided altogether because of how resource-intensive they tend to be.

But, now that I'm basically doing busy work to kill time to the end of the game, I have to say that I'm really enjoying it. Yes, for as much as I rag on FFXIII and XIII-2, I can't help but have a good time with LR in spite of myself. Maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome finally setting in, but taken on its own terms while shutting your brain off for most of the story stuff, it's a wacky game, but a wacky game that can be a fun in the right mindset. This makes me wish that it wasn't just the B-tier game that Square Enix had lying around with FFXIII characters shoehorned in that it obviously is, and that they had taken the time to develop it independent of that and not beholden to a (or any) franchise. But that would be too 1990s of Square, and those ultra lucrative days are in their rear view mirror (Bravely Default aside, I guess). 

Does my optimism for a glorious new Square Enix still hold? Last week, in the throws of those first strange hours of Lightning Returns, I might have said no. I was actually having a bit of buyer's remorse by Thursday night. At this point, though, I'm going to come back around and say yes. Is this the game to "save Final Fantasy?" Not by a long shot. It's something different, though, and it's something fun. For now, I'll take that.

Wah Waaah

Yesterday was another blip, but I suppose these things happen.

Last night was a real scene, though, man. I suppose that's a goofy thing to say now that I'm telling you how I went to my first voice acting class.

Yes.

Here's a brief version of how I wound up there: A really good friend of mine is a freelance writer in the Toronto area. When he recently lost a big client, he decided that, you know, he's always wanted to try voice acting for games, and he better do it now while still financially stable enough to take a swing at it. He had convinced me to do the same.

I know that this is short, and kind of a robbery coupled with yesterday's absence, but all I can tell you after my brief flirtation with voice acting is that I can probably sell the shit out of a BMW.

I'm still not sure if that was a compliment or not.

Today, I Became an Internet Villain

...if only for a minute.

It seems now that Lightning Returns is out in the wild (and getting some pretty mixed reviews), USGamer.net saw fit to run an article that claimed that, hey, Final Fantasy XIII was really a good game after all, and all of us whom criticize it are just plain 'ol mistaken. Silly us!

Because I'm an idiot, I wrote knee jerk reaction in the comments detailing why I disagree while making a few key points as to why the game is, in fact, bad. This did not sit well with some of their readers. I guess someone had to play the bad guy and get that ball rolling. Today, that someone was me.

Sigh.

Unsung Story

I swear I'm going to get off of my RPG soapbox eventually, but today, I'm doing this as something of a cry for help.

In three days, the Kickstarter for Playdek's Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians will close, and as of this writing, they're still about $100k short of their goal. This is concerning to me. Most of the time, I see high-profile crowd funding projects and sort of silently turn around and walk away. This isn't because they're bad ideas or that I have some beef with crowd funding, I just never really take the time to properly research what I'm potentially spending my money on, and to be completely honest, very few games I've seen on Kickstarter or Indigogo spoke to me so much that I felt compelled to help with them.

As it stands, I have contributed to three projects: the Retronauts Revival, a (so far) good retro old school gaming magazine called Retro, and this game. Why, then, in the wake of Double Fine's adventure, Mighty Number 9, and other high profile stuff is this the first toe dipped into actually giving money to game development? Answer: Yasumi Matsuno.

Now I'm sure if you pay attention to this stuff, you know all about Matsuno, or his pedigree, or the fact that he's the big name attached to this project. For those that don't, here's the nickel version of why this is important:

Matsuno is divisive as a game designer. As the man responsible for Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vagrant Story, and much of Final Fantasy XII (which is a personal favorite), he has a tendency to gravitate to mechanics that can feel impenetrably complex. You can call that kind of thing a matter of taste, but what it boils down to is that playing one of his games is just as much about doing your homework as it is mastering minutiae. I'm in to that to a certain extent, but I don't really have a ton of time on my hands anymore to devote to that sort of thing, so this means less and less to me as I get older.

What really sets him apart from his contemporaries, though, is his writing. RPGs from Japan have evolved over time from simplistic Dungeons & Dragons facsimiles (like Dragon Quest) to incoherent narrative sewers (like the Kingdome Hearts games, Lost Odyssey, every Tales game, Final Fantasy XIII and it's sequels, close to everything released after 2002). Like his construction of mechanics, you could say that the stories he writes are also on the dense side, but they are filled with characters and situations that you normally wouldn't find cut out of either shitty anime or a children's book. Adults tend to act and speak like adults. Characters don't repeat dialog just for something to say ("We need to get to the mountain!" "What, the mountain?" "Yeah! Let's get to the mountain!"). His best feature, though, is that he builds worlds that feel old. Not "lived-in" like maybe the Star Wars universe is sometimes attributed, but ancient; built, destroyed, and rebuilt with all of the history surrounding it. For fantasy storytelling, this is much harder to pull off than people think, and mostly because every fantasy universe is trying to do it one way or another. One of the reasons he does it well seems to be a past academic background in history. I've heard he's done thesis work on the Balkans and its various real world conflicts, and this has informed a lot of the Ogre series.

To me personally, Final Fantasy XII basically ruined me for RPGs of any kind for years and years, and especially ones that tend to be developed in East Asia. While I still find them fun to play, it's hard to partition a role playing game's story from its actual gameplay for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's the only genre of video game out there that begs for context for all of the button pressing (or else you'd just be looking at menus for 35 hours). I can't really say that Matsuno's stories speak to me on a spiritual level or anything, but they're coherent, if a little bleak. We need more games like this from guys like that.

Plus, the $20 you could spend on this basically pre-orders you a game on the device you want. Turns out, that's pretty important these days.

See you tomorrow.

Here's To You, Blacksmith

It has recently come to my attention that I'm about 10 pounds lighter than what I was about a month and a half ago. I call that an exciting and satisfying turn of events. Want to know how I did it? I bet you do, discerning internet browser. In lieu of a not-very-detailed procedural, though, I'd like to briefly mention general health for a bit.

It should be abundantly clear that I play a lot (a lot) of video games. Some of you may have a falsified vision of me in your noggin that I am either the part of the basement dwelling stereotype that most gamers get saddled with, or am Joaquin Phoenix in Her. To that, I'd like you to briefly consider that neither of these examples represent any large demographic, and certainly one that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every Fall on discs with the words "Call of Duty" printed on them. While it can certainly be true that most mainstream media outlets find someone with, we shall say, a nonathletic physique to be a one-time commenter when things in nerddom are front and center in the news, I argue that this does not, in any way, represent a group as a whole. I also believe that all of that should have gone without saying, but there's nothing wrong with being clear here. And just to punch this horse cadaver a little more, do you think everybody that's really into the NFL are 6'2'' mountains of goatee-d machismo? My wife and a few of her lady friends will disagree.

Now, having said all of that, it's important to note that while you don't need to be in the (probably) small demographic of Shadow Hearts cosplayers that can bench 325 lbs., being healthy is an achievable and worthwhile goal for anybody. While, yes, I have the ultimate trump card in this argument in the fact that I had cancer and that because I regularly work out it made the whole saga a little better on me than it could have been, that doesn't mean you need a traumatic experience to reaffirm the idea that a body in good working order is its own reward.

Personally, I've been lifting on the regular since just before high school. I had a tough guy older brother that imparted me with little nuggets of wisdom until the day I left for college. Not all of it, you might imagine, was solid gold, but getting me into a routine of keeping my body in check has informed a lot of my habits going forward. I'm in my mid 30s now, married with no kids, and I make it a point to do something between 5-6 days out of the week. That may be a lot for some of you reading this. That might be just enough. For me, I've found that it's what works, and a large part of that isn't just the sweat and fatigue that comes with it, but the act of doing it itself; the routine of being healthy. I'm a firm believer that it's good for more than the body, and the piles of further research that you can dig up across the known universe can back me up. But we might get back to that at a different point. Today, it's all bout losing weight and gaining inner peace.

For the really curious among you, here's what my week tends to look like: On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after work, I go straight to the gym and lift two muscle groups, usually alternating between them doing 3-5 exercises for each muscle. Since the New Year, I've been forcing myself to do at least some kind of short ab workout during this time, too (I hate doing abs). In a relatively crowd-averse gym, I can do a lot in just under an hour, and this includes the time it takes to change into my workout duds. I have a wife, a dinner to eat, and a very demanding stable of consoles that I'd like to spend some time with, so I've always been a very firm believer in keeping gym time short. But I kill it while I'm there. The first exercise of whatever muscle I'm working that day will be to, essentially, brutalize my workout, and subsequent exercises will straddle the line between further strength and endurance. Even though I don't like the idea of hanging out in the gym every night to get huge, I want the time that I do spend to be valuable and meaningful. That may make my gym demeanor a little on the odd side, but that's probably a conversation for a different day.

Mondays it's back and shoulders, which is probably my favorite muscle day of the week. Since my diet on the weekends basically blows out all of the hard-won ground I've gained during the work week (which goes from ingesting nothing but peanut butter, whole grains, chia seeds, and meat to beer and chicken wings almost exclusively) I use Monday as part blank slate, part punishment. The side effect to this is a pair of bum shoulders, but that's on me, I suppose. Wednesday is chest and leg day. This combination elicits an awful lot of hairy eyeballs from the gym regulars, and for good reason. Both your chest and your legs are muscle groups that define your entire physique, and form the basis of a vast majority of your baseline strength. Most people, even people like me that double up on muscle groups, split these up because of how much they take out of you on a per-exercise basis (squats alone muck with your center of gravity almost as much as playing handball in zero-G). On Wednesdays, then, I usually pick one and go heavy while taking it easy on the other one. Because I'm child and I dislike them so much, I almost never go heavy with my legs, and my back thanks me. Fridays are beach muscle day, and that means biceps and triceps. This is going to sound plenty stupid, but I've read my fair share of Cosmopolitans. You know those infantile surveys that they ask their readers to answer about what types of muscles ladies find the sexiest? Surprise, it's your shoulders, John Wayne, not your arms that are always at the top of the list. It's not for this reason alone that I leave arms as something of an afterthought; so much that if I can't make it to lift three days a week that I give up arms day. Every time you push something, though, you're using your triceps. Every time you pull, it's the stuff on the other side. Unless you do nothing but legs, your arms are constantly in motion, so Friday, to me anyway, is desert. I luck out in that I get to dip out of work at 4:00 on Fridays and this affords me extra time for a preacher curl cobbler, but it doesn't change the fact that your guns are swell, but not so much as other parts of your body.

In between lifting days is filled with about 30 minutes of cardio. Weather permitting, I wake up about 45 minutes earlier on Tuesdays and Thursdays and jog three miles in my neighborhood. This is a personal preference; I hate running as it is (and by "running" I mean that I could probably read a novel at the pace I plod along at), and if I can con myself into getting it finished first thing, well, that's just one less thing to worry about. Plus there's nobody else on the road that early in the morning, making crossing streets pretty handy. Lately, Saturdays are filled with 30 minutes on a treadmill and then 10 or so minutes on other machines like an elliptical or stationary bike. I'm usually pretty cooked by the end of the week, so I need those extra machines in case I wimp out and don't make the run a full half hour.

I'm getting older. Soon, I'll be buying houses and making babies. Will all of this continue? Hard to say, I guess, but I'm fine with a "probably not" for now. But that gives me time to be consistent, and to make sure that I don't have a stroke for another few decades.

Do you have to follow this? Not a chance. But something, anything, is better than hoping that you're just going to be healthy enough to live a long, full life. It's the one thing I like to be proactive about, and it works for me.