#oneaday, Day 86: Tuesday Night Tweetup

Brief post tonight as it's late, I'm tired and a little drunk.

Went out to meet strangers tonight. This is weird, as it's something I'm not good at.

Fortunately, said strangers and I had something in common: Twitter. Yes, this was a "tweetup", a fine example of some Web 2.0 shit happening all ova yo' face. Or something. Numerous Twitter types from all over Southampton came together in the pretentious purple basement of "Dock Gate 4" to exchange polite greetings, drink things and gradually divide into "the iPhone corner" and the "not-iPhone corner".

I had a great time. I'd just recently started chatting to a couple of very fine and lovely ladies known as @neicey and @Amy_Walker thanks to our mutual love of pointless but super-addictive geocaching game/tourism thing Gowalla, and they convinced me to come along. Actually, for once, it didn't take very much arm-twisting. I often have a spaz attack at the last minute when presented with social situations – particularly those involving strangers – and decide that no, I don't really want to put myself in that uncomfortable position, thank you very much.

Tonight was a bit different though. I arrived and people were chatting. People chatted to me. I had things to say that people were interested in. (At least they seemed interested, anyway.) There were enough people there that there was a nice mix of different interests, but not so many that it turned into a Heavy Rain crowd scene with me having to hold down R1, X and batter the Triangle button to keep my cool. Which was nice. Apparently sometimes there are a lot more people there, but I feel that now I've gone to one and met some of these people (and now follow them on Twitter, naturally) I could face that same experience with a few more people there. Which is good!

Funny stories were told. Private jokes previously confined to the online realm were shared. And everyone was in agreement that the urinals in Dock Gate 4 are spectacular. They have a damn water feature behind them, for God's sake. One shudders to think where the water to produce this effect is recycled from, however. Perhaps it's best not to think about it too much.

Anyway. I feel it is time for my bed now, much as I would love to beat @neicey in another game of #stayingupthelatest. My eyes are closing of their own free will and the amount of Strongbow I drank is causing a pleasantly cloudy sensation in my brain. So on that note, good night to y'all.

#oneaday, Day 85: The Artist Formerly Known as Top Searches

I was all set to do a post on the top search terms on my blog today, after Rhiarti did such a good one the other day. But it turns out that they're rather mundane, sadly. Still, I've started now, so let's get this over with.

Turtles in Time Reshelled

I wrote one post about this. One post about this game and it's been consistently in the top search results for my blog ever since. You really want to read it? Knock yourself out – it's here. Actually, you know what? I remember being quite pleased with that post. I guess I should be flattered that so many people are looking for it. Thank you for your support, everyone.

Pete Davison

My name! Amazing. I was genuinely surprised to see that the second-to-top search result was actually my name. Apparently people are looking for me. Given that I am looking for work, I assume that this is a good thing. That or my mother is taking an over-active interest in Googling me.

Divine Divinity

I was something of an evangelist for this excellent PC RPG a while back. It's excellent. Read more here. And then go buy it on Good Old Games. Avoid its sequel though, which is less good.

no.one.lives.forever

I don't know why the searcher put dots in the name. But this game is another that I wrote a few posts about a while back, and the term has stayed in my search results in various forms ever since. Also a great game, and a reminder of when first-person shooters had remembered what "fun" meant.

divine communication tumblr

Now this one I have genuinely no idea about. It's a kind of hideous cross-breed of several different posts – most likely this one, this one and this one. But quite why someone felt the need to search for those three words together is anyone's guess. Maybe they thought God keeps a Tumblr. Probably called "fuckyeahomniscience.tumblr.com". I wouldn't be surprised if that actually existed.

The next three are search terms just from yesterday. These are much more interesting.

doctor who spitfires won't work in space

Of course they won't. That doesn't stop it being awesome.

farmville co-op what happens if you let

No! Don't stop there! I want to know what the rest of that question was. Don't be shy. "What happens if you let…" what? Your sheep run amok? Your crops wither and die? Your child have easy access to your credit card for the purchasing of premium items?

highest lvl in borderlands

50. You're welcome.

Right. Enough. Good night!

#oneaday, Day 84: Eternally Questing

Giant Bomb recently launched a quest system on their site. It rewards participants with experience points, badges and a sense of "yay" for exploring the site, looking at different pages and taking part in various activities. Some of the quests are as simple as setting up your profile. Others are more complex "puzzly" ones that require one to solve some cryptic clues about games and game culture. It's a lot of fun, and it actually convinced me to sign up to the site and make greater use of it.

This echoes the thoughts of social game designers at GDC a while back, including Brian Reynolds from Zynga. The idea of getting Achievements for things you do in "reality". It sounded stupid, but given the amount of fun I, and numerous others, have had with Giant Bomb's metagame, it may not be so dumb after all.

It's not the first time it's been tried, either. A very long time ago I posted about a site called PMOG, or the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This game, actually a Firefox addon that sits atop your normal browser interface and re-christened The Nethernet a while back, allows players to earn experience points, achievements and items for exploring the web. More than that, though, other players can leave stuff on web pages for others to discover. These could be malicious (bombs, which make your browser shake about a bit and cause you to lose some points) or helpful (crates with money in them). They could also be mysterious portals, which lead to random places on the web, the destinations of which are only known to the portal's creator. It was an interesting concept let down only by the fact that it only worked in Firefox. Since Chrome came to Mac, I haven't touched Firefox since, the Mac version not being the greatest piece of coding there ever was.

Then there's Shuffletime, now sadly defunct – although the developers claim to be working on the "Next Big Thing". Shuffletime was a great idea – it was a collectible card game where the cards were websites. And you only got to collect the card if you correctly answered a question about the site it was showing you against a strict time limit. It was a fantastically addictive game, and a fine way to get people looking around the web at things they wouldn't normally. I'm sorry to see it go, but I'm sure something interesting will come out of it.

Like them or loathe them, Achievements and Trophies are here to say. And it's entirely possible that their influence will spread out of the world of core gaming and into the collective awareness of the web at large. Let's face it, it's always nice to get some encouragement isn't it?

Now, how many Gamerscore is hitting 100 One A Day posts worth?

#oneaday, Day 55: Communi-what?

A while back, I wrote a post about communication online. If you're extra-good, I'll link to it tomorrow when I'm not typing this on my phone in bed because I forgot to earlier.

Anyway. The gist of it was that I was rather pleased with how my then-early Twitter addiction was proceeding, with the service making it particularly easy for me to keep up with my numerous buddies from around the world. Prior to this, Facebook had fulfilled a similar function.

Here's where the paths of the two services diverge. While Twitter has remained relatively "pure", with little in the way of gimmicky new features, Facebook has taken the opposite route, adding more and more noise to the mix until it's almost unbearable.

Of course, there is the flipside to both services – Twitter has its spammers (bad) and Facebook has Facebook Connect (good) – but I know where I have most of my online conversations these days. Twitter may have its own noise, but it is WAY easier to avoid.

Facebook's problem is that it wants to be everything to everyone, so it added the applications, and the fan pages, and the various redesigns… and now I find myself wishing it was back the way it was when I first started using it. Simple. Clean. To the point.

It's certainly not that any more. Now, one's news feed is likely to be as full of notifications from applications and announcements that Bartlebas McFartington has become a fan of "Not Being Able To Sleep Because Your [sic] Thinking About Crap" (yes, that was real, and no, no-one knows how to use "your" any more) as actual things that people have written themselves.

The ironic thing is that all this sharing is taking away from the original point of the service – communicating. When people would rather copy and paste "Bob" into your comments box so he can "travel around Facebook" than actually write a message to you, one can't help but think that the point has been lost along the way somewhere, (While we're on, people who just say "First" in an attempt to get the first comment – without actually commenting – can go to hell and sit on a spike, too.)

So next time you hover over that "Like" button, why not take those extra few seconds to actually write a message? The recipient will probably appreciate it, and time isn't as precious as you think it is.

One A Day, Day 35: Eve of the War

Don't know what happened with yesterday's post – I definitely wrote the whole thing, but for some inexplicable reason, half of it disappeared. Oh well. Can't go back now.

Well, here it is – the end of my week-long vacation, which has gone by far too quickly for my liking. I feel suitably rested – or I did, at least. Right now? I don't feel very good about tomorrow. I have a 40 mile drive followed by 8 hours of being somewhere I don't want to be with people I don't want to be with, followed by another 40 mile drive back. But at least there are only four weeks to go. Four weeks! I can manage that, right? Of course I can.

It's the other obstacles that are in my way that are stressing me out more, to be honest. The daily grind I can just about deal with, by simply telling myself "It doesn't matter" (in the style of The Rock) repeatedly, over and over again. The things I'm not looking forward to are the two-day Parents Evening (yes, you read that correctly – a two-day Parents Evening), where I will inevitably be stuck 40 miles from home until late at night; the inevitable re-inspection of the school (which, knowing it doesn't matter, I don't really care about the result of but still don't want to have to put up with the stupidity of); and finding a new job.

I don't have a new job yet. I have applied to several. I haven't heard anything back from any of them yet, but going on past experiences of applying for jobs, HR departments are extremely slow. I haven't given up hope yet, and the Universe may well surprise me by throwing something I actually want to do for a good amount of money my way. Until then, though, the uncertainty is the killer. If I had the security of knowing that I had a new job to go to – to look forward to – after the end of this particular nightmare, I'd feel a lot better about my remaining time.

Still, can't be helped. All I can do is just keep applying for things and eventually someone will appreciate me. Right? Right. Of course.

On a lighter note, we recorded the SquadCast for Machinarium tonight – an adorable little indie point-and-click adventure featuring robots and no language. My current tentative plan is to edit that next weekend, so keep an eye out for that one. Also watch this space for more exciting Squadron of Shame podcast news.

See, I like doing that stuff. The annoying thing is no-one wants to pay me for it!

One A Day, Day 10: On The Edge

Part the First

Horrible day today. The behaviour of the children is getting worse and worse and I feel powerless to do anything about it. Probably because I am powerless to do anything about it. My predecessor apparently used to "bellow" at them every so often to get them to be quiet, but last time I bellowed at them (which got the point across nicely, incidentally) I ended up being the one getting told off for it. Which is pretty ridiculous, really.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Children respond to shock tactics and humiliation. The stupid culture of reward that is instilled in modern education now does not achieve anything. When you reward children for everything, including sitting down on a chair (I'm not joking) all rewards completely lose their impact and all you're left with are punishments… which don't work because the kids don't respect adults. It's a complete no-win situation and short of a drastic shakeup of the education system, I don't see a way forward. But it's not politically correct to punish children. It's not even politically correct to shout at them any more. Teachers are impotent in the face of poor behaviour.

Take one kid in my class. I won't use his real name. Let's call him Jack. No, actually, let's call him Cock. Because he is.

Cock has a difficult home life – one of those indecipherable ones involving domestic violence and on-off relationships. As a result (apparently) he's become the person he is – rude, argumentative, confrontational, violent, cheeky and lazy. The school he's at now – where I teach him – was about his third in the space of a couple of months when he arrived.

I can't do anything with him. And when he chooses to kick off, he drags the rest of the class along with him. Because, being kids, they find it hilarious when he lies on the floor, or runs around chasing people, or starts shouting "The Pakistanis are coming!". In a school with a rather large ethnic minority population.

And there's nothing you can do about it. He's been spoken to by me and senior members of staff at the school. His parents have been spoken to. He's had letters home. He has special sessions with teaching assistants. Yet still he's an asshole. His home life is used as a constant excuse for his shitty behaviour. And while it may upset him, that's still not an excuse. There's too much hand-wringing over what are delightfully termed "challenging" children. They should suffer the consequences of poor behaviour just like everyone else. Except no-one else really suffers any consequences either.

Right. Starting to see the problem here.

Still, after handing in my written resignation I calculated today that I only have 51 days until my escape – only 35 of which are actually teaching days. Which is nice. Beginning to wish I had just given them a week's notice and buggered off.

Part the Second

So Apple finally announced the iPad, the official name of the "Apple tablet" which everyone has inexplicably known about for months. And already there are painfully unfunny jokes going around about the "iTampon". I may just be grumpy because of a shit day, but I don't find that even a little bit funny – largely because we've had things called "[something] pad" for years and no-one has ever commented. My estimation of the intelligence of the Internet has just dropped a notch, and I'm reminded of something Mark Whiting of the Squadron of Shame said on our Deus Ex podcast – "Back in '99 we all thought the Internet would turn into SkyNet. This was before we knew it would turn into 4Chan."

As for the device itself… it's a big iPhone which, at this time, I have no interest in owning. I like proper computers too much to even consider a tablet. Call me a traditionalist.

Part the Third

At the time of writing, in 12 hours' time, there will be something exciting announced on Good Old Games. They have been cock-teasing everybody for the last few days on Facebook and Twitter… tomorrow we'll get to finally find out what the big news is. I'm certainly intrigued. You should be too.

Now it's late. Time for bed for me. This entry has been fragmented, but so has my brain. I really don't want to have to go in and deal with those kids again tomorrow… but I have to just keep counting down to first freedom and then an undoubtedly awesome time at PAX East. I can't wait. For either thing.

Good night.

One A Day, Day 7: Achievement Unlocked!

That's one week of continuous blogging. Achievement unlocked! Okay, some of the entries have been fairly pointless so far, but at least I'm writing something, and there's no better practice at writing than to actually do it.

Just been for a run – my third this week. This means I've successfully completed the first week of the course I linked to yesterday. Achievement unlocked! Here's the route I took today, in case you were curious. Going over the Itchen Bridge meant there were a lot more hills than usual, so my legs feel like they've had a decent workout today.

I have a meeting with my boss on Monday to discuss my leaving date! Achievement unlocked! Possibly!

Enough of that. Achievement un… Stop it. Seriously.

Today's been another quiet, dull day. Played a bit more of the Star Trek Online beta earlier and tried out a character on the Klingon side. It seems that Klingon players mainly play PvP missions – or perhaps that's just what's in the Klingon sectors. I wonder what happens if you go further afield?

On the writing front, it's been great to see members of the Squadron of Shame getting well into contributing to BitMob, one of the best community-driven games sites out there, with lots of "alumni" from the 1up blogosphere (ugh… hate that word) finding a new home there. I'll definitely be contributing more as time goes on – if nothing else, it's good practice for thinking up interesting ideas for articles which I could pitch to potential freelance clients. If you haven't checked out my articles there yet, go do so! (The Bayonetta article is by far the most popular. I'm not sure what that says to me.)

That's about all I have to say today, apart from the usual "I really don't want to go back to work on Monday". But let's try and be positive. There's still some of Sunday night left. Dinner, avoiding seeing Dancing on Ice and probably Star Trek Online await.

Heartwarming Tale of the Day

Hello! Regular posting will shortly resume. Those of you who know me well will know that I've been in the process of finding a new job and preparing for that. That starts on the 2nd of November, excitingly.

I also have tons of things to talk about that have gone on recently, what with some decent new games and all manner of other things, but now's not the time for it. For now, I just wanted to share a heartwarming story posted on a World of Warcraft forum I frequent that shows that, mercifully, not everyone in the world is a complete douchebag.

Ok so heres the story… I come from an RP realm (let the flames begin) joining a guild that centres itself around RP doesn't care if you have epics, doesn't care what level you are. Just so long if you abide by the server rules, and enjoy storytelling etc, that sorta thing, you are welcomed with open arms. (that doesnt mean we all wear robes and try to do impressions of Gandalf)

On Moonglade our guild is somewhat respected for its RP, and being a guild officer, i have to deal with a lot of requests from people to join.

A few months ago i was in STV using the neutral action house, and i recieved a whisper from someone "please cn you help me with some quests" usually i'd just tell people i'm busy, or ignore them, but he actually made the effort to spell the word "please" instead of "plz" or the ever confusing "pl0x"

So off i went, with a lvl 34 Human Warrior, and helped this fella out with a few of his red quests.. We chatted a little whilst we played, and it came to my attention that this wasn't a very old player, as he kept on having to go "becuase dad neds 2 chek the emall" he also clearly had no idea how to play, kept on pointing at random objects and saying "coooooooooool!!", and by the state of his outfit, it looked like he hit mach 2 and collided with a Dorthy Perkins store.

Anyhoo.. After a few quests, i really had to go, he was a very polite kid unlike most that play, and actually said "thank you very much" instead of "thx" but then he started asking if he could join my guild.. Now i don't wanna sound big headed, but that sort of player isn't suited for an RP guild.. Atleast not the one i'm in.. Its like a fury spec warrior wearing all green items, asking to be main tank in an MC run.. Its just a big no no.

So not to hurt his feelings, i just told him we were full at the moment, he didn't mind, and bounced off into the sunset, again thanking me.

Over the course of the next few weeks, i would recieve messages from him, just random stuff of his progress, the occasional "ding! lvl 50 :D" he wasn't one of these annoying people that you help once, and then they seem to think you're some sort of xp vendor for the remainder of there leveling process.

A few days ago i was in SW checking the AH, and some people were flaming some poor guy in the trade channel about selling an item for a high price… Afteri while i realised it was this kid that i helped out so long ago.. I didn't want to get involved and just let the flaming die down, but these idiots on the AH were just being really nasty to the poor kid, sure i know they probably didn't know his age, but still, you should be aware of that when playing games like this.

Anyway, a few hours later, i get a message from this kid "i got kicked from my guild :(" i tried to cheer him up, but it wasn't happening.. And to be honest i couldnt be arsed trying, and i was tired and logged off.

So yesterday i log on, and say my usual hellos to everyone, and go to the mailbox.. When i get there, i see this kid sitting next to the mailbox, no guild tag, people bouncing around him having fun.. And theres him, all alone, no-one paying attention to a "noob".. Now i know human race facial expressions never change, but as far as avatars go, this one looked really depressed.

So i message him asking if hes cool, and he tells me hes thinking about quitting, becuase he gets bullied alot at school, and his ex guild mates all said really horrible things to him, and that he knew some of the kids in reality, becuase they go to his school, and are beggining to bully him in school about how he plays WoW etc. We all remember how it was.. I remember i used to get bullied in school for not having any toys, or having an old version of a toy.. Imagine it now, you get bullied about it at home AND school too.

Now this kid had got himself to lvl 62 under his own steam, where as the kids that were giving him a hard time, were all about level 20 and spent the majority of there time in Goldshire asking people to raid Crossroads.

So what did i do? I took the kid shopping is what i did… Bought him his epic (ground) mount, a load of nice armour off AH, which i made sure was well colour co-ordinated AND gave him very nice stats for his level. Bought him 2 very nice rare axes (fotgotten the name) and got a guild mate to put +15 agility on each one.

I also bought him a host of accessories, fun stuff, like a mana wyrm, somedeviate delights, an Orb of deception.. yunno.. all the "coooooool" stuff.

Then i invited him to an outing to Goldshire with 6 other guild friends, to casually walk past these bullies who kicked him from the guild. I then RPed the role that he was a great warrior, and saved me from some horrific fight etc etc blah blah.. The bullies then started to flame him in general chat about "noob" things hes done, so i told them hes one of the best PVPers i have ever met, and he won his epic mount from a bet, by defeating the most powerful PVP player on our realm (whoever that is…. sorry! hehe).

After a while, these kids started to change there attitude, and actually began to beg for him to rejoin there guild.. But i told him not to.. Instead, i helped him make his own guild, i bought his tabard, helped him with his spelling etc. And also helped him recruit enough members to get his charter registered.

Fast forward to today, and i get a mail from this kid.. Except its not the kid, its his Dad, thanking me.. He said i quote

"Dear Falcore

I want to thank you for helping my son in this game, he's been so excited for days about the new things you bought him, hes also been having a tough time in school latley, and we agreed we would get him this game as an escape, although latley its turned into nothing more than another source of bullying and abuse.

Thanks to you the little chaps smiling again.

Once again, lots of thanks!"

Now all of this cost me a total of 1600g-ish. Money that i was saving for my epic flying mount… But i tell ya, putting a smile on a bullied kids face like that is worth more than every epic in the game.

Moral of the story? Helping makes you feel happy, flaming just makes you an *!*@*#%.

Changing Course

Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by, as always!

In an effort to write more on this site, I've decided to change tack a little from past entries. This blog started as a purely personal blog and gradually morphed into mostly games-related stuff. And fair enough, it's a principal hobby of mine. But I have all these unused categories going free at the top of the page so I thought I'd branch out and try to write a bit more on some other topics to give all of you lovely readers the opportunity to get to know me a bit better in some other areas. Plus, you never know, I might even pick up some more readers along the way – this was clearly demonstrated a while back when I reviewed Haunted Stereo live at the Hobbit (cue Pingback on myself… 'cause no-one else ever links to me :)) and I met a whole bunch of fine new folks as a result.

So from this week forwards, this blog will be… a blog, as opposed to a games blog. You'll still find games writing here, of course, but there are plenty of other things I'd like to talk about. My last few video games articles have also been posted over on Bitmob, so do go check me out (and comment!) over there if you like what you see. You'll also see a couple of my articles on Good Old Games, which should be your first destination for picking up… well, good old games. Check out my articles on Rise of the Triad and Simon the Sorcerer.

Right. On to other matters.

My Dan and Charlie project that I discussed in my last post has been proceeding nicely. It's been fun to "roleplay" these two characters and imagine the situations they have been getting into and how they interact. In practice, it has also been an interesting experiment in separating out various facets of my own personality into two separate people. Those who know me well will have already spotted this, but I also think it's a potentially interesting way of telling a story from different perspectives. My research on the subject is admittedly limited, but does anyone know if anything similar has been done before, outside of ARGs such as Perplex City? (Perplex City is, I confess, where I got the idea from in the first place, although those characters' stories were rather less mundane) I'd be intrigued to see how other people have approached it.

That's it for now. Like I say, this change in approach is largely an excuse to get me writing more on a broader variety of different topics, so assuming I have a bit of self-discipline about this I'm sure I can find something interesting to say on a semi-regular basis. I hope I don't disappoint. 🙂

Avatar Integration and Feeling the Burn

In my last post, I discussed the virtual world of Second Life. This is something that, as you probably noticed, is of particular interest to me – and I'm not the only one. Jenn Frank posted entries about the issue of avatars and personal identity at some length here and here – two articles on which I also commented at some length – and this led onto an interesting discussion of whether avatars were a reflection of your real-life personality or a fantastical creation from the depths of your own mind.

There are no particular conclusions to draw on this issue, as everyone's different. Just because someone enjoys being tied up and sodomized in Second Life (not me, I might add) doesn't necessarily mean that they will in real life. Just because a guy plays a woman (also not me, though I have been known on more than one occasion to play female characters in games), it doesn't mean that they want a sex change. An avatar doesn't have to look anything like the real-life human behind the controls, but sometimes it does.

My avatar, until recently, looked like me, sort of, a bit. A slightly-idealised version of me, if you will, if I were slightly cooler, less fat and able to pull off black leather jackets and red hair. This all changed the other night, however, when a friend that I had previously only had passing contact with on photo exchange site Flickr decided that tonight would be the night we would meet in-world. Said friend is an active Second Life photographer, fond of, as I am, grabbing groups of good-looking avatars, snapping some pictures of them and then Photoshopping the hell out of them in order to produce some pretty pics. I have something of a liking for this process myself, so here's a picture of aforementioned friend following aforementioned Photoshop mangling:

(Incidentally, if nothing else, working on SL pics is a fantastic way to get to grips with Photoshop – I've learned far more about graphic design and image manipulation through playing with SL pics than by working on actual photos.)

But anyway: the point. Part of SL's appeal is that you can change your appearance, shape and even gender on a whim. I hadn't done this until now, as I felt something of a personal attachment to my avatar, as you tend to do anything that you "own" and "use" for a long time, or characters in a lengthy RPG *cough*Persona*cough*. Besides, I felt that my avatar was an expression of me – me putting myself "out there" as me. So it was with some trepidation that when Morgana and her friend asked me if they could try out a new skin and shape on me I accepted – I was stepping out of my comfort zone.

The new shape and skin were very different from what I had played before. I felt uncomfortable. It wasn't me. But then the compliments started rolling in. Suddenly I was hot. As shallow as it sounds, a simple change in appearance – an easy matter in SL – was enough to bring these compliments and by extension, give me a huge amount of confidence. Over the subsequent few days, I have grown accustomed to my new avatar – so much so that I feel I am now unlikely to return to my old one, at least for now.

But something else happened in me, too. I looked at my new, buff, muscular self with cool hair staring back at me from the screen and I thought… "I wish I could be like that." The next day I signed up to our local gym and swimming pool complex, and I'm now following a regular exercise programme. It's funny the things that affect you personally and give you inspiration – I never thought the whole avatar thing would work in reverse, with it giving me a desire to do something positive about my real life appearance. And while it's unlikely I'm ever going to look quite like my improbably-shouldered alter-ego, it was very much the "trigger" to set me off on this process. It's an interesting inverse of the usual "avatar reflecting aspects of reality" thing that I hadn't thought of previously.

I discussed this with some friends recently, and they each admitted that they had had similarly peculiar experiences where something "uninspirational" had, ironically, provided them with the inspiration to make a change in their lives. Each of these things carried a certain degree of personal shame to them, too, so I won't embarrass those friends by sharing them with you now. Suffice it to say that I was faintly embarrassed to say that it was SL that inspired me to kick off this workout programme, until I realised that it really doesn't matter what it is that inspires you, so long as it inspires you. And this is why I'm sharing this story with you now.

If you're the slightest bit curious about following said workout programme and my feelings towards it, you can follow my progress on Tumblr here.