Friday 13 May 2005

Pic of the day: "Reality differs from anime" says one anime character to another, here in the anime Rizelmine. Gee, I wouldn't have noticed. Real world, is that where they have the big room with the blue ceiling?

Real and unreal worlds

Audrey is not interested in having more than one child. In fact, she is no longer interested in even cuddling, much less anything more. It is not like she actively resists or even that she doesn't enjoy it. It is just never on her mind. All she is interested in, beside her own career, is her son's grades in school and -- strangely enough -- music. Lately she will go straight from bed to the electric guitar each morning and start to play.

This is not really a problem for me, since Audrey is an imaginary character living in the game Sims2. It is only a problem for her husband, Mazrim Spanner, whose life goal is to have six grandchildren. This will be a long time in the coming if things continue like this. And they probably will. Their son recently became a teenager, so there are still several days of playing ahead before he can start his own family. (Or at least before he ought to do so.)

My renewed interest in Sims2 has come at the cost of interest in City of Heroes. I was moving ahead at a brisk clip until I was diverted by Sims2. I'm still spending some time in Paragon City, but it doesn't hold my attention to the same degree. But this should not come as a surprise to anyone. I have told repeatedly in these pages that I am a fad-driven person; it is just that my fads don't synchronize with the rest of the world.

***

To further complicate matters, I now have this fitness fad in the real world. Or "flesh world" as I like to call it. But it really is more real than the imaginary worlds where I spend my playtime. And in the real world, the things you do have real consequences. Perhaps that's why I avoid it so much. I don't trust myself, much less anybody else.

Okay, perhaps it is not exactly a fitness fad. It is not like I'm trying to build muscle and look good. But I'm reading up on calories and taking long pointless walks that I would not have taken before I got my pulse watch. Did you know that women need approximately 2000 kcal each day? That's more than 10 cups of yogurt each day! How do they manage to eat that much yogurt? I can possibly consume six of those boxes on a good day, each of them holding 175 mL or approximately 1 cup of yogurt. And actually we men, being less insulated and with all those hungry muscles, need 2500 kcal each day. And that's supposedly without any extra exertion. According to my watch, I easily blow another 500 or more kcal just walking to the shop and back. Surely life for people with actual physical work must be a daily struggle to shuffle enough food into the blazing furnace of their bodies...

Despite this, the otherwise reliable magazine "The Economist" claims that by 2008 half of the population in the USA and the EU will be overweight to some degree. This must definitely be what economists call a "mass market"! ^_^ I suppose that in the real world, not only do actions have consequences, but so has inaction. Food for thought, indeed.