D3, waking up to wheat, triggers
Awhile back I signed up for the WoW annual pass. Part of the reason I did it was because they were giving people Diablo 3 for free as part of the promotion. Well the game was released yesterday.
This is the third installment in the series. I was never a huge fan of the prior games. I played a decent amount of the first Diablo and I didn’t play Diablo 2 at all.
Well there has been a ton of hype and anticipation for D3 and since I was getting it for free I certainly was going to check it out.
Just like most of my computer game purchases in the past few years, installing D3 required nothing but an internet connection although the roughly 8 gig download took quite awhile to complete.
I fired up the game and created my first character, a Barbarian of course. Their “Hulk Smash” style of play appeals to me. The game opens with a cinematic, an incredibly realistic cinematic. It is simply amazing what they can do with computer animation, the detail was fantastic.
When I jumped into the game itself the visual orgasm continued, the graphics and character animations are just top notch. Unlike WoW which can seem hopelessly complicated to the novice, Diablo 3 doesn’t have anywhere close to the same learning curve. The controls are much simpler and moving around the environment is made intuitive by the helpers Blizzard built into the game.
It just so happened that as I was creating my first character my buddy Charlie had just logged on to the game. D3 makes it stupidly easy to team up with your buddies for some monster smashing fun. Within seconds Charlie and I were marching around together raising hell.
The game is just flat out fun. At least initially, you feel God-like as you can smash through a pack of 15 bad guys with little consequence. I have a feeling as the game progresses the margin for error will get slimmer.
Diablo shares the gear concept with WoW. As you kill things and progress through the game, upgraded armor and weapons drop which you can pick up and use to make yourself even more bad ass.
Blizzard took a bold new step with Diablo 3, introducing an in game virtual auction house that can have financial rewards in the real world. Players can spend real cash for virtual goods. That concept is not new. However they can also sell virtual goods for real cash, that, is new.
One of the big problems in WoW is the huge underground in-game gold market. Basically there are businesses that are built upon the backs of virtual slaves that do nothing but collect gold in the game and then sell that gold to other people that don’t want to spend the time to accumulate it conventionally. This trade is huge in China, hence the term “Chinese gold farmers” .
Well a few years back the gold farming industry got nasty. Greedy farmers figured out there was a much faster way to collect gold to resell for profit, steal accounts. They developed and introduced trapdoor websites and keyloggers that were specifically designed to steal your WoW account logon information. Once they obtained it they would log on as you, sell everything you have and empty out your virtual bank. It has been a HUGE issue in WoW.
Well Blizzard decided to eliminate that market in Diablo 3 by creating their own virtual to real currency auction house. It will be interesting to see how it works out. I haven’t played around in that part of the game yet.
The game just seems to be so well done and I have only scratched the surface of what it has to offer at this point. I look forward to digging deeper in the upcoming weeks.
In a recent edition of Newsweek (yes I am still receiving it for free) there was an article regarding the obesity epidemic. I found it interesting that the article focused on the “wheat belly” effect I talked about a few months back.
Over the years the public has been fed many magic bullets that were the cause of obesity. First is was food that was high in fat so food companies pumped out “low fat” versions of their products that always cost more than the regular variety.
Then it was all about carbs, carbs are bad. This lead to stupid diets like Atkins that made you lose weight while you stuck to it but the moment you resumed a moderately normal diet you would blow up to dimensions bigger than before.
Well within these fads there remained a pretty solid health plan, eat less calories and exercise more. That always works, right? Well yes, but there is an asterisk.
For decades the established principal in nutrition has been a calorie is a calorie. Whether you consume that calorie via a milkshake or via a piece of broccoli, it is burned by your body for energy the same way.
Well the wheat belly principal bucks that trend in a big way. Now people are looking more at how certain types of foods interact with the body’s processes, in this case, whole grains in particular. Foods that spike insulin production are the ones that are most responsible for fat production. Well guess what, wheat/whole grains are one of these foods.
A more accurate and effective measurement of a foods fat potential on the body is it’s glycemic value, which is indicative of that food’s effect on insulin production. I found it shocking that a piece of wheat bread has a higher glycemic index than granulated sugar.
In addition, in many people’s bodies, gluten is treated as an irritant which contributes to a large number of other problems.
If you look at our food chain, it is just bursting at the seams with “whole grain” foods that have been sold as a healthy alternative when the exact opposite may be true.
I have heard/read repeatedly how a gluten free diet (absence of wheat/grain products) is the best thing you can do for yourself if you are trying to clean up your diet/lose weight. I myself have been quite guilty of jumping on the whole wheat train for the last decade or so. I am now going to be starting to moderate that as well.
For the most part since Ali moved out I haven’t spent much time moping around and dwelling on it, knowing that in the big picture it won’t help me move ahead. However at times I will find myself triggered randomly into sad thoughts.
One of those times was this morning when I was getting ready to leave for work. I glanced at the Peanuts calendar that is hanging on the wall I saw it was still on April. As I turned the calendar to the current month I thought about how Ali always would get a Peanuts calendar every year and then carefully go through it, marking important dates and accenting them with cute Peanuts stickers that were included.
At that moment, the realization that 2012 was the last year such a calendar would be adorning my wall made me sad.