Month: May 2016

Some people might be surprised but talk shows are rehearsed and practiced before taping. Even WikiBear needs some work before going on stage.

The trailer you see above is for the just announced Dawn of War III from Relic Entertainment. DoW III is a sequel to previous two games in the franchise and continues to be based on the Warhammer 40K universe.

You might recall I started working at Relic Entertainment in September of 2013. At the time I couldn’t say what I was working on but it was this game. When I arrived, the game did not have a title and they weren’t sure if this was going to be a true sequel to the previous game. Though the game was undoubtedly going to be set in the Warhammer 40K universe, there was some thought it was going to be different enough that it wouldn’t fit into the Dawn of War mold. With the announcement, it’s clear that they’ve decided it is a true sequel.

The timing of this announcement makes it the longest period I’ve had to wait for a game to be made publicly known by a wide margin. All the games I’ve worked on were announced no more than twelve to fourteen months after real production had started. This game needed two and a half years before they decided to reveal it to the public.

I was at Relic for barely five months and it was not a contract job. I left because I wanted to. You can probably infer how much I liked it there. As this is the Internet I will not go into any specific details about the job.

It was really interesting watching the trailer. First, it was just neat to see what they decided to name the game. Second, I’ve never felt so much detachment from a game I worked on. It was like watching a trailer for something I had nothing to do with. That makes a lot of sense because I’m guessing not a single line of code I wrote in those five months made it into the current iteration of the game. Again, I can’t go into many details but after I left, there were some significant changes made to the code base and a lot of work went out the window.

Since none of my code is in the game and I was there for such a short period of time, I don’t expect my name to be in the credits. I certainly won’t be invited to the wrap party. I’m ok with that though. I hope the game is a success.

Associate producer Jordan Schlansky has decided to review products on Conan’s show. They say these reviews aren’t sponsored by the product makers themselves and I want to believe them. In the review above, Jordan reviews Prep H wipes.

I find myself agreeing with many of Jordan’s views on how one should cleanse themselves after a bowel movement. I feel like I might buy a box of these wipes if and when I find a new job.

As I alluded to in a previous post I am going to London, England near the end of this month. I have two friends who live in the London area and I’ve always wanted to return to Europe. I have not set foot on that continent since I was three years old when my parents decided to bring me on their European vacation. I have lots to write about my upcoming trip but today’s post deals with time zones and traveling through them.

Since I became an adult, my travels haven’t brought me any further than three hours ahead or three hours behind my local time zone. As such, the effects of jet lag haven’t really factored into my adult travels. Traveling east is always much more difficult in that respect than going west but every single time I go to the east coast, you get used to the time changes within hours. When I went to Hawaii last month, it was even easier given it was going west and because of my tendency to go to bed really late.

The last time I had to deal with actual jet lag was when I was about twelve years old. That was the last time I went to Hong Kong where their time zone is fifteen hours ahead of Vancouver’s. As a kid, my parents took the whole family to Hong Kong several times but I don’t remember having to deal with the jet lag. It must have been a factor though, as it’s quite difficult for the body to instantly sync with the new time zone.

London is eight hours ahead of Vancouver which presents a big problem for me personally. Since the end of February, I’ve been going to sleep around 4am and waking up around noon. In terms of London time, that means I’ve been going to bed at noon and waking up around 8pm. If I don’t change my sleeping habits, then that’s exactly what I would face once I got off the plane. That’s probably the worst case scenario where my body wants to sleep during the middle of the day and I’d miss everything in the daytime.

I’ve read various ways to combat jet lag. One strategy is to just slowly and naturally adjust your body clock to the new time zone. I’ve read that it takes about one day to adjust your body clock one hour. Now given that I’m only in London eight days, if I went with this strategy, I’d be all good on the last day of my trip, right before I was about go home. Obviously, that would suck and I’m certainly not going to spend the first few days of my trip sleeping during the daytime in my hotel room. I’ve also discovered some strategies where you accelerate the adjustment using melatonin and not giving into the desire to sleep until it’s actually night-time at your new destination. This seems more reasonable but I bet it totally sucks the first few days when you really want to sleep during the afternoon.

Another strategy involves adjusting your sleep schedule before you arrive at your destination. For some people, this is impractical. If you’ve got a job or other time sensitive responsibilities, you can’t be training your body to start sleeping in the afternoon for example. Fortunately, I have neither a job nor anything like that. Now if I were going to Australia, I wouldn’t have to do any adjustment of sleep schedule. I mentioned in a previous post that my 4am to 12pm sleep schedule lines up pretty well with most of Australia. If I went there, I’d get off the plane and my body would automatically be set for a 11pm to 7am sleep period (or thereabouts).

I’m going to London though, so I’m going to have to make some major adjustments. My target would be to go to sleep around 4pm and wake up around midnight. Now keep in mind I go to bed at 4am right now so I’m in the worst case scenario. In a 24 hour clock, the 12 hour adjustment is the most difficult. Any other time zone on this planet would have been easier to adjust to. Now how am I gonna get this done? I suppose I could go to bed an hour earlier each day. I’d walk my bedtime back so that I’d eventually go to sleep at 4pm. In practice, I think that’s going to be tough. I hate going to bed early. I have a hard time going to sleep at 11pm. I can’t imagine trying to sleep at 6pm.

The more likely scenario is that I’m going to push my bedtime forward an hour or so each day. My body seems to have an easier time with this. I can probably make it to a 7am or 8am bedtime easily in a day or two. I guess I’m going to have to adjust my meal schedule was well. Lunch time here will be my London dinner. London breakfast will be some weird midnight snack here. London lunch will a very early breakfast here.

It should be an interesting week before I go to London.

This evening I had dinner with two friends. One of them wanted to go to a ramen place downtown. I was fine with that since I quite fond of noodles and soup of all forms. I did warn him though that the last five or six times I’ve had ramen, I’ve had to poop with varying levels of urgency within two hours of eating it.

I’m not sure what’s with ramen that causes such a reaction. I’ve definitely had ramen without any ill effects but that was a long time ago and I can’t remember the last time it went down without an incident.

My most recent encounters with ramen have been quite an adventure. More than a year ago, I had ramen at this new place and I didn’t even make it to the end of the meal. Things started rumbling and crashing inside me about ten minutes after I finished my bowl. Luckily, this place had really nice single occupant washrooms. I won’t go into the details of what transpired in there, except to say it was explosive.

That was probably the worst experience and my other ones have been less severe. Sometimes it’ll be anywhere between half an hour to an hour before I feel anything and once that happens the urgency will be anything from mild to great concern. At any rate though, it’s serious enough that it has to be dealt with before I can do anything else. Like I wouldn’t even think about having ramen and then going to a movie. That’s just asking for trouble.

So for dinner tonight, I decided to see if I could change things up. Usually when I have ramen, I get it with a tonkotsu broth, which is a very rich, fatty, and flavourful pork-based broth. It’s my theory that the richness and fat of the pork in the broth is more than my digestive system can handle. To test this, I ordered a ramen with a chicken-based broth. It was much more clear, clean and less rich compared to tonkotsu.

Our whole meal went without incident. I was thinking maybe I was onto something by avoiding the fatty broth. My friends and I left the restaurant and then went somewhere else to hang out and talk. I felt fine the entire time. About an hour and half after we finished dinner, we all headed home. As usual, I took the train home, quite content that I didn’t have to deal with ramen poops for once. Then approximately ten minutes from my stop, I felt that very familiar rumbling in my intestines that signaled that something was up.

Luckily, the build up of the intensity was relatively slow so it wasn’t a full-on emergency while I was on public transportation. While that was certainly true, make no mistake, this was definitely something had to be dealt with fairly soon. I made it back home without incident but by this time there was a level of discomfort there. I dropped by keys and wallet on the kitchen counter and made it a bee-line to the bathroom where I sought the release of what was ailing me.

So, while it was delayed this time by about two hours, I did not actually escape the ramen poops. What is it about ramen that causes me to have this reaction? I’m not sure. When it comes to other noodle soups, I’m fine. I’ve never had problems after eating a bowl of won-ton noodle soup. I eat pho on a very regular basis. I had it last week actually. I feel totally fine after a bowl of pho.

My situation with ramen has come to the point where I really question if I should have it if I won’t have easy access to a bathroom within 10 to 30 minutes after I eat it. Perhaps I should avoid it for the near future? I would really like to know what in the bowl of ramen causes this problem.

On the weekend there was a bike race of some sort in Brooklyn called the Red Hook Criterium. Apparently they intended to use a scooter or a motorbike to pace the race but the vehicle stalled or would not start. For whatever reason, the person on the vehicle didn’t move it to the side and the racers came flying by it from behind. The first few bikes had the benefit of clear vision ahead and were able to go around it. The rest of the pack was not so lucky. What follows is what you see above. Crazy.