Posts by BenWilson
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Interested that he was the same class/talent tree as my favourite toon - Feral Druid. It may be the only class that could get a bunch of the flag running achievements, Feral Druids basically are the natural choice for that. Not too many people are impressed when a rogue tries to run in all 3 flags. They would probably be mighty impressed if the rogue succeeded at it. One of the downsides of achievements is that it encourages people to focus on them selfishly at times. Having a rogue constantly picking up the flag and trying to run it would shit everyone in the team off, because the rogue has weak armor, fairly weak speed enhancements, and most of their ways of getting out of sticky situations involve going into stealth, which you can't do holding a flag.
But having said that, the rogue was the bane of a feral druid's life on every battleground. The number of times I got killed by them whilst trying to run a flag in... They were the natural choice when it was time to break up 'scenario 3', where both flags have been taken.
So achievements in an absolute sense are actually pretty personal, and if you get fully hooked into WoW there's no way at all you could 'finish the game'.
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What does such a person do next?
He raises the famous question: How do you kill someone with no life?
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I can attest that my choice of sport as a teenager, waterpolo, contributed to my skin troubles. Cardiovascular health is not everything. Not to mention injuries, both instantaneous and through the muscular imbalance can can result from training to particular tasks. Then there's the fact that your entire metabolism adjusts to expect training at that level, which isn't so good when you stop playing competitively.
Competition does give motivation to train, but it's often not motivation to train in a healthy way. I met so many people over in Australia who had been pushed in their sports as children (and some continued to push themselves as adults) that they had undergone quite horrendous operations to treat injuries, just so that they could carry on with something in which they were only amateur anyway. The most bizarre of all was the lengths one colleague of mine who went in Iron Man comps went to. He did seriously screwy things to his diet, like massive loading on sugar, huge boom and bust cycles in his consumption, etc. This was on the advice of his personal trainer, and various other famous Iron Men's accounts of their methods. I was actually happy when I heard his knees had given out and he had stopped taking it so seriously.
We think we're a bit nuts about sport. But in Australia, I met a guy who had a Masters in Waterpolo. It pretty much summed up why they cane us at sport in most arenas.
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Hilary, cetomacrogol is good stuff. Used it for years. Now I use even greasier stickier stuff. It does help.
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Danielle, I've been more careful not to take a stance this time. I just raise 'overthinking', in a very long winded way, as a possibility - of course it was already raised, and it's not a new idea.
I don't think it's something that even can be resolved, one way or the other. It seems to me like a resolution that might work for some people, a self-selecting hypothesis. If you were reading me as intended, you saw that it hasn't worked for me, wrt eczema. The urge to scratch wins most days. But I know people for whom it has worked, they just used discipline. Whether this was easier for them because they just weren't as itchy is impossible to know.
In terms of prevention for eczema, it's fairly easy for me to see that it's possible. Both of my kids have it, which was always highly likely, and I've managed it much better than it sounds like it was managed for me when I was small. On the elder child, we haven't had to use steroids for over a year. But I can't really be sure if it's just that neither child is as chronic as I am, and time will tell if it comes back. We have much better information than we used to about some possible links from childhood feeding habits to adult eczema.
Certainly my GP is much happier to give me drugs to manage it than he is for most of the parents he deals with - they will usually just slap the steroids on until the problem goes away, which is not actually the best thing to do. At least it's not the only thing you should do.
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Looks like I was wrong and their is will-to-fat-fight after all. I'm going to try to threadjack it away a little, using the fat-fight as a convenient lead.
It seems to me that one of the causes of modern obesity is very similar in many ways to the causes of any number of other ailments, many of them quite expensive. Basically, advancing improvements in every aspect of technology, social organization, science, understanding of human psychology, basically "progress" of every kind, leads to an increasing and paradoxical handing over to the 'group' of decisions that would formerly only be made at an individual level. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. Or maybe just side-effects, and points of view on those.
Jacking away from obesity to my own chronic ailment, eczema, we find that here is another illness enjoying an inexplicable rise in modern times, despite the fact that we know more about eczema than we ever have before, and are constantly inventing new treatments. Here we have something that it is much harder to invent evolutionary reasons for the rise of. It's a bit harder to say "well, we used to have it less because we chased animals around by necessity". But naturally there are still a plethora of offered explanations. Many blame modern foods, and the additives etc in those. Bottle feeding is one I often hear. Others blame pollution. Other explanations I've heard are that eczema can be treated with UV, so perhaps our past of being outside more contributed to less of it. Then there's the idea that we are more stressed now, that stress is linked in with the ailment. Some think it comes from overmedication. Others think it's from underexposure to natural irritants, so that we haven't developed tolerance. Yet more think that it's an evolutionary thing, that in the past extreme skin conditions would have more likely led to death, or a failure to procreate on account of disfiguration.
There's also combination viewpoints, which is pretty much what the doctors who treat me seem to take. In absence of a 'cure' for me, all bets are off, and anything is possible. Naturally they won't put their name to most of them, keeping their prescriptions to drugs and other hospital treatments that they can monitor. Certainly any link to foods has never received the slightest positive from any specialist I've ever seen, although they've never said that it's not that. But that's moving into dietary control, a minefield for doctors.
Being the only person who can actually observe what I do all the time, I've got my own take on a major source of my problem. Scratching. Scratching makes it worse. Almost 100% of the time. This is for lots of reasons, no real need to go into them - it's pretty obvious that systematically tearing layers of skin off around an afflicted patch of skin will damage it, and probably spread it. Which makes it a much bigger problem, requires more medication to clear it up, which develops a stronger resistance to the medication, and in the case of steroids, weakens the skin too, making it more prone.
Of course the doctors know this, and a huge prong of the treatment centers on ways to stop scratching. So there's antihistamines, moisturizers etc, which are mainly aimed at reducing the urge to itch, or removing some of the dryness that leads to itchiness, etc.
But this defers the problem. It puts it on the doctors to find a way to stop me doing something. The other obvious option for me is "stop scratching". And at some level it really is as simple as that. When the choice to scratch is presented to me consciously, there is some sense in which I can simply stop. I'm doing it right now, in fact. Well, ok, just a little eye rub, lightly, with a finger tip (and so it starts). People often ask my why I don't just stop scratching. The answer is always "because it's itching". Of course I can stop, but the scratch does have a pleasant effect, if temporary. It removes the itch, for a short time. In fact, the harder you scratch, the more it removes it, which is how I end up scratching to bleeding point, and often beyond.
I can say that it's unconscious, that it's impossible to control. It does seem that way sometimes. But at other times, it just seems like bloody mindedness - itching is so incredibly distracting and annoying that scratching a little seems like the lesser of evils. And yet, there are plenty of times when I don't scratch. In company, it's usually at a minimum.
Is anyone seeing the parallel to eating in all of this?
Basically, what I'm saying here is that the mental side of this affliction is huge. There is no other gatekeeper to my fingernails than myself. And yet, clearly that gatekeeper is insufficient (so far). So medical science (and quack science) have a vast array of alternatives, most of them leading, in some way, indirectly and yet inevitably to the final result - I stop scratching. Which is the only real cure. It could have been the starting point. Why isn't it? What has really changed in the modern world on this score?
I think all of the suggestions above to this are plausible. I've had extensive (and expensive) testing to isolate the variables, all of them unsuccessful. I did not respond to UV. Allergy testing picked up nothing. I've tried cutting out some foods (there's not enough time in my life to be systematic about all of them). I've tried self-hypnosis, I've tried antihistamines, I've tried *everything*. So I get to the point where I'm at a loss - the cause is probably something I'm stuck with, and the cure is an act of volition, that magic quantity that may or may not be real or possible on a sustained basis. A constant undending act of volition, since I'm always itching somewhere.
I'm deeply resistant to the idea of psychoanalysis for it. Deeply deeply. You get that way when you've been raised by a psychologist, particularly one from the behaviourist school (at least it's the only school he ever claimed). Maybe that's my problem. I don't know. But who else can ever know? The problem is heavily subjective. And the drugs do work. They're just degenerative and have huge potential side effects (cancer for instance).
To throw that into some kind of perspective, my GP decided I was definitely in the 'too hard' basket and referred me to the hospital when he asked me why I didn't stop scratching, and my answer was "I do stop scratching. I'm stopping right now". He asked "how itchy do you feel, what is it like?". "Like I'm lying naked in a bed of gorse". He seemed startled, and looked at me very closely, I was sitting reasonably still, conducting a conversation with him. I was being honest, I was really that itchy that day, but I'm so used to it, that controlling that to some extent seems normal. It's the only option. To other people it might seem like I'm just weak when I finally give in to the one itch out of the 20 odd I'm feeling simultaneously, and decide to scratch it, just to give myself a moment to think.
So I can fully understand why obese people feel judged when someone says 'just stop eating so much'. It's a very easy thing to say if the urge to eat in oneself is not particularly strong. If it causes physical pain and distraction then you might feel differently about how easy that is to get around.
But on the other hand I can see that it is ultimately going to be the end result of any useful advice on obesity, or indeed any cure that doesn't come via advice, like stomach stapling or some kind of hunger suppressant medication. In controlling the urge to scratch, it does help for me to take responsibility for it, sometimes. In passing responsibility to medical science to cure my ailment, I may have missed the point entirely. I think this might be a modern trend, every bit as much as 'not running around after our food' or 'not getting out in the sun' or 'eating different stuff to what we used to'. Basically we're overthinking the problem, because we can, because we are encouraged to, because anything less might seem irrational.
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I'm sensing no one wants a fat fight, which is good, I sure don't. There's plenty more issues in public health to chew on, which I think would be more mentally nutritious.
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Sorry for characterising obesity as a disease/disability that language isn't ideal but in the terms of the discussion it seemed appropriate.
It's a way of seeing it that seems more empowering than considering it 'inbuilt'. Whether it's true is another matter. Indeed, if it's not true, it's a false sense of empowerment. But I guess we either keep looking for a magic bullet or accept obesity for some. And that's always going to be a personal choice, if such an idea really makes any sense.
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Had some really nice days here recently. But there's virtually no conditions where you can just hang around outside and feel comfortable. The sun is too damned strong. In Thailand, with a lovely smoggy haze above ... oh, that's right they killed that.
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New Zealand's 2009 can be exemplified by an obscure, random, low productiion value animation voiced by an australian-trying-to-do-a-new-zealand-accent.
Weren't the Clones awful? It's not like it's hard to find cheap NZ labor to do the voice-overs, ffs.
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