Talky Tuesday: Walking (Running) (Cycling) (Swimming) to Mordor

Around Christmas of 2013, soon after I moved to Sweden, I decided to incentivize working out on our exercise bike by cycling to Mordor. Except I hated that bike so much (the seat was way too hard and absolute murder on my ass) that I started to find excuses to do anything except go on it. Why wreck my ass when I could take a nice walk in the sunshine instead?

And then I made my fourth attempt at running and C25K, because maybe I was grown up enough to like running. And I was. And so I ended up biking, walking, running, and even a little bit of swimming/water jogging (yes, really!) with Sam and Frodo, all the way from the Shire to Mt. Doom. It took them six months; it took me four and a half years.

(I finished right after my 101 in 1001 list ended. I don't remember the exact date, but I remember that much.)

On the plus side, I got to keep all of my fingers!

One of the tasks on my next 101 in 1001 (which I'll be starting soon) will be to run the long trek back to the Shire. First stop, Minas Tirith for Aragorn's coronation!

I was also half expecting to have some Big Feelings about doing this thing, about committing to an exercise plan for hundreds of miles who knows how many hours, but honestly sitting here thinking about it is mostly underwhelming.

I suppose it's been overshadowed by something that feels like a much bigger accomplishment, namely the fact that I ran a 5K. And a 10K, even! My typical run is now around five kilometers, three days a week. Once the pollen subsides and the weather cools down, I'll see if I can push it a little further.

The second week I started running again this year (after taking it easy during the winter), or maybe the third, I felt awesome and ended up running a 10K, just to see if I could. (I could.) I haven't hit that sweet spot again, but the knowledge that I'm capable of it is reassuring.

Both of those things are bigger deals to me than escorting imaginary hobbits across an imaginary landscape, I have to admit. So I haven't been as excited about making it to Mordor as I would otherwise be. But still, I'd like to thank Sam and Frodo and the rest of the Fellowship for inspiring me to get out there and do the thing, back when not much else could inspire me.

U da real MVPs

Riding the Lord of the Rings: Rauros Falls!

So I got to Rauros Falls maybe three weeks ago but forgot to share!

Since this is where the Fellowship breaks, I had two options for my next destination: Isengard with the rest of the Fellowship, or Mordor with Frodo and Sam?

Mordor, duh!

If you want, you can try the the Éowyn challenge yourself. You can also check out my goals for my new 101 in 1001 list, which begins July 3rd.

Walking (Cycling) the Lord of the Rings

One of my ongoing 101 in 1001 challenges is cycling to Mordor, a fitness challenge originally called The Éowyn challenge or Walk to Rivendell.

I hate most fitness challenges because they are either about losing weight/getting smaller, or they quickly become impossible for someone who is not already pretty fit (yours truly). Never mind that they seem motivated by some kind of public humiliation and belief that health is some kind of moral responsibility. (It isn't, by the way. Neither is happiness.)

But walking (or running, or swimming, or cycling) the Lord of the Rings novels just takes mileage. It doesn't say anything about how long it has to take you, or how you have to do it. You just keep adding your numbers on. That's all there is to it. If you want, you can make yourself a map to keep track of your progress. I did, because it's really neat to "see" yourself travel through Middle Earth:

I began in around October of 2013, and so far I'm nearly to Rauros Falls. That's like 2127 kilometers. (My brain is used to miles but my stationary bike is in kilometers so...) Is that the snappiest pace? No, obviously the Fellowship did not take eighteen months just to get to the breaking point at the end of Fellowship/the beginning of The Two Towers. But 1) they had horses and 2) they're fictional. The point is, it makes hopping on the bike and sweating for a half hour just a little more rewarding, and I'll take all the reward I can get because I like moving about as much as a sloth.

If you have a hard time getting excited about movement, this might be just the thing to get you moving. (If you're a Tolkien fan, anyway.) Enjoy!

Music Monday: I'm On a Boat (because I was on a boat)

First of all, Blogger's "embed video straight from YouTube" option has been really broken for me lately, and I've noticed it's been broken for other blogs too. Frustrating!

Anyway, today's tune:

Because I was on a boat. There are a number of short cruises that depart from Stockholm to the archipelago and other Baltic states, and they're stupid cheap. 

These cruises, by the way, are Swedes' and Finns' favorite way to party. 

But I wasn't on a boat to party. I was on a boat to write. If you've been reading at all within the last few weeks, you'll know that I've been doing NaNoWriMo. This year, the Stockholm NaNoWriMo MLs ("municipal liaisons," for those who aren't hep to the jargon; they are volunteer event organizers within a particular region) announced that for the first time, we would have be having an all-day "skrivkryssning" ("writing cruise"). 

So Sunday morning I woke up at 5 am (!!) to get to Ropsten and get on the boat to Åland, a collection of islands between Finland and Sweden, at which point we'd be shuttled through the deck there to get on a boat back to Stockholm.  

It was a good time, though I didn't write an outstanding amount despite the eleven hours we put aside to write. It was a triple threat of exhaustion, being already past the 50k mark and thus lacking any sense of urgency, and being too distracted by the goings-on on the boat. One of our members won some James Bond trivia they had going on in one of the bars on ship. There was also Finnish karaoke. At 11 am. 

Never too early for Finnish karaoke.

Still, I wrote over 3000 words, or about twice the daily quota needed to hit 50,000 words in thirty days. Nice, though about on par with the word count I've been averaging for all of November. More importantly, I was able to wrap up my story (my only goal for the day). NaNo total: 72,600 words. Manuscript total: 84,100 words. That's about on par with, among other things, Cry, the Beloved Country.

My sense of relief upon having finished a damn first draft during NaNo (something I haven't done since 2011) was something like Frodo's at the end of Lord of the Rings:

Despite my writing degree, I've don't always take what I write during NaNo too seriously. Sometimes (like this year) I use the month to hash out a lot of work and words on an idea I had earlier. Other times I don't have an idea until just a few weeks before NaNo begins and I write it basically to have something to write during NaNo. This is the first "serious project" whose first draft has seen completion in November, and so that means it gets to be the first to get revised and edited!

I'm not sure what I'll do next year. I have a YA fantasy novel (YES ANOTHER YA FANTASY NOVEL, AS IF THE WORLD NEEDED ANY MORE) I worked on two years ago that I keep outlining and plotting despite myself; NaNo 2015 might be the push it gets to see completion. 

What I Played: Lord of the Rings: War in the North

This got a brief shout-out from me both on Twitter and in my latest Read Play Blog response. But I think it's worth sparing a few more words here because I don't think Lord of the Rings: War in the North (PS3, 360, PC, and OS X) got the acclaim or recognition it deserved. On Metacritic it has something like 63 / 100. Google aggregates it as 3.5 / 5.

War in the North is basically the first LotR-inspired game I've played all the way through. I've dropped in on a couple of LEGO Lord of the Rings sessions, and there was some weird isometric puzzle one for the GBA for Fellowship of the Ring but I quickly lost the patience for that one. I've also heard tell of the LotR MMOs but MMOs are not my bag. There are games that predate the Peter Jackson movies, mods for preexisting games, and on and on, but despite my love for the books I never played any of them

I am a LotR video game noob and that is where this review is coming from.

JV picked up War in the North because he heard it was a fun hack 'n' slash game to play co-op and we can always use more co-op games. This was to tide us over until Reaper of Souls launched (and then dropped in price), and it ended up being incredibly fun in its own right.

The story of War in the North is contemporaneous with the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Your party engages with Sauron's forces in his northern outposts and, it's implied, help the Fellowship by keeping Sauron distracted. Yeah, being unsung heroes!

The character setup is your standard thief/fighter/mage trilogy: a human ranger, a dwarven fighter, or a lady elf mage. (You also get a giant badass bird after the first dungeon, but he's strictly NPC.) Each class has its own set of skill trees (AW YISS SKILL TREEEEEEEES) for you to puzzle over. Whichever character isn't controlled by a player is controlled by the AI. After meeting Aragorn at the Prancing Pony, off you go to kick some ass and take some names.

The control scheme is intuitive: you have heavy and light attacks and you can defend and counter. Simple, but elegant. Overall the controls are responsive and the fighting is very fluid and easy to get used to. The level design is also fantastic and mostly succeeds at balancing the challenging-versus-fair tension necessary for every successful game. There are long runs of minion hordes, endurance fights against siege weapons, wave survivals, and rewarding bosses and minibosses. (And no bullshit escort missions!) 

Other reviews judge War in the North for being too repetitive, and I see how it could be, but since my personal heaven is an endless hack 'n' slash, I could not give a flying fuck about "repetitive." It's what it says on the tin! MASH THE BUTTONS. KILL THINGS. KNEEL BEFORE ZOD.

The loot system is also impressive. Each helm, armor, or weapon has its own unique style. The same helm will still look different on the ranger than it does on the dwarf or the elf, so every item in the game has been designed three times over. The artists for War in the North did a superlative job with the design.

I freaking loved this game. I did. I loved the hell out of it. It is just sheer fun to play. You can go back and replay previous missions (though you won't be able to fight the unique monsters, minibosses, or bosses) or, if you want to grind or just see how much ass you can kick, you can choose one of two bonus "survival" levels: Lorien or Osgiliath. They're not part of the story in any way. You can just go and kick ass for the hell of it, or to grind a bit for the next dungeon, or to stock up on ammo and potions. Not to mention there are, of course, a wide range of difficulties you can complete the game on if you want to go for that True Completionist Mode. 

I do have a few beefs, however.

1. The story is just too short. You can finish the game (which takes place over the entire trilogy) in a weekend, and that just doesn't feel right for something as epic as Lord of the Rings. I mean yeah there are some sidequests and things, but that's not enough. It could have benefited from some Fallout level NPCs, sidequests, and world exploration.

2.  Ally AI is just dumb as a sack of bricks. Theoretically you can tell your AI player (if you're not playing with two other players) to "attack" or "defend" with up and down on the D-pad, but in practice it's useless and overall the AI-controlled characters are idiots. JV and I played as the mage and the dwarf, respectively. The mage has a pretty essential spell called Sanctuary that blocks enemy missiles and (after some early levels up) heals. It is the backbone of the game. And every time JV would cast it when we needed some healing, the AI-controlled ranger would just stand RIGHT OUTSIDE the dome unless I maneuvered my dwarf as far away from him as possible (without stepping outside the AOE). 

However, the game was designed to be co-op, so I can see why the developers wouldn't want to sink a lot of time into complex AI. The game is designed to be played with other people, not with the computer and definitely not on your own.

3. But the worst issue, by far, is bugs. Game-breaking bugs. This might be less of an issue if you play online or on PSN (which seems to be the style of play the devs were considering the default), but playing co-op with JV was riddled with issues. At one point near the end of the game, because we teleported back to town to do some maintenance before facing a boss, the boss never loaded. The save was totally ruined and we had to start all the way from the beginning. Dying also seemed to trigger some weird buggy issues, as did trying to drop into a game with a higher-level character. We were able to play around these by playing the game on Easy (no dying), doing dungeons in straight runs (no teleporting back to town), and always playing together (no significant level discrepancies). 

Despite these issues, War in the North doesn't get the love it deserves, and I'm bummed that in the 3 years since its initial release, there hasn't been a sequel, a reboot, or at least some fucking patches. It's easy to get into, it's fun, and overall it's designed well.

101 in 1001: Lothlorien!

I made it safely through Moria and past the Balrog to get to Lothlorien!

Soon I'm going to have to decide which route I want to take first: go with the hobbits to Isengard to Isengard! Or go with the rest of the Fellowship on a slightly different route to Isengard?

I have also accomplished a few other things that are much less dramatic: eating loads of fresh produce (grapes and smoothies are my favorite summertime snack), blogging regularly, finally getting a new images for my blog header/Etsy banner/FB photo, etc. That last one is probably the only other thing that's at all interesting. Now everything matches across all my platforms: Facebook, Etsy, the blog, and Twitter. It's convenient to have a boyfriend who enjoys working with the GIMP and graphic design!

101 in 1001: Walking the Lord of the Rings

I don't know when or how I first stumbled upon it, but the Walk to Rivendell challenge has been something I've known about for years now. After attempting and failing C25K three different times, I decided that running a race (eugh—running) was never something that was going to appeal to me.

But taking the One Ring of Power to Mt. Dûm with Frodo and Sam? Right up my alley!

I just completed the first leg of the challenge: getting from Hobbiton to Rivendell (on our stationary exercise bike). I'll be posting my progress every time I make a significant milepost like this, with help of a handy-dandy graphic. My progress is the light blue dotted line, in case that wasn't obvious.

101 in 1001

A new year means, entirely coincidentally and yet so appropriately, a revision and review of my 101 in 1001 in one list.

I think one of the most important goals on any successful 101 in 1001 list are the "list maintenance" goals: whether it's the commitment to weekly updates, periodic revisions, or sharing goals with others, goals that are about the list itself keep you focused on the rest of the goals you want to achieve. I've noticed a definite difference between this list and my last list in terms of staying on task, and I credit that entirely to my list-oriented goals.


Completed:

I finished Star Trek: TOS. (5 - 12) I'm watching some of the movies now, and also looking forward to starting on TNG. But considering how much Dr. Who and MST3K I still have left, I'm going to save making TNG a proper goal for my next list (which is due in 2015).

In progress:

Went over my list to make sure all my goals are still relevant/good, and added some more: (1 - 1) (1 - 2)

1. I changed "Read one chapter of 'Doktor Glas' in Swedish" to three chapters. (1 - 6) I forgot how short some of the chapters (diary entries) are! 

2. Now that I am bereft of a treadmill and too private a person to go to the gym or run outside, I suppose it's time to retire my ambitions to complete the Couch to 5K program. (6 - 1) Running blows, anyway. I made a valiant effort, really, and I've decided that it's just not for me. However, to replace this goal, I've decided to walk to Rivendell. Or in this case, ride: I may be down one treadmill but I am up one exercise bike, so I have that going for me, which is nice. I'm retroactively including the ~75 km I've done on the bike already (which is a conservative estimate). 

3. Emailing Rodolfo (7 - 1) is kind of a moot point, since we're still in contact on Google+. Counting it as "complete" seems like cheating, but I didn't really fail it either. Instead, I'm just removing it to make room for other goals. 

4. I added "Get my Swedish ID card," though it feels like cheating to add something to the list I HAVE to do. (1 - 7) I've been so lazy about it, though, that making it part of the list will maybe motivate me to finish this paper trail circus. 

5. I also added two historical podcasts as goals: The History of Rome (9 - 7) and The Ancient World (9 - 8). For each one I've made roughly one third of the episodes my goal (so 60 episodes of Rome and 12 episodes of Ancient World), though I have no idea if that goal is too easy or too ambitious or anywhere in between. 

6. Considering the ease with which I cranked out 5 articles for WhatCulture, I thought it would be good to add 5 more to keep me on my game. (10 - 16) I already have rough ideas for a couple more! 

7. I'm unsure what to do about feedback for Kat and Familiar, since I left my hard copy at home and don't have a printer. :( (7 - 4) I don't want to count it as failed, yet, since we might get a proper printer yet.

Another update and comment, of course. (1 - 3) (7 - 4)

I also realized that some of my number counts on the weekly goals were way off. There were a few missed ones I had accounted for, but so many weeks of forgetting to update the number in the list left me 24 (!!) behind in both counts.

I also started working on my ENG CRW story again, clocking in at over 23,000 words. (5 - 10) This goal will be crossed off soon—though considering it was my NaNo project of 2012, I really should have finished this goal much sooner.


Failed:

None!