An interesting data pattern in my diet program...

I've noticed an interesting trend in my body fat percentages data, and I figured I'd share it with you. First, the slope is bottoming out. I suspect part of that is because I've been cheating more often. Sad but true. I'm a foodie in a house full of women and children: there are temptations everywhere. Most days, I can keep to the regimen, it's not tragically onerous. Some days, though, like when everyone's having some home-baked cookies or hand-made ice cream (Omaha won an ice cream maker made by a reputable manufacturer at an auction recently), self-discipline crumbles.

Those green dots are days when I recorded cheating: I had two oatmeal-and-peanut-butter cookies and a glass of milk, or a half-cup of ice cream, or ate my barbecue beef sandwiches on real bread (gasp!, I know, right?). I only recently started to mark down cheating incidents, so there's data missing from earlier in the pattern.

The data is pretty consistent. Upward spikes in body fat readings don't happen the day after cheating: they show up the second morning after cheating. This tells me important things about the relationship between food and my biochemistry, about the delay of fat cell construction and how it relates to eating even small amounts of carbohydrates.

Bioshock II, Completed

Well, I finished Bioshock II. The ending battle is satisfactory, in the sense that the story writers came up with a good excuse for exactly why so much crap falls on you at the very last minute. The battle was hard, the setting appropriate, your ability to acquire and manage resources for it well-considered. The setting is appropriately horrific, too, being the insane prisoner wing of Rapture's prison, now gone tragically awry. It's a very moving setting.

I realized yesterday why Roger Ebert says video games aren't art. Bioshock II is very ambitious, with an astounding amount of illustration, texture, and design, to avoid the "repetitious texture" problem so prevalent in earlier video games. (Even Half Life II suffered from this, although by the time the Episodes were written many of those visual bugs had been worked around.) It verges on art, but it can't grab you and let you absorb the horror-- you're doing things, about getting to the goal, about following the script to the end. You're too busy to be emotionally moved by the setting.

I played it as a saint, so I got the "sunny day" ending. Not much of a sunny day, but still, a challenging and acceptable ending, satisfying to the viewer. I watched the alternatives on YouTube, and I think the "minor sad" ending (there are four endings: "good," "minor sad," "major sad," and "evil.") has more hope than the "good" ending, in that ( spoiler )

If I have one complaint, it's that your equipment list is very hard to manage. For one thing, the camera and toolkits are mixed in sequence with your guns on the keyboard, so while shifting from one gun to the next you might accindently fat-finger and come up shooting your opponent with a lockpick. Yeah, that does a lot of good. For the other, every upgrade to your superpowers scrambled the order of those keys, meaning you had to re-learn where your flame, electrical, and telekinesis were every time you rescued a little sister.

A very good game, despite the hiccups. Omaha will be pleased that I've emerged from my mancave now, although Portal 2 is now only 13 days away. Gack.