Lego

Ever played with Lego? 
Maybe you got a simple Duplo set for your fourth birthday. You’d get a plastic-wrapped set of these big clunky plastic blocks, oddly light but with a real heft to them, topped with odd pairs of dimples. Strange, they seemed, odd and regimented, and even though they were made of plastic they didn’t deform or break no matter how hard you bit ‘em. Too big and clunky for biting, too, seriously, who designed these things? No thought for milk-teethed tots!

But then. Pick a block up, feel the top’s knobbly texture against your palm. And push it onto another block. It sticks! It stays there! And you can do it again! Hey, look, you’ve got a great big bag of the beasties too! Stick them together in various simplistic ways (hey, it’s a start, but ugh Duplo), and bam, you’ve got yourself a car. Or a duck. Or a train.

Forward a few years. Maybe you’re seven. The Duplo set has been gathering dust for a good while now. Why? Toyworld. There’s this amazing gleaming store in the local mall. It sells nothing but toys. Not like one of those great big general-purpose stores which might just kinda sorta have this miserable little toy section skulking in back. Hah. This store has nothing but Good Bits. Nothing but gleaming treasure, glittering prizes, incredible goodies (apart from the oh so pink Barbie / doll section ugh girls cooties blergh) but but but the Lego! Gigantic cardboard-shelled infinities of astonish! You pick up a box, staggering under its weight a bit for that shit is heavy to a seven-year-old, shake it, and the thousands of bits of Lego all rattle at once. Not mere Duplo dozens but Lego thousands. The granularity! The precision! The exquisite plastic elegance!

Then you sneak a look at the price and you shrivel up and die. $109.99? There is not that much money in the world. You lie. Not even your dad makes that much. It is not possible. Still, the set’s a galaxy of perfection. Gotta try, right? The Lego Space Marines OMG2000 Lunar Drilling Ore Precision Extraction E.T Popsicles set? Who’d say no to that? Miss Trunchbull, that’s who. Or the Head Witch from The Witches.

You approach your mum. She’d never be like them, right? She’s on your side! She’ll buy it. Honest. She looms over you. You’re seven, she’s a mile high or something.

“Muuuuuumm....”

That sinusoidal whine kids do when they want something. She looms over you still more loomily and looks at you. Her expression says We’re in a toy store crammed with impossible levels of Holy Shit Gimme, designed for the specific purpose of making the hearts of prepubescent children explode with impotent yearning. What could possibly be on your mind, O my beloved vaginal emission? 
You pause. The whine doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect. You try again.

“MuuUUUummMMM...”

“sigh Yes, dear? What is it?”

“Can I”“No”

“...But I””No”

You smart with the injustice. What! She doesn’t even know what you want! Your lip trembles. “But Mum!”

“All right, sweetie, god give me strength what toy have you been looking at?”

Aha! We’re in! “Mum it’s Lego! It's the Kung Fu Dinosaur Holy Crap Ninja Fusion Battle Excelsior Laser Sexy set!” You rattle off the buzzwords like you’re casting an Ease The Pain Of Carrying Around All That Useless Money spell.

She takes one look at the price tag and her eyes narrow. “I don’t know, dear, it’s awfully expensive.”

“MummmmmmM....” She’s GOT to say yes! It goes against all that is right and noble and honest and decent not to let you have it!

She smiles faintly. “....Your birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?”

“My ... mymy birthday?” What? Don’t you dare dodge this mother. Lego. NOW.

“Tell you what, sweetie, if you’re on your best behaviour over the next month, I’ll buy you it for your birthday.”

You freeze, stricken with the agony of So Near Yet So Far. A month! That’s decades! Aeons! Entire geologic periods will come and go before then! The ice caps will advance and retreat across the globe before your birthday arrives. Civilisations will rise and fall and rise once more. Steaming mangrove swamps with huge dragonflies will envelop the world and vanish, time and time again. The very continents of the world will squiggle and reshape themselves and burn out with age. The geriatric Earth will greet your eighth birthday with withered red deserts, your new Lego set will be small comfort indeed as together you wander Earth’s crumbling desolation, frightened and starving and utterly alone. You start crying. Mum starts growling.

Of course your birthday arrives before you know it. You spring bolt upright in bed at minus infinity-o-clock, heart bursting with anticipation. It’s here! It’s finally here! Birthday and Lego! The Chainsaw McDaddy Tactical Awesome DNA Large Fries Bazonga Nuclear set will finally be yours! You leap off the bed, pull the blanket off, tie two corners around your neck as a makeshift cape, go woohoo, burst out of your room, gallumph down the stairs three at a time and into the lounge, look out the window, that’s odd it’s dark, hang on no-one’s up, hah we shall fix that, gallumph back up the stairs and towards your parents’ room to prod their lazy arses into gear for now they will deliver on their Lego promise, and get within a metre of the door before it’s flung open with great violence and Mum emerges.

“YOU.” Her eyes are fatigued fire.

You falter. “Uu... lego?”

“It’s 3am. Go. To. Bed.”

“But it’s my birthday! Lego-”

“If you aren’t back in bed and asleep in ten seconds Young Man, then for MY birthday you will get me a retroactive abortion voucher. MOVE.”

“Butbutbut-”

“Actually, hah, no, you were born at 4:45! I was there, you know, I remember it well. It is NOT your birthday, not for a couple of hours. Now then. Back to bed. If you’re quiet as a mouse until 7:30, THEN, and only then, you will get your present. BED!”

You trudge off and back to your room, blanket-cape dragging forlornly behind you. Hmph and double hmph and a triple hmph thrown in for good measure. Hours. Argh. Ages. You pout and you sulk and you have a little cry and then feel a bit better and still feel abuzz with great excitement and anticipation. You bounce up and down in bed. 
Quiet as a mouse, she said. Mice can play the drums, can’t they? I bet they can.

Tokyo SF Club #1

Remember being a small child? Remember the nurturing cocoon of Home, of hearth, of family and wee friends? Not only were you virtually never exposed to the brutish realities of reality, of adulthood, of shit like paying bills and taxes and ugh responsibilities and dreariness and shitty bosses and stress and looking after those damn kids, you were virtually unaware of their existences. Your life was filled with friends and playtime and high adventure and a bit of schoolwork admittedly and what seemed like the hobnailed boot of Authority stamping on your fun and making you do cruel cruel shit like go to bed at 7 rather than 7:30 and miss Star Trek. Oh the humanity! Oh the cruel injustice! You’d be sent to bed with decades of taunt-worthy sunlight still streaming through the curtained window, calling to you, saying what the hell are you doing in bed ya moron? There’s stuff to do, bugs to catch, fun little mud canals to dig through river banks, brooks to dam, rafts to build, trails to run along, another ridge on the horizon to explore, friends to josh and tease and do incredible shit with, bikes to ride, sticks to fashion into medieval broadswords and do righteous battle with, shoots of bamboo with which to create epic longbows, fun and glory and Adventure. Hmph. Damn and fuck and wank. Instead you’d do a sub-blanket pout for a few seconds, maybe have a wee cry, then steal away and get a torch or, knowing kids these days, an iPad, and get your favourite book and read for a couple of hours before dropping off to sleep and being woken by in adult retrospect caring and well-meaning but at the time seemingly Stalinist parents, insisting you move your arse out of bed and get to School. Hurry up! Rinse and repeat.

That’s our childhood. Most Western kids have it amazingly easy. But what of ‘30s Japanese kids?

Time for backstory, of novel character creation and early mindset. We’ve got a group of kids. They’re urbane and have sophisticated wealthy Tokyo families. Families who are well-connected, who by and large pay only lip-service to the Kokutai-good-gaijin-bad groupthink mentality so strong in Japan since the Meiji Restoration. Well. Some do, some don’t. There’s a fair bit of variation, the better with which to concoct and mould the same plot-rich Gaijin variation within the Club kids.

Picture one, the archetypical SF club member. Too soon for names, let’s call him A. A is introverted, has self-imposed isolation. He grew up in various places - the family mansion in what then was the outskirts of Tokyo, mainly, but also in summer on the country estates deeper in Honshu’s interior. His grandfather, head of household, is a wealthy, bombastic sort of bloke, cheery and a bit aggro, generous to his friends and happily terrifying to his rivals. This rubs off on the family in general, and most are the outdoorsy type, riding horses by day and their spouses by night. They picture themselves, very definitely, as right amongst the cream of Japanese society, the leading citizens.

A, on the other hand, feels isolated and alone. Sure, he feels mildly proud of simply being that high up in Japan’s social hierarchy, but cannot relate to most of his family. Charging everywhere outdoors? Ugh, what for? It’s smelly and sweaty. And besides, there was that time they dragged me out to the stables, Grandfather harrumphing the way he does, shouting that no grandson of mine will waste his life cooped up indoors with silly books, not when there are Koreans and Russians and Manchurians to conquer, and he ripped up my comic! Frightening Stories 19! I’d waited months for it! Stomach curling and cramping with nervous anticipation every day, staking out the mailbox, week in and week out, finally it arrived and I burst with excitement and joy, scrabbling off the wrapping paper in joy and exhilaration, got cracking into it, reached page 7, and the next thing I know Grandfather stomped into the room, saw the comic, turned ragey red, whipped it out of my hands and tore it up! I felt like he’d punched me in the guts. I’d prefer that! Bruises heal. Books don’t. My world stopped and I could feel myself turning inward, to my “happy” place, away from ol’ G. The servants dragged me out to the stables, plonked me on a horse, still crying bitterly, and oh what fun and fucking joy, we all went riding. The family glaring at me like I was at fault, the whole whole way.

Then the beggars. Somehow they’d got on the estate. The groundsmen are a bunch of bullies, sweaty and reeking of tobacco and with forearms like gorillas, I can’t stand them, but they usually do their jobs pretty well. They keep out the riffraff. Or so Grandfather tells me. But not today. Today several hundred ragged people, people with xylophone chests and outstretched hands, made it onto the estate and kowtowed to Grandfather all at once. They begged for food. Grandfather set the hounds on them. Most survived.

Who are these “people” who call themselves Family? No family of mine. They genuinely sicken me. But books. Comics. Adventures. Full of people, heroes, men and women of honour and decency and morality, they’ll swing from chandeliers and pick fights with the baddest bastards in town, they’ll raid the treasuries of despots and vanquish evil and fight baddies and get the girl, make friends and fight henchmen. They’re noble and wise and educated and see the good in everyone, they’ll bring smiles to a small child’s face, take tea with the village elders, kiss the hand of a beautiful woman so tenderly she swoons in happy bliss, they’re toasting to wine, women, song, camaraderie, friendship, honour, civilization, intelligence, romance, happiness and love. Incredible! I’d love that! Why isn’t the world like that? Why isn’t Japan? Why aren’t my family? Why isn’t Grandfather?

I want to set the world right. But I have NO IDEA how.

Keto

The Keto diet is damn weird. Efficient, no doubt. Pragmatic? Maybe. Depends on your surroundings, and who you interact with, and what sort of food you’ve got access to, and what your income is. If you’re still a kid and you live with your parents and your ability to Keto-ify yourself is channeled through quite-possibly-brittle-minded middle-aged people who won’t be too happy about you prodding their own insecurities about dieting and exercise and weight, well then, good fucking luck with that is all I can say.

It’s quite incredibly damn interesting watching the reactions of people who, for their entire lives, have been taught, by let’s face it, the scientific establishment and quite well-regarded nutritional bodies hurr hurr, that fat = bad, carbs = good, protein = go for it, now for the first time get told that, hey, I eat 60% fat! Ehrmergerd, they squeal, don’t you know that’s bad? Artery-clogging? Heart disease? And it’s mostly fun but a bit conflicting discussing such things.

First up, it’s a bit squeamish having to face the fact that Science, the body of knowledge I’ve so enjoyed following for most of my life, the Scientific Establishment, may well have got this entire field of nutrition so wrong. How? Was early ‘80s science politicised in some way? It’s quite possible, but saying to my friends “Um yes but it’s all political!” “Eh? The Food Pyramid the work of politicals? Have you any evidence?” “Uh.” doesn’t sit well with me. Yeah. I would need more evidence.

Second. Demonstrating on my own terms that a high-fat diet is in fact a good thing. Pointing to the example of Eskimos, chomping down on whale blubber for month after month, ain’t half bad, although I haven’t actually done that yet. Might be an idea.

But it’s not all that difficult - the only diet source I’ve come across, the only “alternative”, “fringe” one, the Spartan Health Regime, that advocates eating shitloads of fruit, even its source, Anthony Bova, recommends a shitload of fat too, for its ability to help us assimilate fat-soluble vitamins. I don’t know what his views on the Keto diet specifically are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he considered it impressive and edgy and gnarly.

The evidence on /r/keto ain’t too shabbby, as is Steve Gibson’s anecdotal account also - a few days of keto flu, then easy weight loss. The stuff just melts off. I’m at my lightest for the last, what, eight years? And I can still Pinch Quite A Bit More Than An Inch. That body fat test I had way back at Sportswide, it estimated that shorn of fat, I’d weigh 76kg. 76. From memory, that’s what I weighed in the summer of 2003/04, and even then, I was still a bit chubby. Just how much can I lose? Quite a bit, apparently :) Although, although, I’ll have quite a bit more muscle on me now than I did then. We’ll see.

The problem is, the Keto diet is damn brittle. Once you’re adapted, fantastic, weight begone, but a single bread slice and you’re kaput for days. Ugh. Additionally, do it really strictly and you can lose a pound a day, but holy shit concentration health ugh blah. You can’t work. You can’t think.

The cure’s simple. Patience! Life is long! My current moderate fat levels are hardly debilitating. I can afford to go the easier route, lose only 2-300g a day, and take the scenic route. I’ll get lean in no time.

It’s frustrating though! When did I last have a flat stomach? Six? Seven? How many times did I proudly proclaim to all who listened, “I’m putting on weight!” Ah, youth, such naivety. Fish and chips were damn tasty then and they’re damn tasty now. It’s just that I’ve got a little more of an idea about their effects. Their repercussions. Sucks! But eh, what can you do. Eat ‘em sparingly, that’s you can fucking do. And done! 101.8kg at my heaviest. Just look at me now.

The Keto diet can be damn frustrating at times. Not because Keto-friendly foods aren’t damn yummy. They are. I love ‘em. Well. Most of ‘em. My boiled vege/meat/butter concoctions could be a hell of a lot worse, but they could be a hell of a lot better too. And almond pizza! Now what’s going on there, eh? Cheese too. Most of what I read on /keto says Yes! Go nuts! It’s scrummy and delectable and holy shit chomp down eat ‘till you’re satisfied. I do. I did. And the result? Gain. Rrr. That’s what Layne discovered too when he tried his bacon experiments. Eat these diets that their authors claim you can stuff yourself, eat what you like - but noooo, try that in practice and clearly You Can Not. Hmph.

Ah well. It’s a little ambiguous sometimes. Just claiming “No calorie counting!” is a little different from explicitly claiming that you may stuff yourself until you explode and no side effects. I pity the poor people who among their dietary plans include things like pasta. Holy crap. Yes pasta’s yummy, but the cravings! The hunger pangs! I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a pasta meal that when I’d made more than I could eat in one go, didn’t stop eating until my stomach physically hurt. That shit ain’t cool. Compare this, on the other hand, to the boiled vegemeatbutter slurry. I eat a fistful and bam, that’s me done for the next three hours. I’m not physically full, but my instincts say Stop. You’ve Had Enough. You Are Satisfied.

And the running! My endurance has doubled. Incredible Keto-related evidence just keeps showing up in front of me about how more efficient fat-fuelled running is. I’m permanently beyond the wall. but my biochesmistry has adapted to it! Every run burns fat directly! Not bad, eh? The only bottleneck now is simply getting quite a bit fitter than I’ve been in the past - all the better for a three-hour run every weekend. Let’s grind those miles down and melt that fat off.