I'm not fat :'(

My Wii told me I'm fat. I'm not fat. My Wii is fat.

Wii Fit. Hah! More like Wii Fat.

Am I overweight? Sure, a little. But I'm not that overweight, and if I were as low as their BMI wants me to be, I'd be really unhealthy. The worst part is that I'm quite possibly in the best shape of my life the last few weeks, and even though I'm around as thin as my body can actually be, I'm 190 pounds apparently.

I'm just going to go ahead and assume the weight is all in my mighty muscles. I was roughly this size around the waist back in high school and I wasn't anywhere near as heavy, but my muscles were also much less developed. I know no one is reading this, but seriously, my biceps and triceps and pecs have improved so much that I honestly am amazed at it. An outside observer probably wouldn't be at all impressed, but there has definitely been marked improvement.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I'd like to echo a point that a show called Bullshit covered quite effectively: BMI is bullshit. Body builders who are the epitome of health are labeled as "obese" according to that shit just because of how much they weigh.

Wolverine or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Prequel

The thing got leaked. I saw it. Was not impressed. Not that I was planning to see it in the theatre anyway, but I really didn't want to after seeing the work print.

Then I heard about the X-men films on Blu-ray. I had been planning on buying them so long as they were reasonably priced, and Best Buy was set to have them in store for 55 bucks on release day. Terrific. I had no qualms about paying that.

Then I heard that the individual releases had e-cash for a ticket to the Wolverine picture... but the box set didn't. "No big deal," I thought to myself. "I didn't even want to see it anyway."

But then I hear that Best Buy is doing a 2 for 35 dollars deal. Not only those 3 X-men films, but more than a few others I had been eyeballing. So I grab the three X-men films and Horton Hears a Who for about 17 bucks each. Each one of the movies comes with e-cash for one of three future Fox releases, most notably here being the Wolverine movie.

So I get a great deal on movies I wanted to buy, and I get to take the family out to see this Wolverine picture. And people say Blu-ray is too expensive. How often are DVDs available for 17 bucks on release day and come with free tickets to a sequel in the theatre? Ok, it's probably not that unusual, but it's still pretty good, especially since these X-men movies are freaking packed with extras.

And anyway, even if the Wolverine movie is just as bad as the workprint, it doesn't cost a thing and the action is top notch regardless. Just disappointing what they did with my homeboy Deadpool.

My addiction

My name is Chris, and I have a problem.

I have an addiction. An addiction to Blu-ray.

Right now, I've got a shelf here with 250+ Blu-rays and DVDs, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 of them unwatched yet. The shelf unit is almost totally full.

And I'm seriously contemplating buying more. I've got a cartload on Amazon ready to go with about 50.

Fifty. Even if I was getting these at insane prices averaging 10 bucks each, that'd be 500 bucks. The average price is probably more like 17~18 or so. I'll let you do the math.

At least I can take solace in the fact that I haven't got anything better to spend the cash on. No family dependent on me, no girlfriend to shower with gifts, no drive or direction to further my education, and I get by with minimal living expenses. Wait! This is a good thing?

Wait... what's ffya?

Been meaning to start up something like this for a while. A place for my insane ramblings that no one wants to read or hear about.

Used to keep the crap confined to a private forum, but they got tired of the bullshit I think. Me always asking for advice then conveniently neglecting to follow through on it, bringing myself further down the road to despair. Not that you'll be seeing any of that here. I can expose my vulnerability and emotional troubles in a private forum, but no way in fuck would I broadcast it so indiscriminately.

So this seems like a better way of pulling it off perhaps. I think I'll start this off with a rehash from the last thing I posted on the private forum. An overzealous tirade about a little something I recently discovered called Seam Carving. Because I'm lazy as fuck, I will just be copy pasting. Hopefully Chardish won't ban me for leaking ffya material:

It was Lifehacker.com this time. Something called SEAMonster. If you've heard of it, yes, I know, it's old. I don't care. This thing amazed the hell out of me just now and I feel I have to make sure others are aware of it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archi...mentation.aspx

Basically, it's awesome and allows for free resizing of an image without destroying the quality of the "important" information in the picture. Something called "seam carving". Here's a video about it: http://www.seamcarving.com/

With the software, it can automatically detect what is "important" based on the contrast difference between adjacent pixels or you can select specifically what is important or unimportant.

The examples they showed involved reframing wide pictures into more square-like sizes, reframing skinny images into wide ones, and hey, removing individual persons automatically and seemingly seamlessly. This is freaking amazing all-around. While watching that video, my mouth was serious agape the entire time. It seemed to have a hard time identifying information to maintain the correct appearance of people (especially their face), but if you tell it what parts are important, it maintains them well.

Apparently the recent build of Photoshop has this thing built right in (although they call it "Content Aware Scaling"). Now, lately I've not been one for interweb piracy, so I don't think I could do that, but I also don't much feel like dropping hundreds of dollars on that piece of junk software either. Ah well. I suppose I'll just wait for the open source community to put something similar together.