Jack of Harts

I wrote the Guns of Freedom a year ago, and wrote it way too long. It wasn’t accepted, but this weekend I devoted a couple days to slicing it down to size and heavily editing it for use in another open call. Shrinking actually made it a better and tighter story, and I like it much better now. Sometimes, cutting stuff out is good. 🙂

I haven’t lost much weight since my last update. I’m now hovering in the mid to low 250s, got under 253 for the first time in well over a decade, so the waveform of my weight loss continues to go down. And the average has in fact gone down ten pounds over the last 31 days. So that is the correct trend for me to have.

The interesting thing is that I just saw my doctor again this week and did blood tests, and the news there is very good. After having lost 30 pounds since January, my Pre-Diabetes is just gone. Almost every other number is good too. Losing 30 pounds has resulted in just about every blood number improving in a substantial way. And she was happy to see me again and congratulated me on my continued improvement since the last time I saw her. The one exception they will be investigating. It is probably just me being 50, but investigations will continue.

In other news, I can once again button the top buttons on my work shirts. I have always had a fireplug neck that makes it just about impossible to button my shirts all the way up. My entire life this has been a case. For the first time in I can’t remember how long, I actually CAN button that top button now. Doesn’t mean I’m going to enjoy it. Or that I’m going to go out and do it for funsies. But I am actually physically capable of making the neck of my shirt meet itself after wrapping around my neck. That is a rather new experience for me. And when you add that to the continued shrinking of my waist and stomach and thighs, I continue to have more room in my clothes than I used to.

It is truly amazing to see the physical indications of my weight loss, even when my weight loss hits momentary hitches. My body continues to adjust to the loss in weight, and continues to shrink as I continue to work at it. That is always good.

Tron has been a story I have long loved. As a techie kid growing up in the 80s, it was my jam. A human caught in the computer grid fighting against a great evil computer intelligence that wanted to take over the world. And the idea that the programs we created could take on the identity of the user who made them was so very intense. That what we put into it is what we would get out of it. And it is an idea we should all remember now, thirty years later, as AIs are becoming a reality. What we put into them is what we will get out of them.

Tron Ares just came out in the theaters and I watched it. It is a good movie. My cousin was in town, and we wanted to go see the movie together, so we watched Tron and Tron Legacy the night before. Both amazing, beautiful films. Then we went to see Tron Ares and it is a fitting part of the franchise. It is amazingly beautiful. The cinematography is top notch. The attention paid to angles and light was truly stellar. They kept to the red and blue themes of the previous stories, and it very much built on the legacy, pun fully intended, of the previous movies. It feels like a natural evolution of Tron and of the ideas behind it.

I love it. It is my jam. I recommend it. I know it is Disney. I know many people boycott that entire studio. And I understand why. Even through that, I recommend this movie. I think it is worth crossing the boycott line to see. I saw it in Imax and it was truly amazing. It was absolutely worth my time to see, and I will buy it on blu-ray when it comes out.