Apparently there’s a game in google where you search for: “[your first name] needs” and then list the top ten

So here are my needs:

1. Lise needs a song
2. Lise needs to be redefined
3. Lise needs a good amount of INT to learn her summons, even though they use PIE
4. Lise needs people to help work that evening
5. Lise needs all she can get in that area if she’s going to be the main attacker
6. Lise needs more full-blooded playing than Cojocaru’s Giselle-like start
7. Lise needs to exude magnetism
8. Lise needs him to come visit her
9. Lise needs them
10. Lise needs to feel that she protects Annabelle, even if she doesn’t exactly understand why

Right…

Here’s a post simply showing some items of clothing that I like and would love owning:

So turned out to be a lot of shoes! And I’d love owning many of them, but alas, I have very difficult feet and little money.

I always rather liked this one

Fluffeh (my boyfriend) just got a new, shiny laptop and I’ve sort of taken over the daily use of it since it’s much better than my own laptop and he usually works from his base unit. Settlers VI runs like a dream on this one, so I took the opportunity to get some better screenshots than I got from my laptop and figured I’d make a blogpost with them. I have cropped the images a fair bit, so they make more interesting pictures than having my whole screen on. Hover the mouse over the pictures to see my comments.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures

Settlers: Rise of an Empire is one of my favourite games, and the one I play the most after World of Warcraft. It’s a nice strategy type game, without being all about winning battles and stuff. In fact, in many scenarios there’s no need for fighting at all. I like building villages that turn into towns that turn into large cities, with a vast surrounding countryside.

Here’s a trailer for the game:

As you can see, this is a very sweet and cozy game in many ways. I haven’t played through all of the campaign part yet, but my impression of the game is very good, nonetheless.

One thing I really love about this game is the festivals where the workers go an get spouses. These ladies look so sweet the way they dance around the men and when they later stand on the streets gossiping with other spouses, or going on errands to get food, clothes or whatever else. Here are some festival screenshots (unfortunately taken on my laptop, so not the best quality!):

And a more focused cropped part:

One thing in particular that I like about the spouses is that they come in different shapes, both thin and fat, and as far as I have noticed the thinner spouses are not preferred over the fat ones. I believe they are fairly equally distributed.

Like I mentioned farther above, I really like the non-military aspects of Settlers. I have tried some earlier Settlers versions, but it is Rise of an Empire that stands as my favourite. This is because you organise villages/towns/cities, with farms and other gathering professions outside of the village. To me, it makes it look a lot like a realistic medieval(ish) world and something I can relate to (I read a lot of fantasy and historical books), so my village sort of becomes my own private pretend-world.

You can also play the game online against other people, but I haven’t done that, and don’t know if I will in the future. At the moment I’m perfectly happy playing it for myself, and I can do that for hours on end, no problem!

More from the BBC: this article is written by a public health expert, who in all honesty believe British people need more nannying from the government. Apparently people need to be told what to eat and we like it. We love it when the government makes all our choices for us so that we can be healty and fit.

Sandy at Junkfood Science commented the article here.

But seriously, we need more nannying because we don’t know how to control our own lives? Sounds more like someone is a bit too fond of control to me. The piece is completely bollocks in my opinion.

I read a BBC article that proved to be quite interesting and has the possibility of education all those people out there thinking that fat people must be eating horrid amounts of (unhealthy) food and never exercises beyond walking from their door to their cars.

The article is quite an interesting read. Some researchers have been doing some tests similar to the studies the article refers to, where naturally thin people try their best to put on weight (fat) by doing such things as eating lots and lots and/or quitting excercise for a period. And, they struggled! Even whilst eating a lot of unhealthy food and not exercising these people had a hard time putting on weight and becoming fat.

How surprising. The amounts and types of food described sounds like what they think fat people must be gorging on day in and day out. Personally, had I been eating as much and so much sweets I would have been sick. I’m one of those people who don’t eat extreme amounts at all, and when I do have a bag of sweets it will easily last me a week or two, the same goes for a, say 150 grams bar of chocolate. I know people of all sorts of sizes who marvel at how I can leave my sweets alone even when it’s directly in front of my eyes for weeks and weeks before it’s finally empty. Most of them will eat it all within a matter of minutes. I don’t know why this is so. I do have a sweet tooth, and I like having some sort of sweet on a regular basis. Not every day, but around about every second day I will have some. But it’s enough to just have a few pieces of sweets or a couple of squares of chocolate on most days. I rarely eat much more than that. But then, I am a slow eater.

And guess what? I can’t remember ever being skinny and in my most slim periods I am still considered slightly overweight according to BMI, and softly padded to look at. At the moment I’m well padded since I put on a fair bit of weight during the last semester of my Bachelors and more whilst doing my Masters. I am one of those people whose weight will fluctuate a bit, depending on a number of factors, and they do no follow the Calories in – Calories out “rule” whatsoever.

I hope these trials to make people put on weight with dismal results will help creating awareness that it’s the same way for fat people. It’s just not that easy to lose weight, and much less so to keep it off. Sadly, I expect a more likely result is that they’ll think even more that what separates fat from thin is that fatties are able to eat ‘more than they should’ and don’t exercise. And if a fat person thinks he or she eats a completely normal diet and exercises plenty, then it must be a figment of their imagination…