Weekend Plans Post: Back To The Gym, Again, And Stranger Things
Remember how I went back to the gym after a forever of being away last year?
Well, I returned again this year. And, once again, I relearned a *LOT* of lessons that I had forgotten. The thing about your forearms, the thing about your toenails, and the thing about your back muscles. The thing about Aleve. The thing about being terrified. The thing about how good it feels to get back up on the wall.
Seriously, if you have a climbing gym in your region, give it a visit. You’ll move stuff you didn’t know you had.
Additionally: I was scrolling through the twitters and saw the announcement that Stranger Things Season 4 came out. Ho hum, I thought. I watched the first couple of episodes of Season One when it came out and wasn’t particularly moved. While I thought that they did a pretty good job of getting the vibe, it still kinda felt that they were yelling “REMEMBER THIS?” over and over and over again.
Though, I will say, they got the vibe *PERFECTLY*. What was the 80’s? Well, for most of us, it was keepin’ on, keepin’ on with the same stuff that was going on in the 70’s. This meme seems to sum it up nicely:
That basement there? The carpet? The panelling? Yeah. That’s the kinda basement that I had. The chairs weren’t that nice in the basement, of course. The nice chairs were where Mom would go. The basement merely had folding chairs. That’s all we needed. An Atari 2600 on the television. Also, the lastest tech for if you could only afford one VCR… The Rabbit:
The story was pretty good but it didn’t, you know, *GRAB* me. I was more irritated by the relationship between the sister (Nancy) and the rich kid (Steve) and said “I don’t want to watch Pretty in Pink *AGAIN*.” So I dropped it.
Anyway, I was scrolling through the twitters and saw that Season 4 was out. “There was a Season 3?”, I asked myself. I was prepared to give it no more thought than that and then I saw that the big bad for the season was…
Vecna.
If you aren’t familiar with the name, I can’t really blame you. It’s the name of a persistent Big Bad in the D&D universe. A wizard who went too far and became a lich who then was thought to have been destroyed but some say he ascended to godhood (depending on your DM) and the only physical things left of him are his left hand and one of his eyes. These became powerful artifacts worth writing an entire D&D campaign around. Either have your evil party look for them *OR* have your good party have to deal with one of the evil parties out there that found them.
He’s an absolutely amazing bad guy, the quintessential lich (or minor deity, depending on your DM). He’s got an amazing backstory, a henchman that you can fight on your way to the guy himself (assume that the betrayal didn’t happen in this universe), and he’s one of those characters that just keeps popping up.
But he’s never really broken through to mainstream culture (beyond the whole D&D thing breaking through, of course). I mean, how do you tell the story about Vecna in popular culture? Before you tell the story about Vecna, you’ve got to explain what liches are, you might have to explain what Greyhawk is, and you’ll definitely have to talk about his artifacts that keep popping up.
And then I saw that he was the big bad for Stranger Things Season 4.
Okay *FINE*. I’ll watch it.
And you know what? Season One is pretty good. There’s quite a lot of HEY LOOK AT THIS THING FROM THE 80’S REMEMBER THE 80’S? But it’s like the basement above rather than the diner in Back to the Future Part II:
This is our American Graffiti, I guess. Wait. Lemme do some math. This is our Summer of ’42. Wait. Lemme do some math. Jeez louise. This is our Dreamgirls. Man, that’s depressing.
So, this weekend, I’m going to go to my gaming group where we will discuss, among other things, Vecna. And, when not doing that, doing laundry in prep for Maribou coming home and otherwise preparing to having everything back to normal again for a while, however short.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Synthwave”. It is in the Public Domain.)
Well, I can see why you might be irritated by the Nancy and Steve thing. But it has a really great payoff. Honestly, if you listen carefully, you will note that Nancy used to play D&D and she was the elf fighter. Umm, that plays.
And it keeps on getting better in Season 2.
I wasn’t a kid in the 80s so it didn’t land on me quite the way That Seventies Show did.Report
I don’t know about the *GREAT* payoff… but the stepping up when the lights flashed and then the Christmas-not-a-present was an amends. It was a good amends.
Even if it was Pretty in Pink all over again.Report
I was pretty indifferent after Season one, though I think it might have suffered from high expectations based on the level of hype that it go. Sounds like I should give it another shot. Maybe once I get caught up on Yellowstone.
This weekend we are getting tires replaced, shopping for a new entertainment center, probably assembling said entertainment center, and catching up on yard and housework. Last week we did a four-day weekend and decided not to do anything resembling work. An actual leave-the-house vacation was not in the cards since we just got a new kitten a few weeks back, so that was our compromise. Since we moved in February, most of our weekends have been busy with setting up the house and doing minor repairs and all that fun stuff, and it was time for a break. Unlike previous weekends when I said I would take it easy and ended up doing way too much, we actually succeeded at not doing anything.
Now we get to make up for not doing anything. Totally worth it though.Report
It turned around.
It did a pretty good job of establishing key players and then giving them opportunities to show heart. And they did.
Even Steve.Report
I hurt a bit yesterday. “It feels good to hurt like this”, I thought to myself.
I HAD FORGOTTEN DAY TWOReport
The weather and other things conspired to keep off the bicycle entirely this winter. The first couple of outings in May didn’t seem too bad so yesterday I did a loop that goes a bit farther and has a bit more elevation change. My legs are shot. My wind is shot. It seems likely it’s going to take all summer just to get back to something approaching normal.
On top of that, the drive train obviously needs me to spend some hours cleaning and adjusting it.Report
Good. I mean, bad. But good.Report
I had the same thing happen to me the past winter. Luckily, in Chicago we don’t have any of those pesky hills you have out there. Riding myself back into shape this summer.Report
More depressing, it was only “hills” climbing back and forth from one drainage arm of the river to another down here on the flat. A hundred feet here, three hundred feet there… Not up into the real hills.Report
300′ is a LOT!Report
No, 3,000 ft is a lot. 300 ft is supposed to be for warming up.
Ten years or so ago I replaced the cassette to get a few more gear teeth. I’m thinking it may time to reconsider the whole drive train. I hate being 68.Report
I did some riding in the Black Forest recently on an electric assist bike. Sure did make climbing that mountain a lot easier.Report
My brother in Germany has an e-Bike he swears by and will do a 45 kilometer ride on the regular. He’ll still get like a 1500 calorie burn with the climbs not being as killer. Arnold Schwarzenegger is apparently also a big proponent of them. Dude remains a fitness hero.
I’m still using my fully manual (lol!) Trek but I’ve wondered about them. I guess I’m just not sure the price is worth it for my rides.Report
Yeah, I would never ride one here in flat as a pancake Chicago. It still wasn’t a breeze climbing that hill, the power just took the edge off so I wasn’t dead when i got to the top.Report
All my recent encounters with e-bikes have been unpleasant. People seeing how fast they can go, rather than using it for an assist.
I ordered a new cassette yesterday with several more teeth on the largest cog. Don’t know yet if I’ll need a new rear derailleur to handle the larger diameter, or if I can just get by with a longer B-screw.Report
I haven’t seen that show. I can’t get enthused about the ’80s (except for music) having lived through them, and I just don’t get the nostalgia.
House stuff this weekend, still recovering from the renovation projects this winter.Report
Yeah, can’t say I’m nostalgic for the 80’s and I’m peak 80s doing all of HS and College in them… I guess I can harken back to an 80’s ‘vibe’ which is a word in the 80’s we would have associated with weird 60’s hippy freaks and NEVER used… but to me just seems like a phase we passed through not something we need to return to. Except for 80’s era baseball helmet caps. Those need a hard comeback.Report
My parents had the same thought about Happy Days. They didn’t get the popularity.Report
I get it. I mean, sure, the 80s were a sh*t show in many ways, but I get it. It is, in many ways, the last “recognizable” decade, in that it had distinct cultural moments strongly associated with it, and it’s also the last full decade before the internet became a big thing (or even something people had heard of).
I started college in 1994, and that first year, I was one of two people on my dorm floor of 30-odd students who had a computer. When I finished 4 years later, it was not uncommon to see laptops in classrooms. It’s difficult for people who weren’t around then to understand just how fast the world changed, but even young people today can look back and see a clear divide between the pre-computer, pre-internet, and pre-cell phone world and the world increasingly (until, in the 00s, completely) dominated by those things, and it’s easy to feel nostalgic for the old, completely lost, and seemingly (from a distance) more innocent world of which the 80s represents the last breaths. Hell, 80s nostalgia became a thing in the late 90s, because people were already longing for that world, less than a decade out from it.Report
Also, though, even today a good analog synth sounds like magic to me.Report
That’s a good thought. The ’80s were just about all college for me (started undergrad in ’81 and finished grad in ’88). Landlines and typewriters were the order of the day. Maybe I should be nostalgic.Report
My wife and I will commence season 4 tonight. I’m a bit meh about the prospect of the nostalgia porn especially given how damn long it takes to release seasons. What was kind of a nice change of pace is feeling tired with It, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and all the rest we’ve had while Stranger Things plods along. However I started it and since there will only be one more season after I feel committed to finishing the series.
I am looking forward to a weekend with nothing on the docket which in practice means I’m going to be running around with my son the entire time. Should be fun.
Also embrace the pain on the wall. I did a 3 mile run this morning then somehow let my wife talk to me into taking a work break to join her for a ’10 minute barre’ torture session. Hopefully I’ll be able to walk again by this evening.Report
I don’t want to say “nostalgia porn” as much as “nostalgia spice”.
At least for Season One.
The thing that got me was “now I’m watching Stand By Me… now I’m watching Pretty in Pink… now I’m watching Firestarter… now I’m watching Alien… now we’re back to Stand By Me again… HOLY CRAP I’M WATCHING ET!!!!”
And so on. The nostalgia wasn’t for the 80’s as much as for the movies from the 80’s that I loved or wasn’t allowed to see or whatever.
Meta-nostalgia, I guess.Report
AND NOW I’M WATCHING CHILDREN OF THE CORNReport
Heh well I got through the first episode, we’ll attempt number 2 tonight. It’s hard to argue with how well done it is. But going back to just how long they take to make the seasons, the aging of some of the young actors really is jarring in certain moments. Obviously there’s only so much they can do about that with make up, stylists, etc. but it makes me wonder if it won’t be a little farcical looking at the end. Though I guess it wouldn’t be totally inconsistent with a lot of the films the series pays homage to either.Report
It’s Homeschool HS Graduation weekend for our (sociable) middle daughter; so unlike our other grads she’s having a party and has requested Cubano sandwiches — which is nice, but requires a multi-step process to get the pork loin smoked and prepped a day ahead. Plus the sandwiches themselves need a’la minute finishing on a gerry-rigged panini press…. So yeah, super tough life problems we’re working through here in the valley.Report
I have to admire her menu choice. Both difficult for you guys but legitimately tough to say no to.
There’s a cuban restaurant up here called Cuba de Ayer. It’s worth going out of your way for (and it is out of the way) if you’re ever on this side of the river.Report
Congrats and you should post a picture of one of the sandwiches, if you can.Report
14 x Cubano sandwiches a’la minute.
Report
Gorgeous.Report
I’ve always wondered about this….
Would a climbing-wall conveyor belt be possible? Like, a 12-foot high machine that cycles through 60 feet of “wall”, where as you pull up, the wall comes down? Split it into 4-foot panels, or make it a continual track of some kind.
The one weakness I see in it would make it potentially a disaster: that the user becomes used to the feel of it, and since it doesn’t duplicate the actual climbing experience, it throws off his balance or weight when doing actual climbing (wall or rockface).Report
They exist: https://www.climbstation.com/Report
Excellent! Thanks.Report
Those look like things that a corporation purchases, though. Like, the executive gym has one, the Diamond Marriott that you can’t even reserve a room for unless you have a credit card that you’ve never heard of, Treasure Island purchasing one for next to Gilley’s, that sort of thing.
Yeah, the cheap one is a little over $21,000.Report
The fitness industry typically doesn’t go out of its way to avoid a giant pile of money. I’m just content that my idea works.Report
Stranger Things has a weird nostalgia squared effect, where it’s nostalgic about childhood in that era while also being nostalgic about fictional portrayals of childhood in that era. So, things are either things you remember from being a real kid in the 80s, or things you remember from 80s movies about kids. I found it was enjoyable for the first season and got a little tedious after that.Report
I have finished Season One. It was pretty good.
I am in the middle of Episode 3 of Season Two. It is pretty good.
I commented to a friend back when I was still between seasons saying, “I have concerns about (unresolved plot point from Season One) and think it’s weird that nobody is talking about it.”
He said “Hrm. Watch Season Two.”
And, wouldn’t you know it, Season Two is dealing with the unresolved plot point.Report