Bay 12 Games Forum

Work got me a new iPhone, and I jumped up like 5 versions of phone and lost my beloved 3.5mm audio jack.

I'd been thinking of getting a pair of Bluetooth ones for a while for working out but never really pulled the trigger. Now I don't really have a choice.

So I'm not looking for top of the line or anything. What I mostly care about is....

-Long battery life.
-No stupid stuff like a wire running between them with a volume control on it.
-No more than $120, and even that is pushing it.
-USB charging.

The only real brand that I know is Raycon because they're all over youtube gaming videos as sponsors. But a bit of research shows they're kind overpriced for what you get. I saw Creative Outlier Gold recommended, but the only thing I can find on Newgg is $170, because everywhere else seems sold out. So that's a no go either.

Anyways, any recommendations would be appreciated.

Short trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=84&v=Zp44GNRzvCc&feature=emb_logo

Being made by Fatshark, the same folks who did Vermintide 1 and 2.

For those unfamiliar, the Vermintide games are the equivalent of Left 4 Dead, set in the Games Workshop's fantasy world. Massive hordes of enemies, strings of missions that deliver the overall story of the game organically, best enjoyed with friends or at least other human players.

I'll be talking a lot about Vermintide because it's pretty obvious that this is the 40k version of it, and it's probably easiest to imagine what to look forward to based on VT.

Vermintide is a largely melee focused game set in GWS fantasy universe. And it's a pretty fantastic looking and playing game (I've been playing with friends on and off since release, and have been playing pretty much nothing but it for the last three or four weeks, so it's timely this was announced today.) It's one of the best presentations of the Warhammer Fantasy IP next to like, Total Warhammer that I can think of. So it stands to reason that Darktide will be a more ranged combat focused experience.

As a fan of both fantasy and 40k, I'm really excited for this. Fatshark did an amazing job with both Vermintide games. It's easy to just sorta slap that adjective on to something you like, but the craft and detail and obvious love that went in to making Vermintide warms the cockles of my heart as a fan.

Visually, VT is gorgeous, rich and detailed with visuals that really do look like WHF stuff come to life and have never once taken me out of the game for their lack of quality or attention to detail.

It also has really high quality sound engineering and voice acting, so it delivers a great cinematic experience.

The writing in VT is also really strong, which manifests mostly in the playable characters and the sheer amount of dialog between them that they helps explain who they are and what they're about without getting in your face or getting old fast. (The kind of voice acting that, to me, you don't resent hearing over and over again. Especially when there's so much of it.) And most importantly, it actually uses the WHF world and its lore and shows both a deep understanding of it and a real appreciation for it.

The action of the game is, if not always super precise, very satisfying. I could crush rat skulls and lop off limbs and heads all day in VT, it's the kind of combat that you enjoy for its own sake rather than because it's helping you get through a game. VT is a pretty fast paced and hectic game that's usually about charging ahead into a mass of enemies to carve them up, only to get wrong footed by special enemies and overwhelmed until you get slaughtered. I imagine Darktide will probably follow the same format and I'm largely ok with that, but I wouldn't say no to a slower, tenser gameplay experience either.

All these things, brought in to my favorite IP, and WE FINALLY GET TO PLAY REGULAR ASS PEOPLE IN 40K! Someone finally had the talent and the nerve to do it instead of yet again making a game about Space Marines. (Although that would have been cool too in Fatshark's hands I think.) Plenty of reasons for me to be excited.

That said, despite the name being pretty obvious what it will be about, I'm sure there will be differences besides "now you shoot guns most of the time instead of hit stuff." I can easily see them dialing back the characterization a bit from Vermintide. (Although you can see quite clearly how they're already sketching out the personalities of the playable characters just by their posture and gestures and how they carry themselves.) A lot of what makes Vermintide a challenging game comes from its melee emphasis, so I'm looking forward to what they've cooked up for challenging ranged combat. Also looking forward to "Dark and Spoopy" stuff, because the lighting effects in Vermintide are one of the best parts of the game and exploring a dank, dark underhive with Fatshark's aesthetic sensibilities sounds very enticing indeed. As I mentioned above, people tend to plow through Vermintide maps, especially the more experienced they are with playing them. I'd be interested to see if Darktide, because of darker and more claustrophobic spaces and more ranged combatants, doesn't produce a slower, more methodical kind of gameplay than VT's frantic flailing around to save life and limb.

I also do sorta hope they get away from the "loot box" style of mission rewards and come up with something a bit more interesting. 40k doesn't really do "magic weapons" like fantasy does, so forging and yadda yadda from VT, and how kinda flat that has always been, could stand to have a lot of improvements or just be different. While playing up through VT the crafting and the random drops aren't really bad or annoying, but once you get in to high level gameplay and want specific things out of your gear, the way VT does it starts to get a little tedious and unfun. So I'd hope there's like, some weapon customization and interesting loadout choices you can make.

Or who knows, maybe there aren't going to be strongly defined characters like VT2 that are the "classes" and it will be a more generic, flexible affair. It could easily go either way.

To me there's only one sorta "big AAA-lookin" game out there in the last few years that really nailed the 40k aesthetic, which is Space Hulk: Deathwing. (It's also in the neighborhood of L4D-like horde killin' games.) It is one of the best LOOKING 40k games out there, and it delivered a lot of 40k lore and flavor via that, but didn't do as good a job presenting the 40k universe via characters or making it feel larger than the game it lived in. Fatshark did that with Vermintide I feel, and I think Darktide stands to dethrone Space Hulk: Deathwing for me as the best looking and sounding and feeling 40k game yet made. It's not really a question to me if Darktide is going to be cool and fun, but rather what form it's going to take.

I swear, in the last 10 years I've bought 3 or 4 Logitech game controllers for my PC, and within a couple years each one ends up having problems. The D-pads start sucking. The triggers wear out. The analog sticks start acting weird or develop dead zones.

Anyone got a recommendation for good controllers that are still affordable and reasonably plug 'n play? I want to buy several but don't want to end up dropping several hundred on something that may be finnicky to get working with all games.

To the medicals out there.

Got my middle right finger pinched in a fork lift about three weeks ago, the bottom fleshy portion of the finger above the first joint.

There was *some* skin which the ER dutifully sowed back on, but in her words there wasn't enough left to fully cover the exposed area of flesh on the finger.

So the top portion has some flesh stitched back on and its mending, sort of. But there's a portion of finger about the size of a pencil eraser just above the joint with no skin on it.

Now, I'm not worried about aesthetics or I would have gotten a skin graft. But I am worried about the wound healing cleanly, and not forming an infection.

My 10 day supply of Cephalexin ran out a couple days ago, and so far the wound looks fine and uninfected. But that bottom portion just has a thick crust of blood over it.

The urgent care clinic that took the stitches out said it was ok to shower it and let it get wet, and that makes sense. These scabs are thick has hell and will need some help to break up. But every morning afterward, I noticed more fresh, dried seepage from the part with no skin covering it. It's always formed a crust and isn't freshly weeping fluid in the morning. But I know it's fresh because it's "shiny" and catches the light. And I'm just worried that, with no skin or real scab to cover it, it's just going to break, ooze and dry over and over again while the rest of the finger heals up until I eventually develop an infection.

Generally just looking for some good post-wound care tips and things to look out for. And maybe some guidance on how long I should reasonably expect this to take so, when the scabs come off, something workable has grown back there. I lift weights very regularly and have put it all on hold out of fear of tearing the wound back open, scraping the scabs off or raising my blood pressure to the point blood wants to exit the wound in force. It's been three weeks to the day of the accident so far, and I was figuring about a month at least. But I get nervous every time I take a shower, worried that the whole scab and half-dead skin is going to come loose and I'll be staring at more exposed flesh. At which point I WILL need a skin graft. I can feel the scab and sutured skin moving at this point, and not exactly in attachment with my finger flesh. I'm not even sure some of the skin she sowed back on is alive....although at least its acting as durable sheath over the wound while the body does its thing. The clinic that took the stitches managed to rip out the bottoms of the scab/flesh when they removed them....so the scab is already starting to come up at the bottoms. Scab? Skin? It's hard to tell quite what it is anymore.

I don't have much pain. Just the occasional mild stinging sensation at the edges of my scabs and parts where it's splitting apart, and reasonable discomfort where the scab is deep in the wound. Nothing that strikes me as out of the ordinary.

I gotta say I was not impressed with the urgent care clinic's dutifulness. I had to ask a lot of questions about post care followup.

Thoughts? Pictures available on request I suppose. I could post them now but I won't subject the forums to this mess unless it's necessary. I'm not worried enough yet by any signs that I feel the need to go back to urgent care or my primary doctor. But it's preoccupying my thoughts enough because I'm staring at it 3 hours a day mapping its fucked up topography that I thought I'd make a post.

(It seriously looks worse than it.)

Here we talk about working out, losing fat, gaining muscles, changing our bodies and fulfilling goals! That's right, you can be a complete nerd and still look ripped as hell! I believe in you!

Please note: I'm just an enthusiast who has done a bit of research. I have no schooling in health, fitness or nutrition and it's not my job. Do your own research and evaluate opinions when it comes to health and working out, because there are a lot of them out there.

Working out the last six months has seriously changed my course on so many things, it's hard to not want to inspire others and get them working out as well. (Known as 'recruiting for the cult.')

I wrote a big thing in another thread about how my fitness journey started, which I won't clutter up the thread with here.

The TLDR of it is though I made real changes with what feels like not a whole lot of work, and it's work I've come to love doing. I went with Resistance Training (i.e. weight lifting) as my main path to weight loss and using a couple different techniques along with getting my nutrition in check, I really started seeing changes.

So if you want to start working out, what you need first are ***GOALS***. Goals are what motivate you to work out in the first place. It all starts with the simplest commitment of "I want X and I'm willing to work for it." For some people "being healthier" is a goal and it works, but I think most need something a little more concrete to get them coming back to the gym and sticking to their workout.

Ask yourself, what do you want out of your body? How have you always wanted to be different?

-Lower weight?
-Less fat?
-Flatter stomach?
-4 pack/6 pack/8 pack?
-A sexier butt?
-Bigger shoulders?
-Bigger arms and pecs?
-Broader back?
-Thiccer Legs?
-Better definition?
-More endurance?
-More strength?
-ALL OF THE ABOVE?

There's an aesthetic component to working out that I think a lot of people who have never felt themselves to be aesthetically pleasing are quick to dismiss, because they've reduced its importance in their life feeling it's not an attainable goal. I know I've been like that. But when you start seeing results and changing yourself and reaching some of your goals, it can really change your mind on whether or not those things are worth putting out the effort for.

Ok, so you've got some goals in mind. There's two main kinds of physical exercise you'll use to achieve them.

Steady State Cardio & High Intensity Resistance Training

1. Steady state cardio. Running, generally, in its many forms. Also biking. Jump rope. It raises your heart rate and breathing and then keeps them there for quite a while. 45 minutes of cardio burns around 150 calories from fat at a rate of 50%. SSC is great for weight loss, toning and conditioning. It is NOT good for muscle retention, muscle gain or strength gain.

2. Resistance training. Lifting weights, generally. (Also includes body weight resistance training.) You place your body's muscles under tension using weight, stretching the muscle fibers and in some cases damaging them. This sounds bad and can be if taken too far, but damaging them the "right amount" is what stimulates new fiber growth, and bigger, stronger muscles. 25 minutes of intense resistance training can burn a couple hundred calories from fat at a rate of 35%. It is NOT good for conditioning, unless you're talking about muscle stamina. However IMO it does have many of the other benefits of SSC, including yes, weight loss! Many women avoid resistance training because they want to slim down and look "soft", not get lean and hard. But there can be a lot of fat burning and toning benefits for women in resistance training too. So don't fear the iron ladies, the treadmill and exercise bike aren't your only friends in the gym.

(3. Yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, other exercise disciplines. I haven't researched these nor tried them so I won't speak to them, maybe someone else can. I might try Pilates soon.)

There are some exercises that achieve the benefits of both, too. For example rowing machines in your average gym are both a cardio workout and a resistance training workout. Partly why people love them so much.

I personally favor resistance training over SSC because I want to build muscle and I don't want to spend a couple hours a week running to burn fat. I also find SSC boring, personally. But many people enjoy it, get a lot of fat burning out of it and if you're at all serious about fitness you should be doing some SSC and conditioning.

No exercise is without risk of injury or repetitive stress injury though.

1. SSC is hard on your knees primarily, but also on your ankle joints and maybe your hips. Uneven surfaces, fall risks, the weather, ice, traffic, pedestrians, are many of the reasons people choose to run on a treadmill or exercise bike instead of outside.

2. You can hurt yourself in pretty much every way imaginable with Resistance Training if you use too much weight, give yourself a hernia trying too hard, practice poor form over a long period of time, straight up do an exercise wrong or drop a weight on yourself. If you're going to do ANY Resistance Exercise, even a pushup I highly encourage you to check out some examples on Youtube if you don't know what proper form is. Lifting weights and doing resistance training correctly is far more technical than most people give it credit for. Just throwing weight around it ain't.

Body Fat % & The Very Overweight

And it's worth stressing: if you want to LOOK athletic and muscular, you have to get your body fat % down. For the average guy, ~15% body fat is where you start looking lean and muscles just kinda show on their own without needing to flex. For women, it's closer to ~19%. Women, because of their breasts and the need for body fat for child bearing, will always have a higher healthy body fat % than guys. Where a guy might get down to 9% body fat and look incredibly shredded and still be considered "healthy", a woman at 9% body fat starts facing a lot of hormonal problems because many of her bodily systems don't function right at that body fat %. Those are the extremes though. What most should take away is: you won't see shit if you don't get your body fat % lower. And let's just be realistic here for a moment: the media perpetuates a body image for men and women that take insane levels of commitment, air brushing, lighting and touch ups, unhealthy eating and dieting tricks and possibly illegal drugs, just to achieve a single photo shoot. (Seriously, go read Hugh Jackman talk about all the crazy shit he's done to play Wolverine in the later X-Men movies, to look like he did.) That is not reality for 99% of humanity, so don't make that your goal. The amount of work it takes to have a visible 6 pack 24 hours a day is like a full time job. Fitness models and the uber fit generally make working out both their job and their life style. You won't look like them unless you commit like them and that's not realistic for most people. So don't hold yourself to that standard. Create your own standard and redefine it as you go.

Lastly, for those who are very overweight you pretty much have to start with cardio. Even if it's just walking. Your high body weight means calisthenics will be very difficult to impossible for you (you know much upper body strength it takes to do a pushup when you weigh 300 pounds? A fuck load.) And you may lack strength or mobility in many critical areas to do many kinds of resistance training. So you pretty much have to start with cardio to get your body weight and body fat down, so other workouts become easier for you to do, to the point they can start contributing to your weight loss. The good news is, with the right effort and what I'm about to talk about below, you can shed that weight very quickly in large amounts.

So you've got some goals, you kind of know the two main kinds of exercise you want to engage in, you know the risks involved, and you know what's realistic. There's one last thing you'll have to address though.

Nutrition

Dun dun dun. The thing no one wants to talk about but probably has the most to do with how they look and feel today!

Whether you're trying to lose fat or trying to put on muscle, you have to think about your nutrition. Especially it come to fat loss.

The principle is pretty simple. If you want to drop fat you have to spend more calories working out and take in fewer calories than you are now. In practice though, it's a bitch.

-We love eating things that are calorie dense AND do not contain any real nutrients.
-We eat too much of the stuff our bodies like to turn in to fat (carbs), and too little of the stuff it doesn't and is good for us. (Vegetables.)
-We're busy and what we want to eat vs. what's available leads us to make poor choices.
-We are not physically active enough, as gamers, as people who spend a lot of time on a computer, to even begin to burn off this excess.

The US Daily Nutritional Value for calories is 2000 for most people at an assumed activity level of something (versus "next to nothing.") Most people know that. Now consider that you can easily eat 1400 calories in a single meal at most restaurants. Before snacking, before unforeseen calories and sugars, you can easily eat 75% of what you need in one meal, and still be ready to eat more later. Consider that you can get 1/3rd of your daily calories from just a couple sodas despite them not containing practically anything else you need. Consider that your body is hard wired to store sugar as fat, it is literally psychologically addictive so you continue to consume more and more, and there is no daily recommended dose of sugar.

The average caloric intake of Americans is around 2400 to 2500 calories a day. Or basically 25% more than most people need. Multiply that by a life time, with little to no physical exercise to burn off those extra calories, and is it any surprise our waistlines have just grown over the years? (For reference, for my age and my current level of activity, I need about 2400 calories to maintain my weight, because I'm burning off half of what I eat in a week through exercise and muscle growth.)

Bottomline: you can work yourself to death in the gym and see little to no change because you don't change your nutrition. At best you will see small changes overtime until you hit equilibrium with your calorie expenditure vs. your calorie intake. At worst you might be staving off further weight gain.

The second part to nutrition is much more enjoyable to talk about. And that's Feeding Your Body What It Wants. Let's say you've committed to making some nutrition changes. You're working out, feeling the burn and wondering "Ok, what should I be eating?"

If you're doing resistance training and trying to build muscle, you want as much protein as you can get. The average person gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 60 grams of protein a day, which is fine for daily metabolic needs and health. But if you're trying to build muscle, the going rate people talk about today is 1 gram per pound of body weight. So if you're 200 pounds, you want to shoot for 200g of protein a day. Which is a lot. But your body will convert that protein in to new muscle growth, and it will also burn calories while doing it. This is why I like Resistance Training over SSC. Not only is your body working hard in your workout and burning calories, it's working hard hours later. I go to sleep and can feel the actual heat in the muscle groups I worked on that day radiating as my body churns away turning good nutrients into muscle, and burning away my fat while I sleep.

It's not all about protein though. You'll want carbohydrates for energy to fuel your workout. People shit all over carbohydrates today because it essentially makes up 80% of junk food. But completely hating on carbs as a nutrient is pretty misguided from what I've read and researched. The problem isn't carbohydrates. The problem is we eat too damn much of it then do nothing with that stored energy it provides. (Carbohydrates get turned in to glycogen which is fuel stored in the muscles so they can exert force, and the liver contains a small amount to release in to the body too.) Carbohydrates are a vital source of energy that our bodies have evolved to prefer, and shouldn't be skipped. BUT! You should get them from good sources. Just eating white bread counts but there are more efficient sources that aren't as calorie heavy or full of other things you don't want. Bottomline on carbs is: don't skip them. Eat them but keep it in proportion.

You'll also want a couple good sources of fiber to keep you regular (I'm in to Kiwis right now), and find sources for your micronutrients like vitamins, potassium, the metals, etc...You can get most of that from a balanced take of vegetables high in the stuff you need. Daily multi-vitamins can help with that. Despite wanting to burn fat, you want to incorporate some in to your diet too. Just, again, get them from good sources like nuts or beans. Fats from oils like fried foods are too much and generally not of the good type. Sodium, again, is something your body needs. The issue isn't whether or not to get it, the issue is getting too damn much of it in everything we don't prepare for ourselves.

If you're doing SSC nutrition is still important too. Depending on how long or hard you run you'll definitely want to replenish your salts. (Gatorade may seem great because it's got THE ELECTROLYTES but consider there is almost as much sugar in a bottle of Gatorade as a bottle of Coca-cola.) You'll also want to NOT AVOID CARBS. You certainly may want to eat fewer of them, but you'll want some none the less. Without carbs, when your body is done burning from fat, it will go after your muscles instead, and when there's no stored energy in the muscle because you don't eat any carbs your body will start cannibalizing muscle tissue instead. Depending on your *GOALS* maybe this is ok. But the trap a lot of SSC people fall in to is they give up everything to fat loss, especially as they start doing longer and longer runs, and end up as really good at running long distances but are skinny, strung out, lacking any real muscle and are starved of nutrients. So don't do that. SSC doesn't mean give up everything besides water and vegetables.

Bottomline: Eat whole, real food! Things that are a single ingredient as often as you can! Vegetables are a single ingredient. Raw meat is a single ingredient (usually.) Rice is a single ingredient (usually.) You don't have to eat 1000% natural, but you need to shoot for making as much of your own food as you can from real food! Because that way you can control what goes in your body rather than be at the mercy of what's convenient (and likely not good for you.)

Getting Started & High Intensity Training

And finally the last bit that will always come up: But I don't have a gym membership, where will I get stuff to work out with!

To start with, if you're a fitness newbie there is SO MUCH you can do in your home, that you should do! before you start tackling weights anyways. If you're in to SSC, this is not an issue for you. If you really want to run, there's nothing stopping you.

For people wanting to do resistance training, you can start at home doing what's called calisthenics. Which is a fancy word for body weight training. It involves things like:

-Pushups (works chest)
-Pull ups (works shoulders and back)
-Body weight bicep curls (works the bicep. Grab on to a bar or pole or pillar or doorframe and pull your body toward it using one arm.)
-Crunches (Abs)
-Sit ups (Abs)
-Planks (Abs)
-Leg raises (Abs/Butt)
-Lunges (Butt, Hamstrings, Quads)
-Chair/Box Squats (Butt, Quads, Hamstrings)

And many more. To get started, do any of these exercises until failure. (I.e. to the point you can't do another.) Give yourself 60 seconds to rest. Then do as many as you can do until failure. Give yourself 60 seconds of rest. Then do as many as you can do to failure. Then rest. Congrats! You got through 3 sets. You should be feeling the burn now. Move on to another exercise immediately. This is called High Intensity Training, and for me it's proven very effective at burning fat while getting good toning/strengthening workouts in. You even get some conditioning in as doing your exercises back to back will leave you out of breath very quickly. The goal is to put the muscles you're working under as much constant stress (safely) that it can handle, for as long as it can handle. When you take 3 or 4 minutes to rest between sets, to when you're "fully rested" several things happen:

-Your muscles go out of a state of tension for longer.
-Your heart rate falls.
-Your breathing normalizes.
-Your workout ends up taking 45 minutes to an hour.

Not allowing your body to leave its elevated state of tension puts maximum stress on your body as you continue to do your workouts. That's how you achieve maximum calorie and fat burning in the shortest amount of time. With the required effort and intensity, high intensity resistance training can burn far more calories than SSC in a shorter period of time, even though fewer of those calories are coming from fat. And remember, it's about the keeping the intensity of your workout high. It is NOT about doing the exercises themselves fast. The exercises should be done in a slow, controlled manner maximizing the amount of time your muscles are under tension. The "high intensity" comes from that, and the fact you give your body little time to rest between states of high tension.

I generally try to get in 4 to 5 exercises at least of 2 to 3 sets each per workout. If you do that, with 30 to 60 seconds of rest in between all of them, I guarantee you within 20 to 25 minutes you will be pooped and unable to do much else. And that's the goal! Reach that level of physical exhaustion by going to failure and giving it your all, and I promise you will start seeing changes in yourself within a couple weeks. I started with just one 30 minute session a week and now am up to 3, planning on a 4th! How tired you feel after your first couple times working out becomes your first benchmark you can measure. As the weeks go by, how much easier is it getting? Are you doing more reps? Less winded? Losing weight?

Once you're comfortable with your home workouts, go to a used sporting goods store and pick yourself up a pair of dumbbell free weights or a kettle bell, and maybe some resistance bands. Plenty of different exercises you can do with each of those. There are variations on all these exercises too that make them tougher once you've become adapted to the basic versions. In Resistance Training that's called progression. And when you do find a gym or collect enough weights, that's where the real muscle building begins.

Maxims

Just a few other points to make about workouts.

1. Consistency matters. Your body gets used to things the more it does them repeatedly. If you've never worked out or haven't worked out in long time, your body has gotten very used to being sedentary. It fights being changed from that state. If you skip workouts, or put in half as much effort as you should be, your body is winning that fight to not change. Remember, once you've gotten comfortable with an exercise it's time to find a way to make it more difficult, raise the weight or graduate to a harder exercise altogether. Your body doesn't grow and change if it's not being challenged. You have to struggle against your body to get it to change its state, and to do that....

2. You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Working out is not easy. It's labor intensive. You strain. It can "hurt". You sweat. You stink. You're out of breath. You grunt. Your muscles burn because they are LITERALLY filled with acid and your body, if it could speak, would be shouting AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. The day after can almost be worse! Most people spend their day avoiding being like any of those things. You, on the other hand, have to want it. Not just the discomfort during your work out, but the exhaustion and soreness you'll feel the day, two days, maybe even three days later as well. You have to make a friend of pain and discomfort, because only when you're feeling them are you changing, are you actually burning lots of calories and fat. You have to learn to look forward to that burn, to relish the feeling of sore muscles. Sounds weird, right? Well what makes that change for you is when you actually start to see results. The results make you want to come back and do it again, make you seek that feeling of pain. You'll start equating that feeling of exhaustion with a job being well done. Which leads me to....

3. Be patient / Be observant. Change takes time. We live in a era of instant gratification where we don't have to work for many of the things that make us happy. Sure we may do a 9 to 5 and that's our work, but have we really had to struggle for some of the things we want that fulfill us? Well for changes in your body, there are no shortcuts that are healthy and safe. All you have is the work in front of you, and depending on how far you have to go to reach your goals, it may take a lot of time under tension to get there. You have to fight your well developed instinct to be disappointed and give up. So be patient. And while you're being patient, putting in the work, pay attention to your body. While you're working out, immediately after you work out, the day after you work out. Look for change. Evaluate. Watch your muscles ripple. Get to know your body and what it's doing instead of avoiding looking at it because it's a reminder you're out of shape. Always be alert for pain that isn't "the right pain." You will quickly learn the difference. Take measurements, weigh yourself. Watch for the signs of progress, and let those discoveries fuel your motivation to work even harder the next time. There's an element of narcissism in it, I won't lie. But some narcissism isn't necessarily a bad thing! Many people have probably been too hard on themselves for the way they look and there's nothing wrong with learning how to like yourself in the mirror again, especially when it was a product of your own damn hard work! Just....you know, don't become a total self-centered statuesque god or goddess, kay?

4) GET YOUR FUCKING SLEEP! This is one of the hardest things for me as a night owl to do. If you're going to be working hard though, your body MUST have rest. It's when muscle building happens. It's when healing happens. It's when bad stuff like stress hormones are flushed from your body. You need 8 hours sleep under normal working conditions. If you're going to be working out and putting your body under that additional stress it's EVEN MORE IMPORTANT to get that sleep. Otherwise you will feel like shit, become the "not good" kind of sore and worst of all, have less energy for your next workout, perform like shit while you do workout and your gains and/or weight loss will be lower and slower than if you had slept. Related that to that, if you've been injured or are sick, REST. Take the time off! Once you start enjoying working out this gets harder and harder to do, because you just want to get in there. But injury and illness represent additional stress on your body and working out in that state can lead you into feeling worse and recovering slower. So don't do it. Work hard, rest hard. And that means taking rest days.

5) Forget everyone else. This isn't about them, how they look, what they think, what anyone thinks.  I remember I used to drive around and see overweight people jogging and sweating and would sneer with contempt like a jerk. Now, now I see people who are incredibly out of shape trying something, anything, and all I can think is "You go girl."

This is about you, what you want, your struggle and no one else's. Let go of feeling judged when you workout, of being embarrassed about it. Anyone, of any fitness level, who commits to working out and getting in better shape should be commended. You have been and will continue to be your harshest critic.

So work hard, exhaust yourself, eat right, get your rest.....then try to tell me you don't feel all around better. If you don't feel stronger, more energetic, more vital, more capable, more confident. For me, personally, after having treated myself like shit for so long, the physiological benefits alone have been worth it. The weight loss and musculature growth is just the icing on the cake.

For me the fitness journey has been about momentum. The hardest part was starting, was committing in my mind to the hard work I knew was coming. Once I started doing the work it got easier, and easier, and easier to want to go back until working out has literally started pushing out other concerns like gaming, work and even stress. I would have never pegged myself as this kind of person and yet here I am, making long-winded threads on the internet about it. If you're thinking about starting, trust me....you are at the hardest point in the whole process because you're not sure you want to make the sacrifices and do it. Believe me on the other side of making that decision, you will see how much greener the grass on the other side is. And what you're sacrificing won't seem like much sacrifice at all. The human body and physiology was not designed to sit in a chair, burning minimal calories all day. It was built and evolved to move, quickly, with grace and power and speed! Start working out and remember what it's like to be in touch with that again and see if you don't recover a vital spark of being alive that you've let grow dim with the passing of time.

Think that's about it for now. Happy to answer questions, give specifics. If you're in to resistance training, I really found the Athlean-X channel on Youtube very straight forward, very honest and very useful.

Anyways, good luck, have fun and feel your power!

I've had the same Creative 5.1 speaker set for.....like almost 20 years now. Has generally worked with little problem.

Except in 2016. Recently I'd say about half the AAA games I've bought lately have screwed up voice overs and dialog when on 5.1 sound settings in Windows. Voice overs play so quietly I can't hear them, like they're playing at no volume on one of the side speakers. XCOM 2, Dragon's Dogma and now Dark Souls 3 have all shown this problem. (In Dragon's Dogma when I spin the camera I can hear the voice overs from NPCs in the world track across my speakers....so I know it's working.) Other sounds play as expected in 5.1, but no voices. I have to switch my setup to stereo to hear voice overs.

I've tested my speakers and they're all playing normally.

Anyone run into this issue? I've got the same Realtek HD Audio Manager that Windows ships with. Did gaming companies switch to a new codec or something recently?

So the background. I'm 35. My mother is 65.

She retired from her job about 3 months ago.

We were supposed to go on a camping trip this weekend but she called my brother this morning and basically said "I have a problem."

I've known there's been a problem for years. I've watched it happen, as she got progressively drunker and drunker when I'd see her on the weekends (I live in the same town as her, my brother does not.) I've told her it was a problem, that I didn't like talking to her or dealing with her when she was drunk, for years now. Her house steadily got messier and dirtier and basic things just continued to slip. My father has in the past told me my mother had a drinking "issue" but I think we both wanted to believe it wasn't more than that. That it wouldn't reach the point where she was endangering her own life.

Several times I'd contemplated an intervention but I let the fact she was holding down an important position at her job without problems (that I knew of) convince me she had herself mostly in check. My mother is a proud, independent woman who raised two kids mostly by herself, who easily gets defensive when you try to tell her what to do.

Well retirement came, and it did not come on pleasant terms for her, and it brought all this to a head. She's been very depressed, arguably for the last 25 years or so since my dad divorced her. She never really recovered from it or other traumatic events in life like her father dying slowly in a hospital or her mother succumbing to dementia or her brother drowning in his 40s. Once she retired and lost the routine that kept her functional, she basically let herself go and her depression set in. We talked about the need to stay active, do things, make plans for herself post-retirement. A lot. But she just never went anywhere with it, she just sunk deeper into her depression and the bottle.

So I came to her today to find her almost insensible, the worst I've ever seen her. Despite knowing my brother and his wife and I were coming she drank herself into a stupor nonetheless. She tells me she's been vomiting and dryheaving for months now (so the heaviest drinking I assume started right after retirement) in the mornings and her hands shake uncontrollably unless she has a drink. Which means she's basically been drunk every day for months now, to lesser and greater degrees. She's not eating well, or sleeping well. The animals have probably gone hungry more than once. There were tears, a lot of emotional drama and she told me point blank she needed help. Which is good. The truth is though, she could no longer hide what she'd become due to this trip. There was no way she could function without drinking and a camping trip would make it impossible to hide all this. She essentially backed herself into a corner, and that's why the admission came out. The signs were all there before (shocking amounts of liquor bottles just stacked up on the counter, trash laying around on the counters that was never taken out, filthy filthy dishes in the sink that had been there for weeks.) I guess I just didn't want to believe it. I wanted to believe this was just a rough patch. Ah well. At least now I can know what I've long worried about her.

Her condition is stable, I guess. She sobered up a little later enough to eat something, drink water, walk without falling over and say little other than how embarrassed and ashamed she feels. So I don't think her health is in literally imminent danger. We're still taking her to the hospital tomorrow for a full physical check up, because there's no doubt her body is totally fucked after the abuse she's put it through. I don't doubt she's malnourished and dehydrated and who knows what else. They'll probably want to do a mental health screening as well.

We'll be using the week vacation we'd planned to instead make sure she's evaluated and detoxing, find her a rehab center and start getting her house and affairs in order and just be there for her.

---

So....this is all pretty new to me. I've never had to deal with an alcoholic family member before, and it's the one-two combo of an alcoholic family member who is also beginning to age and is less and less able to take care of themselves as time goes on. Here's what I know:

1. Her alcoholism has been years in forming and the loss of a routine is what drove her depression, and therefore her drinking, into overdrive.
2. Deep depression lies at the root of her drinking, an inability to deal with past problems.
3. She is very alone. Other than me she gets little face-to-face human contact. Any friends she had from work have moved away and she was never a socialable person to begin with. She has a sister and their relationship is often strained. Her sister also long ago came to the conclusion my mother was probably an alcoholic. But like the rest of her family didn't intervene.
4. Up until now I talked to her at least once a week and would see her once every couple of weeks. She's been fighting me on any kind of shared activity for, honestly, years now. Wouldn't let me take her out for her birthday or even to celebrate her retirement. All now I realize not just because of her depression but because of her drinking. It's been increasingly hard for me to want to spend time with her either, which has just further isolated her. I guess in a sense I just buried my head in the sand and hoped it'd go away. I'd offered help so many times, told her I was concerned so many times, that I was worried, that she was hurting me, her self, her life....I guess I was in the process of emotionally shutting down to the problem that was getting worse every day.
5. She is very stubborn and will likely relapse as soon as she's stable enough to get over the shame and guilt.
6. We'll have to get her to a rehab center and likely into counseling.
7. The weight of checking in on her, supporting her and and keeping her sober is going to fall on me. There is the very real possibility of her drinking and falling down the stairs and seriously hurting herself. I already saw at least one large bruise on her chest where she's fallen into something.
8. The question of suicidal tendencies is kind of an unknown. I've never taken my mom for suicidal, I think her fear of death is too strong. But at this point I can't say for surety what I do and don't know about her anymore.
9. Most of this seems to have come to a head in the last three months. The problems were all there before but I only really started noticing the symptoms (tremors which she'd chalk up to nervousness, getting lost in her own town of 20+ years when driving, making me drive her car whenever she could.) The post office cancelled service to the house when the mailbox was too full and it looks like they've got about a month and a half mail in storage for her.
10. I coulda been there more. I coulda taken action but out of respect for her I didn't. And if I'm honest, out of apathy and frustration too. I kept hoping this was something she'd come out of, but acknowledge I didn't put in the time to try and help as much as I could. I've gone around with my mother so many times over the years about her attitude, her behavior, how she was continually letting things slip like the house and basic cleanliness, that I'd gotten into the habit of badgering her but not putting in the time necessary to really help.
11. This isn't to say my brother and I haven't been there for her. Shortly after her retirement we cleaned her house, weeded her garden, tried to get her involved in maintaining the house, talk about the future, make plans. The timing chosen by my brother was pretty short-sighted and the day was full of a lot of point blank unpleasantness as I brought up a lot of these issues and basically went "What the fuck woman?" while my brother played good cop. That cleaning spree we did then made today's cleaning that much easier. It would have been really, really bad had we not done that.
12. This could have been a lot worse but she finally did reach out for help when she really needed it. And that's all that really matters.

So at this point I'm just kinda writing to vent but to also ask advice from anyone who has been through this. What to expect. What to watch out for. What helps keep you patient and sane though all of this. I think the road is going to be pretty hard for both of us, but mostly for her as she tries to put a life back together for herself.