ECM, special guest speaker at the GamerGate Conference in Toronto, ON - November 20, 2016

Fun facts:

• Uber: Denoting an outstanding or supreme example of a particular kind of person or thing.
  "ECM was an uber-fan of Shinobi on the PS2"
  
  Eric was responsible for the trend of everyone putting "uber" in front of words at the time
  
  
• Shumps: Shortened version of the video game genre "shoot-em-ups" such as Gradius, Thunder Force, Radiant Silvergun etc
  
  Eric coined this word!
  
  
• Beta Male: A man tending to assume a passive or subservient role in social or professional situations
  
  Eric coined his own term for this type of soy boy: Mangina
  
  
• At the time of his passing, Eric was writing a fitness-themed book called "From Geek Bod To Greek God"

"The ECM is always right."

"Being human: is not appreciating what you have when you have it."

"Sleep is for the weak."

"Hammer away." (Smash Bros reference)

"There's two sides to every story but only one truth."

"I consider red-blooded American males that like 'dating sims' to be about as manly as the average Frenchman."

"Gamers aren't all a bunch of limp-wristed, pencil-necked, geeks with bodies by Doritos and virginity by force."

"Words have meanings--they are not open to re-interpretation, corruption, or mangling to suit an agenda."

"Yes, folks, another Canadian, because I attract them like Tim Horton's attracts...Canadians."

"Another dark moment being when (Millar Time) overwrote my GameCube memory card, consigning my Level 200 Phantasy Star Online characters to oblivion--I still hear their silent screams when warm summer nights waft me back to that dark day on wings of ice-cold dread."

"THE TEARS it's a TEARSAGEDDON (regarding Clinton supporters on the night of President Trump's victory)"

"If it feels good, think it, that's liberal philosophy in six words"

"Some day, I'm coming up there and when you go to bed, I'm going to find the real Millar who you locked up in a cage beneath your home (ECM's reaction to me playing Call of Duty instead of Wii U games)"

"You better be buying Mario Kart 8, I don't want to hear it! You have some penance to do! (ECM's reaction to me playing Call of Duty instead of Wii U games)"

"Dude, the people in Ontario are every bit as hopeless as Californians or the loons populating Massachusetts"

"Canada, I daresay, is farther along the collapse sequence than the USA as far as markers lining up with Rome"

"I still tell people the story about the day that the Canadian came and wiped out my 500 hour PSO save. You're part of my personal mythology, congratulations!"

"Where would one even wear a crewneck with a Raizing logo on it? Weekly meeting of the Lifetime Virgin Club?"

"I can't believe Canadians will pick Trudeau, he's literally braindead."

"Canadians elected a functioning retard as a Prime Minister." (Justin Trudeau)

"You (Millar), are an American born behind enemy lines."

"Fuck you, now we're as gay as Canada (ECM on the USA legalizing gay marriage)"

"You might as well also play all of Razorsoft's (terrible) games while you're trolling the Genesis' seamy underbelly, as they'll make you appreciative of marbles and 52 pick up and setting your hands on fire."

If the best part of game for you is not the thing that actually makes it a game, then you are, in all likelhood, wasting your time when there are much better options for both raw cinematics (movies) and far, far better storytelling (books), both of which can be 'completed' in far less time than it takes to wade through garbage like FFXIII."

"Baseball: It's what drying paint watches."

"I already get therapy 3x/week...your name comes up a lot. - Not something you want to hear from a friend when discussing their mental health issues."

"You aren't a person, you're an experience. -Someone attempts to make sense of the previous quote."

"We (I use the term loosely) need to get Eric pregnant. -Violated, puzzled and intrigued--all at the same time."

"You just hate black people. -Apparently you can't even dislike bad movies with a racial component without being a racist these days, *sigh.*"

"The best way I can describe him is that he's like a super hyperactive golden retriever puppy. And though puppies aren't always so bright, they're so sweet and eager to learn. - I find that a rolled up newspaper does wonders in accelerating the learning process."

"Approximately 130-odd hours later, I have come to the end of Xenoblade and it's one of those bittersweet moments that you experience after finishing a great book: you're thrilled to have read it and enjoyed every last morsel, but you're also a little depressed and melancholic that it's over and there isn't anymore left to savor. "

"I guess I'm just looking for something to complain about. Which I never do. All the time."

"Sometimes I wish I had missed some truly epic games in my misspent youth so I could stumble across an Oracle of Ages and be like 'hot damn, this game is awesome!' Alas, fate (and a MIA social life) intervened and history was forever changed!."

"Panorama Cotton is another GameFan insane spooge-fest overwrought fangasm."

"I'm going to assume your conversation with your "friend" is aprocryphal because if someone actually used the word 'funnitude', ever, you should have struck him dead then and there"

"Hard to be sold on a tech that makes a huge part of your potential userbase physically ill... plus, in an amusement setting, liability has to be nightmare... and once it gets into the wild, VRGEDDON... I can't play VR, so I hope it dies a horrible death"

Leptin Resistance and Me (and probably you)
07/27/2011

This is your diet on too few calories.

For those keeping score (read: your life is even more drab than mine), I’ve been trying to get extra-lean (under ~10% bodyfat) for a couple of months now and was making slow (but steady!) progress.

However! It appears that, over the last 2 weeks, I’m in a dead stall and not losing anymore weight according to the scale **AND** the calipers, so I’m going to have to take some drastic, gastronomic, measures.

My potential options are:

A. Introduce enough cardio to kill a Kenyan marathoner.

B. Binge eat like Jack Black prepping for a Marlon Brando bio.

C. Skillful application of Jack Daniels and a scalpel.

D. All of the above, which should get me a one-way ticket to 6 months of AA, a lifetime sub to Insulin-A-Day-Keeps-the-Pancreatic-Failure-At-Bay and years of intense psychological treatment…after barely surviving multiple surgeries and escaping the ICU w/ three out of four limbs still in working order. And a new nickname: Lefty.

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is B, because of fun little thing known as leptin resistance.

I’m not going to bore you w/ the gory details, but the basic idea is that your body thinks you’re trying to starve it to death (and since I have body dysmorphic disorder, it’s right!), so in order to get everything back to an even-keel (and so I can get my anorexia-like descent to sub-7% bodyfat back on track) I’ll partake of all those things you’re *Never Supposed to Eat While Dieting!(TM)*:

1. Fistfuls of el hombre de Mexico’s favorite (now impossible to get) treat, Pop-Tarts.

2. Sacrificing half-a-dozen cows to drain enough cream from them to create a few dozen gallons of that sweet elixir of life, cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream.

3. A wide assortment of candy that, under normal circumstances, would get me a lifetime sub to Insulin-A-Day-Keeps-the-Pancreatic-Failure-At-Bay.

In all, I’ll consume about double a typical day’s-worth of calories (a bit over 4k), almost all in delicious, simple, pancreas-pummeling sugar! (Oh, and some protein because I’m all about fat kid/skinny kid on a teeter-totter-like ‘balance’.)

The net result, if I live, is that I should see an almost immediate drop in bodyfat come day three, and a resumption of normal bodyfat eradication on a roughly 2k cals/day diet that features none of the things you’re Never Supposed to Eat While Dieting!(TM). (Thank God.)

The downside is, of course, when you’ve conditioned yourself to the point where sweet stuff just isn’t remotely appealing is that it’s going to be a hellish chore trying to shovel that much garbage down my throat for 2 days. (Yes, I know: nobody reading this is feeling any sympathy for a ‘plight’ that includes all-you-can-gorge buffets and fields of Skittles, but I will persevere, if not for myself, but for science (but mainly myself).)

The moral of this (long-winded and grating) story is that if you find yourself stalled out on a diet for any more than 2 weeks you, too, probably need to implement this sort of regimen to get the plumbing back into normal tolerances, i.e. boost leptin levels back to baselines so that your body is tricked into thinking you’re not trying to starve it to death (stupid body, you’ll never learn! Mwahahahaha!).