Don't Bury the Lede, Part 1: As I had hoped, today my cumulative weight lost based on my five-day moving average went back above 30 lbs. In fact, I weighed in more than 5 lbs lighter than my peak weight several days ago. That, of course, is not a sustainable rate of weight loss. That being said, it is in my experience a normal amount of movement in the first week of really getting back into a workout routine.  I expect tomorrow to be a slight bounce up in weight for the daily (I was definitely dehydrated this morning) but to still show another drop in the moving average. Yay me!

Don't Bury the Lede, Part 2: Allow me to tell you about the comedy duo Chris & Jack. I discovered them a couple years ago and I absolutely love their work. I will embed a couple of my favorite of their videos below the fold. Anyway, a while back they did a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a series of new shorts, which I decided to back. Late last night I got an email from them with my backer reward -- an audio sketch written and created just for me, in which poor Everyman Dave is once again abducted by aliens (it happens to him a lot), and his abductor turns out to be a fan of this blog. I laughed a lot. I don't know if anyone else will find this nearly as amusing as I do, but here it is:

Dave Learns About the Time Treadmill, and Also Eats Some Cereal

For reference, here is Dave's first alien abduction:

Check out below the fold for another of my favorite sketches from them, as well as my thoughts on today's episode of Doctor Who.

Before poor Dave was abducted, he encountered a troll while on a day hike to Barleydale. It is safe to say that Dave is somewhat more enlightened than Bertlesquick the Troll.

Anyway, please do yourself a favor and check out their other videos. They are all fantastic, and these guys deserve, like, all the fans.

Moving on to Doctor Who, I watched the first of three animated stories today. Check it out.

The Infinite Quest

(TARDIS Data Core Recap)

Back in 2007 Doctor Who was arguably at the pinnacle of its modern incarnation. Series Three is, in my opinion, the very best of the Tenth Doctor era, and for my money the three week sequence of Human Nature, The Family of Blood, and Blink is the most solid series of stories NuWho has ever produced back-to-back. At the same time that was running, there was a companion show called Totally Doctor Who that was targeted directly at younger viewers and serves as a companion / hype show for the main program. The Infinite Quest was an animated serial created specifically for Totally that aired as thirteen 3 1/2 minute episodes concurrently with Series Three. Both David Tennant and Freema Agyeman lent their voices to the project, which also featured Anthony Head as the voice of the main villain.

What I watched today, then, was a compendium of all thirteen episodes edited together into a single story. As you might imagine from its original structure, that makes for a viewing where there is a huge cliffhanger literally every three minutes. That kind of pacing does not work well for a single viewing, and I kind of wish I had watched this episodically when it originally aired.

The story boils down to your basic treasure quest, in which the Doctor and Martha are compelled to find a series of four Whatever McGuffins that will lead them to the titular Infinite -- an ancient device that will grant the finder "their heart's desire." Structurally it is very much like the Fourth Doctor's Key to Time season, except radically abbreviated. There are space pirates, a space jail, an giant insect invasion, and then a final showdown in which the Doctor does a Very Clever Thing and wins the day. So, you know, same old same old.

I'm not knocking it. For its intended audience and purpose it is quite good, the animation is quite nice, and everyone involved gives perfectly fine voice acting performances. It's not a must-see kind of thing, but for completism it was a perfectly fine way to burn about 600 calories on a treadmill.

I am considering doing a grand re-watch of everything starting later this winter, only watching everything in air-date order instead of by show like I did the first time around. When I do that, I will definitely slip in this story broken up into weekly parts like it originally aired. I suspect I will enjoy it more then.

Tomorrow I will be checking out the second of these animated stories, Dreamland. That one features a performance by genre legend David Warner, so I am definitely looking forward to it.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Tenth
Companion(s): Martha Jones
Episode(s): Doctor Who Animated: The Infinite Quest
Steps Walked: 6,980 today, 5,017,017 total
Distance Walked: 2.97 miles today, 2,589.48 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 0 today, 12,458 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 7,865 total
Weight: 276.64 lbs (five day moving average), net change -30.66 lbs