I've finally figured out what's wrong with my back: doctors call it "hyperlordosis"; my spine looks exactly like the picture on the right. My wife has pointed it out before, but I never gave it much consideration until yesterday.

It was caused by the fact that I was morbidly obese-- two hundred and sixty pounds, at sixty nine inches of height-- for over a decade. Presently, I can only get five or six hours of sleep consecutively before my lower back feels like it's breaking in half, waking me up.

Thankfully, I can correct the condition by strengthening my abdominal and glute muscle groups. Apparently, it will take several months of intense exercising before the muscles will slowly pull the spine back into its correct shape. Interestingly, sources indicate I'll probably be a full inch, or even more, taller once the issue is corrected. It will be strange being almost five foot eleven.

In totally unrelated news, I really like where Microsoft is going not just as a company in general, but with their games division specifically.

Their studios are becoming Nintendo-like in their focus on gameplay-first experiences: "Minecraft", "Minecraft Dungeons", "Flight Simulator", "Battletoads", the two "Ori" releases, and "Gears Tactics" are all examples of titles where you spend ninety nine percent of your time actually playing. Even their story-based games like the incoming "Wasteland 3", or last year's "The Outer Worlds" are predominantly gameplay-focused.

This is in stark contrast with Sony, who seem to emphasize Hollywood-style walking simulators. I finally pulled my PlayStation 4 Pro up from the basement and fully patched it and the games I own-- I wasn't feeling it at all, and put the thing right back into a box.

I also haven't touched my Switch in weeks. It's useful for sprite-based games, but I'm totally bored by Xbox 360-caliber 3d graphics-- they look silly in August of 2020.

This leads me to Microsoft's hardware front: subscribe to "Game Pass" for five bucks a month and play on any ecosystem device, save games all transfer seamlessly from one device to another. I get one hundred percent of their output natively running on my Zen 2, RTX 2080 PC. I can even stream titles with ray tracing to my phone's gorgeous AMOLED screen with "xCloud", completely supplanting the Switch.

Even as conventional video game boxes go, if that's how you roll, the Series X is significantly superior to the PlayStation 5. Of course, Sony is going to sell a lot more PlayStation 5's than Microsoft will Series X's, due to brand loyalty alone-- but Microsoft is playing the long game, with a fully forward-looking, cohesive ecosystem and long-term strategy: let's see which company is happier in five years.