oats_son
4d ago
I manage it by not eating during the workday or anything for breakfast at all. I look forward to the black coffee I have after noon. I also take a nap at lunchtime.
My real weakness is the weekends. The association of home = food time is very strong for me. Not eating at all at work is comparatively extremely easy, especially since my boss stopped ordering full pizzas for lunch and letting me have the leftovers multiple times per week.
Related: for some reason, when I am by myself, I am never motivated to go get fast food or takeout or eat anywhere except home.
oats_son
4d ago
Now he probably valued money over self actualization(no one dreams of becoming an accountant, let’s be real) when he was ~20, which is a red tribe value that does go a ways towards explaining the conservative under representation in academia
Yes, thank you for saying this. Conservatives tend to be a lot more practical about career choice, and working at a museum just isn't the kind of thing you can make a career out of that can support a family. When I was growing up, my parents told me a big long list of careers I should not get into, including music and art.
oats_son
4d ago
Posts get pretty bloated if you want to say something snappy but then also have to put in every single thing wrong with gender changing operations. I see this as a point where pretty much everyone knew what hydroacetylene was getting at, but more... analytical? minded people could want to demonstrate that that argument alone is bad. I suppose he should have written it better. I've always gotten annoyed at the "I know what you meant but let's argue out the phrasing" types.
oats_son
4d ago
Great post and actually reverses my opinion. You've Singal-pilled me. I don't understand how any of those studies can be taken seriously by anyone else, but I guess it is important we get anything at all to satiate the people pushing this before axing it. Though I will point out that there are still plenty of communists, even though the communist experiment has failed several times over now.
I guess I'm Singal-pilled in that I see the utility in continuing experiments. I don't actually care if they're government funded or not. Certainly, if I was cutting research, research into something I despise would be one of the first things I cut. But, more nuanced than what I thought, I guess.
oats_son
4d ago
What's cookin' this weekend, The Motte?
Ever since I restarted intermittent fasting, my passion for creating and eating exotic foods has increased quite dramatically, since I'm thinking about food nearly constantly in the latter half of the workday. It is probably for the same reason that I am torn about what I should be doing: creating new exotic foods with ingredients from the Asian grocery store? Eating old food that I don't even know exists yet? Or maybe I should be going cheap and cooking up old beans in the cabinet or roasting/boiling some chicken leg quarters?
Yesterday I went with a compromise option, maki sushi with slightly old frozen fish that had been taking up space for a while, along with some taberu rayu (Japanese spicy chili oil) I had never been brave enough to actually use. It was great. Now there seem to be plans for going to a new wings place tomorrow, which really throws a wrench in the rest of the dinner plans, if you ask me, but I also have been craving wings recently, too, so not the worst thing in the world.
oats_son
5d ago
My God, yes. I got so mad seeing the ~40k year old human fossils be buried. On the one hand, we're enlightened by science and we don't need this pesky Christianity anymore. On the other hand, give into (some of! not even all of them are calling for this!) the natives' homebrewed ideas about what belongs to whom and ancient customs and destroy priceless artifacts. Western civilization deserves to die if it's gonna be like this.
It seems like no country anywhere can stand up to indigenous peoples when they want something unreasonable. Even the Russians caved when it came to the Siberian Ice Queen. Look at this, too. Thirteen thousand year old kid. Modern Native Americans don't even have any more claim to that than we do, man. There's no way their cultures resemble each other at all at that point. And I don't see European natives kicking up a fuss that Otzi the Ice Man got dug up and put on display.
oats_son
5d ago
A return to 2000s norms on this is hardly a wrong. The only reason we're here at all is due to about a decade of Overton window pushing. When these studies and techniques are the best they've got to offer on a fight they picked, it's a moral imperative to just kill it without even asking anymore.
I'm an American and I care, but I am assuming that like always, people will take what they want from Europe and sneer at the stuff they don't like. That goes for both sides. One side sneers at TERF Island but praises the public healthcare that it has (such as it is), one side praises the lockdown pullbacks and other Covid studies from Scandinavia but sneers at their high tax rate and large safety net. Seems like the good-science-enthusiasts have been getting Ws out of the area, though.
Edit: The comment got deleted. It asked something about whether Americans care about what happens in Europe, mentioning the Cass Report and the slow pullback of gender affirming care for minors across the continent.
oats_son
5d ago
That version does look annoying! I'm glad that that's not what you meant, because it looks way more complicated than was advertised in this thread. I will see if I can get the book itself. Swings look fun. Thanks for the purchase advice.
oats_son
5d ago
We already have evidence based results for trans healthcare. That's why I brought up the Cass Review. Jesse Singal himself is good at actually looking at the studies themselves.
But I mean, yes, there are other reasons to oppose it, which have been brought up on this site many, many times, such as allowing children to consent to permanent side-effects like infertility from puberty blockers. Your three steps become a lot more understandable when it's about lobotomies and someone says "you've got all this positive research for this procedure, but you're still drilling people's fuckin' personalities out of their brains."
oats_son
5d ago
oats_son
5d ago
Sweet, thanks. I'll take a look at the Program Minimum lifts somewhere. Hopefully there's a video. I don't want to buy the book. I'll check at the YMCA if they have any kettlebells there. Seems to me like a 35 pound kettlebell is a lot safer than loading up hundreds of pounds on your back and lowering yourself, but I might just not be creative enough coming up with failure scenarios.
I did 3 great chin-ups the other day. I was proud. Someday I'll be able to do 5, hopefully.
oats_son
5d ago
First the lefties get Tesla stock prices down through distributed property damage, now they pick off a future minister of agriculture in Germany with trespassing and intimidation. Terrorism works.
oats_son
5d ago
Today, Jesse Singal wrote an opinion for the New York Times where he argued that Trump defunding youth gender research was a bad thing, despite the terrible research coming out of that part of science. He thinks that reform is in order, not slash-and-burn practices. In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new. Certainly, funding bad actors makes no sense, but to me, reform is little gain, and even a good new study must follow around minors that have gone through the unethical transgender science grinder.
It reminds me of an (unpopular) opinion Trace shared the other day on Twitter regarding the axing of funds for museums and libraries. Even if anthropology is 99% leftist, well, the institutions belong to those who show up, so right wingers just need to get in there and fix it themselves. While I appreciated that stance as it related to conservative law organizations, and as it related to Twitter when left-wingers were leaving the site en masse, I find it pretty distasteful to give up anthropology to positive feedback loops, and let our history become a mockery when it is within one's power to just raze it.
Deus Ex took a look at this perspective. Spoilers for Deus Ex:
I'm going to guess most of this forum disagrees with Trace and Jesse on this matter in pretty much the same way that I do. Can you name any areas in government or other organizations where you do agree with them?
oats_son
6d ago
Wow. I'm not keen on losing weight - I want to lose like 10 pounds but that's about it - but is illegal Chinese semaglutide any cheaper than the real stuff? I know some people that take it, and one paid for it at the start of the year and had to pay the whole deductible until it got covered, and it was painful. A prescription has to be $2k, at least...
oats_son
6d ago
What about weight loss? Just about the only hot 30 year old women I know all smoke. Rhea Seehorn smokes in Better Call Saul and look at her.
oats_son
6d ago
Hiring prostitutes is a fun thought, but thinking about the price at all dispels the notion. The cheapest escorts on the forward thinking hippie sex work site are like, $500. Imagine... you could buy a Glock 19 for that and it wouldn't be gone in an hour of passion. You could buy a bike. You could upgrade a bunch of your old computer parts. You could fix your air conditioner during a heat wave in June. You could put it in an investment fund. I'll be the first to say it: for $500, investment funds are better than sex.
I will willingly out myself here to give some perspective. No, I have not had carnal knowledge of a woman. Yes, throughout high school, I thought the difference between me and the average woman was probably not much. I knew women who could do more pull-ups than me (I could do one-and-a-half unassisted, and I didn't know they needed assistance, but even once I did know, it still hadn't really sunk in for me), I knew women who had better mile times than me, and I thought the difference in push-up requirements weren't much different. I think it wasn't until I did co-ed softball in college that I realized "wow, all the women are really slow and horrible at the game, and all the dudes are superstars who we bank the entire game's performance on".
Kickball in high school probably could have given me this realization as well, if I had cared to notice, but it's not as stark because you've also got unathletic girls and boys who weren't choosing to be there and don't want to put in much effort. I guess I thought even the athletic girls playing just weren't as serious about it as the boys.
Admittedly, there may be a bit of an inferiority complex that played into my not realizing that I am actually stronger than most women. I always thought I was sort of weak. Also, you generally don't get into armwrestling matches with women who are not lesbians, and there were almost no lesbians at my school. Sad, isn't it?
oats_son
6d ago
I never actually tried Stronglifts. What I tried for a few months last year was the basic beginner routine. It actually resembles Stronglifts a bit, I guess. I just liked how straightforward Stronglifts looked while still having the exercises I liked from the beginner routine.
There were fun parts about it, actually - I like overhead press and chin-ups, I am okay with bench press and barbell rows. Deadlifts and squats are things that scare me, because the weight is high enough that you could be seriously hurt for a long time if you mess up. That kind of goes for bench press, too. As I started putting on more weight, I started getting less confident in my form. With bench press, it was warranted. I took a look at some more videos and found that my elbows were too far out to the sides, and that you need to basically curve your lift a bit to do a proper rep (which was disheartening, because I had to go down in weight to do the proper reps). But I was never confident enough to put much weight on a squat or a deadlift, especially after I did increase my weight according to the guide for deadlifts and came away with a horrible tailbone pain to drive home with. I don't think I ever did more than 170 for squats, and maybe even less than that for deadlifts.
Seeing you write about kettlebells does sound fun. There are actually kettlebells at my gym. I've never seen anyone with one in the section they're in. Do you recommend a workout? Can you actually get stronger with a kettlebell? What about lower body stuff, can kettlebells do that? As I've said, I seem to prefer jogging over most resistance training, so maybe kettlebells would be more fun than barbells. There's also the benefit that I don't need to spend hundreds of dollars and allocate a ton of space for kettlebells.
I am open to class formats. I took Tae Kwon Do when I was a kid, and it wasn't boring. I didn't really get along with the other kids very much, but you don't really need to to have fun sparring or hitting a bag. Increasingly, the class got worse as I grew older. It started seeming to be for mostly young kids, and as I got taller and stronger, the only sparring partner was my brother, and the brutality of those seemed to increase over time, along with the weird feeling of bitter rage holding back inexplicable tears in my throat after a spar, usually after I perceived that I had lost or after having taken some blows with some high amount of force (not exclusive to him, I felt the same thing losing in a tournament). I never got injured since we were padded up and kept the hits to the pads. We stopped going due to loss of interest once I was 16 and my brother was 18.
That being said, I think most classes are usually the aerobic kind of thing, right? Hopefully there are some classes that actually build muscle and aren't 99% women.
oats_son
7d ago
You're right, the continuous decision to dedicate yourself is the bigger barrier. When I find a new job, I will consider it after I've settled in and everything.
You use headphones, not earbuds? Wireless, I take it? Does the sweat ruin them? Do you ever do aerobic activities wearing them? How much did they cost, and how often do you charge them?
oats_son
7d ago
I also have to cast some extreme suspicion on most transgenders who wish that they had taken puberty blockers, and making efforts to allow minors to take them, legally or non legally, because they are projecting adult feelings onto children. Most of them discovered their trans-ness as an adult, and that particular activism feels like trying to rectify your own shortfalls by enabling other kids to have better outcomes, except it's very much not a better outcome to most normal people and to pretty much any kid, for reasons given in this thread (infertility, stunted growth, tiny genitals, probably even more significant deleterious health effects that I don't know about). The interest in trans kids is actually kind of sickening to me for these reasons. It's a lot more "adult" than it tries to present itself as.
One dude I know online who likes to crossdress once said that conservatives and transphobes only oppose puberty blockers because it would make it impossible to determine if someone was a real female or not, thus giving the risk of being attracted to the wrong sex (which only a transphobe would find to be a bad thing). I had nothing to say to that, because it was so extremely bad faith and also completely inaccurate, both in its reading of conservative motivations and also the actual outcomes of puberty blockers.
oats_son
7d ago
I understand it's a big ask for anyone to learn a Category V "super hard" language, but he did marry into it, after all... I'd like to learn Chinese someday, but realistically, that probably won't happen. Spanish is probably a better choice anyway.
oats_son
7d ago
A training buddy or a spouse would fix the problem entirely, because I like talking a lot and you can talk all you like during a lifting session. I think, also, if I had a home gym, there would be no problem either because there would be no or very little wait and you could put on a podcast or some music or an audiobook (or fall back on conversing with your training buddy) and you would be in your house after the workout instead of having to drive home. Another way to solve it would be to have an actually fun hobby for resistance training like rock climbing. With rock climbing, every session can be something to remember. But lifting weights at a gym alone is the worst, most boring time sink to me in a way that cooking, doing flash cards, reading, flossing and brushing my teeth, or showering is not. Even mowing the lawn is more compelling. Jogging on a treadmill is more compelling, though not by much.
You'll be disappointed by my answer. I just cook the fish. I never really cared that much about the taste of raw fish. The texture is interesting, but I never could taste any subtleties. The thing I like most about sushi at home is the hot vinegared rice; salted cooked salmon or trout is good in it, and so is cooked chicken, and so are the other crap I like to add. Spicy mayo can taste good on the top or inside, unagi sauce can taste good on the top or inside, but usually I just dip each piece in some tamari soy sauce and have at it.
As for fish, yes, I have a sushi book that says flash frozen is best. I think freezing at all will kill parasites, so if you're paranoid, you can just freeze it yourself. Or just cook it.
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