Navy beans boiled with some bacon is an absolute delight. No wonder our depression-era ancesters were so capable and so fierce.   This is a superpower.  Here to cheer you on for this.   Maybe we need a Legume League ❤️  If you've not been eating legumes much, the first few weeks can feel a bit funky as your gut develops the right biome for digesting. My recommendation is to start with a cup or two of cooked beans a day at most while your body catches up to the nutrition. Barley and other grains help with this, as does vitamin c (the iron in beans needs vitamin c to digest and absorb). You don't have to buy a supplement or anything, just add some diced tomato or a handful of blueberries or whatever to the meal in some way. A cup of chopped kale is packed with vitamin c (80 mg), and I like to add some chopped red cabbage to mine (50 mg per cup). Throw in a diced tomato (17 mg per medium-sized fuit) and some broccoli (80 mg per cup) and slivers of red pepper (190 mg per cup, 1.5 times the green variety), and you have a beautiful, instagram-worthy salad that will knock your socks off and nuture your nutrition all day long. And if you're not opposed to white potatoes, they have as much vitamin c as a tomato does, and tons of potassium and B6 as well. Roasted white or sweet potatoes (lower Glycemic Index than white potatoes and lots of beta carotene) is a favorite comfort food of mine. I cut them into chunks and toss with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt and whatever fresh herb I have around -- rosemary, dill, parsley, whathaveyou. Bonus: Eating roots in the evening helps with sleep quality. Nature is amazing.   Ooooh, an official Origin Story. You know I'm here for this. 100% agree with Kishi. I'm all in.   Yes, I was just talking about this! I missThe Rebellion days, but moslty becuase I miss the Rebellion energy. Never forget that the Jedi were "the bad guys" that brought us "A New Hope."  I was talking with my daughter about how Stain in My Hero Academy was a complex villain that I liked, one whose message was that the status quo was broken and degrading regular people from acting in good ways for themselves, and that heroes had turned into social applause machines and weren't really heoric at all anymore, and so they don't deserve either the title or the power they weild. Even the Joker was all about how the world had gone insane in its slavish adherence to rules that made absolutely no sense and were destructive. I want more of that, everywhere. Let's get Wicked.   PLEASE SAY YES THIS MAKES US YOUR MINIONS!!   This is so perfect for the Blue Sturgeon moon (in Aquarius, the sign of revolution for the collective good and personal breakthrough; expect the unexpected).  There's a nice aspect for this sort of work happening along with the full moon, a conjunction (direct alignment, looks like it is on top of or sitting right next to) with Saturn. Usually Saturn is considered the planet of NO, but I like the way Saturn brings us boundaries and structure, the scaffold that is necessary to enact our wildest dreams and schemes, and it brings our ancestral traditions with it, including all their power and authority. Also Mars is square (90 degrees, usually seen as an external push energy or pressure), which I think will give you just the right oomph to juice this in the direction you're after. Change requires courage-in-action, and Mars is beaming that right onto the full moon in buckets. See? I told you the Universe loves you and wants you to be happy.     Love that cup. Dang, if ever there were an autumnal theme for a challenge, this is it.  Also, having enter my HagDragon era, I highly recommend channeling this energy and letting it transform everything       I hope you're having a beautiful day, Sov. I am sending good thoughts for Dave and for this villainy -- I'm honored to get to see behind the curtain as it begin (sort of a soft launch amongst your tribe). I like soft launches, generally, as it allows for a transition time, which often means a slight adjustment as we deepen into a new way of being. Can you believe we're in week four of this challenge already? Ten days to gather tools and adjust your cap for villainy sounds just right. I love that you are painting your lair this challenge, sort of an "if you paint it, they will come" energy to inviting the villain in. You do so much with painting miniatures fo rthe worlds you build, I feel like the house painting is a macro analog to that, where you are the character you're building a world for and around. ❤️ 

All righty! What have we got here?   Did my upper body workout yesterday at lunch. Early days yet, but I'm liking the upper/lower split.    I am pondering my diet. It is, on balance, pretty good I'd say. But I don't pay a whole lot of attention to it, and I think it might behoove me to think a little bit about my macros and being in a slight surplus to continue seeing gym gains. For the duration of this challenge and next, I'm going to experiment with logging my food in Cronometer. I have no interest in measuring my food or custom entering all the homemade stuff I eat. So basically, I realize my tracking is going to be very guesstimate based and thus wrong, but perhaps as long as I am consistently wrong in the same manner, the actual numbers may not reflect reality but give me a baseline trend to work from. Or perhaps being so wildly off all the time just makes tracking completely pointless, but I'll give it a go for the next 6ish weeks and see where I land.    Between yesterday's workout and this morning's Word of Radiance, I killed a Vampirate, so I'm currently sitting at 572 points behind, which means I am already gaining ground from where I was last week. Rolled a 3 for Shadows, so hoping to dispatch them quickly with cantrips and be back to fighting Vampirates before long.    Got a text from my aunt yesterday that she wants to eat between 1 and 2 on Sunday. Usually the corn roast is Saturday evening, since we're doing it Sunday this year she said she wanted to have it earlier since people work the next day, but I had thought she meant around 4, not that early. So depending on how long assisting the bishop takes Sunday morning, I may not make the corn roast, but I'm okay with that. I could go for a quiet afternoon home alone.   Off to the library on my lunch break today, then over to my neighbor's after work. Want to get some music time in this evening, but I really need to write that final paper at some point as well, so we shall see.

Yes and no.  I have a printed out spreadsheet where I'm supposed to chart my time.  I have a visual representation of how miserable I am lol.  So I can see, 'wow I spent like 60% of my free time doing shit that was marginally fun and not productive'.  It can put things in perspective.  Perfect example is posting on here.  I consider socializing and debate to be fun.  More fun than youtube.  Look how much I've written since moving out of ladyfriend's place just 4 days ago: I purposely didn't bring any videogame consoles with me and because the past two weeks prior I've been logging my overall activity, I knew I could 'starve' that part of myself and then choose the better option.  I'm trying to limit the mindless youtube.    That's how whole30 has been working for me: I don't have any temptations.  I don't go next store to see my sister (until I feel fully detoxed in maybe another week or so) and I haven't visited ladyfriend since I moved out. All I have in the fridge is healthy stuff.  I can literally list every item in my fridge right now:   -cans of tuna -olive oil mayo -togarashi-seasoned pork chops -broccoli -green beans -sweet potatoes -baked chicken thighs -bowl of eggplant and mushrooms in tomato sauce -no sugar added strawberry applesauce -water filter -oj -apple juice -bananas -rx bar   Literally that's it.  I'm starving myself of the unhealthy option so I have no choice but to have the healthy options     I'm debating on making a character or something.  Or maybe create an accountability group.  It's a bit too late this challenge but I might see about making a mini-group and try to rebuild that 'core' I was talking about earlier.     Yeah, if I wanted only that, I could sign up to 100 different forums/sites. Although:   I was bullied for years when growing up and I know all too well that I never want others to feel that way.  I wouldn't say that bullying is *good* or anything, but it did sort of create an awareness and empathy.  I think that, I mean this in the traditional sense, when you think 'nerd' you think of someone that has offbeat interests, socially awkward, all the stereotype cliche things. Maybe that in and of itself is part of why the community didn't have that toxicity.  I may not know anything about Dr Who, but I also am not going to argue or shame someone for being a Whovian, when I know I have equally nerdy interests.  I think that bred a sense of tolerance and mutual understanding. That passion can bleed into passion of other things, when made interesting enough.  And I mean, I know a lot of people who don't have a passion or interest.  They sort of just watch the new show that's come out and watch the local sports team and that's about it.  There's not a lot that fires up people that I've socialized with IRL.  Maybe it's just a matter of striking the right nerve, but maybe the concept of nerdiness/passion/empathy creates a sense of a stable and caring community.     Ya, the toxic relationship I was in knew about NF and that's what ultimately created that rift between me and her and I'm thankful for it.  And yeah, I never mention NF by name, I just say things like, 'a weight loss community'.  I don't want to have to walk on eggshells ever.   I guess because I hate all the other options, I still want to use this.     Ya, I made it seem like it might be seen that way, but it totally is compulsive high-chasing.  I just can't imagine having it take such grips to me.  Like, the comparable high-chasing for me is youtube stuff. Ok, I wasted some time.  I didn't waste $250 dollars.  That seems worse to me. I mean, I suppose you could do a time=money wasted sort of calculation but it still doesn't add up for me.     Oh ya, it's all manipulation and scamming.  Did you know that gamesworkship had a job posting for a director of FOMO? https://spikeybits.com/rumors/games-workshop-hiring-a-director-of-fomo/ People smirked and joked about it as a 'well that makes sense!' as opposed to being appalled.  I don't know, if I saw a company openly hiring for 'Director of Mental Manipulation', I'd be really taken aback but like I said, that community took it in stride.    Again, to make a parallel, obviously I have an issue with eating junk food.  If my favorite place was hiring a 'Director of making Burger King more addicting', I would be like, 'holy shit'. I wouldn't laugh it off and keep eating burger king.  That would be an eye-opener if I didn't *already* know how things like Oreos are more addictive than crack cocaine. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/18/rats-find-oreos-as-addictive-as-cocaine-an-unusual-college-research-project/     You kept up with the news about that and the Femstodes and the huge backlash?   I guess I always tend to soften that information because the writing has been on the wall since I was about 18 and I noticed this stuff and back when I talked about that, people thought I was being stupid and paranoid.  Boiling pot frog, man.  I remember reading 1984 and thinking, 'holy crap I thought all this stuff'.  Years later, there was talk about the xbox kinect and then years after that surveillance cameras, and then laptops having cameras always on, and then phones always recording.  I remember just wanting a cell phone to be as basic as possible and to keep it for as long as possible.  When it started slowing down, I thought it was weird that would happen. Lo and behold, like a decade later, people start talking about electronics being intentionally 'bricked', with operating systems working worse and worse.  With the new 5g wireless, my connection should be even better: it's like 10 times worse than back with 3g.  There's an intentional monitoring and regression.  You hear about how they want to try and make you pay a fee for using a computer mouse?  Like a yearly licensing fee. Remember when that started happening with videogames and then when their 'always online' shut off, it became impossible to USE the thing that you paid for...   I'm so disillusioned from videogames now, man.  I rent stuff through the library and this is the first time I haven't even bothered with the current generation of consoles.  $70 bucks for what? A glitchy, broken mess, that I could pay $100 for instead for 'early access' which makes even less sense when the damn thing doesn't even work, followed by, like you said, microtransactions and loot boxes.     A horse in-game costs more than the game now.  Which makes sense, in a messed-up way, because people already bought the game and those who were duped into the game would be duped into this.  It's that whole idea of games now creating a problem IN the game and then offering a money option to remove that problem they intentionally put in there.  It's predatory.  I know it's shameful and wrong.  I understand why it's done.  But it has made mainstream gaming today, when I see shit like this and the whole host of botched releases over and over and over, make me annoyed that I am a 'gamer'.   The thing is, it's all psychological manipulation and maybe it's because of the time I spent learning about all this stuff, but I liken this to other manipulation tactics, like those 'conviennt' gadgets. The black and white at the start of all the videos is always showing someone so incredibly inept and showing you that you have a 'problem' and the product they have is the solution, when 99.99% of it is all plastic garbage.     And that can be taken further to pick-up 'artists' and their use of 'game' when trying to get a woman by using 'negging' https://psychcentral.com/blog/recovering-narcissist/2018/12/5-pick-up-artist-techniques-narcissists-sociopaths-and-psychopaths-players-use-to-unsettle-you   Hell, it even has roots in religion, I feel.     Right - how often do any of us even fact-check when we watch or see something?  I mean, by and large, I don't think most people do that, ever.     Yup - I actually have Bloodbourne and when I decide to play it, I'm intentionally not looking up any wikis or anything.  When I played Breath of the Wild, I just wanted to learn. Same with Skyrim.  As tempting as googling the answer is, that also deprives yourself of the EUREKA moment when things click.   Like, ok, I remember when I was playing Breath of the Wild and I was killing bokoblins and there was a thunderstorm. I saw little electric sparks flashing on my weapon and then I got hit by lightning.  I NEVER used metal stuff when there was a storm after that.  If I had googled that and knew beforehand, I literally would not have the experience in my brain that I'm recalling right now and that's what made it fun.  I intend to, at some point, play Bloodbourne and maybe attempt all three Dark Souls games.  I remember when I was dating a girl who was playing Dark Souls 3 and couldn't get anywhere.  She was trying to tell me where to go and what to do and I told her, 'let me just try stuff out'.  Turns out, that was the right call, because I learned about dodging and parrying and what places to avoid and I got further than her.  I can guarantee she died a few times, got frustrated, looked it up, and then was trying to teach me how to do it when I would learn better through hands-on experimentation and trial and error.     See, I love being creative so that was the highlight of me starting in the first place.  Those intro articles written about 'being your own hero' resonated with me.  I can understand *why* they decided to do the merge: you didn't want like 4 people in a 'guild' and instead push people together, but I guess I wish there was a way that it never went in that direction.   It actually reminds me of facebook and how originally, it was only allowed for people who were in college as a social app.  More and more people were pissed that they weren't allowed to join the 'club' and so once it went mainstream, the floodgates were opened.  Maybe that's like what @DarK_RaideR parallels with nerdiness being mainstream.  I mean, games aren't just for 'nerds' anymore but.... is that a good thing when you see the mass market appeal watering it down and the current state of gaming?  Is Star Wars and other IPs being more mainstream a good thing when it's just shoveling out more and more shit?   It's why when the Henry Cavill warhammer thing was going on, I felt unease.  GamesWorkshop already will butcher their IP, but if it went even more mainstream, I don't even think I would be a fan anymore.   Maybe franchises always will gets watered down and becomes a lukewarm reheated version of its former glory.  I mean, I used to love Alien, Lord of The Rings, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, etc; but all of those have been mass produced so much with spinoffs and more and more content that it gets milked dry to the point of hatred.  Even smaller things that don't even NEED to be a franchise: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and other horror movies: most of them have like 10+ movies and like...2 of each are good? I ended up hating Jamie Lee Curtis after seeing her in so many of these movies.  You're a senior citizen: PLEASE LEAVE.  It's not fun or scary or interesting anymore.     I'm glad for nerds trying to protect their IPs.  I know that some people call it 'gatekeeping' but honestly, I don't need or want a Dune spinoff series.  I don't need or want a Game of Thrones spinoff series.  I don't need or want multiple Walking Dead spinoff series. etc     See, this goes along with what I just wrote above with the Diablo 4 horse purchase.  While, yes, free time can be valuable because of its rarity, I do think that there's a way to make things easier or more accessible, vs making them predatory for including roadblocks so you can't enjoy the game intentionally.  Like Super Mario.  The newer super mario games have a function that, when in multiplayer, people can put themselves in a bubble and be protected and then float over to someone else.  There are difficulty scaling in certain nintendo games that make it easier after failing a few times.    Compare that with making a game map intentionally HUGE and then charging people for fast-travel tokens. (I think that might have been in dragon's dogma 2 recently. maybe starfield.  I forget since I don't play them).  Yes, a fast-travel token would be nice to make it easier since I don't have then 15 minutes to run to the next location, but at what (literal) cost for something like that?  And why manufacture something annoying in the first place if it was only to sell me a way to make it not annoying.   I think genre also plays a part in that.  Like, discovery/error would need to be done with, say, a puzzle game, like Portal, or maybe a shrine in Breath of the Wild.  I think difficulty/convenience really blurs a line for enjoyment and error/discovery.   What game are you playing?  Baldur's Gate 3?

I went to the gym for the first time in over a week. Dammnit. I struggle a lot with consistency and that's why I haven't seen any progress. But It really did take me about nine or ten days to recover from the wedding.  And in the meantime, I have a confession. After my successful six months off internet, I told my brother to stop checking in and said I would loosen up some of the restrictions. And guess the fuck what happened? I am now back on the internet all day.  The bans were part of the solution, but they didn't create any mindfulness skills. And because I still had 15 minutes of internet on my phone, what I could do is just open up NF and look without commenting for ten seconds, multiple times per day. In addition, I could use books and podcasts as distraction, and I did.  So I didn't really have any big, uninterrupted chunks of time without input, which is what I suspect is needed for curiosity and creativity to return.    I need a new plan. I need to recommit and try for really good consistency with weightlifting and a distraction addiction plan.  On the upside, I feel my brain re-coagulating out of its liquid form, and I'm interested in planning again, so I know the crash is over. 

W4D3 - one DrP in the morning and another with lunch.  I also had a bag of Cheetos Puffs in the morning.  Lunch was leftover pork with mashed potatoes and carrots.  On the way home I stopped for some cold medicine and got a bag of chocolates which I ate as soon as I got home to close out the day a little high.  2588 kcal   I've come down with whatever bug Butch has been battling for a while, so I left the office early and pretty much spent the rest of the evening in bed.  It's hard to distinguish between exercise soreness and illness body aches, but together they're making it tough to get comfortable.  He used up all of my NyQuil which is why I had to get more on the way home, and I'm glad I did--looks like I'm going to be out of commission for a few days.  Thankfully, Amber bought and stored a bunch of GF ramen for me.

I've lately been pondering NF's original cry of "For the Rebellion!" and how abandoning that identity has really changed the feel of the forums. But when the establishment is touting "heroic" values that are at best not beneficial and at worst actively harmful, turning to villainy is the true heroism.   Which, now that I think about it, is basically the plot of Wicked, aka the best musical to have ever musicked, in my very adamant opinion. Do we need a group Wicked challenge for the next cycle? Yes, yes I think we do.

Thanks; you too!