Jarric

Thank you! And yes, that's a good idea. Breakfast won't work - I eat breakfast whilst walking to work, so I'm out of spare hands, but if I can link it to another habit that would work well. Yeah, that's a good idea. I've had a quick look and there's actually a few different art classes available in my town - will have to investigate further. No judgement, I loved getting totally obsessed with games, but now that obsessive tendency puts me off loading up the game at all if I let it. Thanks! That's very pleasing I know - kangaroo dragon is great! I'll have to remember it if I ever want to flesh out a dragon more fully. Thanks! Ah yes, and I can confirm that there are two main benefits to that diet: Chocolate Wine

You and me both . It's all good though; no need to rush it.

As someone who works in insurance, I could explain the difference, but I see no need to bore you with it ? For me I can usually separate the art from the artist, but I really struggle with knowing that streaming a song or buying a book means I am in some way sending them money. Thus I'm much more likely to read/listen to that kind of artist after they're dead.

Hope the surgery goes well, thinking of you.

I'd be annoyed at an unexpected, uninvited house guest too. I'm sure the friend thinks they're doing a lovely thing surprising Dave, but it's not very considerate. Hopefully it'll end up being a fun visit though.

Sunday - W1D7 Yesterday was a good day. Did art in the evening, continuing the theme of charcoal pencils and hot stubbly guys apparently. This was a (not terribly accurate) attempt at Stephen Amell: Kneehab was done late evening, after ⅔ of a bottle of wine - it was pretty challenging Went for a bike ride first thing - 10.7 miles in a little over an hour. I pumped up the tyres on Saturday and it's amazing how much easier it makes things - who knew! Are a ton of chocolate for Easter, slightly mitigated by having nothing but chocolate for lunch. Then a roast pheasant dinner with a bottle of Malbec, because we wanted to be fancy. We even used the fancy glasses. Despite the chocolate and wine, which put me ~1,500kcal over target for the week, I lost 0.8lbs this week so I'm calling that a win. Week 1 scores: Art: 6/7 Kneehab: 7/7 More of this please.

Haaave ya tried Crossfit? (As someone who does Crossfit I am of course obligated to try and get as many other people to do it as possible.) In all seriousness though, it's really worked for me to have a consistent group of people that I meet at the gym and are doing the same things, without actually having to find a friend from outside of the gym who wants to lift together and do the same programming.

18/03 - 164.9lbs 25/03 -163.9lbs 01/03 - 163.1lbs Was quite surprised to see a drop in the scale today. I did make an effort to be sensible last week, but I also ate a ton of chocolate yesterday and finished the week about 1,500kcal over target. I'll take it though! This week should be a bit more back to normal, though I've still got a couple of Easter eggs to work through I'll just have to take it easy with them.

From an eating point of view? I try to remind myself that eating won't make me feel any less stressed. When you're craving a release from stress, or a distraction from it, then your brain my tell you that this is a hunger craving, but eating doesn't solve it and doesn't resolve the things that are causing you stress. If you mean how do you deal with stress in general, that's harder! Short of resolving the stressful situation, there's a whole raft of stress management techniques out there but what works is pretty specific to the person and situation.

Thanks for the update! Will wait to hear.

Glad you're son's ok mate. And well done on reaching Lothlórien!

Welcome back! Sounds like you've been through a lot recently; glad you got it all sorted in the end.

Sorry to hear about your grandma, that sucks. My Dad has dementia - it's different in that I don't live with him, and everyone's situation is different anyway, but I sympathise. If you want to talk about it, feel free to drop me a line. Most of the fun things you did would look really weird in my Crossfit gym, but I might have to have a play with this one. Your feelings are valid, and you can't help how you feel about this. Someone different reacting differently does not make your reaction any less reasonable. I don't have any advice on how to stop being angry, if that's what you want to do. You're in a horrible situation and it's reasonable to be angry about that.

Hope that Wight's ok (and that you are able to send her home after a not stupid amount of time)

Congratulations on the new job mate (whichever one you pick), and the provisional wedding date!

Saturday - W1D6 Yesterday was a good day. I did a charcoal pencil drawing of Adam Jensen, the protagonist in the latter Deus Ex games, in the evening: Kneehab was done first thing before a bike ride. It was a busy morning - a few miles on the bike, then a short bouldering session, drop off Easter flowers at my Grandma's, then home and get ready to go out to the ballet. The ballet was good, but a bit weird. It was A Midsummer Night's Dream, but they did the entirety of the plot before the interval, and the second half was just dancing in costume but with no plot. It felt like a very odd choice.

Friday - W1D5 Friday was a good day. Needed to do art after I posted an update here, and a nerd friend on Discord told me to draw dragons and shared a dragon design video on YouTube. Here's some quick sketches which are very much copied from that video: Kneehab was done after Crossfit, because Crossfit was a weird bank holiday session. We started out with a load of handstand practice, which was fun, and then a workout of: 20 rounds for time: 5 strict press 5 calories 5 ring rows I did the press with 2 15kg dumbbells, most of the calories were on the air bike with a couple of rounds skiing, and finished in 23 something minutes. In the evening WW was out, so I had pizza and cake for dinner on my own, with a beer, caught up here, and then played Deus Ex for the evening.

Oh, I see what you mean. That is an interesting parallel between the two, and a lot of those comments ring true for me. I didn't think you thought I had a problem with movement to be fair. I was more approaching it from the perspective of 'I've cracked regular exercise as a habit, why does that work and can I apply the same principles to art?' Yeah, I don't remember that annoying me too much, but I certainly appreciate him filling out that part of the world. I beat the first boss last night, and so far I'm really enjoying it. It's got a lot of the good stuff I remember from the original - good stealth mechanics, actions feel like they have consequences, the hacking actually works really well (much better than the original), and a nice bunch of conspriacies already in the story. One of the complaints I remember hearing about in reviews, now that I've experienced it to be reminded, is that there's a pacifist achievement for completing the game without killing anyone, but the bosses can only be defeated by killing them. You can still get the achievement, because boss fights don't count towards it, but thematically it's a bit silly. On the other hand, I'm never likely to replay it to try for that achievement anyway. I think the reasons I gave up on it before were a) I was trying to explore every area and talk to every person like I did with the original, but I'm not a teenager any more and I don't have the time or inclination to play the game for 100s of hours to the exclusion of all other activities. b) I turned off object highlighting, because I was being a snobby PC gamer about it feeling like a console-style assist, whereas now I recognise it as a good quality-of-life feature which just makes the game a bit more fun. I feel stupid now - I pre-ordered this game, and never got as far as the first boss. Then I bought it on console and still got no further, and it's taken 13 years for me to come back to it. One minor grumble, the inventory is too small. It doesn't help that the pre-order perks include a sniper rifle, which is fully half the size of the inventory before you unlock upgrades. I got Mankind Divided free on Epic Games a couple of weeks ago, so I'm keen to complete Human Revolution and give that a go.

Thursday - W1D4 Yesterday was a good day. I did some drawing after lunch, drawing along with The Sketching Hour. The prompt was flowery dragon parrot: Not great; the body angle's weird and it's not a very dynamic pose, but it was a nice chilled session anyway. Kneehab was done at Crossfit. Crossfit was good. Deadlifts felt horribly heavy, so I went pretty light, and then we had a chilled 'for quality' workout of ring muscle ups, power cleans, and wall balls. I got 8 muscle ups over the course of the session and felt like I had more in the tank; really pleased with how far these have come on in the last few months. Spent the morning reading, then drawing after lunch, and then loaded up Deus Ex: Human Revolution for the first time in many years. I own it on PC and console, and the last time I played it on PC was when it came out in 2011. Don't know when I picked it up on console but I didn't get much further through it then. Anyway, I'm enjoying it so far - I loved Deus Ex and didn't hate DX: Invisible War, and I'd like to finish this one so I can give Mankind Divided a go. In the evening we started watching the latest series of Taskmaster. I was exhausted again by the time that ended - not sure what's happening with my energy levels recently, so that's something to keep an eye on. Might just be the calorie deficit.

I love that - the man can certainly turn a phrase. My favourite line from today was today "The British had made if clear they didn't want to see them again on pain of sarcasm." On a related note, I finished Winter's Gifts this evening. Very much enjoyed it, and also with the limited amount of reading that I do I thoroughly appreciate novellas (novellae?). I think the movement stuff I do fine with because I have a lot of accountability. I book my Crossfit classes, I plan to meet friends at bouldering. I was doing fine with running on my own thought, but I did have a definite scheduled time for running rather than just trying to fit it in. Maybe I just need a set block of time that I can use automatically every day? Thank you ? That's a good shout. I talked myself out of buying a pocket notebook the other day on the basis that I didn't really need yet more art supplies, but maybe I should reassess that... Yeah, I really like that. I'm not sure where to find that group yet, but I think it would help. We could definitely create an NF group. I'm not sure how we'd structure it though. A weekly drawing prompt? An actual set time drawing together (either drawing separately but at the same time, or together with digital drawing tools?). I'm open to ideas. I've just looked that up - it's a really interesting concept. I quite like that idea, thanks for sharing.

Now that sounds like a fun workout.

Wow, 4-day DOMS are nasty! Hopefully in a couple of weeks they'll be a bit more reasonable in their duration. Good luck on the pullup goal too - always a fun thing to aim for.

As far as I know, this is more of a concern if you have an average to low body fat percentage, but less of a concern at a higher body fat percentage. If you're carrying a reasonable amount of fat then your body should be able to burn that to keep you from going into true starvation mode even if you're below your BMR. I wouldn't recommend doing it, because you probably still won't feel date and the diet will probably be miserable and difficult to stick to, but it's probably not dangerous so I also wouldn't worry about accidently dipping below your BMR if you don't have a good way to reliably calculate what your BMR is. (Disclaimer: I'm a random guy on the internet, not a doctor, this is not good, or even mediocre, medical advice.) I'm in a similar place with this - my observed maintenance from calorie tracking is a good 300-400kcal higher than most calculators will give me, and one calculator gave me a maintenance figure the other day that I'm currently losing 1lb/week at.

I went to look up the new one to see the subject, and it looks like the title's been announced too: benaaronovitch.com/wp-assets/uploads/2024/03/MOS-cover-reveal-FINAL.mp4?_=1 (I don't know why that video won't embed, but still, it's there!)

Wednesday - W1D3 Yesterday was a good day. By the time I'd had dinner I was falling asleep on the sofa, so I didn't art before bed, but I did do my kneehab at Crossfit. Crossfit was box squats - they felt pretty solid at 95kg (209lbs) x 3 x 5, despite feeling knackered from the late night on Tuesday. Then we had hamstring curls, natural leg extensions, and box step ups - all very hard on the legs! Spent the morning reading Winter's Gifts by Ben Aaronovich (thanks @sarakingdom for alerting me that I'd missed this one!), then had physio in the afternoon that I talked about in my challenge intro. Then off to climbing, home for dinner, and an exhausted, early night.