Jarric

No worries, I'll come and investigate your new challenge soon. And glad you like them Sorry to hear that mate, but glad I could inadvertently be of help. I hope your rolls improve, and if you want to talk about anything in the meantime just drop me a message - you know I'm always up for a video chat if you want one too.

Nice! That's some good stuff. I like a good bit of folk metal, though I don't listen to it much these days. You've inspired me to go and listen to a bit of Breed 77 now.

Jennifer Love Hewitt's in that video? Wow, that's weird - you learn something new every day! Also much more intense than I was expecting.

I may have to steal a variation on this for a future challenge - my timekeeping of a morning is shocking. Aww he's so cute! Are you sure that's not a frozen river you're walking on though?

Leg day is never fun to come back to after a break! Keep that consistency up and it'll be better soon though.

That's awesome; glad to see you're making so much headway with the sleep.

Saturday and Sunday - week 0 weekend Saturday was a good day. I intended to go to parkrun, but when I arrived slightly late I discovered I didn't have my timing barcode, so I gave up and drove home. I ended up spending at least 90 minutes in the bath, in which time I managed to do an hour of revision for that goal. Spent the rest of the day finishing off my swashbuckler for Pathfinder on Tuesday, and even started drawing him for my creativity goal. Pretty sure my calories were ok, but teeth weren't done. Sunday was also a good day. I went to Wild Forest with some people from the gym. Wild Forest is a big obstacle training place with a real range of rings/bars/rigs and other obstacles - it was great fun to just wander around there and have a play. In the afternoon I intended to study in the bath again, but ended up watching Critical Drinking in the bath instead. I roasted a gammon for dinner and read a short adventure that I might run for the Pathfinder group at some stage. I'm counting adventure reading as a technical pass on creativity, and running around Wild Forest as a technical pass on the running goal. Calories were over, and teeth not done again. Week 0 stats Running: 3/4 for the week - I didn't run very far, but not bad at least Calories: 4/8, including hitting the mark on beer day Create: 3/7, but I'm feeling like I have more energy to do this for the first time in a while Revise: 2/4, with a week until my exam I need to do better Teeth: 2/7 - must try harder Overall I've felt pretty good this week; a lot less stressed and anxious than I have in a while. Now the trick is translating that into results! Average goal completion is 48.29%, so I get to keep £19.71, and need to transfer the remaining £20.29 to my mortgage account.

Lovely stuff. You are indeed worth the time.

A good soundtrack can make all the difference to a day - what are you listening to?

Friday - week 0 day 5 Yesterday was a good day. My neck and shoulder still felt crap when I woke up, and it had kept waking me up in the night, so I didn't go to Crossfit. Instead I got up and did some neck and shoulder focussed yoga, as well as lying on a massage ball for a bit, which all started to improve it. Work was ok - plenty to do at the moment but I feel like I'm trucking along with it ok. I was working from home, so I managed to get out for a quick 2 mile run at lunchtime too. After work I played some Solasta: Crown of the Magister. I'm not sure about this game at the moment, but I'm barely past the tutorial so I feel like I should give it a proper chance. I also drank the two remaining beers in the house, bringing me up to my maximum beers for the week. Lunch was outside of my calories as it was leftover pasta bake from the night before. Not sure if that influenced my decision to order pizza for dinner, though at least it was a very good pizza. I stayed up way, way too late watching a very stupid D&D stream. Teeth not done, no revision, no creative stuff.

Good shout, I went for a similar method of beer, painkillers, sleep, and a hot bath, as well as a bit of yoga and kicking the shit out of it with a massage ball. It's almost back to 100% now

That sounds like a good plan, and that gif is gorgeous

Happy (belated?) birthday @Bean Sidhe

Thursday - week 0 day 4 Yesterday was a good day. I slept in, having stayed up past 1am on Discord, so missed Crossfit. Work was ok though - had a day full of meetings but nothing too stressful. I'd had a crick in my neck all day Wednesday and yesterday, but when I got home I sat down on the sofa and something just went. I spent most of the evening lying on the floor and on various massage balls to try and feel better, whilst drinking beer. Then I took some painkillers and went to bed early. No goals were completed.

Sanity is an interesting one, because in some systems it's handled really badly and can include some really problematic themes. To me though it definitely makes sense that if CON determines my physical health then SAN determines my mental health in a very similar way. Thanks! It's weird thinking of the year in foundations rather than goals, but it feels like what I need right now. I haven't had a more apt use of the 'that's metal' reaction since it was introduced . Great to have you mate.

Wednesday - week 0 day 3 Yesterday was a good day. Crossfit first thing was squats. I went for 110kg (~232#) for 3 reps, but something felt weird coming up off the first rep and I panicked and bottled it. Deloaded to 100kg (~220#) for 3 rep, 90kg x 5, and 80kg x 7. That was followed by 5 rounds for time of 5 toes to bar, 3 cleans, 100m (~110 yards, so I guess 0.5 furlongs?) run. I came in just under 7 minutes with 50kg on the cleans, and it was actually quite good fun. Work was ok - it feels a bit less overwhelming than usual at the moment. In the evening I had snooker, so I had to rush dinner and rush out. WW made Welsh Rarebit, which put me maybe 150kcal over my dinner calorie budget, but it was quick and oh so tasty. I saw my Dad at the snooker match and got some troubling news, which didn't put me in the best headspace after a few beers. I stay up late on the NF Discord discussing language and regional variations in foods. 0/5 for goals yesterday, and I'm at 1,320/2,400 calories on beer day.

I had never considered that you could have cold weather without ice being an issue, so that statement is a real eye-opener for me. It just doesn't get cold enough here for that to happen.

Same here! I now have both in my head somehow.

Good to have you! As much as you can is always enough Thanks, I hope it works! I remembered to put it on this challenge, so that's definitely a start.

Here to watch you take down that minotaur man!

Oh wow, that sounds really trippy to me! I definitely have an internal monologue, and I always have a song in my head (and usually have a lot of control about changing the record when I get bored of a song), but that's it. Emotions as colours sounds fascinating - I feel emotions, but I don't think they appear as anything in my brain; not sounds or colours or anything. I do dream. Sometimes they're first person and sometimes they're third person. Often I'm in a computer game, and the perspective shifts between playing the computer game and being the character so fluidly that I don't notice the change. I have had quite a few lucid dreams, though they're not that regular, and a lot of dreams where I'm flying. I'm not sure how vivid my dreams are. I usually accept everything that's happening as real, as one does with dreams. I've been thinking about this a lot though, and I don't know if I have clear visual images in dreams but am unable to remember them, or if I just don't have a lot of visual imagery in dreams in the first place. I'm kind of learning towards the latter, but jow would I know really? I'm sure my dreams have at least some visual element. Ah, I see what you mean. So the word aphantasia would literally mean 'no imagination', which is definitely not the case for me - I can imagine all sorts of things, I just can't see them. The meaning I was ascribing to it is the English-language clinical meaning it's taken on, meaning 'no ability to create visual imagery'. And I did not know that about Hendrix, but that's really interesting. It makes a lot of sense with the feeling of his music though (and might explain why he wrote so well on LSD). There was a classical composer, might have been Mozart (I think?), that had synesthesia. Apparently as a kid he thought that they dim the lights during an orchestral performance so that you can see the colours the instruments make more clearly.

Tuesday - week 0 day 2 Yesterday was a good day. Crossfit first thing - bench press, push press and skiing. On bench I attempted 70kg (~154#) and crashed and burned at 2 reps, so I went with 65kg (~143# for 2 sets of 5, and finished with 5 at 60kg (~132#). The push press and skiing were together in a brutal little interval workout, which was quite good fun. My neck and shoulders are killing me today; I can't quite pinpoint why but it has to be some of this. Working from home was pretty productive. I did some revision too, which doesn't count towards the goal as it was in work time but is nonetheless extremely useful. In the evening I rushed to make a quick sausage and tomato pasta dish with stuff we had lying around, and then went off to run a Pathfinder game. Pathfinder: We were playing the second half of a short Pathfinder 2e adventure call Sundered Waves (so spoilers for that follow). It was really nice to run an in-person session for the first time in ages, and it was also really nice to have the adventure and all of the notes on a laptop rather than 3,000 sheets of paper. The party defeated a living waterfall, stole some weapons, and solved a riddle involving matching some statues to some plinths. Then came the final battle - a giant pirate skeleton with a huge gaff (boarding hook), wicked claws, and an eyepatch of course. I rolled a 30 on initiative and went first. Running forward I tried to stab the swashbuckler with the gaff, and rolled a natural 20, impaling him on the stick. He had some terrible rolls trying to escape or hit the creature, and dropped 2 rounds later due to ongoing damage from the spike through his chest. Then the investigator dropped. Then I straight out killed the druid's summoned cactus leshy, and then the druid's tree companion. I've never rolled so well in my life. It was looking bleak for the party, they were whittling down the skeleton by a few hp each round, but it was guaranteed to hit once per turn, often hit twice or more, and took about 1/3 of a PC's health with each hit. At the same time, I had two players feeling frustrated that they had no input in the game - they were unconscious and stable, so weren't even rolling checks to try and recover. I could feel that it was ceasing to be fun. It was getting late, and I had two players forced to be spectators, so I made a call. The skeleton had 21/125 hp left, but I decided that the next hit would be the killing blow. Pleasingly, the next hit was a crit from WW's fighter. It still only dealt 14 damage (though that was the most that character had dealt in any hit all game), but I called that the kill. I feel like fudging the creature's hp was a good call - the players got a tense final battle, and a satisfying end to a one-shot adventure. I've never done that before, so it felt weird, but it made for a better story.

Thanks . We often say that we bought a cooker and it came with a house!

I see where you're coming from, but I do think I have aphantasia. This isn't a new thing, I have never been able to picture anything in my mind, instead I live entirely with an internal monologue. If I close my eyes and "let my mind paint a mental picture", nothing happens - I can't picture WW, or my best mate, or you, or any of my D&D groups. I can't picture my family home, or the house I live in now. I can't picture something generic either, like a sunset or a beach. (The other day someone pointed out that when a meditation guide says 'picture yourself on a beach' they mean actually picture it, and that blew my mind.) I've recently learned the word for this, but this is the way my mind has always worked. RPGs have definitely got more visual, but I'm not sure how that effects me because once I'm not looking at the pictures I no longer remember them. My first intro to D&D was campaign logs on forums, so entirely text based. That really excited me when I discovered it, so I can see the desire for a less visual game. I'm also not a fan of playing an entire game on a battle map - in person I'll draw the room we're fighting in, but none of the corridors or non-combat chambers between encounter rooms. Drawing the entire dungeon reduces an RPG to a board game for me. It's really interesting isn't it? How do you think then, is it mostly visual? Funnily enough when I started talking about this to my mum she has the same thing I do - she actually said she used to find it really distressing that she couldn't picture loved ones who had passed away, until she rationalised that she couldn't picture anyone else either. I wonder if there's a genetic component to it (from my sample size of 1)?

Kitchen pics! Before: And after: