jaffacake6

[jaffacake6]

ah......I might have priced myself out of a cool work opportunity. it's happened before - serious industry people come to me with projects that would take half a year of me working full time, and then I calculate my mortgage, my food, my various bills, add a sprinkle of profit on top so that I'm not just breaking even, and ask for that. and the response is always "wtf, you're insane!"

I don't like working in illustration. it's why I barely do any freelance anymore. my wrists are ruined, my back is ruined, and I have to make enough to keep living. I can't jump for crumbs anymore.

[jaffacake6]

Hey, congratulations! Sincerely, it's a hard thing to keep up with.

Just to throw on to your excellent points above, I find that the best way to encourage myself to exercise is to figure out what I don't like about exercising and minimise it where possible.

Which sounds obvious, but actively thinking about it and wargaming it out is surprisingly useful.

Don't want to go outside? Walk circles in your living room.

Hate feeling sweaty? Go swimming.

Don't like it interrupting other tasks? Figure out a regular time between tasks (or start / end of day) and do it then.

Just hate exercising? I don't really have one for this, but there's a huge range of exercise out there. Tennis, football, swimming, biking, fencing, dancing... You probably don't hate *every kind of exercise*.

Notes on 3000 miles

Last year my doctor told me that I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and a high resting heartrate. So I started biking on an exercise bike, and by my best estimations, I'm either close to hitting 3000 miles or have already gone past that.

I should clarify that this wasn't all at once. I took many breaks.

So here are some notes.

When I started, I was on an exercise bike that my wife had gotten from her work. It wasn't the best, but it was free, and I made a deal with myself that if I biked every day for a month, then I could justify getting something better. I really really did not want to buy a piece of exercise equipment that would just sit in the house gathering dust, because that would feel awful ... but I do kind of wish that I had gotten the better bike sooner, because it removed some of the "friction" of exercise, where it felt like there were too many reasons not to get on the bike. The new exercise bike (a refurbished Peleton off Facebook marketplace that my wife got me for Christmas) really does just feel and move better. I think the general principle of not doing costly monetary commitments until you've shown costly personal commitment is a good one, however.

Blood pressure is in normal range. Cholesterol is in normal range. Resting heartrate is in normal range. This was all the case three months in, and this level of cardio is more than enough to maintain it.

Right now, I bike for thirty minutes a day, going 8-10 miles according to the bike. That range is enormous, because it represents vastly different amounts of work. Going 10 miles in 30 minutes is 20 miles an hour, and I keep the resistance relatively high, so by the end of it I'm always panting. By contrast, going 8 miles makes me feel like I didn't put in enough work.

My goal every day is sweat-based and completely qualitative. I want to soak through a shirt. This means that doing more laundry than I'd prefer to, which is an unanticipated consequence of the biking. It's also, compared to all the metrics the bike gives me, a very clear sign that I am actually exercising my body "properly" in a way that's achieving something.

I did some of the Peleton classes, and found a lot of the metrics to be motivating, but ... eh. Exercise is mostly about being healthy and maintaining my body, so my current strategy, for the last six months, has been to either shut the brain down or keep it fully engaged in something that passes the exercise time. Usually this means a TV show, especially a foreign one with subtitles, which need slightly more brainpower.

The final two minutes is always the worst. I'm just ready to be done with it. Sometimes there's gas left in the tank, but I still feel sweaty, thirsty, and overheated. I have a water bottle, and I drink from it while I bike, and I have a fan pointed at me that I turn on once I'm warmed up, but I always have a sense, in those last two minutes, of "finally I'm done". I tried the thinking man's solution, only biking for 28 minutes, and this did not help. In my entire year of biking a half hour a day, I didn't ever elect to go into overtime.

I initially lost ten pounds, then slowly gained it back. I am, in fact, overweight, but I'm holding more or less steady now, and there have definitely been some body composition changes, with muscle replacing fat. I went down about four inches at the waist. I've changed very little about how I eat (which is 90% meals that I cook myself, and a daily coffee drink of some kind, usually made myself with sugar/cream/chocolate). Biking amounts to 300-400 calories a day or something like that, so I'm presumably eating more to compensate and just not realizing it.

Mental health has been rocky, but that's just sort of how it is for me. I definitely feel less mentally well on days that I don't bike, and feel better afterward, but I have no idea how tight the correlation is, and if I had been keeping track on a mood tracker, I'm not sure I would be able to sus out from self-reported mood alone whether or not I was biking.

During the summer I replaced a lot of indoor exercise bike stuff with outdoor biking. My son has only recently learned to bike, so he's been with me many of these times. Usually that means that we're either biking a lot less distance, or we're biking for a lot longer time at much lower intensity, sometimes both. There's a bike path that's downhill from our house which goes for maybe six miles, with some good, clear turn back points, but that means a fairly arduous uphill to get back home. If I lived in a place where the weather wasn't frigid for almost half the year, I would probably be doing outdoor biking more.

I think the most important thing, if you're doing exercise every day, is making sure that you're doing it in such a way that it's sustainable and virtually incapable of injuring you. This mostly means proper form. Early on, I had a habit of pressing down the right pedal with the outside edge of my foot, and after fifteen minutes of doing that, the muscles in the foot would be aching and uncomfortable. I'm not sure why I was doing that, but it was difficult to get myself to bike in a way that wouldn't be putting strain on me.

I think it's okay to skip a day ... if it's for the right reason. Of the days that I've skipped, I always try to make sure the reason isn't "fuck it, I don't want to". I should either be feeling sick, feeling like I need to rest, or replacing biking with some other form of exercise like a hike in the woods or some weightlifting or something. If I start skipping days because I just don't feel like it, that's where the whole scheme falls apart.

I am currently sort of wondering how long this is going to go on for, and I think the answer is "for the rest of my life", or at least until I'm unable to keep it up for whatever reason. I don't think there's any particular reason to prefer an exercise bike (or regular bike) over running or rowing or some other form of cardio, but I think I have proven to myself that this is cardio I can do daily and stick with it to the level that is probably necessary for me to stay healthy. I'm not committed to doing it for the rest of my life, since in theory some other form of cardio might come along and sweep me off my feet.

I do wish that I had started earlier in my life, even if daily exercise has not been the panacea for mental health that I had been kind of hoping it would be. I hope that I have the willpower and wisdom to keep up with it indefinitely.

[jaffacake6]

Not to be rude, but... Unless I'm missing something, why does it matter what character she voiced?

Like *Ruby* isn't saying something about misandry, an actual person is. They're not hypocritical because they... Aren't Ruby?

[jaffacake6]

tumblr please stop showing me dating apps ads. i'll meet girls the old way; never

[jaffacake6]

the court alchemist has successfully produced a blue raspberry potion

[jaffacake6]

[jaffacake6]

[jaffacake6]

What have you been doing, if you don't mind me asking?

operation treat my dog like a toddler is going incredibly well

communication is best it’s ever been, so much more affection, he seems a lot more confident

getting him out for a walk before the squirrels are out has gotta be a big part of it. That said it’s so dark and COLD I feel like I should be carrying a lil lantern

[jaffacake6]

THE BEST 

[jaffacake6]

thinking about creatures.

[jaffacake6]

[Image ID: A screenshot of an article full whyy.org saying "Mifepristone has a shelf life of about five years and misopristol around two years, according to Plan C, an organisation that provides information about medical abortions. Plan B typically has a shelf life of four years." End ID,]

hey let's start spreading the reminder now that you cannot safely self-manage an abortion with herbal medicine or essential oils. natural abortifacients function by poisoning you; you wait for your body to realize you're dying and reject the pregnancy in order to conserve resources, and hope that happens before the rest of your organs shut down.

i think there will be an upsurge soon of unscrupulous and/or malicious actors preying on desperate pregnant people; do not help them kill people. don't spread recipes for herbal medicines or ingestible essential oil mixtures that purport to cause a pregnancy termination.

[jaffacake6]

hm. grail quest but its a polar exploration au

[jaffacake6]

I know most fannish posts are just being silly when a bigger character being held by a smaller character is “the greed they talk about in the Bible” or making fun of a man for being spooned by a woman or a large person being spooned by a smaller partner in general but can I just ask from the bottom of my fucking heart

What the fuck?

Have any of these people ever been in a relationship or even touched another human being before??

What is the actual joke here? Is there anyone on this fucking planet that actually thinks only the larger person can hold or spoon the smaller one? How are even the jokey assumptions behind that statement not gross to their core?

I’m so confused by this particular meme guys

[jaffacake6]

[Image ID: A bottle of mead next to many discarded honey packets. End ID]

[jaffacake6]

Oooh I'm a doofus!

I've had two silly video editing projects over the last couple weeks:

1. Making worse and worse copies of Armageddon (1998) for my roommate's polycule.

2. Working on a project where I split Star Trek TNG episodes by scene, and mix them back together in random order.

Why didn't I just do this to Armageddon?!

Take the film, dump it in the split by scenes tool, shuffle the order, glue them back together. Bam. That is one BAD fucking copy of Armageddon (1998)! Perhaps even hilariously so? Let's find out!

[jaffacake6]

driving through Kansas on this route is brutal. Nothing wrong with Kansas itself, only that nothing breaks up Kansas. You enter from the West and take 70 straight through all of Kansas. The only way out of Kansas is through Im afraid

[jaffacake6]

we need a song romanticizing Dayton Ohio. to make it easier to drive 17 hours to Dayton Ohio. I’m listening to songs about other places on this drive and pretending they’re about Dayton. Wagon Wheel but replace Raleigh with Dayton. Chicago by Sufjan Stevens. Now it’s Kettering. Trying to reimagine Country Roads but the geography references make it difficult. Alaska by Maggie Rogers just plain doesn’t work.