#if there's any da things i may[?] be slower than usual or take a few days with it (✿╹◡╹)

[felassan]

.

[bigweldindustries]

random question but can i ask if you have any advice for upgrading a pc to have more storage space? or just upgrading computers in general, i feel like i remember you talking/rebloging a post about that kind of thing before?

YOOOOOO hey anon!! For what it's worth storage space is absolutely always the easiest thing to upgrade on any given computer, including laptops. Quick disclaimer in that I consider myself fairly casual at actually working with computer hardware (I'm the defacto computer repair guy at work but work for a tiny org with around 20 employees so my experience comes down to fixing a couple of busted laptop keyboards/hard drives/batteries/I replaced a screen once, and I built my younger brother's computer) but I'm unusually comfortable with gutting hardware due to a combination of a longtime (like a decade now, woof) hobby of fixing games consoles and having a degree in computer engineering.

putting this under a read more BC I wrote an entire guide LMAO

You've got a few options depending on your exact situation (if your motherboard has extra slots you can add another harddrive but this usually involves having to add extra data cables and power cables - I've never done this so I'm no good lol) but your best options are either to get an external harddrive or just straight up swap the drive for a bigger one.

external harddrive is the easier scenario; you just... buy an external harddrive. back when I set up mine it was cheaper to just buy a usb harddrive enclosure and regular internal harddrives than to get an out of the box ready to go external harddrive, and you can even buy multi harddrive enclosures if you wanna go all in on massive storage (I like to think of myself as an archivist as opposed to a data hoarder, but regardless I frankensteined myself a 14tb external harddrive that plays host to my personal data like every photo I've taken in almost 2 decades, but also a stockade of leaked data I find interesting, a few more obscure shows I'm worried about losing, my own lost media finds, and so on).

if you don't want to deal with external harddrives (they take up some physical space albeit not much these days, you have to deal with slower usb transfer speeds, etc.) swapping out the harddrive for a bigger one on your computer is relatively easy, but you will need these prerequisites:

-knowledge of your computer make and model. this seems trivial but it makes working out what kind of harddrive you've got easier, as well as how to get into the boot menu. if you Google "how to find computer model" there's a myriad of guides - I know it's in windows settings somewhere but I don't remember, hahaha

-the type and size of harddrive - easiest way is to Google "(insert computer model) specs" and find the official specs sheet. Size is fairly obvious, but the two important bits are 1) whether it's SATA or PCIe NVMe, and 2) whether it's an SSD, M2 SSD, or a HDD.

-being comfortable in the fact you are going to have to fiddle around in the BIOS, albeit briefly. ooga booga you can really fuck things up in the bios, yes, but all you need to do is briefly change boot order then swap it back. you are not going to poo poo out your computer by doing this, I promise you 500%

-a usb to either SATA or PCIe NVMe, to match with what you found on the specs sheet

-a usb drive that's at least 8gb (I use cheap thumb drives, more on this in a sec)

-and finally the larger harddrive to replace it. you want to look for one that "matches" the old one but is larger; for example my primary drive in my personal is a SATA SSD that's 256gb, so I'd look for a SATA SSD in say, 512gb or 1tb. As for brand it doesn't matter too much but Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital tend to be the more reliable makes; you're better off picking up one of these over a small or no brand drive that may crap out on you early!

first step. we take da pen drive. we make some boot media with it. with windows this is super fucking easy, windows give you a downloadable tool that does this for your itself. Google "create installation media for windows", download the thing, run it, make a cup of tea whilst it writes to usb, bam. you have your Magic Installing Stick. I personally am a weirdo and I like to download windows isos and make my Magic Installing Stick using a little program called Rufus, but you don't have to do this. if you're using Linux this is probably easier but I'm a scrub who dual boots Linux onto my originally-windows system and all my work computers are windows so I have no experience but the Linux community fuckin loves writing guides so one of them will have u it's all good

second step. take password off computer. I don't know if this is necessary but the final step has worked everytime when I do this so. go into user settings and delete ALL passwords and shit on your user

next step. we boot into the bios. we are once again googling with the model name of the computer and this time it's "access (insert computer model) boot menu" because computer manufacturers can't agree on how to do that. turn the computer off, then back on, then spam whatever key the Google told you. you'll get some options, and you wanna pick "BIOS setup" or something like that. you are in the bios now. every bios is ALSO different but you want to find "boot options" or something to that effect and move "usb" or "removable devices" or something to THAT effect up to the top of the list. (I literally cannot be more specific this shit is so different in each computer....) once you've done that save and shut down.

then we get THE SCREWDRIVERS OUT. open the pc. see it's guts. look for the thing that looks like the new harddrive. it's pretty much always obvious and easily accessible because harddrives are the most likely computer component to fucking die so they're really easy to spot even on laptops where they don't want you repairing and upgrading them yourself. unclip it if it's a HDD/slide it out if it's either type of SSD. stick in the new one. congrats on the more memory now it's time to put the pc back together

now it's time for Magic Install Stick. put it in. boot up. in my experience sometimes the bios wants it in one particular usb slot so if it shits itself on bootup turn off and try another slot. eventually it will boot into windows install. install da windows. make another cuppa whilst you wait. boom it's a computer again

go back into bios by key spamming on bootup again. go back to the boot options. move "harddrive" back to the top of the list. you don't necessarily have to do this but I enjoy restoring peace and harmony to my bioses personally

set up windows. grab old drive. grab usb to sata/NVMe/whatever. put stick in usb device. plug usb device in. obtain files from old harddrive. move to new harddrive.

then you have lotsa space and you can enjoy :)

[hydrus]

Version 545

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.gz

I had a good week. I did some small things, and a user contributed some cool things!

full changelog

blurhash

tl;dr: we have some special blurry thumbnails now, but you won't see them much yet.

Thanks to a user who did a bunch of research and work to get this going, the client now generates the 'blurhash' of all files that have a thumbnail. This hash is essentially a micro-thumbnail, only about 34 bytes, that shows a very blurry coloured impression of the general shape of the image or video. They are usually used as placeholders when it may take time to load something--you have probably seen something similar on slower news websites.

You won't see these in hydrus itself much, since thumbnails load fast enough that we don't have to worry about placeholders. In the advanced ways of seeing files you don't actually own, however, I will now show you any file's known blurhash rather than the default 'hydrus' thumb. Same deal for damaged/missing files--if I can't fetch a thumb, I'll now fall back to the blurhash.

The more important thing is these hashes are now available on the Client API, under the normal 'file_metadata' call. If you are implementing a browser or similar and have access to a fast blurhash library, try them out! I've scheduled all users to generate the blurhashes for their existing files in the background, which will take a few weeks/months for users with hundreds of thousands of files (although, if you are working with this and want to hurry it along, remember the queue is manageable under database->file maintenance.

other highlights

The file history chart (help->view file history) now has a search panel, just like Mr Bones! You can search your import, archive, and delete history for creator x, filetype y, or any other query you can think of. Some of the math here got a bit weird, and I am sure I have missed out several 'cannot provide good numbers for this domain' situations, so let me know if you get any really stupid results or outright errors. There's more work to do here, like a button to hide the search panel, which I hope to push on in the near future.

Thanks to the same user above, we also have epub support! No 'num_words' yet, but it turns out epubs are just zip files with some html, so I think it'll be doable in future. Also, some rare incorrect jpeg rotations (for 'MPO' jpeg files) are fixed.

If you right-click on a selection of files, the 'open->similar files' menu now has a 'in a new duplicate filter page' command. This will initialise the filter page just looking at those files, hopefully making it simple to clear out the potential duplicates in any particular selection.

Unfortunately, I am retiring the Deviant Art artist search and login script. DA have been slowly killing their nice old API, and the artist search just went. Individual page URLs still seem to work, but I suspect they will be gone soon. Gallery-dl have a nice DA solution that works with the new API, so if you can't find the same content on a more open booru, that's my best recommendation for now.

next week

I want to take a very simple cleanup week. Nothing too exciting on the changelog front, but I'll refactor some of the worst code into something nicer to work with.

[sergeant-donny-donowitz]

Safe with Him (HugoxFem!Reader)

TRIGGER WARNING: Holocaust/ Scenes in concentration camp 

Requested by @cass-danvers

@owba-chan @war-obsessed @inglourious-imagines @tealaquinn @struggling-bee @frozenhuntress67 @kwyloz @sodapop182

Let me know if you wanna be added to the IB or OUATIH taglists :)

A/N: Dialogue in italics means the dialogue is supposed to be in german

_________ "Hugo?" That was the third time the basterds had called his name.

He didn't even move.

He was sitting alone, off to the side, looking at something.

For a moment, the basterds were a little freaked out... not too long ago, they'd caught Hirschberg looking at a magazine....the uh... contraband kind...

Besides, they'd only known Hugo for a few weeks. They didn’t know what to make of this. After all, he already wasn’t the most social, loquacious type. But, they hadn’t seen him like this. 

When they got closer, they realized he was holding a small photograph. It was worn from being cherished like a precious piece of gold. Crinkled, with a burn mark at an edge, with a warm, tint of the time coloring it.

"Hugo?"

He didn't even look up.

He simply murmured, just loud enough for them to hear, and soft enough for them to understand him. "My wife."

**********

"Das kannst du nicht so weitermachen, Hugo," "You can't keep this up, Hugo."  You sighed as you wrapped his wounded hand. He sat on the ground with his legs crossed,  in front of the fireplace as his blood covered uniform and all the evidence of his seventh kill went with it.

“Ich muss." He spoke with a shrug, as if it wasn’t a big deal.  "I have to."

You nodded as you pulled on the gauze, and gently clasped your hands over his, resigned, knowing you wouldn’t change his mind.  "I know."

"If...If something happens to me, I want you to know that-"

"No," You shook your head, wrapping your arms around him. "Nothing's going to happen. Not to a bastard like you."

He laughed and held you. "Not while you're around." He smiled, "You and..." He rested his hand over your belly, just starting to show, "You."

You giggled, "Haven't decided on a name yet?"

His eyes went wide, as he scrambled for an answer, "Well... What about...if it's a girl, Y/n...if it's a boy, Hugo."

You rolled your yees, "So you haven't thought about it."

"..."

You sighed, "Hugo..."

"Well, what about, Bruno if it's a boy. And Zelda, if it's a girl."

"Bruno...Zelda Stiglitz..." You murmured, and then nodded, "Bruno and Zelda."

"Bruno AND ZELDA?! ARE WE HAVING TW-"

"No! No, no"

"But..." He smiled softly, "What if...We do have a business, the help might be nice... Might be nice to have two...or three...maybe-"

"One at a time, liebling, one at a time," you laughed.

************

"We used to run a bakery together." He spoke lowly, eyes dead set on the photograph.

It was hard to imagine Hugo Stiglitz as anything but a basterd, a rebel who'd killed thirteen gestapo officers...

It was hard to imagine him as a normal person, just a man. A man who loved someone, as any other man did. A man with a home, a man running a business. A man living a life other than that of a basterd.

It was hard to imagine Hugo Stiglitz as that...

It was hard to imagine him, living, and smiling, with someone by his side.

But it was clear to them then, that at one point, not too long ago, no more than a few months before, that was his life.

***********

"Thirteen...Hugo...that's an unlucky number!"

Hugo laughed, you were always so superstitious. "For them."

You sighed, closing the curtains of the living room as the sunset, "Hugo...it's not safe. People are starting to talk."

"We're the safest we've ever been, with less of them around."

"Hugo..." You weren't so sure.

He sighed, understanding you. He wasn't in denial. He knew there was a bigger chance he'd be caught with each kill.

"You can go. Go to England. Free France.... anywhere but here."

"What?!"

"Or...America! Somewhere quiet. Somewhere away from this."

"America?"

"Anywhere but here, Y/n. You have to go."

"What about you?"

"I can't leave without them getting on my trail, but I can get you out. Both of you."

"Hugo, no. I'm not leaving without you."

He sighed, seeing you were getting too riled up. "No arguing in front of the kids, remember."

You rolled your eyes and muttered something a baby really shouldn't hear, and he chuckled, and gave you a kiss on the cheek. "See? It's ok here."

A week passed.

Hugo came home from 'work.' And sighed, knowing you weren’t upstairs in the apartment, but downstairs, working late at the bakery, and he sighed, "Y/n... You should be resting."

"But..." 

He sighed, and rolled up his sleeves, and put on an apron. "Fine."

Hugo sighed, with a weary heart spotting  a regular at the bakery. Mr. Himmelstein... His son was gone. He still came for the usual three rolls of bread, holding up a weary hand with the loose change, and the scars of a cruel world, with a badge stitched on a tattered shirt. 

Hugo shook his head, "No cost." The bakery was empty for a few minutes after that.  You smiled, knowing you'd married  someone with a sense of humanity, someone with a heart in a world where it no longer meant a thing. Hugo couldn't shake that image. He thought, no matter how many nazis he could kill, people like Mr. Himmelstein wouldn't get their families back. People came in and out of the bakery, bread for families, a few pastries for the children... Business was a little slower than before, but, it was something. So, you were both at the bakery as the sun set, the line was dwindling. An old woman was at the register. You and Hugo were both in the kitchen, he planted a kiss on your cheek, and looked at her, another regular. "Just a minute, Mrs. Wagner." She nodded, with a soft smile, "Two more pieces of bread than last time, Hugo." He nodded with a smile. Every few months or so, Mrs. Wagner bought a few more pieces of bread than before. She'd had an 'empty nest' for a while. But since then, she was hiding people in her home. And the bread was the best she could do.

Suddenly, the doors were kicked down. Glass shattered everywhere. The piercing sound of glass echoing into everyone's memories, the sound of boots drowning out any hope. Gestapo officers marched in, "EVERYONE OUT."

He'd turned to you, "Y/N Go." You looked at him for a moment, he knew you'd fight back. But, there was no time. His heart broke, as his fingers grazed over your belly, and he spoke, softly begging, "Hide."

He threw an open sack of flour to cover for you, as people scrambled out the door.

They grabbed Hugo, his commander roaring, "STIGLITZ!"

"This is a mistake, sir!"

"No Stiglitz. All thirteen. It was you."

He kept silent. No matter what he said or did, it would be useless.

"You're married, aren't you? Where's your wife?"

He kept quiet.

His commander leaned in, and muttered, "I know you got a passport for her today, Hugo. America is it?"

"No!"

He turned around and barked orders. "Find her."

They tore apart the bakery, the home above it, until they found you.

They dragged you out, and threw you in front of him.

The commander noted your state, "Ah, congratulations, Hugo." He turned to his men, "Take the whore away."

"Hugo!"

********

His hands shook as he looked at the picture. You were sitting on a windowsill, over looking the street below, above your bakery, holding a cup of tea, like every other evening. The sun began to set, and the street lamps began to come on.

You caught on to Hugo, a moment before the camera went off.

You'd turned, with a wide smile. The smile he fell in love with, a moment before breaking out into laughter, a moment after the camera took the picture.

"Do you know where she is?"

Hugo shook his head slowly, as he looked intently at the picture, without a word.

No one asked any more questions.

They let him say only what he wanted.

Each word seemed to be more painful than the last, and the basterds knew it.

He was silent... He pulled out a box of cigarettes from a pocket over the left side of his chest, and replaced it with the photograph, carefully placing it over his heart.

"One more thing..."

It pained him too much to string the words together in a language that was not his own.

It was agonizing to even say it in his own words...

But he had to.

He knew the date...

It was your due date.

"Sie war schwanger..."

Wicki's heart broke as he whispered, "Hugo..." He didn't know what else to say.

No one did.

No one else knew what he said, but they understood whatever it was was the worst part of all to him. So they didn't ask any more questions. They left it alone, until they were sure Hugo was asleep.

Then they asked Wicki what it was that Hugo said, that made it seem as though the world burned around him.

"His wife was pregnant."

But Hugo wasn't asleep.

He hadn't known sleep since you were torn from his side. ---------- Not long after, the OSS gave the  basterds a new mission. A camp was being liberated by the allies, not too far away from them. The basterds were being sent to hunt down any and every  nazi that ran away. And, they did. The basterds showed no mercy this time. They left no swastika marked survivors this time. Eye for an eye. Because the basterds' eyes had seen the camp themselves. If they didn't hunt the nazis down, who would? Justice at their hand was the only way it was guaranteed... Otherwise, it may take, fifty, sixty, seventy years or so to track the nazis all down again. And what for? They'd get away with it. They'd already gotten away with the worst of it. Burned history, shattered the truth, silenced humanity. Enough was enough... When it was all over, the basterds headed back to the camp. Donny's bat red with blood, the names on his bat were avenged. Their guns, empty. There were no more rounds of bullets left, and no nazis left. But, it could never be enough. Hugo stood at the gates, looking beyond the empty, endless, abandoned hell. His heart shattering, every ounce of hope in his soul was splintering, thinking of the moment you were taken from him. His hand shook as he heavily placed it over his heart. Over the picture of you. There was no doubt in his mind that you were in a place like that. "Y/n..." He was so devastated, he could scream, he could kill a million more nazis. But he couldn't cry. No. Those tears reserved for the moment he knew you were truly gone. For the moment that  he lost all hope.  That was a moment he never wanted to find. He joined the rest of the basterds. Crowds of people, cried, searched, cheered, and wondered... What came next?

Utivich was moved to tears himself, watching. Medics and soldiers. Food and supplies. Families. Everything was found. "Hugo." He looked up. Aldo knew their mission was over, but...they could still help. He nodded. He passed out food and supplies, he helped to translate. He looked up for a moment, and saw people...families.  He was asked to bring supplies to a medic that was down the line. And he did. He carried a crate down, his eyes wandering around, that single fleeting ounce of hope beginning to give out, as the knot of a restrained tear rose in his throat. Then, his heart stopped. He lowered the crate slowly, his knees beginning to shake. He thought, for a moment, he was dead. Because only then, he thought, he'd be able to see what he was seeing. There, in the distance was  afigure. A shell of what once was. Still, so unmistakeable to him.  "Y/N!" He ran past everyone, every medic, soldier, survior, and basterd. "Y/N!" He reached  you, the woman he saw far away, huddled in the cold.  A medic crouched by you, examining... a baby. A baby in your arms. Then...a tear slipped down Hugo's cheek. The tear for an answer. A tear of joy, as a smile cracked through the shell of disbelief, "Y/N!" You lifted your head slowly, unable to recognize a familiar voice through endless memories of screams and prayers. "Y/n..." He kneeled by you, took your shaking, cold, thin hands in his. You looked up, as if you'd seen a ghost...because you thought you had. You thought, all that time, that Hugo had been executed. There were no stories. No rumors of basterds. No signs of hope at all in hell. But there he was. You opened your mouth, but no words came out. Just a soft sob. He wrapped his arms around you. He was careful, feeling as though the wind could hurt you.  His heart broke a million times over, feeling every single one of your bones press through the thin, paper-like, ragged cloth shielding you from the spiteful air. "Y/n..." He murmured softly, feeling something between your arms and his. He looked down, and his heart skipped a beat. There, in your arms was a tiny baby, no more than a few weeks old, looking up at him with big, (e/c) eyes. Just like yours. Full of innocence. His heart broke a million times over again, seeing the hunger in that baby's eyes. Hugo looked at you, as he reached his hands out gently, then pulled back, unsure of what to do. You smiled softly, and spoke even softer, in a way he'd never heard before. Not broken, but beginning to see again. "Bruno." Hugo smiled. He genuinely smiled, finally at peace, as you took his hands, and guided the baby into his arms. He looked down, then at you, "Es tut mir leid ... es tut mir so leid! Ich-" "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry! I-" You shook your head, "It's not your fault." But he couldn't help but feel as though it were. Suddenly, the medic that was there, pieced parts of it together with what she knew of German, and about the famed Hugo Stiglitz. "Your son is going to be alright, Mr. Stiglitz." Hugo's heart began to beat again with relief. He'd only known his son for a minute, but it was all he could ask for. That and one more thing. He looked at you, eyes wide, pleading for an honest answer, "And you? What about you?" "It'll be alright." "Y/n," he knew youw ere hurt. "There are people who need more help than I do." He looked down, "Bruno needs you...He needs us. I..." He looked back at the basterds, who turned away quickly, pretending as though they hadn't been watching the entire time. "I can leave the basterds, and-" You shook your head, "They need you, Hugo. The world needs you, until there are no more places like this." He looked up at you, and knew that was the honest answer you would give him. It hurt... It hurt to know you couldn't be together just yet. But, he knew you were right. He held Bruno one last time that night, and he left with the basterds again. For the first time in a long time, he slept,  knowing you were safe. But, somehow, he wondered maybe you'd never be safe with him by your side. ----1946--- The war was over. It had been for a while, but it was never far enough behind you. Still, what was ahead of you, was always worth fighting for. You were right, the world needed him. But at that moment, you were his world. You and Bruno, and- "Zelda." Hugo declared, as he placed his hand over your belly, protectively.

You giggled, as you brewed a pot of tea, "And if it's another boy?" "...." You laughed again, and looked out the window together, as Bruno, two years old now, ran around behind you, the sun setting ahead of you, the smell of bread rising around you. It wasn't the same bakery. No, this time, you were across the Atlantic. You'd finally made it to America, to a quiet town in the northeast.

This was home now. As he held you, he shrugged,  "We have all the time in the world."

"We have six months." He laughed,  picking Bruno up in his arm, and wrapping the other around you. Maybe he'd never go back to Germany, but maybe that was ok. He had everything he wanted, right there, with you. Now, as the street lamps came on, he smiled, knowing you were finally safe with him.

[neocityarchive]

ends | mark lee au (pt 1)

summary | part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

Word Count: 3.5k

Warnings: none

Chapter Summary: You didn’t have to be reminded that you lost the best thing to ever happen to you, but when a great opportunity came your way, you thought maybe a little risk won’t hurt. 

A/N: i woke up and suddenly this wasnt on my blog lmao im so frustrated. i mightve accidentally deleted it but here it is again.

You looked at your phone to check the time. You have 15 minutes to get to the SM building. Why you’re going back there, you have absolutely no idea.

One of your sunbaes called and asked you to come in, saying they needed the interns’ input on the graphics of the new advertisement material for the recent SM Rookies project. You could have easily said no, but you also are very much aware that SM doesn’t usually do this. It would be crazy to pass an opportunity this big. But that’s not what you’re really worried about.

You stared at your screen until it went black, then pressed on the lock button, illuminating it again. Only a minute has passed since you last checked. You still weren’t used to your generic lockscreen. It’s been a month since you changed it, but it still feels weird not seeing Mark’s cheeky grin everytime your phone lights up.

Stop it, you told yourself.

You don’t know if it’s just in your head or if it’s the fact that you’re anxious and overthinking about the possibility of seeing him again, but the bus seems to be going faster today when you didn’t need it to.

You have no idea if the boys are going to be in the building. You stopped keeping track of the whole group since the break up. You couldn’t bring yourself to watch any of their videos since your ex seems to be in every single one of them.

In an attempt to get distracted, you put your earphones on and your playlist on shuffle, shifting your attention to the busy city life happening outside the bus’ window.

As if the universe didn’t want you happy, the songs coming up the playlist just made everything worse. Yang Da Il’s Sorry started playing and suddenly, you were thrown back to a memory you’ve been trying so hard to suppress lately.

You just got back from a trip to China, two days earlier than what you told everyone. These days, Mark has been really stressed trying to balance his time and energy between the three units. You could tell he was tired despite his efforts not to show it to anyone. You haven’t had a decent conversation in a while. He was always drained, so every phone call would just end up in an argument. If not, he’d be sleeping, or he would say bye even before you could tell him about your day.

It was hectic, so you thought you could pay him a surprise visit to lift some of the stress off his shoulders. After all, it used to work. Used to.

You were already on your way to the conference room where the dreamies were having a meeting but you stopped in your tracks a few feet away from the door.

It was quiet. There wasn’t the usual rowdy noise you could hear even from the elevator, which is very weird considering it’s the dreamies. That’s how you knew they were talking about something serious. A chill went down your spine, finding the whole thing unsettling.

“You should tell her the truth,” you heard Donghyuck’s voice from the hallway.

“I know, though,” Mark replied abruptly.

Your face contorted. You missed the sound of his voice, so much that your chest ached. But that wasn’t what you wanted to hear more about. Tell the truth to who? What truth? Who’s her?

“Just don’t make her wait,” Hyuck said. “She’ll only get hurt.”

Mark sighed. He sounded exhausted, like they’ve been on this topic for quite a while and the flow of the conversation wasn’t going his way.

No one spoke. It was very unusual since they usually just talk over each other, but this time, even a singe drop of water would sound deafening. You found yourself holding your breath.

It didn’t seem like they were talking about work. If it was, they would definitely be louder. You searched your mind of anything or anyone they could be talking about but there wasn’t enough information to make a conclusion. Still, there was something stirring in your chest. You don’t know how to explain it, but it didn’t feel good.

“Mark hyung,” Renjun called, breaking the silence.

“Oh?”

He cleared his throat. “I’m just going to ask the question that is on everyone’s minds right now.”

Silence. It was deafening.

“Do you still love Y/N?”

You blinked. Twice. Thrice. You suddenly felt like all the air had been knocked out of your lungs. Your knees felt week, and your mind was going nuts. This wasn’t what you expected to hear when you came. Not at all.

You started going through the possibilities. Do they know another Y/N? Did you hear Renjun right? Is this some sort of prank??? Do they know you’re listening?

But the silence in the room proves it’s no prank.

You wanted to run, you wanted to scream. You wanted to burst into the room all at once. But your feet stayed glued to the ground. You found yourself waiting for the answer to a question you never thought you’d have to ask.

Do you? you thought.

Your mind wandered to your recent phone calls, your frequent arguments. It happened so often that there has been a part of you that hesitates to call him, afraid you’d fight again. He rarely ever sends goodnight and good morning texts, or even updates about his day anymore. Things have definitely changed between the two of you, but you always thought it was just because he was exhausted from work.

Your breath hitched in your throat. Today was supposed to be a good day. Today was supposed to be the day that would get you your boyfriend back. The day everything would be back to normal. But apparently... not.

“Do you?” Hyuck asked again.

“I don’t know. I’m just...” Mark’s voice trailed off.

You waited.

“...so tired of it.”

You pulled your earphones from your ear and stuffed your phone in your purse in frustration.

Your eyes have started to well up again. You looked up, trying to blink the tears away but it won’t work. No matter how you try to fool yourself and convince yourself you’ve gotten better, all these small moments that lead you back to him proves otherwise.

Part of you always knew things would be like this eventually, that Mark would get tired. He had way too many things on his plate, and you always felt like you should be the least of his problems.

He was always born to be a star. With his talent and passion for what he does, he was bound to take over the world. You knew that meant a lot of sacrifices for him. Living away from his home country, giving up the chance of a normal teenage life, always being within the eyes of the media and fans. You always knew the time would come when the compromise he had to make was our time for each other.

You just never thought it would come to the point where he would give up everything you had after all you’ve been through. Somehow, through all those months of dating him, you had yourself convinced that he loved you enough to not leave you like this. Turns out you were wrong.

“I never imagined I would say this...” you remember him saying, “but I think we should break up.”

It really felt like your world fell apart that day.

You used to be so cynical about how breakups are portrayed in the movies. It’s always so dramatic. The characters always seem like everything have stopped working after the breakup. You used to think it was overboard. But after going through it yourself, you realized maybe the movies were right.

Nothing felt right after that day. Everything seemed so much dimmer, much quieter, much slower. It was like the world forgot how to function properly...

The bus pulled at your stop, breaking your train of thoughts. You got off and walked to the building, taking two steps at a time, afraid of seeing anyone even remotely familiar. Thankfully, you arrived at the 11th floor without any casualty.

The whole thing went by quickly. Your mind was completely preoccupied while working. No traces of Mark, not even on the huge television screens on the walls.

Contrary to what you originally thought, working in SM was actually a fun experience. Aside from the fact you met the love of your life there, the people working with you were really nice. Today, they offered you a job, convincing you to stay. It sounded tempting, good pay, good benefits, but you didn’t know if you could work in a place that holds too much of the past you’re trying to let go of. Maybe not now. You told them you’d think about it.

Before you knew it, the work part was over. You were already back in the elevator, feeling a bit better than you were when you arrived.

The elevator stopped at the 9th floor, revealing a group of people who looked like executives. Upon seeing them, your sunbae grabbed you and the other intern by the arm and pulled you out of the elevator.

“You may go first, Mr. Lee. We’re not in any hurry.” He smiled to them, who nodded politely as they entered the elevator.

“Thank you,” the man who you assumed was Mr. Lee said.

Once the doors closed, your sunbae let out a sigh of relief.

“Are you okay?” you asked. “Who was that?”

“I’m fine.” He nodded. “That was a major stockholder of the company and a bunch of other important people.”

You nodded to yourself, suddenly realizing why the faces looked familiar. You must have seen them in the TV or something.

“Alright you guys. I’m gonna take the stairs. I’m just going down one level anyway. You can wait for the next one here,” your sunbae said.

Just then, the other elevator door opened but it was going up. The other intern went in, saying she forget something upstairs. Just like that, you were alone in the 9th floor.

A sudden realization dawned on you. You didn’t recognize the floor right away since the interior changed a bit, but this was where the recording booths are. This was also where you last saw Mark. As if in a trance, you decided to around to see what else changed within the few months you haven’t been here.

A chill went up your spine as you walked past the lounge beside the recording booth, your mind going back to how easily you got your heart broken the last time you were there.

It was two days after you heard the dreamies’ conversation. You couldn’t bring yourself to see him after that. You called him earlier and asked to meet up, lying that you’ve only just gotten home from China.

He agreed to meet you at the lounge beside the recording booths, saying he can’t leave the studio because the dreamies need him for advice while recording.

So you went there, feeling uneasy. There was no one else around, which was a good thing because you were sure whatever happens, you would cry.

You and Mark haven’t seen each other for weeks, but when he came, there were no kisses. Not even hugs. There was none of the usual excitement and undeniable craving that you both get whenever you see each other after not being able to for a long time. This time, he just sat quietly beside you. You weren’t even surprised.

He looked different. He had makeup on, but you could still tell the circles under his eyes got bigger. He obviously wasn’t doing well. But then again, neither were you. You spent the last two nights sleepless and crying, anxious, wondering what the hell you should do.

Without a word, Mark held out his hand, palm up. It’s something he does when he wants you to hold his hand.

You hesitated, wondering what happens after this, but it didn’t take you much thought. You intertwined your fingers with his anyway. It felt so natural and familiar, and weirdly out of place in the situation. It hurt.

He squeezed your hand gently.

“You okay?” you asked, your voice barely a whisper. If it was any louder than that, you knew it would break.

He nodded weakly.

“You look tired,” you managed to say.

He looked at you for the first time that day, and it took all of your willpower to keep yourself from breaking down.

“Cause I am,” he replied.

“Can I help?”

He shook his head, looking down. He detached his fingers from yours to fix his cap, running his fingers through his hair. You were half expecting for him to hold your hand again, but you weren’t surprised when he didn’t.

“Y/N,” he said.

“Mark,” you replied.

He bit his lip, an anxious habit. “Aren’t you tired?”

“Not really? I had a nap before coming here so–”

“That’s not what I meant.”

You just stared at him.

“Aren’t you tired,” he said again, slower and softer this time, “of this...? Of... us?”

You looked away. You knew this was coming. You just didn’t think it would be this soon. You took a deep breath and tried your hardest not to cry.

“I am,” you said, your voice close to breaking. “But...”

You weren’t sure what to say. It’s true. You are tired. You’re tired of not being able to see him, of not getting a proper conversation out of the small time you have together, of things not being like they were before. You’re so damn tired of it all. But telling him that is like telling him to stop doing his job, to stop doing what he loves. That’s the last thing he needs.

“But?”

You sighed. “I don’t care.”

He shook his head again. “God, this is so hard,” you heard him mutter under his breath before turning to you. “How can you not care that you’re tired? Doesn’t this frustrate you?”

“I can’t just...” your voice broke. You let a deep breath and swallowed, trying to calm yourself. “What do you want me to say? I’m tired, Mark, and yes, it does frustrate me. A lot. But so what if I am? It doesn’t mean I want to give up on us.”

He buried his head in his hands.

You don’t know what you’re still holding on to. It’s like everything that used to be there is disappearing right before your eyes. You’re stalling, but you already know how this ends.

“Y/N,” he said, his eyes meeting yours. “Let’s face it. I’m already losing time for you, and it will only get worse. We never see each other anymore. I can’t even go out of this damn building to spend an hour with you. All we do is argue on the phone, and even when we see each other, we don’t talk properly. How can you still want to stay even after all this?”

You opened your mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Does love really need to have a reason? you thought.

“Look, we barely understand each other anymore. I can’t... I can’t do this.”

Your heart broke. There was no other way to explain it. That’s exactly how it felt. Like something inside your chest just died. It’s like he had stabbed you with a knife, and just when you thought the pain was at its maximum, he still had to twist the blade in your chest.

“I never imagined I would say this,” he said, “but I think we should break up.”

You just sat there, almost motionless if your lips weren’t quivering. If this was a few months ago, he would already have his arms wrapped around you, muttering that it’s going to be fine, that he has your back no matter what. Now, he’s just... there.

You forced yourself to speak. “Just like that?”

He didn’t reply.

You let out an empty laugh, a tear rolling down your cheek simultaneously. “You couldn’t even wait a day and just spend a little more time with me. That’s how much you want this done.”

“No, I—” he tried to speak, but you were already riding the high of your emotions, you just had to let it out.

“I got back from China two days ago,” you said. “I was supposed to surprise you, maybe ask you out for lunch. But when I got here, I overheard your conversation with the guys. I heard you say you were tired of us, but it wasn’t just that. The way you said it...” you let out a shaky breath, your tears now uncontrollable. “God, it hurt to hear. I knew what you were thinking even then, and there was no changing your mind. So I couldn’t bring myself to see you after that because I was so afraid of what you’d say. I had a feeling if we saw each other that day, it would just make things worse. So I spent the last two days thinking what to do, you know how stupid I am.”

“Y/N,” he said softly, but you weren’t done.

“I still hoped I could maybe change your mind. I hoped my gut was wrong, that there was still a chance this could work. But I guess my luck had already ran out. I knew from the moment you walked in and just sat there, not even giving me so much as a hug, that you won’t even try to make things work anymore. So I guess... this is really it.”

“I didn’t... you weren’t supposed to.. I...” He searched for words, but you couldn’t bear to stay and wait for him to change his mind when he clearly won’t.

So you stood up and took something out of your purse. It was an elephant keyring that you got from China, something you bought especially for him. You two have a thing of giving each other tiny souvenirs from the places you went without each other.

Mark stood up too. His eyes were welled with tears, making the situation harder than it already is.

“It’s a lucky charm, supposedly,” you said, handing him the keyring.

He wrapped his fingers around it. A single drop of tear streamed on his cheek. And then another.

“Stop crying. God, at least make it easier for me to leave. This is unfair,” you joked, wiping his tears.

Mark managed to let out a laugh. For some reason, it just broke your hear even more.

You forced a smile. This is the guy you’ve been in love with, longer and harder than you’ve ever been with anyone. You hate the you probably won’t hear his explosive laugh again or watch him get overexcited over the simplest things or hear him randomly sing Frank Ocean under his breath. You hate that you have to let it all go so soon when you never thought you’d ever have to.

“I love you, Mark Lee,” you said, taking a step back. You know he secretly loves it when you say his full name. “And I sincerely hope you’ll find peace again and be happy after this.”

Before you could break down again, you began walking away.

But you haven’t even taken three steps when you were pulled by the arm. You spun around slightly, ending up wrapped in his arms again, his hug tighter than any you’ve felt. He buried his head on your shoulders while you wrapped your arms around his waist like you’ve done so many times before.

He didn’t say a single word when you pulled away. Neither did you. There was nothing left to say.

You turned around and just like that, you were gone.

The ding of the elevator opening pulled you back to the present. But you were too far from the doors already. You wouldn’t make it in time.

Your cheeks were wet. You didn’t realize you’ve been crying.

You figured it’s pointless to tell yourself you’ve moved on when you know full well it would take so much more than just two months to get over something as special as your relationship with Mark. Still, you couldn’t help but beat yourself up over the fact that you’re staring at an empty lounge in an empty hallway, crying like a baby.

You quickly dabbed your eyes and cheeks to dry the tears before looking around to see if there was anyone who witnessed your slightly embarrassing moment, but the are was still empty.

You went back to the elevator before you could see another thing that would trigger your thoughts once more.

You thought you were already safe. Excluding the flashbacks, the day has gone smoothly so far. But with the luck you are born with, when something is bound to go wrong, it definitely will. It’s almost funny that it didn’t even take five minutes before something did.

“Y/N?!” a familiar voice called from behind you.

You turned around, facing a tanned, brunette boy whose eye glinted with surprise, and with an aura radiating mischief and cleverness.

“Hyuck?”

[moshofmuses]

Da Rules

⚠️ = A pretty important rule on my blog. If you’re in a hurry, just read these bullets. The rest is basically either common sense or not very important.

—-

⚠️This blog has gone through many changes recently. As of right now, Grimm is the main muse. Main muse gets most of their drafts published right away. While side muses are slower and go through the queue most of the time.

⚠️None of the icons belong to me (a few do, but idc if they’re credited or not.) If you are the artist, let me know if you want it taken down. I DO NOT accept people who are NOT the artist telling me to take it down. Do not speak for others.

⚠️I try to stay with one thread per muse with your muse. If you want your muse to have a thread with each of mine, that fine and I encourage it! If you want 15 of your muses to rp with one of mine, that’s fine too! AUs are also fine! I just don’t want 50 threads between the same muses. When you start a new one, I will drop the old one unless I am really into it (if that is so, i will keep both.) CRACK + ONE LINERS are not included in this. Feel free to reply to any crack and I will keep any threads we have still!

Opens are for anyone! Too timid to approach and ask for one? Just look on the open pages for the muses, and see if there are any that floats your goat, go ahead and reply and I’ll get back to it when I can! Honestly I encourage replies to opens.

⚠️NSFW is allowed, but not smut really. I don’t like smut really, but things like violence, gore, and all that is fine and I like it. I also don't like fighting RPs

Any age is welcome to my blog. I will be honest, I have a LOT more patience with younger folk than adults.

⚠️If you send me an IM, don’t expect a reply back, or at least for a while. I would really prefer NOT to use IMs, as it causes anxiety and I just don’t like it. I only answer IMs on breaks at work (which is early morning.) If you spam my IMs, it’s automatic block. To contact me (and preferred and quicker) ask for my discord. I will pretty much give it to anyone, mutual or not.

    -If you have me on discord, and you message me on IMs here, I will not reply. IMs are for people who don’t have discord or wish to build up trust before adding me.

⚠️Please only ask about a thread if you have actively seen me replying to threads. And keep this in mind before you ask me; Would I want to be asked this soon? If the answer is no, then probably don’t ask. All that I ask, is if you do ask, do so once. I don’t like to be poked a lot. This goes the same for PMs. Also I do not want any poking regarding threads, this includes: Liking the post after a day or so (unless you are saving it) asking if I got the thread, asking anything about the thread, reblogging the thread again. Etc. DON'T DO IT.

⚠️Generally, please wait about three days before asking.

I usually don’t reply to tags. It’s not that I am ignoring you, I just forget due to me drafting everything asap.

This blog is no longer mutual only. I will RP with anyone. No matter your skills or characters. Though keep in mind, if you do taboo things such as god mod and such, then I will NOT RP with you.

I will no longer RP with personals. Due to events on my previous blog that made me move, I don’t want personals interacting with this blog at all.

Me unfollowing you will happen for the following; You have untagged stuff I don’t want to see, post too much ooc (I am perfectly fine with ooc talk, but if you’re reblogging pictures and random posts that has NOTHING to do with your muse, I will PROBABLY unfollow (unless it amuses me or I don’t mind it.) WHEN I UNFOLLOW it means I will STILL RP with you. I just didn’t want your stuff on my dash.

Blocking= You give me bad vibes, I don’t like the way you talk to me, you vague post, issues that are with YOU and not the blog. WHEN I BLOCK SOMEONE, I will NOT RP with them or talk to them or anything. I give no warnings, cuz I don’t have to.

I will never soft block someone.

I will RP with ANY fandom. Whether I know it or not. (I honestly like to go in blind. My muse doesn’t know yours so it makes it more realistic and I learn things with my muse.)

Mun =/= Muse.

Paragraphs > one liners. That being said, most of my starters will be one liners.

I REALLY do NOT like RPing nothing but one liners. I don’t mind it here and there in an RP when it’s just a paragraph, but nothing but one liners.. I can’t focus on them and I lose interest, thus I will drop it. Sorry if you can’t do longer threads, but I can’t do nothing but short replies.

    Note: If you do do one liners, I will make an honest attempt to keep the thread going. I can keep one going if the other person tries as well. It’s called effort and I can work with effort.

I ship with chemistry. Please don’t be hurt if I don’t approve of a ship.

This blog is mutliship.

I usually stay away from multi threads. (Unless with multi muses and it’s with a different character.)

Don’t like a starter call if you don’t intend to reply. I don’t remind people due to anxiety.

No god modding, auto hitting, etc. We all know that stuff. Don’t do it. Unless you get permission of course

I do not send pass words for rules read. I admit, I DO forget, or I’ve read so many they blend together.

Mun is a potato.

Mun uses he/him pronouns himself, however, I really do not care what you refer to me as. Whatever you see me as is okay by me~. (He/him/she/her/they/them. It all works.)

⚠️If you make a starter in my ask, reply to it in a separate post. Honestly if you don’t do this, there’s a big chance I won’t reply.

⚠️Please do not spam me. Whether it’s asks or IMs. I don’t mind continuations off of a message, but spamming me is a no no. As in don’t send another message after your 2nd message to me. This ALSO includes like spamming. That will get you blocked. (Unless it’s a friend trolling me or something.)

This blog does contain considerable amount of OOC posts, they are tagged as ‘Ti speaks.’ or if it’s a pic of video ‘not rp’ or ‘ooc’

Do not reblog RPs you are part of.

⚠️I AM NOT YOUR THERAPIST. Please do NOT come to me with your problems. Only very close friends may vent to me that I feel comfortable with. I’m sorry this sounds mean but it really affects my own health when I start helping random strangers. If you come to me starting something, I will probably ignore it.

I AM FLEXIBLE, I CAN and WILL make exceptions! Just ask about whatever is on your mind.

I am perfectly fine with RPing with someone who doesn’t use icons. I use mine out of habit and it doesn’t feel right NOT using them. But I imagine pictures and scenes of what’s happening in my head.

⚠️I work a full time job. I am at work for nine hours or more, five days a week. I work from 10pm-7am PST. I sometimes have very low energy at points and don’t do much. Work seriously affects my mood to write. If I have a good day, I have an easier time writing, if I have a bad day, it’s hard to write. Please understand I also have a low social battery, I am not a social creature, and if I talk too much, or talk to too many people, I get drained and that leads to bad depression. So please do not poke me too much for replies. Doing so will upset me very much, and I will withdraw. And that is not fair to everyone else.

⚠️And the most important rule on this blog– HAVE FUN!

—-

If you have read my rules, please either like this post, or reply to it with your side blog urls. I will be more understanding to people who have read these.

If someone doesn’t read my rules, and breaks them, I will simply say ‘read my rules.’

-Ti

[clevelandgaragedoorpro]

Garage Door Moving Slow? Here's Why and How to Fix It

Your storage door is one of the most vital portions of system in your house. Now not only does it offer safety in your car and property, however it also protects your home from weather and intruders. So in case you've been noticing that your storage door has been transferring a touch slower than typical, don't forget about it! In this weblog submit, we will discuss the possible reasons of a gradual garage door and the way to restoration them.

Why is my storage door jogging slowly?

There are some feasible explanations for why your storage door is probably strolling gradual. It can be due to a lack of lubrication, dirty sensors, or tired parts. Let's take a more in-depth take a look at each of these reasons:

Loss of lubrication:

If your storage door tracks aren't well lubricated, it can motive the door to transport slowly. To restore this, clearly lubricate the tracks with a silicone-based lubricant.

Grimy sensors:

Any other possible reason for a slow garage door is grimy sensors. The sensors are answerable for telling the opener while to stop and start, so if they may be covered in dust or dust, it could intervene with their signal and cause the door to move slowly. To smooth your sensors, in reality wipe them down with a moist fabric.

Worn-out parts:

In the end, another commonplace purpose of a gradual storage door is tired elements. Over time, the springs, cables, and pulleys can turn out to be worn and no longer paintings as effectively as they once did. In case you suspect that your garage door is stricken by tired elements, it is high-quality to name a expert for assist.

How do i restoration a slow garage door?

Now that we have checked out some of the viable reasons of a gradual storage door, let's communicate approximately the way to restore them. First, if you suspect that your door is not nicely lubricated, genuinely lubricate the tracks with a silicone-based totally lubricant. 2nd, if your sensors are grimy, wipe them down with a moist fabric. And eventually, if you assume your storage door is laid low with worn-out elements, name a professional for assist.

How do i boom the rate of my storage door?

In case you need to increase the speed of your storage door, there are a few things you could do. First, make sure that the tracks are well lubricated. 2d, easy the sensors with a humid fabric. And subsequently, if you assume your storage door is suffering from worn-out parts, call a professional for assist.

What to do while the garage door slams close all of sudden?

If your garage door slams shut, there are a few matters you may do. First, check the tracks to ensure they are well aligned. 2d, tighten any unfastened bolts or screws. And eventually, if the problem persists, call a expert for assist. Whilst a slow-moving storage door can be demanding, it is vital to take the time to troubleshoot the hassle in order that it is able to be fixed well.

What form of lubricant is excellent for garage doors?

The first-rate lubricant for storage doors is a silicone-primarily based lubricant. This kind of lubricant will no longer handiest assist to preserve the tracks properly lubricated, but it'll additionally assist to save you rust and corrosion.

How long ought to a garage door to open or near?

Most garage doorways have to take about 30 seconds to open or close. But, in case your door is transferring slower than standard, it is satisfactory to call a expert for assist.

Is it normal for my storage door to make noise?

Sure, it is everyday to your garage door to make noise when it opens and closes. However, if the noise is excessive or seems unusual, it is exceptional to name a expert for help. If you've been noticing that your garage door has been moving a bit slower than usual, do not ignore it!

How to check for a damaged garage door springs?

In case you suppose your garage door springs might be damaged, there are a few things you may do to test. First, try to open the door manually. If it might not budge, then the springs can be damaged. 2nd, search for any gaps in the springs. And subsequently, if the problem persists, name a expert for help. Damaged garage door springs can be risky, so it's critical to name a professional for help in case you think they might be damaged.

For more info please visit: clevelandgaragedoorpro.tumblr.com

[blogs-of-our-lives]

I, Frankenstein is a Trash Movie

           I’ve been putting off writing this for some time now. I watched Episode 98 immediately after watching 97, and you can tell it was getting a little hazy by the end. I can vaguely remember the beginning of the episode, and that’s when my memory was at its clearest. So I may take some creative liberties and make my own plot as I go.

           Welcome to Carter’s nightmare carnival funhouse version of Days of our Lives.

           This show makes me sad. I write way way way slower than they produce episodes. As I write this review for Episode 98, they’ve already released episode 205. Granted, I have no intentions of following it every day (episode 200 has a thumbnail of Ciara passed out on the floor as an obviously fake fire consumes her house, so I’m abso-fucking-lutely reviewing that one next), but the blistering pace that this show takes is disheartening. It just goes to show that life moves fast. You blink, and kids your age are getting married. In the previous NFL draft, the Buffalo Bills selected linebacker Tremaine Edmunds in the first round, at the age of 19. He’s younger than I am. That’s ridiculous. I’m getting old, fast.

           The episode opens with John at the hospital. He looks flustered, glancing around desperately. For those who haven’t read about the previous episode, the last we saw John, he had just entered the Dimera mausoleum with Will. As the door shuts, we hear a gunshot. Shortly behind him is Paul (wearing a black leather jacket, everybody in this show is wearing a black leather jacket, it’s like the soap opera version of Sons of Anarchy).

“What have you done?” Paul asks, staring in horror at the floor.

John steps in behind him, holding a comically small gun. “The same thing I’m going to do to you,” he says. It cuts to the outside of the mausoleum, where we hear another gunshot.

I didn’t mention this last episode, but imagine if that was the last thing you heard. It was clearly not a sincere question. Paul knew what happened. Ugh. I hate that line so much. Imagine your first memories. Imagine kindergarten, first grade, all the way up to middle school and high school. Every moment of your life, every love and every regret, every moment of anger or sadness, has been leading up to an old guy in a black leather jacket with a tiny gun saying “The same thing I’m going to do to you” and then shooting you.

Anyway, we’re caught up. John is distressed, and at this point it’s kind of unclear what he’s trying to do. I can’t remember if John is trying to finish off Steve (John is a spy tasked with killing Steve, the eyepatch guy), trying to tell his wife (Will’s grandma, and just so you guys all know, there’s no coming back from murdering someone’s grandson. No amount of foot rubs and boxes of chocolate shaped like hearts can help you come back from murdering your wife’s grandson) that he’s a spy, or maybe he just had a moment of clarity and realized that Days of our Lives can only rent like three sets at one time and he truly had nowhere else to go.

I’ll just tell you all the truth. Will and Paul are alive. They both make an appearance on the thumbnail of episode 191, and unless it’s from a flashback (more on that later), they survived. Just as a good rule of thumb, if this show wants you to think somebody is dead, they’re probably alive.

Fun fact, when someone on the show says “They’re in a better place” when talking about a dead character, they’re telling the truth.

Oh god, I just realized that it doesn’t even matter. They’ve blurred the lines between life and death so much (Will returning from the dead with amnesia, the Salem Stalker victims returning to life, John dying in a car accident and somehow appearing in this episode) that there truly is no reason to believe anyone is dead. It doesn’t matter if an actual licensed doctor comes on screen and pronounces the character dead. You could probably bring back your favorite character just by emailing the producer. The email is [REDACTED BY EDITOR – You absolutely may not use my personal email address], by the way. Email that at least twice a day every day, and soon you’ll get your character back.

The scene cuts to a man and a woman standing next to each other in front of the Dimera mausoleum. The mausoleum has “DIMERA” etched into the marble, just in case the viewer has forgotten that scene from less than 24 hours earlier. It could have easily been confused with any of the thousands of mausoleums that appear in our day to day television. These two people (the woman is a former lover of Andre Dimera, the most recent Dimera to pass away – which apparently is common enough that it merits the need for a mausoleum – and the man is of absolutely no consequence and isn’t worth the number of words I’ve invested in him already) take up most of the episode, pondering Andre’s life in front of his tomb, before they will presumably enter and discover Paul and Will’s “bodies” (I have no idea what they will find there), but are also painfully boring. I’ve said before that a single Days of Our Lives episode contains very little content. Usually it has about a conversation’s worth of information. For example, the description of episode 189 is “Kate makes a huge confession to Chad.” Presumably they also talk about the confession, right? Usually not. Usually the episode breaks down in the following way: Kate sees Chad and says hello, cut to other characters, cut to commercials, Kate says she has a confession, cut to other characters, cut to commercials, Kate says the confession, cut straight to commercials, Chad looks upset, the episode ends.

This is a very long-winded way of me telling you that it takes the full 60 minutes of Days of our Lives for the two people to enter the goddamn tomb.

It’s about time I talk about the flashbacks. I don’t remember what each individual flashback contained, but there were two or three in this episode. And holy crap, they were genius. Not the content of the flashbacks, but the idea of them. Because they literally reused old Days of our Lives footage. Imagine if I could copy and paste bits of previous Blogs of our Lives episodes, label them as a flashback, and call it a day. Oh man, I am jealous of the writers. Until I remember they’re stuck in the Fields of Asphodel that is being a writer for Days of Our Lives.

Naturally, the flashbacks have slightly lower quality than the episode itself. We live in an age of progress, and in a few years, even the most recent movies will look dated. But this is just absurd. It looks like someone went frame by frame and printed out the entirety of the flashback, photocopied them, photocopied them again, and put them back in. Also the audio sucks. I don’t have anything poetic to say about it. It just sounds like the voice actors did their recordings via walkie-talkies.

Remember Gabi, the chic murderer? Well now she’s talking with a police officer in the station. He’s trying to get help her out, clearly a friend of hers. “You’re going to be home to see your daughter soon,” he said.

“That’s not likely,” a woman says, strutting into the room. She’s got a satisfied, smug smirk. “I’m pressing charges.” Ah, she must be the DA. I think? Is that how law works? The DA can just press charges? Does that mean that she just as easily could have chosen not to? For murder? I’ll give DOOL a pass because I don’t understand it myself.

And now my notes start making even less sense. The handwriting is larger and sloppier and mostly illegible.

The former lover of Andre Dimera and the man accompanying her continue on their Hamlet-style soliloquy, talking and talking and talking and just standing outside the damn mausoleum. Finally, she opens the door and gasps, before the camera fades to black, ending the episode. Which is the biggest cop out I’ve ever seen, but nothing in this show surprises me anymore. I’m not mad, just disappointed. I’m telling you guys, an hour of Days of our Lives contains about five minutes of something actually happening.

Of course, this isn’t the end of my notes. I will transcribe them below exactly as it is written:

·       GUY IS MURDRER

·       WOMAN SEES THINGS

·       PUNTS SRYNGE IN SLEVE

·       FIGHTS OF ANGELS AND ALL THAT

All of these wonderful pieces of insight culminate in a full page entry, in all caps, on the next page. SHE FINDS HIM THERE.

I don’t know. I was going to put more to that sentence, but I realized it answered every question one could possibly have about that list. Why did I forget how to spell? I don’t know. Presumably I was in a rush to get all my ideas down. Where does the syringe (or rather srynge) come in? Who is the woman that sees things? Why are the angels fighting? I don’t know.

My best guess is that John Black stole a syringe to inject Steve with poison, seeing as both were in the hospital. Which opens up the possibility that I meant to write “punts srynge in STEVE.” Somehow I doubt that, however. I assume I meant “flights of angels,” a Shakespeare reference. Who even knows. You guys can probably decipher my notes better than I can.

The other day, I was at Walmart (while procrastinating writing this, and I suppose in a way I’m still procrastinating by writing this side segment), when the $3 movie bin caught my eye. I’m drawn to it every time. I love DVDs (there’s something to be said about physical media rather than digital), I’m a cheap bastard who loves cheap-ass shit, and I love love love love love bad movies. More on that later.

I found a three movie collection of Prom Nights 1-4, starring Jaime Lee Curtis. It seemed to be some kind of an off-brand Carrie. Also, for those of you with keen eyes, it was not a mistake that the 3 movie collection contained 1-4. For whatever reason, the set contained Prom Night, Prom Night 2, and Prom Night 4. Why not Prom Night 3? Won’t I be lost without knowing what happened between Prom Night 2 and Prom Night 4?

I truly, sincerely believe I have good taste in movies. I watch a lot of good movies and can understand what makes them good and why. However, on one fateful day about three years ago, I discovered that it was far easier to enjoy a bad movie with your friends than a good one. I get upset if people talk during a good movie, and don’t care if people talk during a bad movie. We can make fun of bad movies, but not good movies. Most of all, a good movie often invokes a specific mood. It’s hard to match that mood with a group of people. A bad movie also invokes a specific mood, always laughter, which is very easy to match with a group of people.

Which is why I’ve seen Fridays the 13th Parts 1-8, Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X, Freddy vs. Jason, Nightmares on Elm Street 1-3, FACE/OFF, The Room, a lot of Scooby-Doo direct to DVD movies, Scared Shrekless (in my defense that was a gift), The Wickerman (the one with Nicholas Cage, obviously), The Gingerdead Man (starring Gary Busey), Starship Troopers (starring Gary Busey’s son), Antz, Darkman (treat yourself, it’s pretty great), Flushed Away (I enjoyed this one a little too genuinely), Birdemic: Shock and Terror, S. Darko, Jurassic Park III, Vampires Suck (not as much as that movie did), Hellraiser, Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2, Meet the Robinsons, Hannibal Rising (swapping Jodie Foster for Julianne Moore was a poor decision), Alvin and the Chipmunks, Eragon (sweet Jesus Christ, I forgot about Eragon), Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, The Conjuring (people will try to tell you the Conjuring is a good movie… don’t let them), Ouija, The Boy, and The Visit. Honorable mention goes out to Rubber, which isn’t actually a bad movie, and one other.

I, Frankenstein.

A movie so bad its title needed to be separated so it couldn’t taint any other sentences. The worst movie I’ve ever seen. But I can save that for another post.

You’ll notice that a lot of these movies are horror. I looove horror movies, so I say this with all the love in my heart. It’s a trash genre. I’ve never seen anything like it. For every one good horror movie, there are at least fifty horrible ones. Not fifty bad ones. Fifty horrible ones. I’ll talk about horror as a genre next time, but I’ll leave you with an anecdote. My friends and I wanted to watch a horror movie, so we found a list of the Top 100 Horror Movies of All Time. We didn’t recognize a single movie until #50, and they had the movie Oculus as the 25th best horror movie of all time. That’s ridiculous. The nicest thing I have to say about Oculus was there were a lot of parts of the movie where I didn’t want to get up and leave. There were a lot of mediocre scenes, and I mean that as a compliment. I thought about this for a moment, that Oculus was ranked 25th of all time, and realized that’s about right. There are so so so few good horror movies, and just an absurd amount are terrible. I think it’s due to the fact that all horror movies are vaguely formulaic, relying on tropes for the genre. It makes them really easy to write and produce.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I’ll have the next Blogs of our Lives out much sooner than I got this one out.

Fuck I, Frankenstein.

[stephobrien]

Why “Just Cause” Pages Are Taking Longer These Days, And How You Can Speed Them Up

Hi, everyone, Some of you may have noticed that the latest pages of my Undertale webcomic, Just Cause, have been taking longer than usual. I wanted to give you an update to explain why that’s happening, and what you can do to help if you so choose. About a year ago, I decided I wanted to spend more time creating stories and art. That’s always been my passion, but for most of my life, it’s had to play second fiddle to the other things I had to do in order to pay my bills. I wanted to change that. So I set up an account on Patreon, opened up commissions, started selling art on Society6 and RedBubble, and created a tutorial on SkillShare to teach others how to draw symmetrical snowflake patterns. I spent more time working on Just Cause, while also juggling a part-time job as a sighted guide and another business. Between said other business, the job, and my writing and art, I often worked 50-60 hours a week. The results… have been deeply discouraging. I recently lost my biggest supporter on Patreon (she had her own financial obligations she needed to prioritize), and I’m getting next to nothing in monthly pledges now. The income from my tutorial and print-on-demand patterns hasn’t been nearly enough to put a dent in my bills, and after all the countless hours of work I’ve put into all of this, I’m frustratingly unsure of what I’m doing wrong. As a result, I’ve needed to cut back on the time I spend on art and storytelling, so I can focus on things that actually bring in income. If I don’t, it won’t be long before I won’t even be able to buy food.

What can you do to help?

I understand that a lot of people reading this are low on funds themselves, and I don’t want to make you feel guilty or obligated. I intend to continue to work on Just Cause, but it will likely continue to go slower than before as long as my financial situation stays this way. If you want to help me spend more time making stories and art, here are a few ways you can do it, and some of them don’t require any money from you: 1. Watch my symmetrical pattern tutorial on SkillShare, and share it with anyone you know who might be interested. SkillShare is basically like Netflix: it pays the creators who put content on it according to the amount of time people spend watching that content. The more you and other people watch my tutorial, the more I get paid. Here’s a link to the tutorial. 2. Share my Society6/RedBubble art, and/or purchase it. If you see something you like in my S6 or RB stores, every purchase helps. And if you don’t want to buy something or you don’t have the funds, sharing product images and links to the store with people who you think might be interested in buying something for themselves or getting something as a gift is a way you can help for free. My RedBubble store My Society6 store 3. Share my art, with credit. If you think your social media followers will enjoy something I posted, please reblog it on Tumblr, or share it on your other channels with a link to the DA or Tumblr page on which I originally shared it. On DA, you can find a series of social media “share” buttons near the upper right corner of each “deviation”s page. 4. Support me on Patreon. Ideally, I would LOVE to have a stable, reliable monthly income that enables me write and create art with the knowledge that doing what I love is HELPING my ability to pay my bills instead of putting me in financial jeopardy. In return for your support, you get early access to completed art and stories and exclusive access to works in progress, as well as other tier-exclusive rewards depending on the size of your pledge. You can see a breakdown of the available rewards on this page. 5. Commission an art piece or a panel of Just Cause. Another way to support me financially is to hire me to draw something for you. You can see my commission prices here. If you want to use your contribution to make the next page of Just Cause come out faster, you can commission a panel of the comic. When you do this, I can schedule creating that panel into my work hours, in addition to the ones I draw during my free time, so I get more panels done that day.Once your commissioned panel is done, I’ll send you a copy of it right away as thanks for your contribution. You’ll also have the option to be credited as a sponsor on the page once it comes out, unless you prefer anonymity.Thanks for reading this journal entry. The last few months have been pretty stressful for me, and anything you can do to help will be greatly appreciated!

[ciathyzareposts]

Pimax 5K+ Impressions – The First of the Second Generation of VR

In case you haven’t figured it out, I am a Virtual Reality enthusiast. I’ve been looking forward to the coming of consumer-level Virtual Reality since the early 90s. I expected it a lot sooner than it got here, to be honest, but I’m glad it’s here now. I love that I get to work with it as part of my day job. Anyway, I have been willing to sink a bit of cash into it this hobby… to the extent that I pre-ordered a Pimax 5K+. Offering about the highest resolution out there and 170+ degrees of field-of-view, it seemed like a game-changer for PC-based VR.

My headset arrived a few weeks ago. Due to crazy work hours, I haven’t had as much time to play with it as I’d like, but I thought I’d share my impressions so far. The company and the PiTool software are still kind of young, so there’s plenty of room for both to grow. In fact, that’s probably the first alarm bell you should be hearing: There’s always a chance that one big disruption could cause the company and all its support of this product to disappear tomorrow. It’s no longer a “boutique” product, IMO, and has been growing to meet demand. My pre-order took months to arrive, but I understand that lately people have been getting their orders within 3-4 weeks. So… it’s improving.

Since it arrived, there have been a ton of announcements of new and impressive VR headsets for 2019. I’m going to state for the record that I’m calling this the second generation of VR hardware. Yes, annoyed pundits have their own list of demands for second-generation hardware, a bunch of revolutionary changes, but I call tough toenails. It is what it is, and the latest stuff coming out is definitely pretty exciting. I count the new Pimax headsets to be the first of this new generation. For the next couple of years, you’ll be able to treat yourself to much higher resolution, bigger field of view, inside-out tracking without the need of external sensors, untethered (or standalone) use, lighter weights, foveated rendering with eye-tracking, and improved frame rates for cleaner tracking. The problem is… I don’t know of any system coming out that will give you all of the above (or even a significant subset of the above), at least not at a consumer price-point.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to describe a VR experience. You can’t even show videos, really, that capture the experience properly. All I can do is offer comparisons and hope that it works.

Construction / Appearance: Construction feels a little more rugged than the Oculus Rift, but not as solid as the Vive / Vive Pro. It’s lightweight, though, in spite of its wide size and beefy lenses – less than the original Vive, I think. Anyway, I dig the LED Cylon-looking thing across the front. Maybe it makes me look less dorky or less like a hammerhead shark when I’m wearing it, but honestly, I don’t care. While it looks weird, it works. All is good.

Fit / Comfort: The strap that comes with the Pimax 5K+ is… well, functional. Kinda like the strap that shipped with the original Vive. I ordered some 3D-printed adapters for less than $10 that allowed me to hook up my Vive Deluxe Audio Strap to my Pimax, and it worked GREAT. I mean, really…. it feels like it belongs there. Pimax is coming out with their own version of the DAS for the Pimax, but I have a tough time imagining that it’ll be any better than this. I keep saying the Deluxe Audio Strap is a “must buy” for the original Vive, and it holds true here, too. With the strap, the Pimax is plenty comfy.

Some caveats, however: If you wear glasses in VR, you’ll need some thicker padding and adjustments to make it work right. Also, it seems to me that you really need to dial in your inter-pupillary distance (IPD) pretty closely… it’s not as tolerant as most headsets to being off by a couple of millimeters. If you don’t do this, you’ll probably see double and feel some eye strain after a while.

I’ve played for up to 90 minutes at a time with no significant feeling of eye strain or discomfort.

Setup: Getting things working with my computer is always a little bit of a chore, requiring software installation, reboots, etc. However, once it was set up, everything worked and kept working. Sometimes VR is finicky. The Pimax (currently) requires Lighthouse base stations (for position tracking) and controllers only available from HTC, which is great for an upgrade from the Vive, but not so great for new owners. However, Pimax is supposed to have both available really soon now, if they aren’t already.

Image Quality: Okay, here’s the biggest part – how are the visuals? In a word, fantastic. But you probably want more. Compared to the early 1st generation headsets, they are amazing. Compared to, say, the Vive Pro (which I have available for comparison), I think they aren’t quite as good. The LED display isn’t quite as bright and vivid, and the vertical resolution is about 10% smaller (1440 instead of the Vive Pro’s 1600). The horizontal resolution for the nearest 110 degrees (the standard FOV of headsets today, including the Vive Pro) is as good or better. The images do seem a little bit sharper than on the Vive Pro, and the screen door effect is hardly noticeable for me.

Of course, the selling point of the Pimax 5K+ is the wide field-of-view (FOV). It does not disappoint. The software allows three display modes: Small, Normal, and Large. Small FOV is about the usual 110 degrees that other headsets offer. If your game is having a really tough time running at higher resolutions at a decent frame rate, try this. “Normal” offers about 150 degrees of horizontal FOV, and it’s fantastic. “Large” opens up an extra 10 degrees on either side, giving you 170 degrees of horizontal FOV (they advertise 200 degrees “diagonal” FOV, which is a bizarre way to measure it that only marketing schmucks could come up with). Honestly, the difference between “Normal” and “Large” is hardly noticeable, and that last sliver is a little distorted by the lenses anyway. It’s really just good for catching stuff in the extremes of your peripheral vision. However, I didn’t notice a big difference in frame-rate for the large FOV, either, running on an RTX 2080Ti. So… YMMV. I may switch to “Large” mode in the future, but right now I’m extremely happy with Normal mode.

Normal Mode captures most of what your eyes see. You no longer feel like you are wearing blinders.  It’s more like ski goggles than scuba goggles. This makes it much easier to “check six” in a flight simulator, or to catch a glimpse of bad guys attacking you from the sides in a shooter. Some people say they can’t go back after experiencing the wider FOV for a while. I don’t have that problem, but it really is nice.  The higher resolution and sharp image quality make it easier to read the instrument panel in a flight sim, or to spot the details in Skyrim VR.

Looking at hard numbers: The original Vive and Oculus Rift offer 1080 x 1200 resolution per eye. The Vive Pro offers 1440 x 1600 resolution per eye… about a 75% improvement in resolution. The Pimax 5K+ has up to 2560 x 1440 resolution per eye – 184% better resolution than the original Rift and Vive, and about 60% larger than the Vive Pro… but it’s also spread out over a 55% wider field of view.

Software / Tuning: The Pimax 5K+ is compatible with SteamVR. I haven’t found anything that doesn’t work yet. However, you do need to run support software called “PiTool”. There are a lot of things to tweak here, in addition to the options inside SteamVR, in order to get the performance optimal for your tastes. Tweaking stuff in PiTool requires a restart of SteamVR for many of the changes to take effect. One of the most annoying issues is that a lot of older VR programs require the “Compatible with Parallel Projection” option to be activated.  This forces a slower rendering system to avoid seeing double, and it’s a significant hit to performance. Unity games and the newest Unreal games don’t require this option (and, happily, neither does DCS). Sadly, IL-2 Sturmovik does require this option, and I can’t get a solid 90 fps anymore in this game. Still, I’m generally ranging near 80, so it’s not terrible.

Other options include changing the field of view, modifying the brightness of the display, enabling their own version of Motion Smoothing (“Smart Smoothing,” which I don’t like as much as the one for the Vive), allowing “hidden areas” to be left unrendered (which can sometimes be noticed in the periphery of your version, but increases performance), changing the frame rate target (to sacrifice max FPS for a smoother frame rate… very important) and a bit more.  One size might not fit all games — particularly with Smart Smoothing and parallel projection compatibility. However, I like that they enable so many options to try and get the optimum performance / quality balance.

Overall: The VR landscape is about to get a bit more complicated, but as of right now, I’d say the Pimax is an excellent upgrade to the original Vive, if you have a machine beefy enough to keep up. You can keep your Lighthouse sensors and your controllers, and even keep your Deluxe Audio Strap if you have one. Put the original Vive in a box to remember it fondly, and rock on to the new, higher-resolution, wide-FOV new world. I consider it an upgrade over the Vive Pro, but not nearly as significant. The positives and negatives in the differences in visual quality probably balance each other out. The Pro has a wireless adapter allowing untethered gaming, but the wide FOV of the Pimax is a huge improvement.

If you do not already own the Vive “Lighthouse” base stations and controllers, it is a far more expensive system (even before you consider the costs of the PC). Pretty much the cost of a Vive Pro.

Is  the high resolution and wide FOV a game-changer? Not exactly, but for some games it really makes a tremendous difference (especially flight sims). I think foveated rendering doesn’t make much sense until you go outside the 110 degree FOV window. It’s a big enough deal that my next VR upgrade a few years down the road will have to offer a similarly wide FOV. Nothing announced so far is giving me any semblance of buyer’s remorse. If I didn’t already own the Pimax, I might be looking very closely at the upcoming HP Reverb or the Vive Cosmos. Then, I still might choose the Pimax.

  I think it probably represents the hardware limits of graphics cards for the next few years, and unless you really MUST have an untethered experience or the absolute bear minimum of Screen Door Effect, I think this headset looks like something that will grow with me for several years.

  source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/pimax-5k-impressions-the-first-of-the-second-generation-of-vr/

[andrewdrobins]

Max Shank: Athleticism Makes Life Easier #69



Strong enough, Hard work mentality, 5 min flow, Strength vs. athleticism, Adaptability Quotient, and more.

[2:45] Strong Enough [15:45] Hard work mentality [23:15] Redeveloping curiosity for learning [31:45] Training for longevity [38:45] Strength vs. athleticism

[47:15] 5 min flow [51:45] Ultimate Athleticism — Easy training [55:15] Adaptability Quotient (AQ) [59:45] Wrong focus

Guest: Max Shank

Max Shank is owner and head coach at Ambition Athletics, where people become muscular ninjas. He is also teacher of world class coaches and athletes and has taught 100+ courses around the world.

Max is also creator #5minuteflow and has written 3 books: Ultimate Athleticism, Simple Shoulder Solution, and Master the Kettlebell.

Max likes to experiment and explore the human condition. Fitness is his primary method of developing life-altering skills. In addition, he has picked up guitar, piano, and drums as an adult.

In this episode, Max shares with us why he is focused on athleticism rather than strength, what it means to be strong enough, why we all need to work more easily, how 5 min a day of practice can make a huge long-lasting impact, and much more.

Enjoy!

-Mike

Max Shank

Connect with Max on: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Resources: Max Shank website, Ambition Athletics,

Books: Ultimate Athleticism, Simple Shoulder Solution, and Master the Kettlebell

2:45

Strong enough

What does it mean to be strong enough? When will you consider yourself strong enough? Making a marginal increase on your squat, clean or snatch, is not exactly congruent with what you or most people really want. Training should help you get more athletic, make your life easier, more rewarding and more fun.

Half the problem of why people are focused on the wrong strength goals stems from comparing themselves to everybody else. There are so many rewarding things you can pursue besides training. Give yourself an honest overview of your whole life and consider how much time you spend training.

This bad pattern also happens outside training, people also do it in learning and business. They act like martyrs. They want to go through the pain. The way society is structured now, hustling and grinding makes people look good on the outside. But it’s destructive, life is not about hustling and grinding.

Max Shank loves being strong as it definitely makes his life easier. But he doesn’t always need to be pressing 100 lb. kettlebells overhead, he can get a great workout with a 8 lb. kettlebell.

What’s also cool is that you can get stronger by diversifying your training, rather than add a few more lb. to your squat or deadlift. John Wolf (episode 11), Chief Fitness Officer at Onnit, was amazed at how he was able to pull a 600 lb. deadlift after playing with clubs and maces for a year, and barely doing any powerlifting.

“I think people who are constantly chasing strength, are the ones that are mostly injured and fairly one dimensional. And I think they would actually be a lot happier if they expanded their horizons a little bit. When I say I’m strong enough, I can easily carry 250 lb. sandbag fairly far. I can pull a deadlift of 550 lb. My point is why would I keep beating my head against the wall trying to get tiny little margins on the movements? You are better off working on balance and rhythm.” — Max Shank

A post shared by Max Shank (@maxshank) on Apr 10, 2018 at 10:51am PDT

15:45

Hard work mentality

For years, Max wanted people to think he’s a hard worker. Mike was also in same boat, he tried to be a hard worker because of his dad, who said: “work hard.” Mike had the idea that if he wanted his dad to love him, he needed to work hard.

Mike, and a lot of other men, grow up thinking: “If you don’t work hard, you are not valuable.” Which also sets the stage for those men to think that other people who don’t work hard, are not valuable. But it’s not true, life is about working smarter, not harder.

Honestly ask yourself: “Are you are having a good time during, before, and after training?” If your answer is no, then reevaluate your training routine. Iy your answer is yes, just know that you might be fooling yourself. Mike used to think he was having fun at the gym, but in hindsight, he now knows he didn’t know what fun was. Only a few years ago, a friend of Mike taught him how to actually have a good time.

“I was so in love with hard work that it was my whole life. Hard work was actually part of my identity.” — Mike Bledsoe

23:15

Redeveloping curiosity for learning

Max used to hate school with a passion. Everything about school didn’t suit him. He hated sitting for hours at a tiny desk with bad posture, learning things he didn’t care about, from people he didn’t like. Although, as soon as he got into fitness, it reinvigorated his desire to learn, which opened up the gate to learning many more things!

“Using a metronome while I moved weights and move myself has changed the way I move in a very profound way. Because when you move slowly, you have the opportunity to pay attention to more detail. When you move more quickly, you don’t have the opportunity to pay attention as much to detail. Neither of those is right or better. It’s just that most people usually pick one side of the spectrum only… On hand one, you have people doing really heavy deadlift, and on the other hand, you have sprinting. Deadlift is going to be a lot slower, sprinting is going to be a lot faster… I think it’s really important to own the full spectrum of speeds at least, and I would never learn that unless I developed an appreciation and learned about music, and just became really curious about not only the patterns, but how people learn, like the art of learning in general… You really solidify by trying to learn new things.” — Max Shank

One Max’s favorite books that has really influenced him is Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.

31:45

Training for longevity

When the average consumer thinks about being fit, he thinks of the steroid shredded, monster on the cover of fitness magazines as having the ideal body. But that’s a huge misperception caused by fitness magazines, as taking steroids doesn’t make a long-lasting impact.

Fitness is about educating people on how they need to organize their body, so they can make solid muscular tension connections. Fortunately for us, media and technology will solve this misinterpretation over time. We will be able to look back at people’s progression over time, and see how they did after specific training and nutrition programs.

A great example of applying longevity for fitness was done by Barbell Shrugged co-host, Adam Von Rothfelder (Barbell Shrugged episode #305) on the TV show “Strong”, where people with no athletic background got paired up with top notch trainers to compete in various fitness challenges. Adam’s match was the only person who kept improving her athleticism after the show.

“It’s about how well you can send out and absorb force in an integrated fashion, across as many joints as possible.” — Max Shank

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38:45

Strength vs. athleticism

A lot of people don’t have a goal to be athletic, else to be strong. What they don’t get, is that becoming more athletic gives you more options. If you have a good athletic base, everything is an option: Tennis, snowboarding, wakeboarding, juggling, etc.

If you do a lot of deadlifts, squats, bench presses, pull-ups, etc. You might become a big muscular, monster, but your training capacity won’t transfer to many sports. You will miss one-sided movements, twisting, transverse work, and more movements that are used in various sports.

If you want to expand your training beyond the above mentioned, Max recommends you incorporate these movements:

Cable half-kneeling presses — Half-kneeling cable flies will get your pecs, core and hips working.

Balance on a balance beam — Walk on a balance beam, or just balance in place on the balls of your feet, with your heels hanging off. To make it spicier, you can juggle balls, clubs, batons, etc. while you are balancing.

Pro tip: You don’t always need equipment to train balance or whatever. When you travel, you can get creative by walking on a curb or even throwing a towel on the floor to act as a balance beam.

A post shared by Max Shank (@maxshank) on Apr 9, 2018 at 7:43am PDT

47:15

5 min flow

You can make significant improvements on many skills with just 5 min a day! It’s really important you go outside of fitness to see what it can give you just to make yourself more whole.

Check out Max’s 5 min flow, it will not only make you feel better, but you also won’t have to warm up as much when you train. The 5 min flow takes your body into full range of motion and circular range of motion:

“That’s the secret: You need to anchor movement to something you will definitely do everyday. If you do it first thing in the morning, you’ve done it, you won, you have this sense of victory. Every step you take after a 5 min flow is rehab. Every step you take without 5 min of flow is probably reinforcing whatever posture you slept in, which may not be very good. Every step you take can be far superior if you do just a little bit of mobility and water in the morning.” — Max Shank

51:45

Ultimate Athleticism — Easy training

Ultimate Athleticism is a method that Max developed, which simplifies training, and help organize things to develop skills that stay with you. Max teaches clients the method in person, but also wrote a book about it.

Max takes pride in his clients, who are not the typical hardworking athletes. He taught female school teachers how to achieved L-sit to handstand by training only 2–3 days a week, over a few years of easy training.

“You can’t learn skills if you are going hard. The only way you can learn a skill is by slowing down.” — Max Shank

55:15

Adaptability Quotient (AQ)

You have heard about IQ, perhaps about EQ (Emotional Quotient), but you may not have heard of the key of the future of work, which is AQ — Adaptability Quotient.

Mike has learned how to get more done by working less than ever. When he does work now, he thinks about the result he is looking for, as well as the highest leverage activity he should take. Turns out, most of the time, all he needs to do to get work ahead is to have a conversation with someone. When it comes to fitness, a lot of times it means not working out, else staying home to roll on the coregeous ball or walking on a slack line.

Mike created a workshop along with Mark England (episode #46) called FlowStated, where they teach people a method to learn more more easily and effectively in life. learning more skills, much faster.

“If it’s hard it can never be effective.” — Mike Bledsoe

59:45

Wrong focus

You are not going to get a six pack by taking another 2,000 steps everyday or by changing your macros by 5%. A healthy, good life is a result of sustainable habits.

A few things you can apply immediately is to start avoiding sitting. You can eat some of your meals on the floor, use a standing desk for work, and watching TV while mobilizing.

Mobility specifically is very rewarding because it involves deep emotional work, since trauma gets stored in tissues in the body. When you release your physical body, you release your soul, and you will even notice improved relationships with people who are close to you.

Another thing you can immediately apply is portion control. It’s great if you already eat clean, but are you eating too much? When you eat, focus on your meal, by ditching your phone, computer, Netflix, etc. Just be with your food and enjoy it.

Pro tip: When it comes to indulging bread, both Max and Mike choose Sourdough over other breads as it is easier on digestion.

A post shared by Mike Bledsoe (@mike_bledsoe) on Dec 13, 2017 at 8:36am PST

The post Max Shank: Athleticism Makes Life Easier #69 appeared first on Shrugged Collective.

[hellyes-tommccamus]

Mutant X [TV] (2001-2004)

S01E18 “Ex Marks the Spot”

[spoilers]

Sci-fi/action

Tom McCamus plays a main role in season 1

The episode title is a laboured pun. It’s about Shalimar’s ex. But is it also about a treasure hunt? No.

Zack (Callum Keith Rennie) arrives at one of the safe houses accompanied by several GS Agents. They want him to break into a vault but he changes his mind. Brennan and Jesse show up and rescue him. It turns out Shalimar knows him and isn’t happy to see him again. Adam won’t listen to her warnings about him, even when she tells him Zack framed her for a crime.

The guys take Zack to another safe house and he demonstrates his power, which is kind of interesting and unique - he can see through solid objects and generate an image of what is behind them. Then he and Jesse have an exchange that definitely isn’t cool. Zack says he used to charge the other boys to see into the girls’ locker rooms, and Jesse says he used to phase through “inconvenient” walls. Even now the two of them seem to think it is funny and acceptable to violate privacy. At least Brennan makes half an attempt to call him out.

Artie Hill (Michael Anthony Rawlins) is Mason’s second in command this week. Artie gets the generic telling off for failing, and makes the mistake of touching Mason’s desk while gesturing during his explanation. I do enjoy those moments when Mason glares at someone for touching his stuff.

The guys ask Zack what the GSA wanted to steal, and he tells them he thinks it was art. Shalimar shows up and attacks him, and he doesn’t even attempt to fight back.

Emma checks out the intel and finds that the vault the GSA were targeting is used to store art for an auction, including a Faberge Egg made by Henrik Wigström. (Who did indeed make Faberge Eggs. Oddly Mutant X’s history tends to be more accurate than its science).

After the beating, Zack decides to leave and take his chances with the GSA, as he puts it.

Mason is not amused by Artie’s enthusiasm for the Faberge Egg. I guess it is another one of Mutant X’s lucky coincidences that Emma focused on the egg rather than anything else in the auction, and that so happens to be what Mason is also looking at. He makes it clear that he is not interested in what the Egg is made of, and tells Artie to find Zack to help break into the vault.

Brennan and Adam do a brief history lesson on Faberge Eggs. The Egg in the auction was owned by Russian biogeneticist Sasha Kandinski, name probably stolen from abstract artist Kandinsky, who was at least Russian. Kandinski was according to Adam, head of the Soviet anti-Genomex programme. We heard about the Russians and their involvement in the New Mutant epidemic in episode 3, but haven’t heard about them since. As Kandinski was said to be a biogeneticist, one can only assume that Russia was conducting their own experiments on human DNA. Biogeneticists are concerned with altering genomes, after all. Brennan compares him to Mason and Adam agrees with him. Yet another comment that suggests that Mason may have been a scientist. Although they both deny responsibility now, it’s possible that he and Adam knowingly created New Mutants in the 80s, while sporting mullets and baggy suits, which they also deny memory of.

Emma finds Shalimar sitting and glaring at plants. She is, quite understandably, angry that Adam has chosen to trust Zack. Someone who supposedly cares about her taking the side of someone who hurt her is going to feel like betrayal. Emma warns her not to build a wall around herself, but if I was Shalimar I’m not sure I’d take advice from someone too young to have experienced heartbreak. Plus her last ex almost manipulated her into changing who she was, then died.

Proxy Blue makes an appearance for the first time in a long while. Brennan and Jesse are asking her questions about Kandinski. She is full of sassy remarks as usual, but eventually tells them he was working on manipulating the DNA strand that controls free will. Jesse quite rightly is dubious about there being a DNA strand that controls free will. I am absolutely certain that no amount of new research will reveal that there is a damn bit of DNA that controls free will! Free will is an abstract concept, or a lie, depending on your feelings about determinism. But anyway the Russian’s records were all burnt.

Adam thinks that the Soviets poisoned Kandinski because he succeeded in finding the free will DNA strand. (Cue scene of a man in a fur hat pulling an oversized double helix out of an Erlenmeyer flask. “Da! I found it!”) And somehow the jump to the conclusion that it is saved on a disc which is hidden inside a Faberge Egg. One would think the Mutant X team would be tired from constantly jumping to the right conclusion.

Adam tries to convince Shalimar that using Zack’s help is the only way. He already knew how she felt about him, and had already sent the rest of the team to proceed by this point. He makes a terrible attempt to change her mind, and follows her when she walks off, demanding to hear that she is OK with it. Despite Adam’s attempt to make a show of being everyone’s buddy and mentor, this is another example of his poor people skills.

Jesse shows off a power we didn’t know he had. He phases through the floor of the Double Helix as it hovers a fair distance above a building, and floats slowly down. It does make sense that if he lowers his mass he would fall at a slower pace. Brennan guides him to the server room, which is not only unlocked, the doors open automatically! IT departments actually like to keep server rooms locked, even in places that don’t require security guards. Jesse’s hacking skills fail him and he can’t guess the password. The security guards get an alert from somewhere and come to investigate, but Jesse manages to hide from them.

Shalimar tracks Zack down at a garage. Despite her feelings about him, she tries to convince him to help them. She makes a comment about the free will DNA being specific to New Mutants. Which is a bit odd. Why would it not work on anyone else? He apologises repeatedly but apologies don’t fix everything. She tells him they can put the past behind them if he agrees to help, and he jumps on the opportunity. Then suddenly they’re all over each other. Unhealthy relationship alert. Should have kept building that wall, Shalimar.

The GSA show up. How did they know where Zack’s secret hide out was? The GSA are obviously also blessed with the same ability to jump to the correct conclusions. He and Shalimar fight them off and they ride off on their motorbikes.

The GSA don’t pursue Zack any further and instead attempt to break into the vault without his help. They are doing well until Brennan causes them to trigger an alarm. Artie and the other GS Agents are arrested. He calls Mason for help and he suggests looking for a lawyer in the Yellow Pages. A few interesting things here: I didn’t realise the Yellow Pages was a thing outside my country, in fact never really thought of it. Also I wonder why Mason suggests a book rather than the internet or asking Proxy Blue? Mutant X is set in a technologically advanced world, but as I was not in the market for lawyers circa 2001, I can’t confirm if businesses were listed on the internet. There is also the fact that specificity is one of the keys to humour.

With Zack on their side, Mutant X plans their own break in to steal the Egg. Brennan expresses his concern for Shalimar being with Zack, and Adam dismisses him. Brennan says he hacked into the auction house computer and found that a seven figure absentee bid was made by one Henry Purcell. Adam laughs and tells him that was the name of Mason’s favourite composer. Which is pretty solid proof that they were close friends at one time. When was the last time you discussed 16th century baroque music with an acquaintance? (Incidentally I was able to impress people and appear more cultured than I am by correctly answering a quiz question about Purcell).

I’m not really sure why it’s in any way surprising that Mason placed the bid. There would be collectors interested, but he was the one who wanted it in the first place. What I don’t understand is why he had the idea to break in and steal the egg in the first place. If he had access to that sort of money, surely he could have said nothing, quietly bid on and won the egg and easily got the disc. Bingo, mind control activated. (Assuming mind control is the effect of the free will DNA, not the erasure of the concept of free will in itself. Which, let’s face it, would be interesting but desirable to no-one. Or perhaps we would lose the facility to find anything interesting ever again. There’s not very much science in this episode, so have some bonus philosophy.)

The team break into the vault. Emma demonstrates another new ability, and makes the guards fall asleep. Can sleepy really be considered an emotion? But let’s face it, they didn’t even make it through the first episode before straying from the theoretical constraints of telempathy. Not only that, she makes them sleep standing up (I’m sure the extras were glad as they weren’t required to repeatedly fall down) plus they won’t remember anything. It’s a bit worrying that she says this with a smile and no-one is concerned. Jesse does his phase jump again, accompanied by some terribly stretched out slow motion throwing. Zack checks for traps, Brennan zaps them with electricity, then they’re in.

Zack almost drops the egg but Shalimar grabs it. Then Shalimar does exactly what you shouldn’t - she takes off her gloves and touches the egg, leaving fingerprints all over it. They take the disk and leave.

Back at Zack’s garage, Shalimar confronts him and finds that he somehow swapped the disk while fumbling the egg. Unless he took it and they should have shown the part where Shalimar opened it before this. Either way, Shalimar takes it from him and hits him.

Mason gets the egg delivered right to his office. It’s empty. So he does the obvious thing and smashes it. Didn’t keep it. Or decide to sell it on and recover his/the government’s money. This would make a bit more sense if he had needed the disk for a particular reason.

Emma and Shalimar have a conversation to wrap up. Shalimar was right about Zack but they end up laughing in the end.

[fantasycrest]

The Struggle Anew

OK so... After today I decided to do a new journal post as I thought it might be good. So before going any further and into the reason behind this post's title I thought I'd cover the other topics. My addiction to The King's Avatar still goes on strongly. I finally got caught up on Mysticons (the delay due in part to my stupid satellite box) and it's pretty good today's episode was something. Still have yet to touch Voltron season 3 I will probably deal with it soon but it just hasn't been that high on my list for some reason. I've been playing a lot of Kingdom Hearts Union Cross lately. OK so on to the main topic of the journal that being that my writing is going slower even more so than usual so yeah the struggle is real. To be honest I was sort of worried that something had gone wrong then animatedrose of DA  helped me gain some perspective (again thank you for that) so stuff will happen it'll just take time but that brings me to my next point my projects. This new molasses is certainly hindering me in some ways but it did give me some truth to a few projects the main one being the companion piece I was gonna do for Gold Stripes after thinking it over and such I've decided it's just not gonna happen really. I'm sorry but even for an AU it's been too long and so much has changed that I just don't see it anymore granted things could happen but I don't have high hopes for it. Sorry. As for the follow up piece to A Miraculous Vision that actually is still happening I just need to finish writing it as I'm partway through. Stardust, MiracuCaptors, and Possible Powers are all in states where I merely just need to write the next chapters so no real worries there. As for PMD Rescuing Reality... I worry I may have jumped the gun on it so while it may not be scrapped I may do a re-write like I did for Stardust and Shades of Pink last year(I think it was?) luckily for me I just started so I have a bit more breathing room then usual. As for my ML OC project while the story is in the distance I think I will do pictures for my Kwami showing off names and appearances if only to get them out there. I also Fragment Journey pieces in mind and on the way. So yeah I have stuff in mind and on the way it will just take time. And that's all I have for now look forward to stuff. I'll keep you posted if something happens.

[joshuabradleyn]

Want to Burn More Calories? Add This to Your Fat Loss Plan

Fat loss has an identity crisis — and you’re the one suffering from all the confusion. While the “rules” of fat loss and crushing calories are not overly complex, there’s a reason why the number of overweight people continues to swell. It’s the same reason you struggle to lose the first 20 pounds — or the last 10 that will reveal your abs.

Why does fat loss have you so confused? Because we misunderstand how fat loss works, and what you can do to help the process be a little less complicated. Yes — if you want to lose weight, the old adage of “eat less than you burn” is true. But that’s where the problems begin.

Fat loss is not about a single meal or workout. It’s the combination of efforts (like NEAT) that are overlooked.

Eating less is not that simple. If you have tried to reduce how many calories you eat in a day, you know this to be true. And telling someone they are “lazy” or “don’t care enough” doesn’t do anything to fix the problem or help. (Not to mention, it’s usually not accurate; weight loss is a difficult process that takes time.)

And even if you do eat less, you might battle psychological or physiological barriers that make it even harder to drop pounds. Or when you start to eat fewer calories, the difficulty of maintaining that pace also seems to force you to quit.

It’s not fair, but that doesn’t mean it’s a losing battle. Most people never take the time (translation: go to a doctor, get blood work done, examine the mental barriers) to understand why the pounds don’t come off. You just understand your reality — you don’t look different and neither does the scale.

There’s another part of the equation that’s oftentimes overlooked, and it has nothing to do with eating. When you hear “burn calories,” you’re probably thinking about metabolism crushing workouts [soul-crusher], doing cardio, or hitting the weights. 

From an exercise perspective, fat loss is not all about insanely intense workouts. In fact, if you talk to some of the leading researchers, it’s the easier approaches to fat loss that everyone forgets. And it could be the link to you dropping a few extra pounds or jumpstarting a big weight loss journey.

Still confused? It’s time for you to uncover the missing piece of the fat loss equation.

How You Really Burn Calories

Pardon me for a moment while we do a little math. (I promise it won’t take long.)

The total number of calories you burn in a day comes from three sources:

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): This is the number of calories your body uses simply by being alive. Even if you were to lay in bed all day, your body would burn them. Roughly 60% of the calories we eat in a day go toward maintaining these baseline biological processes.

Thermic Effect of Food (TEF): The amount of energy it takes to digest, absorb, and store food. The rate varies from person-to-person, and from food-to-food (protein is the most “metabolically expensive” macronutrient, with up to 30% of its calories being burned during the digestive process.) But on average, TEF accounts for about 10% to 15% of our daily calorie burn.

The third element is Activity Thermogenesis (AT). But this category has two components: exercise—any kind of moderate-to-vigorous session in the gym, on a bike, on the trails, etc.; and Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), which basically includes everything else. Standing, walking, fidgeting—they all contribute to NEAT.

While NEAT might elicit a sarcastic remark deserving of its name (neat? Pssshhh), if you only think of exercise as the activity you do in the gym, then you’re missing out on huge fat burning potential.

Don’t just take our advice at face value, researchers have been studying it for years. What they’ve found is that NEAT can have an enormous impact on the total calories a person burns—as many as 2,000 per day. And that’s much more powerful than any fat burning supplement or BS appetite suppressant. So if you’re serious about fat loss, NEAT is the cost-effective (it’s free!), scientific approach that can work for your body.

Oftentimes, we choose to compare types of exercises. Weights are better than cardio. High-intensity training (things like HIIT) are better than slower bouts of treadmill time. But fat loss is not about a single meal or workout. It’s the combination of efforts.

You already know that a killer 30-minute workout can burn hundreds of calories—but so can a few hours at the mall. For example, an 180-pound guy can burn about 285 calories just by taking a one-hour leisurely walk.

Just because you aren’t out of breath doesn’t mean your activity doesn’t ‘count.’ In fact, the opposite is true: All of the ‘light’ activity you do can tip the scales pretty heavily in your favor.

For example, in a 2005 study by Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic recruited a group of 20 people. Half of them were lean, while the other 10 were obese self-proclaimed “couch potatoes.” After tracking them for 10 days, researchers found that the obese people sat for 164 minutes longer during the day than their slimmer counterparts. What’s more, the skinnier group stood for about 152 minutes longer than the obese group.

Levine’s team crunched the numbers and determined that if the obese subjects did nothing else other than stand or stroll as much as the lean group, they would burn an additional 352 calories per day.

Again: That’s more than 350 calories—nearly 15 percent of an average male over age 30’s daily intake requirement—burned without adding any exercise at all.

But even if you’re not among the couch-bound, NEAT plays a bigger role in your life than you think.  Levine wrote in a 2004 review in the American Journal of Physiology: “NEAT, even in avid exercisers, is the predominant component of activity thermogenesis and is the energy expenditure associated with all the activities we undertake as vibrant, independent beings.” [Emphasis added.]

Put another way: “There are 168 hours in the week,” says Harley Pasternak, a celebrity trainer who’s worked with everyone from Lady Gaga to LL Cool J. “If you work out for an hour a day, five days a week, there are still 163 hours—or 97% of the week—that you’re not in the gym.”

Even the most highly committed workout-a-holic will still spend more of their life away from the gym than in it. Your habits during those non-training hours can either work for you, or against you.  

The Trapdoor: How to Combine NEAT and Exercise

NEAT can help you work toward your weight loss goal. But here’s where things get tricky: Your workout can work against your NEAT.

James Krieger, M.S. nutrition and founder of Weightology, says that some exercisers actually erase all the calorie-burning benefits of their workouts by being less active the rest of the day (compared to a non-training day). And there’s research that backs up this idea.

“Let’s say a person expended 200 calories during an exercise session,” Krieger says, “they can actually make up for it by their NEAT levels going down by 200 calories the rest of the day. It’s like they didn’t exercise at all.”

One possible reason: They’re so exhausted afterward.

“I tell people, if you have a client that’s interested in fat loss, be careful how hard you work them because if you work them so hard that they sit around and don’t do anything the rest of the day, you may actually doing them a disservice if they are trying to lose body fat.”

If you needed more proof that not every workout should kick your ass, now you have it. But there’s also evidence that biology plays a role, too. “Your body doesn’t like being in an energy deficient state,” say Krieger. “If you’re dieting and exercising, your body is going to try and resist that by decreasing your NEAT levels, whether that’s by less fidgeting or moving around.”

So what can you do to combat this subtle sabotage? Krieger recommends that people wear a pedometer and try to maintain the same level of activity every single day—even on the days when you do an extra-hard workout.

“The key is consistency,” Krieger says. “If you’re only doing it once in awhile, it’s not going to make much of a difference, but if you do it consistently, it’s going to add up.”

Note that he’s not telling you to give up wind sprints in favor of a walk. NEAT isn’t going make you jacked. Resistance training does that.

What he’s saying is that you should do the wind sprints and take a walk.

How to Make NEAT Work for You

This is not an invitation to start forcing mini-workouts into your day. You don’t need to look for ways to break a sweat at every waking moment of the day. You don’t need to perform bodyweight squats while you cook. That isn’t NEAT. That’d be exercise. (That’d also be awkward.)

Instead, pay attention to how much time you spend moving—or not—during the day. In his book “Move a Little, Lose a Lot,” Dr. Levine recommends keeping an activity journal for a few days. You’d want to record at least one weekday and one weekend day. Track how you spend your time in half-hour intervals. Mark each activity into one of three categories: sitting, standing or moving.

When your log is complete, take a look at each item—especially the ones categorized as sitting. Think of ways you could make those tasks more active. For example, those conference calls you have to be on at work—could you take them standing up, or even strolling around your office?

Levine recommends 135 minutes of NEAT time during the day—which sounds like a lot, but really only amounts to slightly less than 10 percent of a 1,440-minute day (yes, that’s how many minutes there are in one). And remember, standing counts.

Small activities burn more calories than you’d think. Vacuuming the house for 30 minutes burns 143 calories. Cleaning the garage for 30 minutes burns 122 calories. Use a standing desk (which both Winston Churchill and Leonardo Da Vinci apparently did) for an hour and you’ll burn 98 calories. Everything you do in your garden burns between 100 and 200 calories an hour. So does pacing or walking the dog.

Think of every step you take as a small win. A 2011 study published in the journal International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity researchers found that taking a 5-minute walking break every hour could burn an extra 660 calories per week. Extrapolate that over one year and you could lose about 9 to 10 pounds just by adding up the 5-minute walks.

Again, the point isn’t to cheat the system. It’s to understand that fat loss is not just a byproduct of weight training or diet. There are other efforts you can do that — when added up over time (think 2-3 months, or longer) — can have a significant impact and help you finally understand how to make fat loss programs work for you.

The post Want to Burn More Calories? Add This to Your Fat Loss Plan appeared first on Born Fitness.

http://ift.tt/2qLureD

[albertcaldwellne]

Want to Burn More Calories? Add This to Your Fat Loss Plan

Fat loss has an identity crisis — and you’re the one suffering from all the confusion. While the “rules” of fat loss and crushing calories are not overly complex, there’s a reason why the number of overweight people continues to swell. It’s the same reason you struggle to lose the first 20 pounds — or the last 10 that will reveal your abs.

Why does fat loss have you so confused? Because we misunderstand how fat loss works, and what you can do to help the process be a little less complicated. Yes — if you want to lose weight, the old adage of “eat less than you burn” is true. But that’s where the problems begin.

Fat loss is not about a single meal or workout. It’s the combination of efforts (like NEAT) that are overlooked.

Eating less is not that simple. If you have tried to reduce how many calories you eat in a day, you know this to be true. And telling someone they are “lazy” or “don’t care enough” doesn’t do anything to fix the problem or help. (Not to mention, it’s usually not accurate; weight loss is a difficult process that takes time.)

And even if you do eat less, you might battle psychological or physiological barriers that make it even harder to drop pounds. Or when you start to eat fewer calories, the difficulty of maintaining that pace also seems to force you to quit.

It’s not fair, but that doesn’t mean it’s a losing battle. Most people never take the time (translation: go to a doctor, get blood work done, examine the mental barriers) to understand why the pounds don’t come off. You just understand your reality — you don’t look different and neither does the scale.

There’s another part of the equation that’s oftentimes overlooked, and it has nothing to do with eating. When you hear “burn calories,” you’re probably thinking about metabolism crushing workouts [soul-crusher], doing cardio, or hitting the weights. 

From an exercise perspective, fat loss is not all about insanely intense workouts. In fact, if you talk to some of the leading researchers, it’s the easier approaches to fat loss that everyone forgets. And it could be the link to you dropping a few extra pounds or jumpstarting a big weight loss journey.

Still confused? It’s time for you to uncover the missing piece of the fat loss equation.

How You Really Burn Calories

Pardon me for a moment while we do a little math. (I promise it won’t take long.)

The total number of calories you burn in a day comes from three sources:

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): This is the number of calories your body uses simply by being alive. Even if you were to lay in bed all day, your body would burn them. Roughly 60% of the calories we eat in a day go toward maintaining these baseline biological processes.

Thermic Effect of Food (TEF): The amount of energy it takes to digest, absorb, and store food. The rate varies from person-to-person, and from food-to-food (protein is the most “metabolically expensive” macronutrient, with up to 30% of its calories being burned during the digestive process.) But on average, TEF accounts for about 10% to 15% of our daily calorie burn.

The third element is Activity Thermogenesis (AT). But this category has two components: exercise—any kind of moderate-to-vigorous session in the gym, on a bike, on the trails, etc.; and Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), which basically includes everything else. Standing, walking, fidgeting—they all contribute to NEAT.

While NEAT might elicit a sarcastic remark deserving of its name (neat? Pssshhh), if you only think of exercise as the activity you do in the gym, then you’re missing out on huge fat burning potential.

Don’t just take our advice at face value, researchers have been studying it for years. What they’ve found is that NEAT can have an enormous impact on the total calories a person burns—as many as 2,000 per day. And that’s much more powerful than any fat burning supplement or BS appetite suppressant. So if you’re serious about fat loss, NEAT is the cost-effective (it’s free!), scientific approach that can work for your body.

Oftentimes, we choose to compare types of exercises. Weights are better than cardio. High-intensity training (things like HIIT) are better than slower bouts of treadmill time. But fat loss is not about a single meal or workout. It’s the combination of efforts.

You already know that a killer 30-minute workout can burn hundreds of calories—but so can a few hours at the mall. For example, an 180-pound guy can burn about 285 calories just by taking a one-hour leisurely walk.

Just because you aren’t out of breath doesn’t mean your activity doesn’t ‘count.’ In fact, the opposite is true: All of the ‘light’ activity you do can tip the scales pretty heavily in your favor.

For example, in a 2005 study by Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic recruited a group of 20 people. Half of them were lean, while the other 10 were obese self-proclaimed “couch potatoes.” After tracking them for 10 days, researchers found that the obese people sat for 164 minutes longer during the day than their slimmer counterparts. What’s more, the skinnier group stood for about 152 minutes longer than the obese group.

Levine’s team crunched the numbers and determined that if the obese subjects did nothing else other than stand or stroll as much as the lean group, they would burn an additional 352 calories per day.

Again: That’s more than 350 calories—nearly 15 percent of an average male over age 30’s daily intake requirement—burned without adding any exercise at all.

But even if you’re not among the couch-bound, NEAT plays a bigger role in your life than you think.  Levine wrote in a 2004 review in the American Journal of Physiology: “NEAT, even in avid exercisers, is the predominant component of activity thermogenesis and is the energy expenditure associated with all the activities we undertake as vibrant, independent beings.” [Emphasis added.]

Put another way: “There are 168 hours in the week,” says Harley Pasternak, a celebrity trainer who’s worked with everyone from Lady Gaga to LL Cool J. “If you work out for an hour a day, five days a week, there are still 163 hours—or 97% of the week—that you’re not in the gym.”

Even the most highly committed workout-a-holic will still spend more of their life away from the gym than in it. Your habits during those non-training hours can either work for you, or against you.  

The Trapdoor: How to Combine NEAT and Exercise

NEAT can help you work toward your weight loss goal. But here’s where things get tricky: Your workout can work against your NEAT.

James Krieger, M.S. nutrition and founder of Weightology, says that some exercisers actually erase all the calorie-burning benefits of their workouts by being less active the rest of the day (compared to a non-training day). And there’s research that backs up this idea.

“Let’s say a person expended 200 calories during an exercise session,” Krieger says, “they can actually make up for it by their NEAT levels going down by 200 calories the rest of the day. It’s like they didn’t exercise at all.”

One possible reason: They’re so exhausted afterward.

“I tell people, if you have a client that’s interested in fat loss, be careful how hard you work them because if you work them so hard that they sit around and don’t do anything the rest of the day, you may actually doing them a disservice if they are trying to lose body fat.”

If you needed more proof that not every workout should kick your ass, now you have it. But there’s also evidence that biology plays a role, too. “Your body doesn’t like being in an energy deficient state,” say Krieger. “If you’re dieting and exercising, your body is going to try and resist that by decreasing your NEAT levels, whether that’s by less fidgeting or moving around.”

So what can you do to combat this subtle sabotage? Krieger recommends that people wear a pedometer and try to maintain the same level of activity every single day—even on the days when you do an extra-hard workout.

“The key is consistency,” Krieger says. “If you’re only doing it once in awhile, it’s not going to make much of a difference, but if you do it consistently, it’s going to add up.”

Note that he’s not telling you to give up wind sprints in favor of a walk. NEAT isn’t going make you jacked. Resistance training does that.

What he’s saying is that you should do the wind sprints and take a walk.

How to Make NEAT Work for You

This is not an invitation to start forcing mini-workouts into your day. You don’t need to look for ways to break a sweat at every waking moment of the day. You don’t need to perform bodyweight squats while you cook. That isn’t NEAT. That’d be exercise. (That’d also be awkward.)

Instead, pay attention to how much time you spend moving—or not—during the day. In his book “Move a Little, Lose a Lot,” Dr. Levine recommends keeping an activity journal for a few days. You’d want to record at least one weekday and one weekend day. Track how you spend your time in half-hour intervals. Mark each activity into one of three categories: sitting, standing or moving.

When your log is complete, take a look at each item—especially the ones categorized as sitting. Think of ways you could make those tasks more active. For example, those conference calls you have to be on at work—could you take them standing up, or even strolling around your office?

Levine recommends 135 minutes of NEAT time during the day—which sounds like a lot, but really only amounts to slightly less than 10 percent of a 1,440-minute day (yes, that’s how many minutes there are in one). And remember, standing counts.

Small activities burn more calories than you’d think. Vacuuming the house for 30 minutes burns 143 calories. Cleaning the garage for 30 minutes burns 122 calories. Use a standing desk (which both Winston Churchill and Leonardo Da Vinci apparently did) for an hour and you’ll burn 98 calories. Everything you do in your garden burns between 100 and 200 calories an hour. So does pacing or walking the dog.

Think of every step you take as a small win. A 2011 study published in the journal International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity researchers found that taking a 5-minute walking break every hour could burn an extra 660 calories per week. Extrapolate that over one year and you could lose about 9 to 10 pounds just by adding up the 5-minute walks.

Again, the point isn’t to cheat the system. It’s to understand that fat loss is not just a byproduct of weight training or diet. There are other efforts you can do that — when added up over time (think 2-3 months, or longer) — can have a significant impact and help you finally understand how to make fat loss programs work for you.

The post Want to Burn More Calories? Add This to Your Fat Loss Plan appeared first on Born Fitness.

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[johnclapperne]

Want to Burn More Calories? Add This to Your Fat Loss Plan

Fat loss has an identity crisis — and you’re the one suffering from all the confusion. While the “rules” of fat loss and crushing calories are not overly complex, there’s a reason why the number of overweight people continues to swell. It’s the same reason you struggle to lose the first 20 pounds — or the last 10 that will reveal your abs.

Why does fat loss have you so confused? Because we misunderstand how fat loss works, and what you can do to help the process be a little less complicated. Yes — if you want to lose weight, the old adage of “eat less than you burn” is true. But that’s where the problems begin.

Fat loss is not about a single meal or workout. It’s the combination of efforts (like NEAT) that are overlooked.

Eating less is not that simple. If you have tried to reduce how many calories you eat in a day, you know this to be true. And telling someone they are “lazy” or “don’t care enough” doesn’t do anything to fix the problem or help. (Not to mention, it’s usually not accurate; weight loss is a difficult process that takes time.)

And even if you do eat less, you might battle psychological or physiological barriers that make it even harder to drop pounds. Or when you start to eat fewer calories, the difficulty of maintaining that pace also seems to force you to quit.

It’s not fair, but that doesn’t mean it’s a losing battle. Most people never take the time (translation: go to a doctor, get blood work done, examine the mental barriers) to understand why the pounds don’t come off. You just understand your reality — you don’t look different and neither does the scale.

There’s another part of the equation that’s oftentimes overlooked, and it has nothing to do with eating. When you hear “burn calories,” you’re probably thinking about metabolism crushing workouts [soul-crusher], doing cardio, or hitting the weights. 

From an exercise perspective, fat loss is not all about insanely intense workouts. In fact, if you talk to some of the leading researchers, it’s the easier approaches to fat loss that everyone forgets. And it could be the link to you dropping a few extra pounds or jumpstarting a big weight loss journey.

Still confused? It’s time for you to uncover the missing piece of the fat loss equation.

How You Really Burn Calories

Pardon me for a moment while we do a little math. (I promise it won’t take long.)

The total number of calories you burn in a day comes from three sources:

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): This is the number of calories your body uses simply by being alive. Even if you were to lay in bed all day, your body would burn them. Roughly 60% of the calories we eat in a day go toward maintaining these baseline biological processes.

Thermic Effect of Food (TEF): The amount of energy it takes to digest, absorb, and store food. The rate varies from person-to-person, and from food-to-food (protein is the most “metabolically expensive” macronutrient, with up to 30% of its calories being burned during the digestive process.) But on average, TEF accounts for about 10% to 15% of our daily calorie burn.

The third element is Activity Thermogenesis (AT). But this category has two components: exercise—any kind of moderate-to-vigorous session in the gym, on a bike, on the trails, etc.; and Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT), which basically includes everything else. Standing, walking, fidgeting—they all contribute to NEAT.

While NEAT might elicit a sarcastic remark deserving of its name (neat? Pssshhh), if you only think of exercise as the activity you do in the gym, then you’re missing out on huge fat burning potential.

Don’t just take our advice at face value, researchers have been studying it for years. What they’ve found is that NEAT can have an enormous impact on the total calories a person burns—as many as 2,000 per day. And that’s much more powerful than any fat burning supplement or BS appetite suppressant. So if you’re serious about fat loss, NEAT is the cost-effective (it’s free!), scientific approach that can work for your body.

Oftentimes, we choose to compare types of exercises. Weights are better than cardio. High-intensity training (things like HIIT) are better than slower bouts of treadmill time. But fat loss is not about a single meal or workout. It’s the combination of efforts.

You already know that a killer 30-minute workout can burn hundreds of calories—but so can a few hours at the mall. For example, an 180-pound guy can burn about 285 calories just by taking a one-hour leisurely walk.

Just because you aren’t out of breath doesn’t mean your activity doesn’t ‘count.’ In fact, the opposite is true: All of the ‘light’ activity you do can tip the scales pretty heavily in your favor.

For example, in a 2005 study by Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic recruited a group of 20 people. Half of them were lean, while the other 10 were obese self-proclaimed “couch potatoes.” After tracking them for 10 days, researchers found that the obese people sat for 164 minutes longer during the day than their slimmer counterparts. What’s more, the skinnier group stood for about 152 minutes longer than the obese group.

Levine’s team crunched the numbers and determined that if the obese subjects did nothing else other than stand or stroll as much as the lean group, they would burn an additional 352 calories per day.

Again: That’s more than 350 calories—nearly 15 percent of an average male over age 30’s daily intake requirement—burned without adding any exercise at all.

But even if you’re not among the couch-bound, NEAT plays a bigger role in your life than you think.  Levine wrote in a 2004 review in the American Journal of Physiology: “NEAT, even in avid exercisers, is the predominant component of activity thermogenesis and is the energy expenditure associated with all the activities we undertake as vibrant, independent beings.” [Emphasis added.]

Put another way: “There are 168 hours in the week,” says Harley Pasternak, a celebrity trainer who’s worked with everyone from Lady Gaga to LL Cool J. “If you work out for an hour a day, five days a week, there are still 163 hours—or 97% of the week—that you’re not in the gym.”

Even the most highly committed workout-a-holic will still spend more of their life away from the gym than in it. Your habits during those non-training hours can either work for you, or against you.  

The Trapdoor: How to Combine NEAT and Exercise

NEAT can help you work toward your weight loss goal. But here’s where things get tricky: Your workout can work against your NEAT.

James Krieger, M.S. nutrition and founder of Weightology, says that some exercisers actually erase all the calorie-burning benefits of their workouts by being less active the rest of the day (compared to a non-training day). And there’s research that backs up this idea.

“Let’s say a person expended 200 calories during an exercise session,” Krieger says, “they can actually make up for it by their NEAT levels going down by 200 calories the rest of the day. It’s like they didn’t exercise at all.”

One possible reason: They’re so exhausted afterward.

“I tell people, if you have a client that’s interested in fat loss, be careful how hard you work them because if you work them so hard that they sit around and don’t do anything the rest of the day, you may actually doing them a disservice if they are trying to lose body fat.”

If you needed more proof that not every workout should kick your ass, now you have it. But there’s also evidence that biology plays a role, too. “Your body doesn’t like being in an energy deficient state,” say Krieger. “If you’re dieting and exercising, your body is going to try and resist that by decreasing your NEAT levels, whether that’s by less fidgeting or moving around.”

So what can you do to combat this subtle sabotage? Krieger recommends that people wear a pedometer and try to maintain the same level of activity every single day—even on the days when you do an extra-hard workout.

“The key is consistency,” Krieger says. “If you’re only doing it once in awhile, it’s not going to make much of a difference, but if you do it consistently, it’s going to add up.”

Note that he’s not telling you to give up wind sprints in favor of a walk. NEAT isn’t going make you jacked. Resistance training does that.

What he’s saying is that you should do the wind sprints and take a walk.

How to Make NEAT Work for You

This is not an invitation to start forcing mini-workouts into your day. You don’t need to look for ways to break a sweat at every waking moment of the day. You don’t need to perform bodyweight squats while you cook. That isn’t NEAT. That’d be exercise. (That’d also be awkward.)

Instead, pay attention to how much time you spend moving—or not—during the day. In his book “Move a Little, Lose a Lot,” Dr. Levine recommends keeping an activity journal for a few days. You’d want to record at least one weekday and one weekend day. Track how you spend your time in half-hour intervals. Mark each activity into one of three categories: sitting, standing or moving.

When your log is complete, take a look at each item—especially the ones categorized as sitting. Think of ways you could make those tasks more active. For example, those conference calls you have to be on at work—could you take them standing up, or even strolling around your office?

Levine recommends 135 minutes of NEAT time during the day—which sounds like a lot, but really only amounts to slightly less than 10 percent of a 1,440-minute day (yes, that’s how many minutes there are in one). And remember, standing counts.

Small activities burn more calories than you’d think. Vacuuming the house for 30 minutes burns 143 calories. Cleaning the garage for 30 minutes burns 122 calories. Use a standing desk (which both Winston Churchill and Leonardo Da Vinci apparently did) for an hour and you’ll burn 98 calories. Everything you do in your garden burns between 100 and 200 calories an hour. So does pacing or walking the dog.

Think of every step you take as a small win. A 2011 study published in the journal International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity researchers found that taking a 5-minute walking break every hour could burn an extra 660 calories per week. Extrapolate that over one year and you could lose about 9 to 10 pounds just by adding up the 5-minute walks.

Again, the point isn’t to cheat the system. It’s to understand that fat loss is not just a byproduct of weight training or diet. There are other efforts you can do that — when added up over time (think 2-3 months, or longer) — can have a significant impact and help you finally understand how to make fat loss programs work for you.

The post Want to Burn More Calories? Add This to Your Fat Loss Plan appeared first on Born Fitness.

http://ift.tt/2qLureD