The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
I went to a HEMA tournament a few weeks ago. It was peak hayfever season, I was keeping myself somewhat functional with an ample supply of antihistamines and complementary coffee, I had barely slept, but there I went to compete, I cannot do otherwise. I ended up in a pool that contained the following types of fencers:
1 and 2 made short work of me. I got a few sloppy hits in, but otherwise got justly dismantled.
3 turned out to be left handed, and I completely failed to adapt to that in time (I ended up having to realize that I grossly overfitted my entire fencing style to defend against strong blows from my opponent's right). We fought again in the eliminations, I tried to recall my best anti-lefty techniques but failed to pull them off, then just switched to maximum aggression and threw a wide variety of different attacks at him which got me a lot further, but but my opponent used his superior mobility to get safe hits in and retreat.
4 did exactly what he did in every fight so far, going in hard and fast to push me out of the ring - I saw it coming and tried to use his momentum to swing him out instead, but fumbled it. From then on I used what worked against him in the past, kept him at a distance and hit his exposed extremities. No pretty fighting, but it worked, I won that one.
6 had previously gotten absolutely pounded by 4, who won the match by repeatedly going in close and grappling her with little resistance. I fought 6 last in the pool, and was by then thoroughly exhausted. I first scored by doing what 4 had done to her, went in close, grabbed her right arm with my left and just gave her a one-handed bonk on the helmet. I could have probably repeated that a few more times, too, but instead I wanted to do better and tried to outfence her at medium distance, which just turned into silly sword-waving on both gassed-out sides. She ended up winning that one by pushing herself and paying actual attention in the end, while I was just phoning it in out of fatigue.
First time I lost against a woman in a swordfight!
Also, 4 took an honest-to-God nap right next to the ring. I was very impressed.
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