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:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I am trying to convince myself that I can recover from a hysterectomy in a week. Two if I am a complete wuss. I need to start doing planks like a crazy person I think. And make sure my surgeon does the surgery in a surgical center because I will lose my mind if I have to spend any time in a hospital. I hate being "sick."
More options
Context Copy link
I'm currently looking into investing into a nice office chair for my work from set up. I'd like to spend at most 500 dollars. Does anyone know what the best chair is for that price range? And I know body type matters, so I'm tall and on the skinny side, if that helps.
Thanks in advance!
I would not recommend buying new if possible. Go on Craigslist etc. and find a warehouse with lightly-used office furniture and you can get a high-end Herman Miller or whatever you want well within that budget. Offices offload barely-used expensive chairs all the time, particularly in volatile economic times.
Second this - I bought a new Herman Miller Embody which cost a pretty penny but was absolutely worth it (and has a killer warranty).
You can find them from an office supply store, corporate office selling or tossing its stuff, etc and get most of the benefits for a fraction of the price.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know about "best", but I can say that I (not tall and skinny, but medium-height and fat) have felt very comfortable in the WorkPro 12000 that I bought for 415 $ four years ago. That specific product is no longer sold, but the WorkPro Momentum appears to offer basically the same features for 470 $, except that its seat is cloth rather than mesh. The FlexiSpot C7 (380 $), the RealSpace Radano (300 $), and an Alpha Home chair (normally 330 $, currently on sale for 187 $) also seem similar to the WorkPro 12000.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Random question, apropos of being dragged into karaoke night by an overly enthusiastic Scottish lady (the mother of the bartender):
Has anyone tried singing with a bone conducting microphone? A nigh universal experience is that our voices sound so much better in our heads, courtesy of the conduction of deeper frequencies and harmonics right through bone better than air. It's the reason behind "telephone voice" (other than shitty codecs and low bandwidth). I wish others could hear how silky smooth my voice sounds like in here, as opposed to the congested version everyone else is used to.
I wonder what that would sound like, in practise, but I suspect that they're not optimized for music.
The traditional thing is singing in the bath(room). The tiles resonate nicely for everyone else in the building :)
A family friend was once met in the hotel corridor by a Frenchman who complimented him on his rendition of The Marseillaise; the walls had carried the notes from his ensuite perfectly but thankfully not my friend's words which were his own private tune and began:
"A French-man saaat on the laaaaavatory...!"
This sounds like a tale that ended happily for all involved.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Should I watch Fallout, the TV show? Did they do justice to the games, including 1 and 2? Is it palatable to woke-allergics?
If I remember correctly it's never explicitly woke, but it fucking sucks. It actually made me yell at the screen multiple times because of how bad the plotting was. Almost all of the characters are utter morons, and the structure of the narrative is awful.
The arcs of the two main characters (Lucy and Maximus) are basically structured like a game, and involves the main characters getting involved in a whole lot of irrelevant and often stupid sidequests that contribute nothing to the ending - which doesn't work nearly as well when you're operating in a film medium. They mostly don't have any agency in where they end up either, so it feels like the film's central characters are just endlessly reacting to what the wasteland throws at them, instead of forging their own path at any point. As a result there's a real lack of direction within the show, and I would say maybe somewhere around more than half the episodes are complete filler. A huge amount of your time is also spent going over narrative-interrupting flashbacks in the life of a mysterious character called the Ghoul before the bombs dropped. The big reveal that both plotlines build up to is downright nonsensical.
The only plot thread that actually worked for me was Norm's arc, which all took place within the vault. That actually had a central mystery which was presented in a gripping way, a story which didn't waste time, and a PoV character who was by far the most agentic, intelligent and likeable character in the show. It was much less bombastic than the main plot following Lucy and Maximus, but it was far more interesting and felt like a completely different person wrote it.
More options
Context Copy link
The ending makes the beginning of the show make no sense, almost like they wrote it as they went along and then never bothered to go back and make sure that it added up.
Also they do the whole capitalism bad thing, while leaving out that the Communists in fallout are also cartoonishly evil and stupid.
More options
Context Copy link
I got about halfway thru S1 before getting bored. There's some girl power/male cuck wokeness in there, but from what I saw, there was nothing too egregious. What really got me, which is wokeness-adjacent or -like but not quite on the bullseye, was a scene showing a couple of apparent-stoners whose apparent job is to hold zombies in cages, who had the protagonist captured IIRC, but then through a set of boneheaded decisions, lets everyone loose in a way that causes the freed zombies to come at them and murder them. They were depicted as having been doing this sort of guard duty for some time, yet they had the attitude and competence of a couple of potheads that were hired on as line cooks because no one else was available that day, so either they should've gotten got a long time before the protagonist encountered them, or they should've been competent enough not to make those obvious errors. The whole thing just reeked of "the universe bends around the (female, headstrong, whose primary flaw is being too stubborn in her ambition and sense of justice) protagonist" to me, which, hey, this is a video game adaptation after all, but it's a video game adaptation.
More options
Context Copy link
You accidentally posted this in the Wellness Wednesday thread rather than in the Small Questions Sunday thread.
Why would it go in SSQS? It's mainly a q about entertainment, not politics.
I chose this thread on purpose because I'm an evil deviant.
Or just because the previous Friday Fun thread felt far away and these non-CW threads don't have strict rules in any case.
Also I could at a stretch try to defend its relation to wellness, because of the concept of going more directly to (small) joys to increase actual perceived life quality a bit; spending more time on quality(?) entertainment and less time on just browsing the internet aimlessly.
The SSQS thread isn't about politics, so that wouldn't really matter.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is patience the ultimate virtue to try and cultivate? I've been listening to a lot of the endurance guru Gordo Byrn while doing trainer rides lately. His big shtick is the 1000-day, or roughly three year, plan that encourages you to focus on longer time horizons for improvement. The focus of this mainly seems to be with building fitness for endurance sports, but can be applied to a lot of other things like finance, education, and personal relationships (indeed Gordo seems to take this approach with his family too, with seemingly pretty good results). This has got me thinking about my own life and how a more patient longer term view could have served me much better in many areas of my life. I can think of three big examples off of the top of my head.
First with endurance sports. I ran 14:41 for 3 miles at the Illinois state cross country meet my senior year of high-school, which was roughly ten years ago. I got marginally faster in college, up to about that speed for 5k, but haven't gotten any better, and have in fact probably regressed quite a bit since then (can maaaaaybe run a 16:00 5k right now). Part of this is just aging and reprioritizing things in my life, but there's a very real sense in which large periods of injury/illness/burnout has derailed my training because I was too aggressive and impatient and had to completely shut it down because I put myself in a huge hole. Of course it's far from too late, I'm only 27 and have at least another good 8-15 years to continue to improve with a less-aggressive, more balanced and kinder training plan focused on maximizing recovery.
Secondly with my scientific career, my publication record would be much improved and my doctorate would be complete if I had been more patient. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get results NOW, leading to overly complicated failed experiments that didn't produce any data that I could use in my thesis. If I had focused on this long term view (producing things that are real and useful and gradually building that number up over time), instead of trying to impress my bosses at our weekly meetings, I might have enough material to graduate. This is still something I need to work on, and is perhaps not helped by the weekly meeting structure in my lab. Also want to note that my publication record isn't particularly bad: I have one first author paper and multiple 2-3 author papers, and will have two more by the end of my PhD, I just think I could have accomplished this all faster and with less stress if I was more patient and systematic.
Finally, with romantic relationships, as many of you on this forum have probably observed, have suffered greatly from a lack of patience. In high school and college it was an impatience to be "in a relationship" which led me to be with people who were much more interested in me than I was in them. This is still part of the problem, but now there is an additional layer of impatience about wanting to get married and have children, which exacerbates the former problem. I'm both desperate for a partner and unwilling to actual discriminate between those who come my way because I'm impatient to get married and have children.
Contrast this to things in which I feel like I have applied patience. The foremost thing that comes to mind in my life is learning Spanish, which I've been doing consistently for the past 5 years. This past year I passed the DELE and consider myself functionally fluent, although there is still a ways to go in terms of what I would like to accomplish. This success came from the consistent 1-2 hour a day practice in the language. Another example is my blog, where I've slowly built up a following into the low hundreds, just by consistently publishing an article or two a month.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk. What has your experience with patience been? Are there error states I should watch out for (i.e. being too patient?).
More options
Context Copy link