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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Re: distant (if even feasible) 100x100 on 100sec swim goal, have commenced lessons, doing lots of kick drills, often with a snorkel. Starting to feel good body position when prone, still struggling with body position/fore-aft balance when rolled approx 45 degrees to one side. Flip turns have gotten a lot better and more consistent. It's kinda fun! Hard to say whether it's a meaningful cardiovascular load at this point, but it's something different, anyway, and I've certainly heard guys claim that swimming enough seemed to have some carryover to e.g. bike and run.
Re: Patrick O'Brian and what to read after you finish Aubrey-Maturin, I recently read Beat to Quarters, the first-published Hornblower novel. It's okay, definitely not as fun as O'Brian. There's a sort of dynamic where Hornblower is internally tortured by self-doubt but externally distant, steely, and always right that annoys me a bit and vaguely reminds me of certain animes.
Re: last week's "plan F" thread, I'm starting to engage with a sort of inverted version of this in a not entirely theoretical manner. tl;dr got a degree, hated the white-collar world, took a blue-collar job with lots of time away from home in remote locations for ~8 years, met nice girl, now want to be home more. There are offramps within the field that would probably work for me but I haven't been able to take one in the last six months or so of trying. My academic background wasn't professional, as such (econ, math, phil, UCs) and I didn't really stay in touch with anyone from the programs. I've been semi-seriously looking at nursing school, there are some accelerated programs that would theoretically work for me, but I'm not at all sure that it's something I even want to do and I would have to take a fair number of pre-reqs before applications close in May or June. I think they'd accept online coursework for most of it (and am about to reach out to confirm) but it feels awfully committing to drop a couple grand at Modoc County Community College or whatever to laugh my way through Anatomy and Physiology.
/deerdiary
I read those books when I was about 12. I loved them at the time, perfect for a tween boy. But yes, in retrospect Hornblower is very much a Mary Sue and they're not nearly as sophisticated as the Aubrey-Maturin novels. It's more interesting to me that he was also literally working for the British Ministry of Information at the time, writing propaganda, so I wonder how much of the series was influenced by that.
I think The African Queen is his best book for adults. It has an interesting setting that you don't see much (African riverine warfare, circa 1914) and more realistically flawed characters.
I'll look into that one. I'm still finishing up The Wine Dark Sea.
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