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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1518 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 11, 2026

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).

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New Year's resolution check in

  1. Work: Terrible week at work. Boss forgot to plug in the water supply to the fly incubator, so humidifier ended up cooking all our flies, including some stocks that it took me years to make! This sets me back a month or two which is really annoying.
  2. Fitness: 11 hours last week! Started track night Tuesday's again and had a surprisingly low heart rate for what I hope will be my marathon pace in October (workout was 8x 3 min at tempo, I averaged 5:50 pace and my heart rate was around 170, which is right at the edge of Z2/Z3 for me). I woke up a little wrecked this morning and skipped this morning's session: hoping this doesn't compromise volume for the week.
  3. Intellectual Stuff: Finished my first Spanish book this year and HP7 in Italian! Got my blog posts for this month planned, and got another paid subscriber on substack (it's my friend emory so it feels like it doesn't count.
  4. Finances: Going well this month. Earned $400 extra from opening a new checking account at Wells Fargo (guess they want my mortgage) and will be earning extra on cat sitting throughout the month.
  5. Dating: Had a pretty disregulated Sunday as I got super drunk at tavern run (~13 mile run+bar crawl) and ended up bypassing all my controls and masturbating to porn. Decided to pause all my dating apps and focus on building real life connections that may or may not turn into anything.
  6. Screen time on my phone is at an hour/day, despite my binge on Sunday. Need to update my controls to better prevent binging in the future.
  7. No tarot this week. Giving the ex-roomate some space.
  8. Socializing: Tavern run was awesome, always great to hang out with the whole running community here. Otherwise have had a good balance of social activity and rest this week. Would like to host a dinner party this month or next.

How goes it @FtttG and @oats_son? I enjoyed your blog post on rejection quite a bit last week FttG!

  • I published my fourth blog post on Tuesday, a review of Tony Tulathimutte's sophomore novel Rejection (glad you enjoyed!). I was so busy on Monday that I fell a day behind my self-imposed deadline, but as we're in week 7 of 2025 and I've published four posts, I'm technically within the letter of my target of "at least one post every two weeks". I'll aim to publish the next post a day early to compensate. (Incidentally I meant to offer: if you'd like to send me a private link to your posts before they go live just to give them a spot-check, I'd be happy to.)
  • Went to the gym three times last week. Haven't yet gone this week as I was moving house, but planning to go this evening. Can deadlift 1.78x my bodyweight for 5 reps, squat .93x for 10 reps and bench press .75x for 9 reps.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
  • Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.

Once I get settled into our new flat I want to finish the SQL course and start writing the next album, although I think I may need to get my guitar set up as I think there's a bad connection.

Good review! I also recently read Rejection and, incidentally, it came up in my most recent writers' group, with opinions similar to yours. We all loved "Pics", and opinion on "The Feminist" and the closing stories were a little divided. Not that it's a bad story, but that it has to compete with writers like ARX-Han who are both more extremely online and willing to be actually edgy. I think Tulathiamutte is masterful in going right up to the limit of "safe edgy" that the uniformly-leftist literary scene will accept, and so he's able to scandalize without any unacceptable transgressions. He's also just not as convincing in his portrayal of the online world, partly because of that (he can't make the actual incel arguments, hence the need for the "narrow shoulders" thing) and partly because, I assume, he's a bit older, has a social life, and all the other things that stop people from being in weird corners of the internet 24/7.

it has to compete with writers like ARX-Han who are both more extremely online and willing to be actually edgy. I think Tulathiamutte is masterful in going right up to the limit of "safe edgy" that the uniformly-leftist literary scene will accept, and so he's able to scandalize without any unacceptable transgressions.

ARX-Han actually criticised him for exactly this.

Thanks, hadn't caught that post of his.

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