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Wellness Wednesday for February 25, 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 resolutions check-in:

  • Posted my fifth blog post of the year on Monday, offering my two cents on the school shooting in Tumbler Ridge. It was expanded from a comment I wrote here after the Annunciation Catholic shooting last August. I'm sad to say the points I made remained exactly as relevant six months later as they were at the time.
  • Went to the gym three times last week, again on Monday, planning to go this evening. Can deadlift 1.8x my bodyweight for 4 reps, squat .98x for 9 reps and bench press .82x for 7 reps.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.
  • Have completed 8/11 modules in the SQL course.

How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble and @oats_son?

Great blog post, by the way. Always very well reasoned.

  • I got the flu, or something like the flu, and went off my diet for a number of days and didn't leave my apartment for like, four days. Naturally, it's difficult and perhaps inadvisable to lift weights or go jogging in this state. I recognize that my life feels like it has less point to it if I'm not doing something semi-regularly at the gym. I still have a headache even today, though. At least the coughing is subsided. Interestingly, I actually lost weight, despite not tracking my calories. I weighed 174.2 lbs yesterday, 174.6 lbs today. I don't really look that different.
  • I managed to listen to 4 hours of Comprehensible Input last week. I think I need to start throwing in some "Intermediate" level content. I also read a couple articles. I think I want to take the article goal down from "1 every day" to "like 2 or 3 every week or so". Native articles are very taxing to me, especially on complicated subjects. My favorite articles have to do with murder or people threatening each other or evicting people or immigrants being bad or something. The other day, I actually learned more details about the Mar-a-Lago trespasser from that site. I guess Japanese news is actually news, rather than just study material, huh.

I missed out on a fun time on Saturday doing a bowling pin shoot with my 10/22 at the gun range, which was pretty sad. I skipped out on a pistol league yesterday so I could get my oil changed. Also that rotisserie bone stock went pretty well, the resulting stock is quite gelatin-like. I guess I should freeze it.

I got a job out of college, but it feels like every day I spend at this job, the possibility of me ever getting another computer science job dwindle, even as the computer science industry dwindles itself. I guess I'm no striver. Really, I apparently lack quite a bit of motivation. If you wanted a job that AI can't replace without going back to school, what would be good? I'd like to leave this state someday, it sucks.

I think I'm going to stop posting on this account. I've posted a lot of personal things, and to do that, I had to trust that no one would use those things against me. I no longer trust this.

If you wanted a job that AI can't replace without going back to school, what would be good?

I've been asking myself the same question a lot recently. Right now, it seems like my best bet is "bartender". I've done it before, and if you're good at it the pay can be decent by the standards of unskilled labor. Waiting tables also isn't bad if you can find the right place. The pay is good enough that I could live on it

Anything beyond that is probably going to require some sort of certification, outside of sales, and sales is its own special kind of hell.