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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   1342 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 15, 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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Yesterday I tried going to a LGS to help some friends try out wargaming (specifically Grimdark Future, the actual rules for 40K as a game are terrible). The guy who was agitating for it in the first place didn't turn up, nor did another guy. Turned out, my only day off was also the day of a tournament, so there were no available tables and I had to cancel on the one guy who would have turned up. I should have just gotten lunch instead with that guy, but I was in a miserable mood by that point and didn't want to take the risk of being unpleasant.

My miserable mood snuck up on me. The last time I'd been to that store (it has display armies you can borrow and good terrain) it was 2021. I'd seen the store's policy was that either masks OR vaccination was required, it was a little ray of hope for me that we were exiting the pandemic/lockdown conditions; my J&J card would let me sit in a basement and play plastic army dudes unmasked.

But by the time I got there, there had been a slight uptick in reported COVID cases in the city, and the store had a new sign on the door; Masks AND vaccination required. The unvaccinated need not apply.

It was, frankly, one of the reasons I stopped engaging with 40K, MtG, and ("F")LGS culture in general, even when the pandemic ended. I hated how obedient and cowed most geeks were, and how over-eager store staff was to go above and beyond on Taking COVID Seriously; normies didn't have to deal with this, they could go to their sports bars and whatever else it is normies do without wearing stupid cloth things on their faces just to soothe the anxiety of neurotic hypochondriacs who were staying home anyways.

One thing I had liked about the culture of wargaming was how mixed the culture was; blue collar and white collar, some ex-military, some artsy people, all of them united by their appreciation of chainsaw swords and Catholic Space Nazi aesthetics.

Anyways, I go back to this place in the Year of our Lord 2026, and the entire staff, and 25% of the upstairs mtg/board game clientele, are still masking up. The entire staff is also trans, for some fucking reason. At least there were no masks downstairs in the crowded basement of cis male tourneyfags, (with more racial diversity than the upstairs crowd).

It just reminded me of bad times, and how if these people had their way, those times never would have ended.

I've been thinking a lot about how people on the spectrum actually try and follow rules as written and have real issue with the inconsistencies, incoherencies, and hypocrisies of everyone else. Normies don't care, they'll swallow it and see no problem justifying breaking lockdown to protest or meet people they care about, because "that's different", or they don't see the incongruity between their behavior and their stated beliefs.

Do the autists have more integrity, or did the normies just stop valuing it?

(it might also have some explanatory power for intelligence being inversely correlated with dating success, although I have no idea if there's better recent research that doesn't support this due to measurable IQ being mapped to financial gains)

I need to get back to the gym. I have almost all of the "critical" list knocked out and I told myself getting back to the gym was the last item on that list. I have my systems in place. I have my bribes in place. (Exercise does not make me feel good. It just makes me tired and sweaty. I think endorphins are a lie. But I would prefer to retain some strength into my old age.)

I have a bunch of reasons why I am failing at this but ultimately they don't matter. It's been just shy of 3 months since my husband died. Almost 4 months since I have been in the gym. I have a small handful of excuses left and they're quickly running out. Even if all I do is step foot in the door and turn around and leave I have got to get back to the gym.

I had an odd experience at jiu jitsu this morning. A few of us have a 6am open mat group, we show up and roll for 45 minutes of rounds in rotation. It's great, even though I'm normally bottom man on the totem poll there and just getting smeared by the blue and purple belts. I'm strong enough and learned enough now that even when I'm losing I'm doing jiu jitsu rather than just flailing around. I'm getting submitted in more creative ways, at least, trying things that fail rather than just resisting.

And everyone was chatting before and after, and I realized I might be the only one in the room not on gear. Everyone is using TRT or peptides or something.

And it's weird because I get the "blond white guy" stereotype of "farm strong," and I'm typically stronger than my opponents on raw power. But if I stick with this, am I going to end up on gear?

This is one of the reasons I'm taking a break from BJJ. Over half the guys were openly on something, and I have a feeling half of the remaining half just kept their mouths shut about it. It got to the point where people didn't believe me when I said I wasn't getting outside help.

But if I stick with this, am I going to end up on gear?

The answer is yes, and it's true for many things that fall into [this].

Peptides as in GLPs, or something else?

As in injections one gets off of websites shipped from China designed to help with injury recovery.

You have two choices. It can either be a lifestyle for you and a sport, or it can be self-defense. My advice would be to stay off of it, but if you're all in you're all in.

Damn this Street Fighter trailer looks dope, crank the hamminess all the way.

I saw the original one with Jean Claude van Damme years ago. Makes me feel nostalgic. Terrible movie, but I was a kid. Raul Julia played Bison wonderfully though. I saw HBO's MK2 trailer the other day. Hope it's better than the first one they did.

They really couldn't wait 5 days and release the trailer on a Tuesday?

Following off @hydroacetylene's thread here, I will add condensor fan motors as something that a barely-competent techie can replace. It's annoying, but it's annoying in a 'fucking screws' sense, and not a 'ohgodimightdie' one. Big things to watch out for :

  • As for any work inside the outdoor unit, make sure to completely power off the air conditioner by pulling the fuses and/or breaker, verify that it's powered down, and discharge the capacitor.
  • The fan blades are easy to bend, and very sharp.
  • Take photos of the contactor and capacitor before removing any wire, and do a check and review before reinserting the fuses.
  • Expect to need to crimp at least three and possibly up to eight wire ends, and cap off one or two unused ones. I like insulated disconnects, and they're a half-buck at your local hardware supply company. No idea why so many of these parts come with 50% of the wire ends pre-crimped.
  • Wire management is very important, especially near the fan itself. Those sharp blades love to eat cable. Most air conditioners have wire runs, and they're completely inadequate. I went nuts with zip ties, but there's probably a better solution.
  • The fan blade hub usually 'connects' with a square screw to the motor's output D-shaft. Don't want to torque the bearings or bend the shaft itself, but you gotta throw a ton of muscle to get the screw to bite in well. I threw on some locktite blue because I'm neurotic, but that's probably overkill.
  • Almost all replacement motors come with comically long output shafts, especially for the 10+ year old units that are actually going to need new motors. Sometimes, that extra length will just look goofy, but it might also rub against the compressor shroud. Cutting it to size is Not Fun, but it's doable with a dremel cutoff wheel or a metal hacksaw. Some shops will offer to do it for you.

If you're doing this, you might want to swap out the contactor and capacitor too, just because you'll be getting 90% of the way through them anyway. It was 15 USD for the contactor, 30 USD for the capacitor from a Home Depot (and a different vendor sold me a spare for 20 USD), and motor was 200 USD. You can get the motors cheaper (sometimes worryingly cheap) online, and that might be the better option for many people, but I'm lucky enough to have a small general-purpose shop that still sells to the public. We'll find out if it's more reliable than Amazon's VEVOR, but since the latter promoted itself as anti-explosive...

I will caveat that if the fan's not moving or only moving sporadically, and you didn't catch it quickly, there's good chances it caused compressor damage. I got lucky, since the motor had been alive last fall and didn't spin when I was doing a seasonal startup test and cleaning, but from everything I can find online the compressor over-temp and over-pressure safety switches are not very reliable if the fan just dies in the middle of the day.

You definitely can't (legally or safely!) replace the compressor as a casual DIYer, and it's pretty common for a bad compressor to mean just replacing the whole outdoor unit. So you want to keep ahead of problems here rather than hoping and praying, if the blower motor's even slightly unreliable.

This is timely, and something to chew on for me. Thanks.

I'm one month in since I decided to lock in and go below 18% body fat before the summer. I've been on top of everything, haven't missed any workouts and have been hitting my macros every single day, which ended up being easier than expected. I've come up with an easy routine for food: high protein breakfast (25-33% of all protein intake for the day), huge high protein and high carb late lunch/early dinner (50-60% of protein, 70% of carbs, 70-80% of fat for the day), and whatever else I gotta hit in my macros for dinner/evening snack (usually greek yogurt or peanut butter). Having one huge meal is very convenient. Down 4 pounds so far, which isn't much but I've also gained a bit of muscle in the meantime as well - still able to increase weights/reps on major lifts week over week. Changes are very subtle, and I unfortunately didn't record measurements like waist size beforehand, so I can only go off of what the scale says and what I'm able to see in the mirror. I've definitely lost some fat on my stomach and waist, even seeing some soft outlines of the 4 pack when flexing. If I were to guess, I must be around 19-20% body fat (started at 22% bf) right now. If progress doesn't stall, I should be able to get down to ~16% by mid June. The absolute MVP for me so far is greek yogurt, aka greatest food macronutrients wise, and microdosed melatonin pills, which allowed me to consistently hit 7.5hrs+ of sleep of every night, something I haven't been able to do for almost a decade before this.

I’ll tell you what’s not well this Wednesday: this website. Was what felt like a two+ hour outage until pretty recently.

Here I thought I had just bad reception and my network connection got muddled.

Two weeks ago I, along with the rest of the family, was laid low by a thorough stomach flu. I couldn't keep down my coffee, so I went (or rather slept) without, and subsequently got a withdrawal headache on top of already not feeling very well. Now as is my habit, immediately vowed everlasting enmity to the traitor, coffee.

Problem is, now that I'm back at work, I find myself not quite over it. It was easy at home, where nobody aside from me partook! Everyone's drinking coffee at the office. All the time. Breaks are spend on a hajj to the cafeteria. Lunches in the office are concluded with communal coffee consumption. Everything smells of coffee, I now realize. The coffee is free, dammit! Gratis!

Please give me reasons to stick to my crusade against the cursed bean. Lend me moral support. God knows I need it in this darkest of hours.

I successfully reduced my coffee intake from 3-4 cups/day average to <2/week, for about 1.5 years so far. I’ve also gone totally decaf twice within that period (about 2 months each time) and found that after the 3-4 week mark I didn’t really miss it, so it’s possible you’ll see some change even if you’re through the initial withdrawal period.

Initially I cut back for similar reasons to you, but this led to me realizing that caffeine had been a trigger for these weird fleeting déjà vu episodes I’d experienced for years, which I now recognize as focal seizures — mild enough to not need actual treatment (you wouldn’t notice even if you were talking to me when it happened), but this has helped push caffeine from daily productivity tool to recreational drug I occasionally enjoy on weekends.

Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the headaches pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to brew more.

Try just getting less addicted this time. Maybe you drink 2 cups of coffee instead of 4, and maybe you drink one day on, one day off, like resistance training your caffeine sensitivity. Quitting is unthinkable. It tastes so good. What would your life be without coffee? Come on, all your friends are doing it.

It's bizarre that I recognised that quote without having to look it up, even though I've never gotten further than the first ~3 hours of Deus Ex.

Nice DX reference!

What is a spendcel? Someone who copes by spending lots of money on crap? But you still seethe after applying the cope?

Thanks! A spendcel is someone who buys something he wanted and yet feels regret at having paid as much as he did, yet probably could not resisted the temptation of buying it. JC Denton was a seething spendcel when he was buying Jock all those beers, or when he was forced to give his only candy bar to some dumb kid.

Much overlap with poorcel, I assume.

Indeed. Spendcel is just something I came up with on a whim for this account name. I find names (and passwords!) are better just going full stream-of-consciousness.

Yeah. I know. I now realize that coffee was pretty much the only reason I ever went to work. Without coffee, I really have nothing to look forward to.

Which just means I'm one step ahead of everyone else, in my view.

Please give me reasons to stick to my crusade against the cursed bean.

Sorry, nothing useful to add. My pre-sunrise walk with a cup of coffee is pretty much the highlight of the day and everything goes wrong after that.

Tell me more about that walk.

I wake up at an absurdly early hour, get my cold brew, and walk around a park near my house. It's roughly a mile. I do this daily and year-round except in pouring rain. I sip coffee while looking at the stars and, if the moon isn't too bright, the milky way. I saw a vivid shooting star this morning. I usually don't see more than one other person, if that (the other early bird lunatic in my neighborhood). I have a flashlight so I can spot troublesome wildlife in the really dark spots (stupid skunks). Aside from some great horned owls hooting away, it is usually quite silent. I get to savor my coffee while being the only person in the world. No one is bothering me to do something, I don't need to make small talk, I don't have to carry or look at my phone, and I don't have to get anything done. It's the best part of my day.

[the second-best part is my lifting or running, which follows this walk. Everything is unpleasantly downhill after that.]

Ad fucking hoc. Free fucking gratis.

Why don't you drink tea instead? Black tea has got around 1/4 of the caffeine compared to coffee. Herbal infusions and the like have no caffeine.

Ad fucking hoc. Free fucking gratis.

Based Deadwood enjoyer.

Anyways, no thanks. I'm not looking for a replacement. The whole point is blowing a big hole into my daily routine, telling addiction and habit right off, and not needing any of it!

Hmmm... I suppose you have to try to recruit a few others to your cause so that you're not alone in this? Maybe start a "hydro homie" club where only the finest h2o will be imbibed.

Also, I guess you can just try to regularly appreciate the fact you're not addicted or beholden to any thing.

not addicted or beholden to any thing.

Well, one less thing at any rate. Let's see how long that motivation lasts.

Have you tried decaff? You can get some that are quite nice.

I'm philosophically opposed to things-that-aren't-what-they-seem. Decaf, de-alcohol beer, vegan replacement foodstuffs.

Also, I suspect that constantly drinking coffee-that-isn't-coffee would just weaken my resolve. Am I even sticking to it in the first place if I drink decaf? I think not!

I'm going to second tea. It's hot, and in a mug, but you can drink more for the same amount of caffeine.

I'm not looking for a replacement. Well, other than water anyways.

Also, the gratis coffee machine doesn't dispense tea. Only hot water. I'd have to bring my own tea bags! What a hassle!

Here's my pep talk one man to another: Just fucking stop drinking it. You're a German for heaven's sakes, since when is your willpower weak? Job done. Onward

Yeah. And as said, on my own that would've been it. But you know us Germans' one great weakness? Peer pressure. Or rather, our strong sense for communal, prosocial behavior and cultural conformity. Refusing to drink coffee in the office is strictly over my eccentricity budget. You can't imagine the looks I get for it.

I sympathize. Just trying what often works. Best of luck.

New year's resolutions check-in:

  • Posted my ninth blog post of the year last Thursday, about the reflexive urge to assume that apparent public gaffes or mishaps were deliberately engineered as publicity stunts. Lightly edited from a comment originally posted here.
  • Went to the gym three times last week, focusing on cardio. I've realised I've been neglecting cardio for the last few months, which is having a negative impact on my energy levels, mood and waistline. For the last few weeks I've spent my lunch breaks working on my novel, but having now completed a fourth draft, I think my time might be better spent exercising. My plan is to do strength training in the gym three times a week, then run at least 5k on my lunch break, at least twice a week. Did my first 5k on Monday and felt energised in the afternoon, and my good mood carried over to the next day. Went to the gym again last night. Can deadlift 1.84x my bodyweight for 3 reps, squat 1.15x for 7 reps and bench press .87x for 6 reps.
  • Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1st.

How goes it, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @falling-star, @Tollund_Man4 and @self_made_human?

I've just been working a lot so no real time for bad habits. This new job is almost 100% in French so with that and learning how to cook a bunch of new things I can't really get away with a hangover.

Also I've gotten kind of fat for the second time in my life. 95kg at 5'10", a new record for me. I think I can lose it pretty easily, but I am getting measured for a suit soon so I might have to stay at this weight until my friend's wedding in August is complete.

Met my criteria, thanks for the reminder!

  1. Work. Working on only three things at a time which seems to be helping with the overwhelm. Still thinking about this job opportunity: if I take it I need to wrap up the PhD in the next few months.
  2. Fitness: 9 hours. Tapering a little this week for the Boston marathon which is Monday! Goal is a PR (sub 2:35:30)
  3. Intellectual Stuff: Italian class is ending, which I am happy about. Adopting the only three books at a time, and only one YouTube/Podcast and one substack/blog article a day is also helping.
  4. Finances: Talked to a financial advisor at my brokerage and he suggested that I should put money into individual bond funds rather than CDs (better liquidity and slightly better rates). Spending is low for this month, and we are working on finding a third roommate, which should ease my financial worries for the next year (if we don't find a third roommate, my rent will go up 50% at the beginning of June.
  5. Dating. Had a fun time hanging out with my friend Bella last night, but didn't and am not planning on making any romantic moves.
  6. Tarot. Great session with my ex-roommate when I asked about job stuff. The cards basically said to stop trying to please other people and do what I want to do
  7. Socializing: went to a board game bar with my lab. Will be hanging out with friends all weekend at the marathon.
  8. Screen time: 1.15 hours phone.
  9. Mental health: anxiety is 100% hunger-related. Haven't been the best about eating enough this week, so was quite anxious Friday-> Monday.

The good news: spending is $838.88 lower than it was on the same day last year.

Bad news #1: My insurance reimbursement for my $4k dental expense was... $35. Modern dental insurance is a Kafka-esque joke.

Bad news #2: I was awoken to a loud, repetitive banging outside my window the other day. It turns out that a woodpecker decided to punch a hole in the soffit of my house. The rot is extensive enough that I don't trust myself to do the work, so I'm looking at a $4k - $5k repair.

I'm reminding myself that emergencies like this are exactly why I made the resolution in the first place, but it's still frustrating.

Bad news #2: I was awoken to a loud, repetitive banging outside my window the other day. It turns out that a woodpecker decided to punch a hole in the soffit of my house. The rot is extensive enough that I don't trust myself to do the work, so I'm looking at a $4k - $5k repair.

I recently got a quote for $25k of foundation work, so I know the pain of having the budget totally blown by shit going sideways.

Goddamn. That's a right kick in the balls. I hope it works out for you.

Fucking hell. What dental work did you need done that cost 4k?

Implants are expensive, particularly when there are complications.

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