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Wellness Wednesday for April 19, 2023

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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General updates

tldr for the entire post - started studying 6 hours daily, working out, coworking, had my grandads 90th birthday, stopped hating my parents, saw LOTR, Cyberpunk Edgerunners and John Wick 4. All three are amazing and finally picked up Ramayana and chess for my leisure.

So currently I do math (three different subjects), python (udemy course titled python data science machine learning bootcamp) which has some very rudimentary python in the beginning followed by more advanced stuff at the end. It is on ude,y, has about 25 hours worth of lectures. My aim is to do about 4.5 hours of math and finish this course before the months ends or the next month's first week. After that fast.ai and then my sabbatical would take over my life with me returning to formal logic, nannd 2 tetris and lots and lots of pure C programming.

The whole point is to take these next 6 months and hammer home the real basics so that I can learn to think instead of just matching patterns or lying about things. Anyone can cram questions for interviews but to actually learn under someone good one on one and do so to ensure I not only cover my own gaps but those modern education has is a worthwhile idea.

My Initiation

I also about a month and a half ago got my janeu, the sacred thread which is given to men of very very few clans when they come of age, I was the first to revive the tradition in my house (not just home, house as in the house in terms of clans under the ruling family, feudal lords) and was overwhelmed with the support I recieved from all my e friends. You recieve gifts on that day and I got close to 500 usd (500 is the exact conversion, to inr closer to like 5k in terms of purchaing power in India) in under 24 hours. I only asked for 11 rupees and got close to a hundred donations from friends (mostly) and family in less than 24 hours.

My grandad also turned 90 so we had a large party for him with close to 60 or so guests at our house. I have stopped hating my parents or even wanting to cut them off permanently, making money, having any kind of status. The people who showed up and the kinds of gifts he got did show me that my family indeed is doing well and my disdain for them is more out of my spite for them pointing out my shortcomings rather than anything rational.

I still have issues with my oneitis (I see her in my dreams sometimes. Will leave town when my sabbatical ends. I know what to do, just that time and situations right now are testing me. All this PUA knowldege, nowhere to implement it lol, still stuck on the same chick) and I still have depression and agitation according to my psychiatrists but co working with a bunch of friends my age and older has helped tremendously. I will also officially graduate uni in the next month so another thing I look forward to. My last update was very gloomy and one of my friends even called me upon reading it and spoke to me for hours trying to reassure me, he was right and it has been relatively alright since then. I appreciate all the good things I have, whether it is such gestures by friends or helpful comments on these forums.

Meeting e friends irl

I met one very close e friend recently and he bought me a pair of swords attached to a shield as a gift for my initiation on behalf of his own self and some other friends. We went out, smoked cigarettes, watched some movies and I had a great time with him overall.

Working out

I gained 5 lbs of weight and now weigh 150 lbs, it is not all fat because I can see my face better, same for my abdominal area. I started working out again at home using HIT style bodyweight workout as mentioned in project kratos (by Drew Baye, you can find it online, ideal workout routine tbh), going to total failure on 12 exercises in a circuit is plenty painful so I wish to keep this up for at least 2 if not 3 days a week and slowly gain more quality weight. 145 at 6'0 is very skinny given I have long limbs. I can see all my lifts go up each time I workout and it takes less than half an hour with little to no equipment.

All good for now. Just need to keep this up, build momentum and ensure I rest properly. Proper rest (meditation, actual real leisure, social interactions, sleep etc) are much much more important than people think them to be. I cut my working out to two days for this week due to bad sleep last week due to work and saw great improvements. I will switch to 3 a week now and study more but cutting back at times is important.

Pop Culture

I saw three things that are must watch according to me. Cinema will never be high art the way literature is but it is damn fun. Cyberpunk Edgerunners (Anime on Netflix), John Wick 4 (watch it in theatres) and LOTR extended edition, all were a treat to watch and left a tremendous impression on me.

Highly recommend anyone who has a gf to watch Cyberpunk Edgerunners with her. Edgerunners is a great emotional rollerocaster of an anime whereas John Wick 4 is the second best action movie I have seen, maybe as good as Mad Max Fury Road. Everything about them is brilliant, just go ahead and watch both. Also LOTR extended editon, all three movies are fantastic and Tolkien was a genius. He was able to craft a tale that manages to tell a story that makes you appreciate the atavtistic values your own forefathers defended. The entire thing is beautiful, I had never read the novels and will never watch the garbage amazon is putting out but the original trilogy is a work of pure art. Will review all three things this friday on the fun thread. I cannot imagine comparing harry potter garbage to these things. I was blown away by harry potter as an 8th grader but this is aeons ahead. Truly fantastic.

Leisure

My leisure is Chess and Ramayana as I stated earlier. Ramayana is an amazing epic, Lord Ram, the protagonist whilst an incarnation of Lord Vishnu was never aware of his own divnity and hence his journey through the world is not that of an immortal being but rather that of a mortal man going against the worst evil of his time and winning against it. The tale of a man who did everything he could to live by Dharma and hence is remembered as Dharma Incarnate. He never lived a happy life, his wife chose exile after his victory and his homecoming which we celebrate as Diwali was the only time in his life where his entire family was happy as many suggest that Mata Sita was pregnant with their unborn twins then. I cannot put it down, I love reading it. Ram is everything you can hope a man to be and more in ways that you just cannot help but idolize him and for good reason. Read the epic, I am reading the goldman translation and recommend it highly.

Chess is a fun way to pass time too, I had many exciting games but Ramayana is still my go to.

Until next time!

The Lord of the Rings is an excellent movie trilogy, but in some ways totally misses the point of the books. It gets so many other things right, such as Tolkien's careful balance of serious drama and threat with beauty, humor, and action, and some choices are simply inspired - Peter Jackson's imagining of Sauron atop Barad-dur is pure genius, discarding the letter of the original to capture it's spirit. It's unimaginably bold that such a movie could have been made in the early aughts. At the same time, key characters and plot points are mangled almost beyond recognition. The bizarre thing is that it would not even have been that hard to get it right.

But then, Tolkien's prose is so difficult to follow up.

It is excellent and I appreciate it because the fact that it got made and that too with a high budget alongwith universal acclaim, high box offic numbers and oscar wins is a big fat W. They payoff was so good, cannot recommend watching them enough, amazing fantasy movies, need to read the novels too now. Cannot imagine people bothe comparing GOT or harry potter to something good like this.

Btw, any other thots on my post?

It's good that you are feeling better towards your family. I don't think that people have to like their family but it's important not to carry hatred around.