Lentils, my friend. They don’t need soaking. Aside from soups and stews here’s a fun recipe:

Find some wheat gluten, could be in the baking aisle, maybe in the “ethnic” aisle with Asian stuff as it’s used for making seitan. I got some from a health food store where I felt like I was carrying explosives as I strolled past bourgeois folks and their toddler on a leash.

• 2 parts cooked lentils (I like red lentils, could substitute chickpeas), puréed and cooled
• 1 part wheat gluten.
• 1 part breadcrumbs

Add water or broth sparingly until you can knead it all into a rough dough. Spices to taste.

Roll into "meat"balls or burgers. Bonus: gluten is protein.

Fry or bake.

A second tip, frozen veggies and fruit retain a lot of their nutrients. Best to buy a kilogram or two of frozen berries in winter rather than a wee clamshell of tasteless berries flown in from Peru for the same price.

Third, tofu is often cheaper in Asian groceries than in supermarkets. Cube it, toss it in salt, white pepper, and cornstarch, fry until golden brown. The cornstarch gives it a good crispy layer. Mix soy sauce, oyster sauce (available with no actual oysters as ingredient too), white sugar, stir fry veg of choice. Serve over rice.

William Basinski - Disintegration Loops

1-2 lbs a week is the MAXIMUM you should be losing.

Find a TDEE calculator (total daily energy expenditure). It’ll give you a rough idea of how many calories you need to maintain your current weight.

Eat less than that. Weighing your food is critical or else you’re lying to yourself.

It’s near impossible to exercise yourself out of a calorie surplus unless you already do endurance sports and if you’re looking for drastic weight loss chances are you can’t handle that much cardio right away without dying.

All fad diets are a way to trick you into eating less than maintenance. Keto? You won’t be able to get enough calories - so you lose weight - although rarely some people manage to maintain on a keto diet. Vegan? Lose weight due to reduced fat intake and fat is calorie-dense. Intermittent fasting? Just hard to eat 3000+ calories in one meal per day.

The world ends on 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

Find a music teacher in real life. There is no substitute. They will be able to see very subtle things in your technique that are hindering you. They can give you feedback in real time. Video lessons from the greatest guitarist will not come close to in-person lessons from a decent guitarist.

Also make friends with other guitarists and play music with them. Music is a social thing.

I got lessons to start off with and it helped a lot. Then years later I tried to learn jazz on my own and I was hopeless. Six months with a teacher got me to where 3 years on my own would have gotten me. The teacher identified gaps in my skills I was completely blind to - I’d have reinforced my strengths while ignoring my weaknesses.

Here is the website in question

NTS

That’s awesome! People can put on muscle at any age. At some point there’s no way you could get massive but you can still benefit from it.

Growing up broke will make you feel broke for all your life no matter how much you save up. Therapy helps. Luckily with money you can afford therapy.

Lifting weights and bulking up.

I was underweight most of my life, not severely, but enough where I’d get comments. I hated summer because I hated my skinny arms being exposed. Often avoided wearing shorts even in the heat. Almost never went swimming or to the beach. People don’t say “wow you’re a fat fuck” to people they know but they WILL comment on how skinny you are.

I started lifting, put on 25 lbs so far. I look better, have more energy, and more confidence in my body. Fewer random aches and pains. My mood has improved (turns out not eating can worsen anxiety and make you tired and depressed). While bulking I’ve paid attention finally to what foods digest well or not and so eating has become self-care rather than a chore. I’ve had to replace my entire wardrobe except shoes and hats so I took the time to overhaul my look. I don’t dress flashy now but I dress a lot less like an ignoreable wallflower and more in shit I like. I get more positive attention from hot people and I’m not even super jacked yet, I just went from skinny to normal.

If you play by the rules while your enemy doesn’t, you’ll be destroyed. Machiavelli said as much. So USA’s traditional allies have to start playing dirty to survive.

Understandable, I also do things the difficult way in my hobbies.

You can also get pre-mixed stuff if all that is a hassle.

I got a wooden cutting board and a tube each of oil and some stuff that seals it, those have lasted for 8 years now maybe.

New years’ resolutions don’t really work for 2 reasons:

• You’re in survival mode so a year-long project is impossible to keep up, you’re living from one day to the next or paycheque-to-paycheque.

Or,

• You’re doing well enough to think of long time horizons. Likely then you have many medium- to long-term goals on the go, and you don’t have to start them in the new year.

I find myself luckily in the latter case. I’ll take the new year as a chance to evaluate where I am with my goals and adjust priorities, if needed.

Goal: put on muscle mass.

Do exercises within all of these categories:

• Vertical press
• Horizontal press
• Vertical pull
• Horizontal pull
• Squat
• Hip hinge

Any program I do must have those. Beyond that, isolation exercises as needed. I’m adding shoulders and arms as I want big ass arms.

This year I mostly did 3x a week full body. Now I’m gonna change to Upper, Shoulders/Arms, Lower. More ShArms to bro out, less leg frequency as they’re growing faster than everything else.

Estimate your total daily energy expenditure:

https://tdeecalculator.net/

Eat in a caloric deficit. You will need to weigh your food and track calories, at least for a while.

Weigh yourself and see if the weight is going in the right direction and not losing too fast either. Adjust calories as needed.

It’s way harder than just these steps but this is the foundation. Personally I found the food weighing and calorie counting massively stressful but I got a good sense of how much to eat from doing it from a few weeks. Now I check the scale and log weight and make sure it’s going the way I want it.

Also talk to a therapist. I needed one to get over certain mental barriers and to re-evaluate my relationship to food and my body image.

Have used the apps on and off for a while. When things didn’t go well on them and swiping and chatting only to be ghosted was taking a toll on me, I deleted them and focused on other things in my life for a few months, then returned.

When I still set myself as looking for men on the apps, I’d get a 10:1 ratio of likes from men to women/NB. Men who swiped on me would often be obviously incompatible if they read my profile or have minimum effort profiles. So I turned off looking for men on the apps.

Where I live is pretty accepting of LGBTQ+ people and there’s a good sized queer scene IRL so I can easily find events to meet queer people. However I have severe RBF, generally act unapproachable in-person, look a little scary, am clueless to hints, and don’t drink or party, so for meeting women I use the apps and IRL events specifically for single people.

Not a lot of success so far, but I’ve learned a LOT about what I don’t like in a person. I’ve learned to listen to my instincts. When things felt off and I carried on with the dates I met on the apps, things went badly. As a result, I’m much more in touch with what I want too. I was in a long-term relationship for years before where I compromised too much and settled with someone who I never should have. Dating many people has allowed my own preferences and desires to resurface and has given me a lot of confidence and self-esteem back.

Early teens:

D’Angelo’s video for Untitled (How Does It Feel)? made me realize I like dudes too. Round the same time I remember blushing heavily watching the male gym teacher do pushups.

Knew I liked women earlier when some kid snuck a stack of porno mags and a bunch of kids flipped thru em ogling the titties etc.

Sure, they’re not a bad place to shop. But making it a personality trait is excessive.

Also Costco hotdog is the only true stablecoin.

Apparently the first world is free or something, yet everyone is so amazingly conformist. From the way they speak to the way they dress to the work they do and friendships and relationships, the vast majority is content to live a life of greige and shopping at Costco.