They are the closest for me to the vibe of early trapo. Also can’t recall which guy, but one of the Brit’s in that show does hilarious impressions. The cast the net wide enough that I don’t find the otherwise British focus to be a downside.
Man that rings true. When I contemplate what it would be like to extract myself from my current home, it overwhelms me and my brain just defaults to: “I would prefer to be forced to flee and live with almost nothing rather than go through trying to package and move everything”
I think coffee use is growing pretty rapidly, but it’s definitely a tea culture, so coffee is a small piece of the market. But basically a decade or two ago they probably didn’t much coffee at all, and now there are Starbucks and local chains that have coffee all over the place in Beijing (this could be money and Olympic effect though, haven’t been anywhere else). I did get a great coffee at a local chain in Xian though, and you could only pay through WeChat. The cashier was really nice to us (you can’t pay with WeChat unless you have a Chinese bank acct, so no dice for tourists) and she paid for us and we gave her cash.
But yeah—won’t replace US consumption. Maybe the Brazilians are looking to hedge—assuming that their sales will drop somewhat to US because of tariffs but not entirely, and making up difference by sending to China, which could also grow over time.
I with ya on that one. Can’t remember if they’re the same or a different one but I also dig the hawk moths, the ones that are like hummingbirds I think.
Yes actually I saw a bird with one in its mouth, so hopefully they will be good eats and be kept in check. Despite seeing tons I haven’t heard of major ag issues where I am yet. Probably just took a year for the local predators to figure out they were valid food hehe.
That’s a spotted lantern fly nymph. Technically she should crush it, but they’ve already spread everywhere so not sure if it matters at this point…
It’s the god awful axios house style—helpful to hide AI content and assuming your readers can’t read or handle content that takes more than 15 seconds.
The struggle is real. I’ve tried lots of stuff, with variable rates of success. No clear method to solve this issue reliably, but a couple things you can try:
-make a quick list of 4 or 5 items you think you might want to do, rank them by time estimated to do them or get into them. Starting with a quick one often gets some juices going, and may make doing a more involved task easier to tackle.
-pick something random, set a timer for 25 mins, and agree to yourself that regardless of progress or outcome, you’re going to mess with random task only for 25 mins. The short time limit allows your brain to counter the idea that you’ll be wasting time if the task isn’t the right one and missing out on the opportunity to do a more fun engaging activity. Limiting distraction devices, depending on what you’re trying to get into here, can be helpful to avoid distraction
-if other things aren’t working, and the paralysis is there, I often decide that I need to move somewhere else, or lie down for a shorting, etc. basically you tell yourself “you don’t have to do anything, but you can’t just sit here spinning or thinking about it—take a Nap or a lie down and do breathing exercises for 10 mins. Sometimes after doing this, changing location/and mental spiral process, I’ll find I have the juice to actually start something.
-along the same lines, have a couple of neutral but basically “always beneficial” activities in your head that you can use as a way to shake things up. Going for a quick walk will almost never be a useless act (you get exercise, maybe daylight or some greenery, your eyes get to focus on stuff farther away than 3’) or playing with a pet. I often find no matter what I’m spinning about a walk or something physical activity can help change things up and reset my mental state a bit, and if not, well I still did something beneficial for myself; I got some movement in.
-the pet one reminds me; often having an activity that involves another creature, whether human or animal, can be motivating. I might not be able to motivate to go for a walk on my own, but when I combine it with the fact that my dog will enjoy and needs to go outside, that can throw it over the threshold.
-standard advice about breaking things into smaller parts—if you really want to set up that new gadget, but you constantly do like me and imaging that the task can only be satisfyingly complete if you fully install, on figure and get it working precisely as want, you may avoid the activity because you intuitively understand that it’s unrealistic in the time you have. Instead, try telling yourself: just get it unboxed, and maybe plugged in. I can configure it other time.
-Alternatively if I have task I’m procrastinating on a lot, sometimes I try and grease the wheels so to speak—I agree that I’m not going to replace that faucet in the bathroom, but what I am agoing to do is go collect the tools I’ll need into a bucket, and place it congenitally so that when I do feel like tackling the faucet, I won’t wave off after getting overwhelmed thinking about the prep I have to do.
-try visualizing why you want to do activity x. Sometimes these things can devolve to the level of chores, so that what was intended as a hobby/fun activity can begin to read as an obligation with shame attached “I never built that stupid model that I spent all that money on…” try to think of how doing the activiy might make you feel in a good way, or what skills you wanted to explore by doing it. That kind of reframing seems simple, but can sometimes be powerful in changing your approach. Also, sometimes you realize that you don’t really like the activity or want to do it, but feel obligated to continue sine you’re feeling shame about how you “never properly follow through”. I don’t advocate for just quitting things when they get challenging, but you simply can’t do everything., and some things just ain’t going to be your cup of tea. I joined a virtual flight sim squadron once, and while it was initially very neat and educational, I found myself starting to dread the scheduled get togethers. I stuck weeks longer than I should have out of a fear of “Being a quitter” until I finally realized that I was only showing up to not quit, not because I was enjoying my time. Once I realized that and ended my involvement in the activity, I felt such a huge relief…
-when in doubt; cull. A lot of times my task-paralysis will spring from having too many things on my plate to choose from, or an unrealistic idea of what could be possible. I’ve been working on forcing myself to pare down, maybe. I started with 5 options, but since I know I can’t do all 5 things, I need to make the decision space smaller. You can try randomly moving stuff into the future, or do A/B testing: “if I had to chose between the first and second task, do I have a strong feeling between the two?”
-if you feel discouraged and stagnant, take a moment and think back and see if you notice areas that youe improved with over time—maybe you astarted a hobby 3 years ago, and dipped in and out, and maybe you’re actually better at it you used to be.
-and of course, the most important and sometimes hardest thing: let yourself off the hook. Remind yourself that you don’t have to do anything, and even if you stare at a wall for 30 minutes, that’s not a “waste” or useless. Work on reducing self-shame. Accept that you may have to rotate in and out of hobbies and activities to progress, and that that’s fine. Accept that this acceptance will always be a work in progress and you will likely never become the worlds number one swordsman or able to manipulate objects with telekinesis after mastering your mind by studying Buddhist meditation techniques. Whenever you can summon the awareness to do it, be kind to yourself.
Yeah forgot that one—that’s a huge one also.
Yeah my experience with them mirrors yours. I wouldn’t claim they’re safe, or they won’t kill me, but there are multiple major ways they don’t affect me the way cigarettes did—sense of smell, lung capacity/congestion, awful smell leaching into clothes, etc.
From a harm reduction standpoint, I think they have a good use case. I don’t like nicotine gum or pouches, I want the throat hit/nicotine feeling. Early vapes didn’t really do it for me, but I kept with em to make SO happy. Then I found Nov salts and that gave me what I was looking for.
I scanned through various reporting for the same question. They tested 3 brands of cheap disposable vape (article cites there being something like 100 brands of disposable vape on the market). Pretty sure these are all-in-one units; I don’t even think they have pod cartridges—so you use it and throw the whole thing out, batteries and hardware included. So they would have incentive to be the cheapest components possible and to cut corners. There’s a line in one of the articles that said something like they have worse chemicals than cigarettes which are worse than refillable vapes, suggesting these are bad, cigarettes bad, refillable less bad to some undefined degree. While they mention the vape liquid as a cause a little bit, a lot of the bad stuff seems to be coming off the hardware with heat—so like leaded wires and atomizers with bad metals on or near them.
All that to say that as per usual reporting tries to lump all vaping into this one mysterious bad category (thinking here about how that stuff with off-market internet THC vapes was used to support headlines like “vaping destroying lungs of zoomers overnight”). I doubt vaping is safe, but even so I would prefer clear and transparent info about it, and often it seems like there’s just a policy decision/agenda-driven bent to a lot of the reporting.
My guess is that if you get a larger system with better quality parts, it’s going to be safer generally than smaller/and more disposable oriented stuff.
He’s posting this picture for transparency, and because the rest of the media refuses to post it.
Former rower also, co-sign all of this. Form/technique is key, and contrary to most people’s assumptions, the machine is, like you said about a stable core and leg power with arms doing not much till the end of stroke. Definitely worth watching stuff to get the form down, most people use the machines incorrectly.
Nice thing is the difficulty is mostly self driven—and comes down to split times. I’ve had erg sessions where I barely broke a sweat. But we also had some erg races… where we all ended up puking haha. Do not miss that.
Shouldn’t be tough on knees unless they have significant mobility issues with bending the joint.
I would search around a bit on craigslist or Facebook marketplace or whatever and see if you can find a second hand concept II air machine. There should be a fair few of those in circulation.
Every time I’ve bought sub 200 dollar home excersize machines off amazon I’ve been disappointed (3 times).
Also this just could be my hours spent on the machine back in the day, but… it can be pretty boring. Unlike a stationary bike, your hands are also engaged all the time which is good for workout, not means you’re not playing with tablets or books etc.
Is this fairly unprecedented? What I mean is sure many leaders in last 20 years have threatened conflict and stuff, but like directly posting on social media that they’ll utterly destroy a country and murder civilians as punishment if they don’t get what they want?
I’m sure Bush said some stuff in the 9/11 GWOT years and Russia does its veiled threat thing here and there, Iran talks vaguely of destroying great satans once and a while but this is like a specific threat of annihilation to a civilian population.
Like usually the threats are couched in metaphors, I guess, and this is clearly non-metaphorical.
Heartwarming Buffalo-interest story.