I am similar wrt to bodyfat fluctuations, but interestingly enough, it did happen to me overnight. During the pandemic I reached my lowest bf% ever, single digits, despite gyms being closed.
It was after things began to open back up in summer/fall '21 that, as I started to get back into the gym, I allowed myself to "eat instinctively" and went from 160-190 in a month. The weight managed to stabilize but still slowly go up, eventually reaching in the 200's. I was hitting the weight racks but struggling to keep my weekly caloric intake in a deficit.
There's a lot more to the story in terms of what I did and learned, but in short, calorie estimates online were often over-prescribing my TDI which was a lot closer to my BMR. I now eat 600 less than my BMR every week and that's about 1.5 lbs/week lost. I'm still hitting the gym and getting 1g protein /lb of lean body mass so I am still managing to put on muscle despite being in a deficit.
But ultimately, it will have taken me 2 years of meticulous, dedicated calorie and macro tracking and diet modulation to undo that single month of damage, and return to my previous bf%. Although I have dealt with the frustration of impatience, I am finally on track and expect to hit my goals in October/November.
Joined reddit the second half of my freshman year of university in early 2008, after hearing about it from an XKCD comic on 4chan. It was during the democrat primaries (Hillary vs Obama) and between that and the science articles I was hooked.
It was not the only website of its kind, but it was the fastest for news updates and also had some content on other sites like it didn't (such as slashdot, which had the tech and science stuff but not much else). I would repost stuff to FB and managed to garner a decent amount of clout that way. It went along like that for some years but eventually reddit 'hit mainstream' and the content I reposted didn't get the same traction. At that time I remember thinking reddit wasn't "underground" anymore. I recall that thought occurring in 2012.
But that still didn't stop me from using it, except for a couple breaks it was my primary source of info and discussion and debate for many years, even to this day.
However I'm at a point though where I feel like I need to divorce myself from social media entirely (perhaps even HN). The 'debates' / discussions / etc feel as though they have run their course for me. It's like groundhog day where I feel like I've had the same interactions 1000 times over to the extent where I don't feel like it's worth the effort.
But at the same time living without social media makes my world feel much smaller. I only talk to a handful of people, my friend group has dwindled significantly, and adding new folks has become really difficult, even with sparse usage. I feel like I was so dependent on social media for so long to keep in touch with people that, now living without it, I have practically no social connections.
This has been exacerbated by my decision to live a sober life, free of any and all mind altering substances. Going out to a bar or music night loses most of its appeal without alcohol involved. Likewise for gaming without smoking. Between all this and no social media, my life has become really... Well, boring I guess. spend my days reading books, and going to the gym. It's more boring than it sounds. No social media also means no gigs and that's a bummer, may have to start looking for steady employment.
Anyway to stay on topic, I don't know what a world looks like without these things that have taken up so much of my life in the last 15+ years. I'm just trying to take it one day at a time. I want to develop other hobbies but thus far the motivation I previously leveraged from caffeinated beverages has dried up as well. So I guess I can just wait and see, and try to remain optimistic.
You touch on what is effectively the biggest problem I see with ads: how aggressive they are.
Interrupting my watching experience so you can show me 15 seconds of some chips bouncing around on the screen only serves to frustrate me and cause me to despise whatever you're selling. It's reminiscent of the "butt in chair" managerial mindset, and does not convey a solid understanding of how an intelligent person makes purchase decisions or meaningfully interacts with whatever you're peddling.
The most effective advertisements are the ones you don't even realize are advertisements. If you've ever searched reddit for product recommendations, you've likely read covert marketing campaigns disguised as casual suggestions. I'm not saying those are better, they're actually just as bad if not worse, because they are fundamentally dishonest.
In my opinion, a tolerable ad is one that does not aggravate me. Non aggressive, non intrusive, quick, to the point, and at least somewhat relevant without having to spy on me. Showing me ads for travel or hotel bookings during a video about videogames or hobby model making isn't useful to me (or anybody I presume).
It's like spam having obvious misspellings as a bandpass filter for lowered reasoning faculties. YouTube ads are made to appeal to the type of person who doesn't use adblocking. They don't care if they're intolerable to you - they already know you're not going to engage.
The question is, if ads are forced on the rest of us and we can't walk into the proverbial other room while they're on, how might we allow ads, make them useless for capturing real data about us, but have them appear valuable?
Spam is unsolicited, and will keep coming no matter what you do.
Web ads are implicitly solicited. You go to websites knowing that they will serve ads. If you don't like it, you can stop going to said websites and no more ads.
Email spam is implicitly solicited. You open your email knowing people are sending you spam. If you don't like it, you can stop opening your email and no more spam.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the 'striking because of AI' is a coopted narrative and not the actual cause of the strike. Strikes tend to occur because of infringement on worker's rights. Framing it as resistance to automation seems, to me at least, that it's to undermine the intent and confuse the goals and desired outcome.
This is just speculation and I could be wrong, I'm just going off of american cultures disdain for the working class and how private organizations endeavor to jeopardize parity for it.
AI is a real consideration, but it attracts disproportionate attention.
The real issue is, as always, money. Studios used to get away with paying less for streaming content in its early days. Now that it's very successful it's time to establish real rates.
There's also an argument about "mini rooms", where they hire fewer writers to work on a project. That's also partly an AI thing: they're afraid of the studios getting AI to do the first draft, and then hire (fewer) writers to make it not suck.
A lot of this ultimately cuts to the concept of unions in general. Studios can always get somebody to do mediocre work for cheap. That threat cuts into the earning power of those who can do better work. There is a strike because studios think they can hold out longer than the writers can.
Categorically speaking, all tropes are previously used. There are no original ideas, just ones you haven't been exposed to yet or otherwise identified.
Haven't you heard it said: 'there's nothing new under the sun'?
It's certainly more complicated than that. I spent a year and a half trying to be in a calorie deficit, meticulously tracking every calorie and wasn't able to lose weight, because I wasn't able to stay in a calorie deficit long enough.
Recently switched to keto, which has the primary function of lowering insulin levels and reduction of feelings of hunger. And within 2 months I'm 18 lbs down.
It's not simply a matter of Calories in/calories out, the kinds of calories you eat matter. 2000 calories of donuts vs 2000 of beef are vastly different nutrient profiles and you will have corresponding health effects accordingly.
Frankly, you really should be fixing and cleaning the tags with a program like tiny media manager or the like. It improves the user experience vastly, from having cover art, background/preview art, plot overviews, actor / studio lists, and clean, consistent file/folder names.
It's a very fast and easy process, I was able to complete the task for 2tb of files in an hour or two, and that's because I was being thorough. It makes the experience close to netflix in terms of quality (in several ways better even). Jellyfin's default behavior of interpreting file names is fine as it is, but clean file names is truly the more bespoke solution.
I'm fairly new to the nas hobby, got one during covid and went with jellyfin because plex wasn't free. And honestly, using it has been really effortless and it's been a treat to find it supported in various places (like having the app on my tv. I haven't run into any issues with it so far.
I can only hope that your level of sanity is more commonly adopted because judging by the replies to you it appears many have just given into the machine. Unwitting servants of Moloch.
It was after things began to open back up in summer/fall '21 that, as I started to get back into the gym, I allowed myself to "eat instinctively" and went from 160-190 in a month. The weight managed to stabilize but still slowly go up, eventually reaching in the 200's. I was hitting the weight racks but struggling to keep my weekly caloric intake in a deficit.
There's a lot more to the story in terms of what I did and learned, but in short, calorie estimates online were often over-prescribing my TDI which was a lot closer to my BMR. I now eat 600 less than my BMR every week and that's about 1.5 lbs/week lost. I'm still hitting the gym and getting 1g protein /lb of lean body mass so I am still managing to put on muscle despite being in a deficit.
But ultimately, it will have taken me 2 years of meticulous, dedicated calorie and macro tracking and diet modulation to undo that single month of damage, and return to my previous bf%. Although I have dealt with the frustration of impatience, I am finally on track and expect to hit my goals in October/November.