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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • Hit up exrx.net and look for weight lifting exercises that target back muscles specifically. For lower back (erector spinae), thing like weighted hyperextensions are going to target it specifically. I would suggest doing about 12 weeks where you start you back workout with basic compound lifts–deadlifts, squats, bent over barbell rows–and progress to more isolating lifts like hyperextensions at the end of the workout. I would suggest doing that 12 weeks with just 1-2 sets of 12-15 reps for each exercise, with rests of 30-90 seconds between sets and exercises; that will get your body ready to progress to more sets at higher weight and reduced repetitions. And yes, you need to change you workout every 3-4 months or so; that’s a basic principle of periodization. Changing your workout will mean more or fewer sets, with lower or higher numbers of repetitions, and different weight. In general, you’ll do a few sets of high repetitions with lower weights, and more sets of low repetitions with higher weights.

    Also, don’t forget to do abdominals; those are important stabilizing your back.

    For cardio, rowing is going to be your go-to choice for a strong back.

    I would strongly suggest getting a personal trainer for a few sessions specifically to work on your form for squats, deadlifts, etc. If you do that though, be very, very firm with them that the only thing you want is direction on form; PTs will have a strong tendency to try and sign you up for months or years of training that may or may not help with your specific goals. Look for trainers with ACSM or NSCA certifications only (most other certs are barely worth the paper they’re printed on), ans a BS in kinesiology or exercise science.


  • IDK; my partner has met ppl that have become very close friends at their workplace. I’ve become more and more isolated as I’ve worked as an adult, to the point where I have zero close friends.

    I hope to fix that this year though; I’ll be trying to get my handgun and rifle instructor cert so I can work with the Pink Pistols and Operation Blazing Sword, and connect with my local SRA chapter. E.g., try to do something good in my community, and also meet people.


  • people do not quit jobs

    Bullshit. I’ve quit jobs before. like the job I had at a veneer mill. It was boring me to tears, was so loud that ear-pro was mandatory–about 110dB, IIRC–and I was spending about an hour each day digging splinters out of my hands. (Couldn’t wear gloves b/c they didn’t have the dexterity needed for picking up a single sheet of veneer without breaking it.) I don’t think I even saw my manager more than a few times in the brief period i worked there.


  • You’re aiming for the medulla oblongata, the part of the brain that controls all the autonomic function like respiration and cardiac function. It’s right at the top of the spinal column. Hit that, and it’s lights out instantly. The easiest way to thin about the location is by putting a stick in your mouth and trying to touch you uvula, and then angled very slightly up from there, basically right through the soft palette.

    That’s why a gun in the mouth is so often used in films and TV; it’s essentially correct.



  • We know that cops can break encryption on your phone

    Depends on the phone. Cops have not managed to break the latest iPhone encryption yet, and I believe that some of the more recent Android is also currently unbroken. Regardless - if you don’t use a smartphone for doing questionable shit, there’s nothing to break. This is why burner handsets exist.

    get everything from your social media account

    Not if you don’t have one. And even if you do–a smart assassin isn’t going to post anything that’s remotely close to linking your real life to committing a murder.

    track your payment methods for your ebike get away

    Not if you steal it. Which is reportedly what happened. An even easier trick is to buy a used bicycle with cash off at your destination; you’ve already spent $1000 on a pistol with a threaded barrel, and about $2000 on the printer to print a silencer (because you sure as fuck aren’t buying a Dead Air Sandman and getting on an ATF list, right?, the printed silencer won’t last long, but it doesn’t have to), so what’s another $500 for a used bike, and $200 for a good lock and chain so that it doesn’t get ripped off while you’re whacking a CEO?

    Pro-tip: .45ACP is always subsonic, although a silencer will never make a gunshot silent by any stretch of the imagination. Best case scenario for anything other than .22LR is that it’s going to be quiet enough that you won’t destroy your hearing if you pop off a shot in a small room.

    to the CVS you bought your prepaid card with cash at

    …Which is 500 miles from where you live.

    they can use gait identification to ID you

    Easy to fool just by putting a rock in a shoe. Also an exceptionally questionable (e.g. psuedoscience) method of identification, much like bite analysis.

    use thermal vision drones to find you in some field.

    First, they have to know who and where you are in order to even be searching for you in that field. Second, thermal is not nearly as useful as you’d think. A piece of carboard, a mylar blanket, even a sheet of glass will entirely block it. It’s not even going to be able to see through moderately heavy brush or tree cover.





  • freeze drying is not the ultimate food preservation method.

    Ultimate? No. But it’s part of a suite of food preservation tools. Without watching the video–YouTube is doing that annoying thing where it requires sign-in–I can say that you need to be able to use multiple food preservation techniques. You should learn to do canning as well, and you really need an effective vacuum sealer (that can use heavy-duty mylar, versus specialty plastic bags) in order to effectively preserve freeze dried foods, and those mylar packages need to also be sealed in containers away from pests that might chew through the bags.

    Freezing food, by itself, is only useful as long as you have electricity. If you’re entirely off-grid, and have over-capacity solar system, that might be good enough, if you have a LOT of freezer space. The least expensive freezers I can find are around $25 ft^3; costs decrease slightly when you’re talking about large walk-in freezers, but that requires a building that can accept a walk-in installation, and $25,000 for a 1000ft^3 freezer is more than most people can afford.

    Drying foods in general is decent, and high sugar content–fruits in particular–can lasts decades if they’re vacuum packed with oxygen absorbers. Even though dried foods will have some moisture content, the sugars act as a preservative and prevent the growth of bacteria. (Sugar curing meat is definite a real thing, much like salt curing; more on this in a sec.)

    Canning is good for some things, but certain things can not be safely canned, and canning is slooooooooooow. It also requires a botttle/ring/seal for each and every thing that you can; seals are not reusable.

    Dry goods don’t need to be freeze-dried; you can vacuum seal most of them with oxygen absorbers and desiccants, and be fine. Things like flour can mostly be put in large buckets with gamma seal lids and be okay for years at a time. White rice stores wonderfully for the long term, as do dried beans. (However!, dried beans must be soaked prior to cooking, the soaking water discarded prior to cooking, and can not safely be eaten raw. Cooked canned beans are a better choice for anything other than very long term storage.) Brown rice has a high fat content relative to white rice, and has a bad tendency to spoil, as do nuts of all varieties; I haven’t tried vacuum sealing them with oxygen absorbers and desiccants to see if that preserves them for longer than a few years.

    Meats can be preserved by curing. This is, however, a very exacting process, and it not recommended unless you know what you’re doing. It requires a temperature and moisture controlled container and a few weeks of time, and fucking it up means that you kill yourself with bacterial contamination.

    Freeze drying works for complete meals where you can’t freeze things, and you want food that’s going to be ready-to-go, either rehydrated or dry. Yes, you can eat freeze dried things without reconstituting them, although it’s not terribly pleasant in some/many cases. If you, for instance, made a stock-pot full of red beans and rice, freeze drying would be the ideal way of preserving it and making it shelf-stable.




  • It seems like it’s absolutely possible to solve all of the unrealistic problems that exist in CRPGs. You could have a rational encumbrance system, where you can only have the armor you’re wearing, minor supplies in a backpack, and everything else has to go on a pack horse. You could have realistic hit points, where a solid hit from an enemy with a sword meant very rapid death from blood loss or organ damage, hits on armor did nothing, you got physically tired quickly and had to actually rest to feel better (ever done HIIT training?, like that), and when you were exhausted you just collapsed and got stabbed to death. They could have realistic movement speeds, where trying to walk across a kingdom would take a month in real time.

    But would it be fun? Would anyone want to play Medieval Minor Nobility Life Simulator?



  • It’s a human being at every stage of development

    Based on what? Religion? Jewish thought says that a child only exists once it draws breath.

    In cases where they didn’t consent to sex, it still doesn’t make sense to kill them.

    So, to be clear, once a person has already been deprived of their freedom and liberty by one person, they should continue to be deprived of their liberty?

    Riddle me this: where would you stand on forced organ donation? That is, you’re a tissue match to me, and I need a kidney. Would you be okay with being legally obligated to undergo surgery and give a kidney to me so that I can live? To make it a little lower stakes, would you be okay with being legally obligated to donate blood every eight weeks in order to preserve the life of people that need blood and blood products to live? Why, or why not?

    How is that different from someone being obligated to undergo the risk of carrying a pregnancy to term if they don’t want to be a parent, and especially if the were sexually assaulted?


  • Example: roids. Used appropriately, they can help improve your body.

    Correction: they can improve aspects of your body, at a very, very steep cost. Pretty much all oral anabolic steroids are C17α-alkylated, and they’re hepatotoxic (i.e., cause liver damage). All steroids will fuck up your lipid profile to one degree or another, and all of them can cause heart disease, specifically hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. While most AASs will increase red blood cell count, Boldenone in particular will sharply increase RBC production, which in turn increases blood pressure and can cause strokes. All of them will shut down the hypothalmus-pituitary-testicular axis (HPTA) feedback loop in men, leading to testicular atrophy. Most AASs will cause hair loss in men that are sensitive to DHT. AASs can fuck up your hormones enough that men can start lactating (!!!). High doses of testosterone can cause gynecomastia, because testosterone aromatizes into estradiol. In women, all AAS will cause some degree of virilization.

    There are not very many IFBB pros that make it to 80; if you want your candle to burn brightly, it’s going to burn out fast.



  • If banning them wouldn’t significantly affect firearm deaths, then why are Kamala Harris and the majority of the Democratic Party pushing for it?

    There are several reasons. First, the times they are used in crimes, they tend to create much higher casualties than you would otherwise be likely to see. The combination of a vry high velocity intermediate cartridge with a box magazine makes it very easy for a novice shooter to expend lots and lots of bullets, bullets that are generally more deadly than a pistol-caliber firearm. Secondly, it is a slippery-slope; they want to ban these now to make more extensive bans in the future seem more acceptable, esp. to courts. It’s a way of creating precedent. Third, for people that don’t grow up with firearms, they just seem more scary than wooden-stocked, full-power rifles. And last, all politicians, across the board, seem to want to maintain the supremacy of state-sponsored violence; Dems want to ban guns, Republicans want to give cops ever heavier firepower.

    Again: neither side seems interested in directly addressing root causes for violence, which are largely economic. Fix the wealth disparity in this county, eliminate the systemic racism that limits access to opportunity for non-white people, and end toxic masculinity, and you eliminate most of the gun homicides. From speaking to a criminal defense attorney that specializes in gun rights, the biggest single thing the gov’t could do to sharply reduce gun homicides would be to entirely end the way on drugs.

    However, given the number of states that have very little or even no restrictions on abortion,

    FIRST - I misspoke/I was wrong. Each trimester is roughly 12 weeks. The absolutely earliest viability is about 22 weeks, or close to the end of the second trimester. Earlier than that, and a fetus is little more than a tenant that’s not paying rent.

    This article isn’t saying what you think it’s saying. Yes, there isn’t a time limit, but most or all states do not allow abortions after fetal viability. That is, if a fetus can survive outside of the womb–heroic measures or not–you aren’t getting an abortion. Does it seem unreasonable to you to allow abortion when a fetus can not survive independently? If so, why does that seem unreasonable? Do you believe that any person should be legally required to use their body for the benefit of another person?