eupraxia

This is a context where what works for different people tends to vary a lot, so experiment with a few different strategies and find what you like best! As long as you’re pushing yourself close to muscular failure for a couple sets, you probably will see an increase in strength regardless of the particular loading strategy.

Usually it’s best for warmup sets to not be fatiguing at all - you want to save your energy for the heavy working sets close to failure that will provide the most stimulus. So I’d go for 6-8 reps at about half the weight you want to do in your first working set. Warmups are just to get comfortable with the movement and make any adjustments before you do your working sets.

You may like “wave loading” - progressively lowering the reps and increasing the weight over the course of your sets. All sets are performed within a rep or two of failure, but e.g. the first set is failure after 8-10 reps, second set is failure after 6-8 reps, third is failure after 4-6 reps, or something similar. You can use a 1RM calculator to estimate what difference in weight would bring you down from one rep range to another.

It may or may not also be helpful to bring yourself completely to failure in the first set to ensure you’re stopping only when you cannot possibly do more reps, and not due to sensation of weakness, slowing of the movement, or moderate reduction in range. To do this, you’ll want to keep doing reps until the cable absolutely will not move - you might have a few more reps in the tank on your first set than you realize. Raising the rep range a bit can also help with this.

(also, re: another question from the original post, you can do less than 6-7 reps of a movement and get stronger if you’re getting close to muscular failure. I do a lot of sets in the 3-5 rep range, not all the time, but especially for big compound movements it can be great.)

Might just be the flare of the pant legs, but it looks like her knees are hyper extended way beyond fully straight to me lol. The stretch itself doesn’t have to be too hard on your knees though!

knee crunching noises

It’s pretty much a standing pancake stretch, a common stretch for people working on flexibility in their splits and straddles. I was unaware it’s seen as a horny pose lol. It’s pretty intense in your hamstrings and adductors. Definitely possible to train past 30, but requires starting light and doing it consistently over many months.

sameeeee! It’s a form of self-massage, and massage is well understood more generally. it won’t make muscles longer but it’ll help a lot with adhesions, tender points and postural tension.

recently I’ve been getting some great results out of using a harder plastic massage ball for some areas, seems to get deep into my psoas, quads and calves especially. also love using a racked barbell to mobilize triceps, rotator cuff, and hamstrings! it hurts so good!

It’ll just do other things than other forms of exercise. Some train intensely for flexibility and so stretching is most of what they do! Most athletes except gymnasts, aerialists, etc don’t have the same demand for flexibility and so don’t need as much static stretching. But I think most people could benefit from a few stretches, especially as they get older.

absolutely this!

I also think static stretching has its place in injury prevention for day-to-day sprains and injuries. Longer, more pliable muscles = not tearing your hamstring if you accidentally fall into a split. They can be great teaching tools too, and can incorporate some core training.

But otherwise foam rolling, banded distractions, dynamic warmups get the job done just fine. Even just starting right into a warmup set if the motion feels good already.

This is why you shouldn’t kill rattlesnakes. If we kill the rattlesnakes that make themselves known, over time they adapt to not rattle before striking.

I’m standing outside the LL Bean

…tryna get some free woman sweaters, know what I mean?

This tracks for how a lot of people use the app, but depending on where you are you can also have some fairly normal (for a dating site) conversations with people as well. I spent a couple months on Grindr despite not being interested in hookups, since it’s a decent way to meet other trans folk in my area. My inbox was mostly dick pics but I also met some amazing people I’m still with several years later!

Yeah, 100%. This kind of advice can maybe make sense if you’re starting a startup, but everyone employed at that stage needs to be on equal ground and well-protected. If they’re not, then that can still be fine, but they can’t be expected to put as much of their lives into your product. They’re contractors you’re hiring for some shit-shoveling and maybe it’s best to be honest about that.

The unfortunate thing in tech is that, due to pushing “learning to code” as a universal employment option, there’s always a pool of idealistic fresh blood that is willing to crunch for you if you make vague mention of being in it together, when a few people stand to gain the vast majority of the profit if the company’s product is successful. By the time the new recruits are old and bitter and burnt out, you can lay em off for poor performance (or cannibalize the company at large) and hire some more doe-eyed interns.

If you’re expecting your employees to consistently work long hours for you, they need to have the same stake as you do. They need flexibility to take care of their mental and physical health as needed. You should encourage them to unionize and collectively bargain for their needs once they come in conflict with yours, because they absolutely will. You can’t afford to lose these people, because it’s rare to find people that won’t get ground into dust doing this because they want it as bad as you. so make it sustainable and more than worth their while. if you can’t find these people? maybe your app sucks.

these types view themselves as above the labor they’re hiring because they got there first / had the means to form a company and I fucking hate it.

This was one of the more baffling experiences in coming out - seeing some of the most scientifically minded, media literate people I know suddenly shut off all of those instincts when they encountered “the trans debate.” Like someone with a healthy amount of skepticism around statistics linking me bullshit “average number of sexual partners” figures from a conversion therapy lobbying group. Or someone with an active dislike of sports suddenly deciding that the sanctity of women’s sports is more important than their relationship with their daughter.

The best explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that gender is regimented by complex trauma, often when we are children, and these are the types of cognitive distortions that occur when we’re in fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses. Flashbacks are often thought of as vivid sensory experiences i.e. re-experiencing the traumatic event, but it’s a spectrum of responses. Many are more subtle and feel extremely normal in the moment, while our ability to reason is actually overtaken by our need to feel safe in the face of a perceived threat.

I think this kind of statistics vomit can sometimes be a “flight” response to a perceived threat of someone being trans in proximity to them. Flight responses are characterized as attempting to avoid a threat by throwing oneself into action not to overcome, but escape the threat. Perhaps a wall of text with nuanced-and-reasoned set dressing and lots of links and numbers feels like a wall between them and “the problem.”

definitely seconding this - I used it the most when I was using Unreal Engine at work and was struggling to use their very incomplete artist/designer-focused documentation. I’d give it a problem I was having, it’d spit out some symbol that seems related, I’d search it in source to find out what it actually does and how to use it. Sometimes I’d get a hilariously convenient hallucinated answer like “oh yeah just call SolveMyProblem()!” but most of the time it’d give me a good place to start looking. it wouldn’t be necessary if UE had proper internal documentation, but I’m sure Epic would just get GPT to write it anyway.

“I love dogs! I’ve always loved dogs!” has to be one of the funniest movie lines I’ve heard. but for my money it was probably the bees choosing their space queen because they “respect royalty”

do actually recommend getting some friends and drinks to see this one, we laughed our asses off at space-twilight and had a good time

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and for anyone who’s played the base game - make sure to check out the DLC, it’s essentially a sequel! and I found it even more fascinating and affecting. an improvement on all fronts to an already very special game.

I’m of the opinion both violent and nonviolent means are probably necessary and there’s plenty of nonviolent means of engagement. no war has been fought without support from somewhere, whether that’s a national war machine or the supporting element of an insurgency. there’s always logistics, resources, and well organization that has to occur.

I’m in no condition to fight myself, but over the coming decades I’m gonna have to be thinking about how much violence I’m comfortable being around and how much we can support people in the thick of it. violence is definitely present already in day to day life, but it’s more of an orphan-crushing-machine kind of violence that feels more normal.

Hi, this sentiment from non-americans pisses me off and it’s okay, but I feel it’s important to explain why so I’m copying another comment I made today.

Goodness knows some of us are trying our best. I mean keep in mind our country is a democracy in name but systemically props up white supremacists in excess of the real popular opinion. And a media disinformation machine keeps the working class divided against itself, with open support from the wealthiest and owners of the most popular social media platforms. Social media platforms that, let’s be honest, are super recent inventions we are not yet capable of engaging with safely. It makes it an uphill battle to try to reach out to people whose necks aren’t on the line. And the responsibility to do so falls upon the disenfranchised themselves, who are increasingly saddled with economic and health burdens that might just kill us someday.

I get the potshots at Americans, but frankly I don’t plan on taking the blame if this goes tits up - many of us did a hell of a lot more than vote to resist fascism. Nothing happened here that isn’t happening elsewhere. And I’ll fight the notion that citizens at large are the problem. It’s a cynical outlook that serves to individualize the responsibility for a systematic disaster. Our country was built to make this possible after all. And I sure as hell know I don’t plan on giving up. Kind of morbidly curious about how much of an incompetent clusterfuck Project 2025’s implementation will be.

Victory or no, fascists are paper tigers and I plan on sticking around to remind them of that fact however I can.

omg I just wrote a comment about a student project with this mechanic, wishing to see it in a full production and then scrolled down and here you are telling me that game actually exists! Thank you 😁

I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you’d click to send out a pulse, and you’d get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn’t directly see anything moving - you’d have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.

Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I’d love to see that mechanic in a full game production.

(edit: apparently that full game exists, it’s called Perception, and I’m absolutely giving it a shot!)