Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Revenge to 159: 1-5 of 9

Okay I definitely dropped the ball on writing the weekly updates. At first when realizing this I thought “okay forget it”… BUT hey why not just pick up from here.

No need to try to rewrite the weeks I didn’t write updates. Just need to pick up from here and finish strong.

  • Current weight: 169 lbs
  • Goal weight: 159 lbs
  • 4 weeks left

Okay so I’m not going to get to 159 lbs even if I somehow got to -2 lbs a week. But I can still get to like 162 maybe? Even if I just get to 165 and manage to maintain there, that’s a win.

What’s been working: pre-packaged salads and chicken, two a days

I’ve got back to the pre-packaged salads and chicken. And also stalled progress by picking up a giant bag of Cheetos at Costco. (And, of course, eating that giant bag.)

The newer thing has been aiming for two-a-days after seeing a tweet about 75 Hard and hearing about it a few times before that.

Now, when I watch and listen to interviews about 75 Hard, I hear them talk about people who cruise through it and knowing those people didn’t really do it.

Which is why I’m not saying I’m really doing 75 Hard right now. It’d be disrespectful to the program. Because if I were I wouldn’t have bought that bag of Cheetos I mentioned above.

BUT I have been reading 10 pages a day (crushing that part of the program) and getting two workouts in, one outdoor.

The program so I’m counting long walks outdoors as one of the workouts. Definitely not on that Dillon Panthers two-a-days program.

It’s starting to become something I really look forward to. For the other workout I either do another long walk on a treadmill while reading or lift heavy, following Greyskull LP—alternating combos of bench/press + squat/deadlift.

If anything, my strength is going up measurably. So I’ll take that as a win.

What can be improved: social eating, snacking

Slowly improving here and also realizing social eating is not really a thing that will slow down. (And that’s a good thing, because it means spending time with friends.)

It does mean I just need to stop eating so much during these meals.

Okay my time is up on this walk + writing session. (2nd workout of the day) time for hopefully a good night’s sleep. Then back to it tomorrow.

Hello blog my old friend

I went into an NFT fever dream. Not the insanely positive kind where I announce my early retirement on social media. Just diving into learning about how it works right in the middle of the frenzy.

I’ve followed the no-code/creator economy/content marketing/etc. space for a while and have seen a few people leave it for crypto, DeFi, NFTs, and whatever other Web 3.0 stuff there is out there.

I got a taste for how it happens. I abandoned this blog for weeks after blogging nearly daily for a few months.

But I’ll try to be back.

Anyway, it’s a magnitude shift in Web 3.0. Just following NFTs, a week of news seemed like months in other spaces. So there’s a magnitude shift in how quickly stuff seems to be happening

Then there’s the magnitude of income. When an NFT can be minted at 0.08 ETH or 0.1 ETH on secondary, it can seem like a steal.

But that’s like $300!

So there are creators who have been working on their newsletter, courses, investing in themselves, building consistently for literally years.

And then they see that they have the skills to do a pivot to Web 3.0 stuff. It’s easier to make and sell an NFT for 0.1 ETH than it is to build a video course for $300 or sell a $100/yr subscription to 3 people.

It might not be just for the money. There’s interesting tech, communities, art, etc. But money is a factor. And often a major one.

Okay back to browsing JPEGs……..

Proof of Work and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Blockchain x Games)

Trying to learn how blockchain works, beyond just throwing money in and crossing my fingers.

===

I was watching an interview between Justin Wong and Maximillion Dood about Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (TIL there’s no legitimate way to buy the game new right now.)

They talk about when MvC2 first came out. It wasn’t something that was leaking piece by piece on the internet. It just appeared all of a sudden. (That’s how I remember it, too. Thought I’d go to the arcade to play Marvel vs. Capcom and then part 2 was there from out of nowhere.)

In those initial weeks, you had limited characters until people played and unlocked characters over a few weeks. They weren’t time released, it was all through points accumulated by everyone playing the game.

(The Dreamcast was the same, but you could go online and download save data with everything unlocked and somehow throw it on a VMU.)

Digital characters were unlocked by players in the physical world.

Proof of play.

Now, let’s say that you need to get some exact score by the time you beat the game.

You have no idea what the exact score is. You just have to keep playing the game and beating it and finding out if the score matches or not.

Then imagine every MvC2 machine is networked, and everyone is trying to get that exact score match.

Some machine in a Las Vegas arcade has people playing 24/7 so more end game scores are generated. It gets more chances to match.

At some point, one of the machines gets a match. That machine releases 6.25 Bitcoin.

A new number to match is generated.

The machines keep running. The game goes on.

Revenge to 159: 0 of 8 — Good things to continue

I hit my all time heaviest weight: 176 lbs

That was after the trip to New York and Montana for a wedding in each state. Let’s call my first attempt at the road to 159 a failure and the next attempt will be the revenge tour. Where, hopefully, I’ll be able to turn the first failure into one of those “Win or learn” failures to build off of.

Some of the bloat is coming off but let’s call the starting weight 175 lbs.

  • Starting weight: 175 lbs
  • Goal weight: 159 lbs
  • Start date: August 16 (Mon)
  • Next friend’s wedding date: October 10 (Sun)

That’s 55 days, let’s call it 56 and a nice, even 8 weeks.

This is almost 2 lbs a week, which I know is pretty aggressive. But that starting weight was at full bloat after a meal and the day after wedding feasts. (My biggest small win: not going for thirds at the prime rib station, but I thought about it.)

If I drop a bunch of water weight in the first couple weeks, this could be more like 1-1.5 lbs a week. I know, I should do a DEXA scan or something like that. Maybe for the winter revenge.

So for this first check in, here’s a retro with some steps to go forward.

Nutrition

Things that worked that I should continue doing

Keep focusing on making it easy to follow some simple rules: high protein, high fiber, veggies with every meal, no snacking

  • Eating pre-packaged salads and chicken: I tried variations but the thing that was working really well (up until the trip started) was bulk packs of pre-packaged caesar salads and pre-packaged chicken breast. Convenience is king and this really makes everything so mindless and is the right balance of healthy + tastes good. Both taste better than when I try to make them from scratch. (Will this packaging destroy the earth? Collectively, over time, probably.)
  • Minimizing snacking: I installed a 2-tiered drawer in our cupboard that has the snacks in it. It’s actually sort of cumbersome and a side effect is that I think it might be helping with reducing snacking. Unintended, but I’ll take it. I also know that basically no snacking is good because the meals more than cover nutrition. That said, when snacking I’ve been pretty good about just grabbing one of the pre-packaged chicken containers and eating that.
  • Tracking with MyFitnessPal: Earlier on, I was tracking with the Drafts iOS app. This was good for increasing my mindfulness and at least thinking about tracking. But I wasn’t really paying attention to macros and calories, just eyeballing it. While I’m decent at guessing how much any individual item is (my wife is constantly impressed with this), it’s not really a useful skill in preventing myself from making bad food decisions. I switched to MyFitnessPal in the last couple weeks and that did help me make better decisions—usually in one of these major ways (1) Oh I need more protein today or (2) Oh I hit my calorie limit, I can try to cut myself off now.
  • Using some mantras (win this fight-thru, eat like an adult, I already know what that tastes like): How you talk to yourself matters. Thinking these things doesn’t always help, but it’s worth giving them a try even if they only work like 2 out of 5 times. It feels like they’re working a little more the more I use them though so who knows. No cost to continue using them and I’ll keep looking out for any others that are effective.

Movement

Things that worked that I should continue doing

Some combination of heavy weights, bodyweight, walking, and kettlebells.

  • Lift heavy – reverse pyramid 3x a week: The double progression has worked pretty well for me in the past. The lighter AMRAP for the final set always keeps things interesting and does help with the mental “oh that felt like a workout” feeling. Which might be dumb (soreness != good workout) but if it helps with motivation then it’s a good thing. That said, I need to be careful because there were a couple days where I was sore probably in the wrong ways. So I either need to warm up better or be more careful with form.
  • Bodyweight – 3RM and 5RM fighter pull up program: I just want to get my pull-ups back up. I was listening to Pat Flynn and Dan John talking about strength standards and one listener question was about pull ups. I used to know I could bang out 5 no problem. Now 5 is a struggle, as in I’m not sure I can do 5 right now. So I want to do the 3RM sequence to get to 5. Then use the 5RM sequence to get to 10 by the time I’m headed to that October wedding.
  • As many long walks as possible: Being back in New York for a week reminded me of just how much I used to walk and how that probably kept some pounds off over the years. I averaged 5 miles a day most months in New York. It’s gone way down in San Francisco and with the pandemic. But I want to get this back up by doing longer walks with Booster, walking to the gym, and aiming for one hike with Amy every weekend.
  • Kettlebells: I want to work the kettlebells back in in some way. It might be something like doing a warm up with the kettlebells 2x a day (one before the workout and one at night as a little extra practice and movement). Or it might be doing 10 minutes of light get-ups on non-heavy days. Not sure but I miss using kettlebells.

That’s that, see you for the week 1 check in. If I’m numbering these posts right, I can do week 8 final check in on the flight to New York headed to the wedding.

Info diet check-in (August 13, 2021)

This morning, I bought a book based on Tim Ferriss’s recommendation in his newsletter to just buy it without reading the description or reviews.

Lesson: the most important part of an email isn’t the subject line, it’s the “from:”

Maybe these info diet check ins can be my minimum effective dose for writing.

    Build a bit of awareness: It might help me notice that all I listen to is My First Million and Not Investment Advice, but I already knew that. It’ll be good to capture the other things that I’m listening to or reading.
    Practice writing short descriptions: I’ve always enjoyed Polina Marinova Pompliano’s The Profile and how good she is at two core newsletter elements: curiosity in the link title + succinct descript of why you’ll want to read the full profile. Maybe I can get reps in with these info diet posts.
    Reduce churn in my own writing: I pretty much write a private version of these posts anyway, scattered across Roam, Evernote, and Drafts. It’s not too big a step to write with publishing in mind.

Okay on to these links.

My First Million: Why you need a chief automation officer (w/ Steph Smith)

Invest in yourself: Shaan and Steph acknowledge this is a bit of a cop out answer to “what do you invest in?” so she goes further into what investing in herself actually means. Buy anything education related: currently taking a Python automation course. Never look at the market. Invests in her own time.

Bike metaphor: If you’ll do a big goal, it’s a cross country trip. Lay the map out. Eliminate all the stuff that’s unnecessary. Get an electric bike. Eliminate, automate, delegate.

Underrated – job shadowing: More people should be shadowing others in their jobs. First, it’s a great way to learn how to do a job. Second, it’s a great way to identify places to automate pieces of other people’s jobs.

All in vs. side hustles: The podcast was Shan’s hobby while he was at Twitch. He doesn’t think the part time approach will work for full on businesses. He’s big on mindset, so working on something part time that needs full time conviction is a recipe for failure.

Okay I was going to write more episode notes but I didn’t expect that intro to go so long.

Next post will be after this trip, back in SF.

5 creator lessons from The Suicide Squad

“Oh so that’s what they were trying to do with the first one.”

I watched The Suicide Squad last night and saw that comment somewhere on reddit or Twitter. I really enjoyed it. So here are some lessons if you’re a generalist creator.

(Light spoilers ahead.)

1.) Just run it back!

It’s sort of a reboot, except Harley Quinn’s character continues on from the first movie. It’s hard for a story to get that kind of shot again in Hollywood.

But you’re not in Hollywood!

You’re writing threads on Twitter or making videos in a single day.

Take advantage of the medium and that you don’t need permission from a studio. Get a lot of reps in and find a way to get feedback, then get even more reps in.

2.) Do it the long way

James Gunn shared on Twitter so this isn’t a huge spoiler: King Shark rips a man in half.

Vertically, the Kung Lao way. (Or the Bone Tomahawk way if you’re familiar with very very disturbing scenes. Though that’s probably another lesson: if you want to make it stick, just give a glimpse and the thud of guts. But please don’t.)

Oh yah so back to King Shark. Gunn mentions that the body ripping was a practical effect. (Though King Shark is CG added in later.)

Gives it a different look.

Same goes for doing something by hand, like morning pages. You’ll write fewer words than you would with a keyboard. But the words will be different. Your thoughts will be different.

3.) Get focused (even if you have to kill a few darlings)

There are a couple scenes where characters die earlier than expected. Built up pretty nicely then gone the next moment. Nice way to keep the audience on their toes.

When writing, it can be tempting to add a ton of examples to support the point you’re trying to make. Each additional example dilutes the rest. Sometimes 1 or 2 will get the point across. Kill the rest. (Or stick them in a parking lot to use later.)

4.) Put an explosive in your neck (or just remove your backspace key)

In Suicide Squad, the criminals each get an explosive put in their neck. If they desert the mission, the government can blow them up remotely. It’s, of course, very effective.

You don’t need to go that far.

When doing creative work, you’ll go through diverge-converge stages: drafting to revising, clown brain to editor brain, mind map to outline.

If you’re in a diverge stage, find ways to put that explosive in your neck. (I often use Cold Turkey Writer which locks me into a draft until I hit a word count or time count.)

Stay focused and don’t turn back.

5.) Storytelling is about creating contrast

Suicide Squad is all about contrasts. Bad guys as good guys. Peace through killing. B characters as star characters. A shark on land.

Every good story has these contrasts. Matthew Dicks explains this in Storyworthy:

Contrast is king in storytelling, and laughter can provide a fantastic contrast to something authentically awful.

Without jokes and things being over-the-top, Suicide Squad would just be murderers continuing to murder other people in disgusting ways for their own freedom, all organized by a murderous government.

No contrast, just depression.

Practice building up contrast in scenes and in your overall story.