bitsplease

This is my first time posting here, so I'll give a bit of background,

Start Weight: 303 lbs/137kg Goal Weight: 220 lbs/100kg

Height: 6'4"/193cm

My whole family decided more or less together to get our shit together and start being healthy, my brother was the first, and he's almost 40lbs down now, then my parents joined him, then my wife, and finally I got off my butt and joined them

My routine has changed a lot from the start, but where it sits now is this

Workout Sun-Thurs - alternating gym days and running 5km - at the gym I do 35 mins on the stair stepper doing interval training, basically just doing the highest level I can manage without cheating, currently at 100 stories in those 35mins, then weight training afterwards. My 5k times are currently clocking in around 40mins, I'll be running an actual 5k next month and my hope is to get down to 35mins by then, but we'll see!

Nutrition - On a typical day I aim for around 2k calories with a macro ratio of 40% protein and 30% carbs and fat. I often miss my protein goals, but I do my best - my main concern at this stage is weight loss, so I pay more attention to the calories than the macros. On my rest days I bump up to 3k calories, which is just a bit below my TDEE. To help manage my calorie intake, I've been using Huel's Hot & Ready meals pretty much every day for lunch, mixing in Costco rotisserie chicken breasts for extra protein/flavor. It helps to have my lunch be low calorie and consistent because I enjoy having a big dinner. I also have two scoops of Whey after every workout with 2 scoops of creatine for muscle growth.

The first 15 pounds shed off really quickly, in the first few weeks, but from there I hit a bit of a plateau hovering between 15-20lbs, I was finally able to break the plateau by introducing refeed days - which I originally left out because I figured CICO was all that matters and that refeed days were just working against myself, but it turns out they help a lot as long as your long term calorie intake is still a deficit.

Right now my main focus is to drop pounds until I get to around 220, then I plan to focus mainly on building muscle and lowering my body fat % while more-or-less maintaining weight

Still a long ways to go, but I'm further along than I dared hope I would be at this stage!

Appologies if this isn't the right community, but there isn't really an r/astrophotography equivalent on Lemmy yet

Managed to get a good look at Saturn this past weekend, It's not in an ideal position for viewing yet, but it was good enough to snag this picture

Taken with a ZWO ASI224MC on an 8 inch Dobsonian telescope with a 2x barlow. The effective magnification was around 265x and no tracking was used, so the frames were captured over a dozen or so recording sessions back to back where I'd position the telescope, let Saturn track across the sensor window.

Each recording session only lasted about 15s before Saturn would leave the sensor frame. The final image was processed from around 1,000 frames using AutoStakkert, then finished in GIMP.

For those unfamiliar, the process used to generate this one picture out of the 1,000 or so frames i originally had is called "stacking". It essentially combines the best aspects of each frame to pull as much detail as possible from the whole collection, giving a final image which is significantly more detailed than any one of the original frames

You can make out some cloud bands and even the Cassini Division (that's the gap between the outer-most ring and the inner ring sections). To give a sense of scale, our moon would comfortably fit within that gap with a 1000km to spare!

Hopefully later in the season when Saturn is at opposition I can grab an even higher quality version!

Took some getting used to - but after only a day I'm already back up to my usual typing speed and loving this setup!

Kensington Trackball Riser: https://www.printables.com/model/263594-kensington-slimblade-stand Moonlander Tent Kit: https://www.printables.com/model/385536-zsa-moonlander-tent-kit

I'm re-reading the City Watch series via the new audiobook (pro-tip, listen to them at 1.2x-1.3x - I really disliked them when I listened at 1x, but speeding it up a bit really improved them). And I can't help but feel like STP went into the series with an entirely different expectation of what he was going to be writing about.

I'm talking, of course, about Carrot. Now obviously, anyone whose familiar with Sir Terry Pratchett's writing style knows that Carrot was never going to be crowned King of Ankh Morpork. His story was, right from the get-go very clearly supposed to be a subversion of the old "Long lost king from humble origins saves the city and comes into his crown" trope.

I still do get the impression though, that Carrot was planned to be the main protagonist of the series, and that Pratchett just fell in love with Vimes as a character early on and pivoted. It sure seems like the original plan was for Carrot to eventually wind up as the commander of the City Watch, with Vimes retiring, which would play into the theme of Carrot's character that he can do the most good for the city by not being King.

But it reads as though along the way Pratchett saw the potential in Vimes and had so much fun writing his character that he changed his mind. It would explain why by the final few books in the City Watch series, Carrot goes from having one of the largest shares of "screen time" to being a barely present side-character.

Thoughts?

Side Note - anyone else catch the multi-layer pune (or play on words) for Carrot's name?

A Carrot is an orange (see hair color) vegetable that grows underground until it is plucked out from underneath the soil to fulfill it's true purpose

And

Carat as in diamond, as in diamond in the rough, as he's a King living amongst "commoners"

Right now the user count Lemmys is comparatively tiny when held up against reddit - but the user count isn't the thing that makes a social media site, it's the engagement

So even if you're used to lurking, try to get a little more active! Post memes, vote on posts, talk in the comments, whatever!

If people come here and see activity, content, and discussions, they're more likely to stay and contribute their own - if they come and see a ghost town, they'll just go back to reddit

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1184436

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1185961

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1184486

Lemmy doesn’t seem to have any popular woodworking subreddits, so I thought I’d post here. Just deleted my reddit account and want to contribute some content here!

Was suggested to crosspost this here! Happy to see a woodworking community on Lemmy!

Just finished The Long Earth series by Sir Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter. I'm a huge Pratchett fan and these were my first Baxter novels. It pains me to say it, but it was kind of awful..

The whole series can be summed up by "amazing premises that go entirely to waste". The pacing and plot of the books are just terrible, to be frank - each book feels like 9/10 exposition 1/10 plot & character development.

So many fascinating plot points are just abandoned without ever being revisited.

Where did the rectangle buildings with the ray guns come from?

What became of the Beagles after humanities intervention?

Who built the martian beanstalk, and what became of them?

What happened to the fragment of Lobsong/Abraham that was left in the satellite on the Silver Beetle world?

Who sent "The Invitation", and why?

And then even more plot points are kept going, but it feels clear that Baxter really had no idea what to do with them.

The Next show up (out of nowhere) and then proceed to just spend all their time naval gazing until the Deus Ex Machina that is "The Thinker"

Valhalla's quiet revolution was the subject of the whole second book - but then at the point of the third book, basically nothing has changed.

The Traversers went from being an existential threat to the whole long Earth to just being a cool tourist destination, seemingly overnight.

Lobsang's avatar which he sent to 1st person singular was supposed to become absorbed into it, but it turns out he was just having a beach vacation the whole time.

Ultimately I wound up severely dissapointed given how excited I was in the first half of the first book. It's an amazing premise and has so much potential. But ultimately it feels squandered.

I had to really force myself to finish the final book, without much enjoyment

Lemmy doesn’t seem to have any popular woodworking subreddits, so I thought I’d post here. Just deleted my reddit account and want to contribute some content here!