December 7th - Talking about December 6th (¡crazy wall of text!), Decent Bench and Squat

 07.12.2024

Lovely day today so far. Woke up miraculously twenty minutes after missing my alarm. A little exhausted... Yesterday, I gotta tell you, was simply an amazing day for me. I slept very little yesterday, in contrast to two previous days. I had an insane amount of fun over the day. I had the most fun I had in years, or possibly ever playing GTAO casually yesterday - just doing the good old delivery missions while joking with various gamer anons in Russian lobbies. The first one was Russian, it was a lot of fun. I did two boat delivery missions in a full lobby - you know, it's kind of boring mission when you're the only one playing in 'your group', cause it's meant to be done as an 'organisation'. And other players see you on the map and are being constantly given directives to go and grief you, even though they'll receive very little for it except for mental satisfaction. I managed to do one full mission before getting griefed, so I was happy that I did all the deliveries on time. That one griefer was annoying all the players in the lobby, so I went after him with a plane myself, quickly ending up scaring him into going passive mode, with him even complaining to me about him getting griefed now. That was a win, exciting. I sound so silly when I write all that, but it was so much fun yesterday, mostly due to biochemistry, the right conditions in the brain. Moderation, you see, it's very important. Then I had the same situation in the game - there was a proper griefer war happening in the lobby while I tried to deliver stuff near the city. I got griefed twice, with the griefer guy not managing to destroy the boat the first time, so I ended up delivering 12 or 13 out of 15 items, which is very good, especially in a full lobby, since you get a lot more money for each player present. I was going to go after that griefer guy, but he ended up leaving, so I went after another couple of griefers who were trying to play with their aeroplanes. I ended up doing something weird as I ambushed them at the airport and exploded them accidentally without death notification; I'm sorry, I just have to write it all down. One guy got so impressed he said something along the lines of "what was that? execution?" and ended up talking about how I must be modding (a great compliment). Well, he was likely a noob not really used to getting attacked unexpectedly, so he took out a tank and ended up leaving immediately as I began to attack him the second time in three minutes, which was the remining time on the 'off radar' ability. That was quite the compliment too. After a while, I ended up trolling the other guy, who was a much bigger griefer and a tryhard; I ended up acting really silly, pretending not to care at some points, letting him kill me over and over until he stops, all the while talking about how I don't care and how it's all casual for me and then killing him when he least expected it, usually with a very silly way and then going all toxic tryhard supergamer mode in the chat, teasing and taunting him, mentioning 3 - 0 and 'gordom ramsay' (video meme - explanation) as I typed too quickly, with the kid eventually asking me about how old I am; that when I switched gears and spoke more eloquently, focusing on punctuation in order to throw him off, confusing him. It was really surprising because I almost always get super butthurt when I get killed by another player in that game for any reason, but yesterday I was able to actually relax mentally and just keep goofing off, teasing that guy and jerking his chain over and over as I showed disregard to the mental constraints that the sweaty hardcore gaming puts upon us. I have not been in this kind of state in so long; probably the last I felt like that was when I was trolling people in duels in ESO in 2020 and earlier, and I gotta tell you I was never quite 'casual' about that that in ESO, I was and still is kind of super proud about my ESO duealing and animation canceling skills, about my 'action per minute' type of deal. So, even when I trolled and had fun with people in ESO I was still a super tryhard. And yesterday I was able to let go of that 'mental sweat' (although I admit, I felt it creeping back for a second and had to think hard about a response that would be funny enough! - I just had to go ahead and come up with something super silly, something that was so relaxed it perfectly showed that I do, in fact, not care at all rather than coping and shilling) - and that felt lik,e a breakthrough, a mental breakthrough, like I can finally breathe fully. As I mentioned, all of that was the cause of me not getting enough sleep but still feeling nice and fresh, amazing even. I had so much fun outside of the game too with all of my normal activities such as writing. I'm writing super slowly right now; ideally I wanna be about 20 and a half years ahead of the storyline, but my narration style prefers to focus on very slow movements, so some chapters - which are quite long, mind you - they end up taking weeks to write, especially as I keep coming back to re-edit and rewrite old text. I'm starting to like my earlier text more. I really wish I could just post it somewhere, but I can't yet. Or maybe I can? I ought to have a separate tag for all the posts in which I talk about writing the book. I definitely could post the raw, poorly edited and poorly filtered parts... Maybe that's how I could do it. Just one huge blog post with all of the tome 1. Yes, I think I simply will do it. It's got so much junk, so much garbage from AI abuse, yet right now I don't care, I don't care to wash it all up, clean it up - because ultimately AI was and is helpful in a good way, not in a replacement way. It's hard, cause I'm both a real ai enthusiast as well as a vehement ai hater - I hate being shoved slop down my mouth when I'm not asking for it. For example, there's a platform called weebly which got an insane amount of pure AI slop optimized for SEO and it's got gaming tutorials and flashy pics which, upon closer inspection, have absolutely nothing to do with the game and are just a load of pure hallucinations. And it features many other topics too. That's dead internet for you. That's why I'm an 'ai hater'. I hate ai music the most, the newer algorithms (suno) which generate soulless slop. It could not generate music made os strictly timpani and percussion no matter how many times I asked, and those singing vocals are the most perfect example of uncanny valley. Suno, the service, should fucking just burn, get destroyed legally, although I am opposed to copyright. And it should burn exactly because the copyright is going to get abused by bad actors, including some very normal people turning into bad actors - they will copyright their ai slop and the algorithm will claim real music alongside it. Venus Theory (a music youtuber who focuses mostly on ambient music and has great vids on music theory) made a deeply insightful, informative video about; it made its rounds through youtube as a lot people reacted to it and talked about it. The problem with suno is that it's slop and it definitely uses other people - real musicians'! - vocals (as well as instrumental performances). But vocals are a much clearer example, because there's established case law regarding voice artists and their voice being used for generators in commercial purposes, so it's only really a matter of time before some big artist tries to sue the slop generator machine, as they should. And yet I am so pro progress and freedom, and yet again I am deeply saddened to see that people who should be using this technology for fun and progress instead try their laziest to exploit to to save time and make money. That's why I'm anti ai. You gotta spend a minute searching a stock photo website to find a nice genuine illustration for your youtube vid, how hard is that? "Brainrot" was the word of 2024, "slop" will be the word of 2025, hehe. We all should be anti AI while being pro freedom in order to try to achieve a healthy balance between progress and exploitation. OpenAI, for example, that whole debacle with how they started and what they ended up being - that whole thing is monstrous, like a cute little angel evolving into a disgusting tentacled slimy mutant that screams for your blood and for your money. And yet the work they do is amazing, really pushing the technological progress ahead. Anthropic is lowkey doing better in my mostly subjective opinion rn; a lot of people do agree with me though. Claude is slowly taking over while OpenAI is doing a great job posturing, pretending like they got something really wild like AGI (artificial general intelligence) cooking up, like they got that monster behind closed door already and they're just waiting to unleash it into the world, trying their hardest to train it an to align it but in reality they do not actually have anything and they're still riding their wave of popularity from the "AI spring" (Fall 2022).

Anyway, speaking of yesterday - I had fun not only gaming and writing, but in so many other ways, all contained within my cranium, it's hard to describe. I felt so good and I still do, although I definitely woke up more exhausted than I have been in a while. And we have bench and squat today - should be great. I worked on highly detailed background lore for the book which will reflect itself fairly minimally in the book, but is going to be so much for me. Speaking of, there's an unrelated video which touches on both topics being discussed in this blog post, even though they are not closely related - https://youtu.be/DehjByrOyR4?si=3irBA70BfPS7SwAv It's a video by a TTRPG channel Russell_DM in which he talks about the new AI slop system that is meant to fake genuine comment responses from youtubers to keep up the engagement level, which I find highly disingenuous unless you let your viewers know you're using it. The LLM that youtube has in the background, that provides suggestions for quick responses to comments so that youtubers can talk to their viewers - that LLM is not really 'trained' on various youtube comments but likely just summarizes and copies various other interactions from the comment feed to emulate a response. A new feature which sort of existed for quite a while but in a much more rudimentary form. And it's another one of them contributors to dead internet theory. Sad, amusing and fascinating - we are moving towards the future, towards the brave new world.

Also, the world has been buzzing about the news of that one CEO of a really scummy healthcare company getting assassinated in the street... When I heard it, I immediately knew it that the guy was small fish. Yet they are all cheering, all the normal people are cheering... You could not have expected that ten years ago, even though healthcare in the US was in some ways even more atrocious back then... Well, only in some ways, from what I can gather; in most ways it's definitely a proper Mammonian monster that's gotten fatter than ever right now. All of them other CEOs, the real owners, are trying their hardest to scrape themselves from the internet. So many theories; many people say it was a revenge killing. I have a speculation that it was likely infighting among the fat cats. Yet people are still cheering, and I can understand them all too well. But that much is obvious - only a small fish would just get splattered in the street like that. You best believe that the real fat cats take serious (usually government-funded) operations to take down - when they need to be taken down, which only really happens when they refuse to cooperate with the shadowy string-pullers. That's the world we live in, and the people are starting to wake up. We are having out Renaissance, slowly but surely. I wish for a mental and spiritual reawakening rather than a revolution. But it's possible that one isn't possible without the other one. But the mental change is crucial, else it's just going to be a castling of power - violence, someone gets overthrown, the new guy is worse than the old guy. Cause you need to start with a mental change first, so you can pick a guy who is not connected to the old guys, or even if he is, he's gotta be strong enough to resist them, force his will (and the people's will, ideally) upon the shadowy puppeteers, some of which enjoy wearing their colorful sweaters and giving interviews talking about how enlightened they are. You best believe these kind of guys roll around in an armored SUV, squeezed in between two muscle hunks bodyguards, with a decoy limo in front.

Another conspiracy people have been talking about - ChatGPT censoring some prominent individuals' names for no reason. Clearly, those are some people who "reached out" to OpenAI and demanded their name to never ever pop up in the output for one reason or another. And if you mention a name of one of these individuals on Reddit you immediately get a DM from an attractive conservative woman who wants to be friends with you and wants to know your name, where you're from and how old you are. Yep.

***

Alright, that was quite the giga wall o' text. Today we have bench and squat. I had cup o' instant coffee and now I'm gonna have a moderate conventional brew.

So, I'm thinking soon we'll go heavier on bench, and today we'll do a medium-moderate volume in sets of 3, maybe up to 135. I wanna strengthen my tissue, and I'm not exactly what subtle adjustments I could implement to help with that. Should I change technique? Probably not, stick with the most powerful, the one I've been focusing on mentally (elbows not going too low on the chest, cause I used to do it way too much). What about tempo/velocity? Should I lift/lower weight slowly or accelerated? I have a suspicion my pecs aren't completely ready for the 'bouncing' without tearing, so I'm thinking I wanna make my lower (eccentric phase) just a tiny bit slower. Not as slow as I used to, just, perhaps, 10-20 percent slower than my fastest speed in which I still have control over the bar. I know, it's hard to follow, I'm simply writing down my process - or at least the surface layer, you know?

I have a good feeling about bench today. Moderate volume, strictly medium weight, like 60-70%. Do I really think 120-135 are 60-70? Hmm. Well, I know I can do 130 for around ten reps if I'm in a good shape. But today I'm only gonna take this weight and do triples. Moderation, patience, discipline. In that exact order - cause someone like me cannot start with discipline. I simply have to lower my indulgence levels first, promise myself I'll lift heavy soon - just not today (patience) and hopefully I can achieve, one day at least, a level of self control where I don't overexert and/or injure myself for fun (discipline).

Squat, what about the squat? A little heavier than last time, and I think ultimately we can increase the volume as well, slightly. Sets of 5 - we're not ready for lower reppage and corresponding load. I think it'll be 150-160. Perhaps 100 - 120 - 150 for warmup. Yeah, sounds right.

Workout

Warmup - some, pvc pipe

Bench

20 and 40

70 for 10

90 for 5

100 for 3

120 for 3

125 for 3

130 for 3

135 for 3

Alright, it feels good. Not perfect, still a little frail in pecs, but it's a step forward.

Squat

40 and 90

100 for 5

120 for 5

140 for 5

150 for 5

155 for 5

Okay, this is decent. Technique improving, angles getting better. I've rediscovered 'the arc' for the butt position through the movement - not strictly up and down, but back at the lop and more to the front in the bottom.

Tricep extension from behind the head with the 3 spring expander - 4 sets of 50 - decent burn, especially on the 4th set, cause I started separating my hands - that made it harder

CoC№1 - 4 sets of static holds, just for fun and feeling. Spring galore!

Spring expender curls - 2 sets of 50 reps, one with 4 springs and one with 3. It got pretty difficult there in the end and I had to pause and cheat a lot to get to 50.