GM Nostr. 5:55am. Waiting for the gate to open. Pretty intense red dawn this morning. Won’t be much longer until the sun is already up when my shift starts. Days getting longer down here. Nature’s base layer protocol functioning perfectly well.

Unintentionally added 9g of water to this at the end of the pouring and holy shit. This is it. 11/10. View quoted note →

I fucking did it. I am literally a blue collar meathead who barely knows how to turn on his computer. It took me several hours but I figured out how to post a long form article to Nostr. I got an extension to sign it and everything. Haven’t felt this accomplished in a while. Thank you to all the smarties at Nostr for making this possible. #AskNostr

GM Nostr. This morning’s attempt: Boil: 550g water. Grind: 33g beans. Light roast. Mexican origin. Pour 250g water into French Press. Add grinds. Slowly pour another 250g water on top of grinds, spiral motion. Allowing time to plume throughout. Gently stir. Add remaining 25g water. Steep 4 mins. Very satisfied today. 10/10. #coffeestr

GM Nostr.

GM. Days getting longer. Machines warming up faster. Nature’s base layer protocol remains in working order. No need to fret about turmoil upon upper layers.

Sure it’s a well orchestrated bull trap, but it’s still a bull trap.

GM. Had a union meeting last night to go over our new master contract. The ILA successfully negotiated our way out of any progression of automation in our industry. Part of the agreement includes an increase in work standards on an individual basis. I could not be happier about this. Unions get a bad reputation, some deservedly so, for creating an incentive to do as little work as possible because the negotiations don’t support a meritocracy. As much as I think it’s important to protect workers, I also see how unions can be problematic for employers. I love my job. I love the work I do. I enjoy getting up into this machine everyday and trying to raise the standard of my own individual performance. I may make the same amount of money that the guy with the worst performance here, but I am much happier and more fulfilled than he will ever be. Control what you can control. Create your own standards. Make them higher than any standard someone else will hold you to. I believe doing this ensures your happiness as you continually push yourself to meet them. This morning, I’m working at a pace more than double the new industry standard. Feeling grateful for the opportunity to work such a cool job in such a well protected industry.

The gym is a microcosm of life. The last thing on a gym newbie’s mind while they’re training is controlling their breathing. Pushing one’s body to the point of muscular failure when you’re not used to it is going to illicit a high stress response from the body. You may know that you’re in the safety of a gym, but all your body is understands is it’s doing something very difficult that it’s not accustomed to doing. High stress situations like this create a psychological environment where the limbic system dominates and higher level cognitive functions carried out by the prefrontal cortex - like being conscious of autonomic functions (breathing) - are deprioritized. Breathing while training is crucial not only because oxygen is a required component in muscular contraction but also because if you don’t breathe - you die. Proper, controlled breathing is the difference maker between taking your target muscle group to true failure or sandbagging a set and leaving 3-4 reps in the tank. This would be akin to a swimmer not completing a lap, not because they were too tired to keep swimming, but because they never came up out of the water to catch their breath. Hard weight training thus forces you to become conscious of, and eventually control, your breathing. This is difficult at first, but the more often you expose yourself to the stresses of training near failure, the less limbic activity you’ll have and the more your higher functioning psychological powers can get involved. That is to say, the more often you put yourself in uncomfortable situations, the more comfortable you’ll become during them. This is why athletes often train under more rigorous conditions than the actual competition. It’s why the military is constantly trying to make their training simulations as real as possible. The more exposure we have to difficulty, the better we get at handling it. Make note that I didn’t say “…the easier it gets.” If you’re training hard, you must continue to evolve your concept of “hard.” People who train hard, leave the gym and enter a world where almost nothing that happens to them will be harder than the stress they voluntarily exposed themselves to while training. These people dominate in today’s soft world. And when something truly stressful does happen in their lives, they’ve got the mental fortitude to slow things down a bit and use their brain to solve the problem instead of entering fight or flight and having an emotional response.

GM.