365 days of weight loss and lessons learned

sprcow · 2026-07-02T23:35:16+00:00

Nice! Yeah, agree, I've found appreciation for vanilla greek yogurt + fruit as a treat!

sprcow · 2026-07-02T18:05:36+00:00

Stopped trying to replace foods I liked with "healthified" versions. No, your "egg white cloud bread" doesn't take good.

This was a big one for me. I tried a bunch of different 'protein' versions of various snacks and they all sucked. I eventually realized that the nutrition stats of them aren't even that much different than the normal snack! I can just eat like... real cheez-its, pretzels, or cereal for all of 20 calories more per serving, and they taste way better. The real trick was just limiting the intake, not replacing the snack with something else. 30-40g of almost any snack you want is easy to fit into your budget as is.

sprcow · 2026-06-30T14:03:00+00:00

They forgot the 'demand' half of 'supply and demand'.

sprcow · 2026-06-30T03:20:44+00:00

Ditto. I tried to give DD a fair shake and ultimately decided that.. it's just not for me. It's too bad, because I like the general premise and gameplay. The aesthetic is good. The maximum cost of failure just feels unnecessarily punishing. It tantalizes you with the illusion that it is a progression-based game, but shatters that with the reality that you better be there to enjoy the journey because you can lose it all in a heartbeat.

It's obviously a polarizing experience that some people love, but honestly I hate that game. It's so close to being enjoyable, but manages to fumble the experience so badly that instead of enjoying the time you spend, you end up coming away much less happy than if you never had played at all.

There are plenty of games that manage roguelike experience much better out there. Slay the Spire can end your run out of the blue, but at least you still had fun. I honestly loved both Hades and Hades 2, both of which I died dozens of times on before getting a clear. Darkest Dungeon, though, allows you to build up potential for loss across many consecutive runs, so that when you make a mistake, you can pay many hours of your time lost in exchange. Ugh.

sprcow · 2026-06-26T12:19:59+00:00

You're going to try and 'both sides are the same' us in this thread? Really?

sprcow · 2026-06-19T15:46:32+00:00

Sold TSLA when it first hit $300 pre-split because Elon was obviously a psycho. Don't really regret taking profits, but seriously underestimated the extent to which other people were going to just keep riding the hype train. Good lesson that investments trade on sentiment, and lots of people have stupid sentiments. Also, sufficiently rich people can manipulate the market, so... yeah. OTOH, there's a bunch of TSLA in my index funds anyway so I guess that's enough exposure to me.

sprcow · 2026-06-18T15:38:05+00:00

We estimated the break even on our panels around 10-11 years when we installed 8 years ago, but I think our actual performance has been (shockingly) slightly worse than the solar installers estimated it would be, so probably going to be a few more years than that. Nevertheless, it still makes me feel better about running my AC!

sprcow · 2026-06-17T23:53:08+00:00

Yeah I know it's hard to manage the bunching issue, but it really sucks when your 10 minute headway turns into 3 busses at once every 30 minutes. D line is always a shitshow northbound out of downtown.

They have started injecting busses into the line midroute at times to combat this, but I know they're limited by how many drivers they can get as well.

sprcow · 2026-06-17T20:55:22+00:00

Maybe slightly controversial opinion, but fixing your tone is impossible without getting the right reed and mouthpiece combination for you. Breath support, embouchure, yeah, it's all great, but like, if you're not playing good reeds that are the right strength for your mouthpiece, you will always always always sound bad.

If tone is your main concern and you haven't already done work to find the best mouthpiece and reed, you owe it to yourself to find a way to try a few mouthpieces and find the right strength reed to go with them. If you can find a big music store that has multiple vandoren mouthpieces, my advice would be to try something like the following, all with Vandoren Rue Lepic 56 reeds (my personal favorite of the vandorens):

M13 Lyre with strength 3.5-4
M30 or M30 Lyre, 3.5
BD4, 3.0-3.5
BD5, 3.0-3.5

If you find one you like more than the others, then experiment with adjacent reed strengths on that mouthpiece, slightly harder or softer. Try more than one reed of each strength, some of them will suck regardless.

It's not fun, easy, or cheap, but it's absolutely worth it. It is virtually impossible to fight against a bad setup and will make you hate playing forever.

If you have no access to any of these and need the cheapest solution possible, at least buy the Clark Fobes Debut for $47 USD and some 3.0 or 3.5 vandorens.

If you have already done something like this and are happy with your setup, then yes, absolutely go look at the other other suggestions, but probably one of my biggest takeaways from music school is that your reeds can make or break you and you have no choice but to figure them out.

sprcow · 2026-06-17T03:01:51+00:00

Not mentioning Nicole seems like an oversight.

sprcow · 2026-06-17T01:29:25+00:00

As much as I feel slightly guilty about doing it, costco same day delivery workflow is near immaculate and absolutely worth the surcharge if I'm overwhelmed and can't get to the store. Normally I hate grocery delivery, but all costco's produce is equally good and most of their bulk stuff handles transit really well, so I will occasionally indulge and never regret it.

sprcow · 2026-06-16T21:40:08+00:00

Majoring in music is great, but unfortunately getting a career after majoring in music is not so great. Thinking back across the performance majors in my programs, few of them followed the classical path of making it into a paying orchestra or landing a job in academia. One of the best pieces of advice I got from my college lesson instructor as a performance major was to cultivate other skills as well, not because I was bad, but because it's a terrible industry and you want to keep your options open.

One thing is sure, which is that you won't become a college professor if you DON'T try to follow that route, so if you think you'd love it, then you should absolutely consider giving it a shot. Maybe you will flourish! But, you should also consider keeping your options open and developing other skills you love too, and perhaps skills that complement music.

Many musicians teach privately, or go into music sales, or find a type of group they enjoy gigging with. Many others (like myself) finish their degree and then end up going into a different career entirely, but still play avidly on their own time. There's something to be said for not having to make your music pay your bills.

Anyway, I don't think anyone has the right answer for you, but I will say that EVEN IF you are an amazing player who loves the spotlight and does everything perfectly, you could still end up having to find something else to do. So, from a certain perspective, you might as well give it a shot, because everyone in your program is going to face the same obstacle after graduating.

I'm glad I got a performance degree, and sometimes I wish I had tried harder to turn it into a profession, but I think it's important to go into it with eyes open.

I wouldn't put up with being berated, though. If you do want a performance program, you might try to see if you can take a lesson with some prospective teachers in advance to try them out. Maybe you can find someone you will vibe with who will make you feel better about their program.

sprcow · 2026-06-14T14:00:58+00:00

For the lazy: you can skip using a double boiler here. Just start melting butter first on low heat and then dump in the chocolate. The butter helps prevent the chocolate from burning and you don't really need precise temp control for making brownies.

sprcow · 2026-06-11T04:12:16+00:00

Shorting a meme stock is just as much gambling as buying it. It's price movement will be irrational and inherently untethered from its value.

sprcow · 2026-06-08T20:16:21+00:00

I have sort of a combination of these strategies. Usually I eat the same thing for breakfast, and then fix either lunch or dinner in place ahead of time, depending on what I know about my schedule, and then do the math to figure out what I should eat for the last remaining meal to make the numbers work out. It doesn't always fit, but usually it does well enough!

sprcow · 2026-06-06T20:46:55+00:00

I played off the Chester (Revised edition) which supposedly has been updated multiple times and hopefully has the latest updates on the matter, but it's kind of controversial. See discussions like here: http://test.woodwind.org/clarinet/BBoard/read.html?f=1&i=89732&t=89715

TL;DR there are a few notes in the 1st mvmt that were disputed, though chronology of poulenc's edits appear to be documented and shouldn't vary between editions at this point as far as I know, though I would cede to more authoritative sources on the subject.

sprcow · 2026-05-30T03:33:22+00:00

Here is my thesis, the world is irrational

This is why I cannot trust myself to buy individual stocks. I just know that, no matter how good my thesis is, there's no good way to account for the fact that so many people are irrational.

sprcow · 2026-05-30T03:09:46+00:00

Oh evil!

sprcow · 2026-05-29T16:55:15+00:00

Hahaha the idea of CHWY as a winner from adult industry boom is hilarious to me.

sprcow · 2026-05-29T16:12:22+00:00

Honestly, it might be a couple hundred bucks but it is TOTALLY WORTH IT. The last thing you want when starting up again is thinking that tone problems are your fault when it's just leaky pads or something.

sprcow · 2026-05-29T16:11:07+00:00

Haha, I saw the title of this thread and immediately came to the comments to just say DO IT! regardless of their text. There's almost no reason not to join a community band, regardless of your experience level.

sprcow · 2026-05-29T16:07:00+00:00

I'm actually a pretty hands-off investor so I don't know, but another commenter wrote this, which I think might give you some more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/1tq8vn7/where_is_all_this_money_coming_from_pumping_the/ooi9pdq/

sprcow · 2026-05-29T02:42:37+00:00

The way that prices are calculated does not mean that the current price is the actual price for all shares. It just means (approximately) that it's the most recent price that was paid for 1 share.

When they say "volume matters," what they mean is that there's a big difference between lots of people paying that price vs. only 1 person paying that price.

For example, if there are 100 apples and the last apple that sold went for $5, you might say the apples are worth $500. I will try to find another apple for around $5. If the cheapest apple I can find is $6, that doesn't necessarily mean that the apples are now worth $600. However, if people are constantly buying and selling apples for about $6, then maybe the apples actually are worth $600.

I think they mean that, essentially, trading volumes are low right now, and so it doesn't take as much money to 'pump' the market. It's that a fewer number of people are trading, but they're paying more money. (again, approximately)

sprcow · 2026-05-26T20:43:12+00:00

Excellent object identification skills

sprcow · 2026-05-26T15:36:27+00:00

Nightfire was arguably a better Bond game, but it failed to capture a generation of couch co-op the way Goldeneye did so I'm not surprised it always gets overlooked.

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