Feb 2nd
Phew! I guess I've now got what I was aiming for with ketosis. It's been 6 days since I ended my last fast. I've been eating 2 keto meals a day in a 6 to 8 hour eating window. Breath meter reading hasn't dropped below 2.8mmol/L ketones while the sticks have been reading higher at around 4 (pink/purple). Face looks haggard and my weight is definitely 5lb down on last week and still dropping.
So how is your health and fitness routine going?
Feb 3rd
Trudeau only has a hammer and everything is a nail. When you see stuff like this, and the recent asshole opinion of Whoopie Goldberg, you come to understand that the woke left exist in a parallel universe. Also, in our universe, they're just a reality check away from occupying a rubber room.
Feb 4th
Just in case I ever disappear from here on FB, which is always possible with their censorious attitude, I can be found on Gab. Neal Asher @nealasher
And my Twitter alternative should I ever get kicked off there is Parler, again Neal Asher @nealasher
Feb 5th
Corporates as usual collapsing under pressure like empty suits. Gofundme have cancelled the millions of dollars donated to the truckers in Ottawa. Those who donated will have to fill in forms to reclaim their money else it will go to 'approved' organisations, y'know, like one that was burning down buildings not so long ago. Meanwhile Spotify is hurriedly taking down Joe Rogan podcasts from the likes of dangerous comedians. *sigh*
Oh I see what you did there: reality doesn't match the models, therefore reality must be altered.
He blinked and backed down (Rogan), validating his woke detractors. They will only increase their attacks on him. For the woke, or their opinions, attention is oxygen and they should be deprived of it.
Jack Reacher on Prime - very enjoyable.
Feb 6th
Okay, plenty of smart IT guys here. When I'm looking at a site in Safari and want to post it to Facebook I just hit the post icon top right of the page and that opens a box of sites I can post it to. All I get in that list, however, is FB, Twitter and instagram. How can I add others there? When I want to post to Gab or Parler I have to laboriously copy and paste the address and would like to simplify that.
Damn Twitter. With this new Ipad I had Twitter back and started scrolling through it again. It is ridiculous how it sucks one back in. I found myself getting annoyed, political and making comments. It just isn't any good for the mind. Okay, in terms of liberty and the awful rise of the woke, those truckers in Canada are important, as is what's happening with Joe Rogan, but me getting angry and shouting into that vacuous site only serves to make me feel crappy. In all honesty I kept Twitter up because I stupidly hadn't figured out how to hide it from my home screen rather than delete it i.e. I wanted to keep it to post to through Safari but not be tempted to look. Now I have and it can bugger off.
Feb 8th
The day before yesterday I all but emptied my fridge. I'm now 42 hours into another fast and have been keeping myself busy to avoid thinking about a trip to the supermarket. 2,000 words written and house cleaned throughout. đŸ¤£ Since I was eating keto before there's been no delay on ketosis - I never dropped out of it. It has been interesting to see how ketosis varies between the two measures I have. The sticks and the meter show changes that seem unrelated (they do measure different ketones) though if I got really anal I could probably track it e.g. perhaps breath ketones dropping when I drink milky tea or urine ketones rising x hours after my last meal or something. Whatever. My clothing has stopped shrinking.
Feb 9th
It's not just 5 years they've been shouting resist and putting #resist in their profiles. The self-proclaimed revolutionary left have been 'the establishment' for decades.
Interesting metabolic functions. During a 46.5 hours fast the highest I got on the breath meter was 2.9mmol/L. Finishing my fast at 5.45pm yesterday I ate sausages, veg and eggs in one meal then cheese, preserved sausage olives and celery in another. I also ate clotted cream, put cream in coffee and milk in tea. Now look at the breath meter this morning. This tells me I am fat adapted. My ketones went up during my fast but I was burning them. Then eating all that fat knocked them up even higher.
Excellent stuff today. I'm now on the downslope of my latest book and heading towards the ending. 2,000 words today typed without appreciable pause. I think I did them in 2 or 3 hours. All I know is I sat down at my desk sometime this morning and then when I looked up again it was 1.00 PM. I love writing when it goes like that. Of course this is first draft so there'll still be lots of work to do after I've written: THE END.
Feb 10th
Well, I guess the ketogenic diet is working out. I fasted a few days ago then returned to eating keto. My ketones, instead of going down when I started eating again, have continued to climb (the picture). Meanwhile, since getting into this properly with my first recent big fast two weeks ago, I've shed 7lbs and it ain't water weight.
Feb 12th
Same bullshit as with covid: dodgy models, predictions of catastrophe from 'experts' who like the power and the limelight, graphs that never match reality, massaged statistics, plain lies and corporates and politicians with their hands in our pockets, except in the case of global warming this has been going on for twenty years.
Feb 14th
Keto diet plus intermittent fasting seems to have stabilised me at high ketones constantly. Around 7.0mmol/L on the breath meter and varying from light purple to darkest purple on the keto sticks. Interestingly if one goes lower the other goes higher. The ketones measured by each test are different ones and I wonder if their variability relates to whether body or dietary fat are being burned?
What are you doing for health and fitness? What routines and plans?
About to head to the computer to get on with the latest book. I did 10,000 words last week and aim for the same this week, or to finish it, whichever comes first. Be nice to have the first draft out of the way so I can concentrate on some other things. I want to get up to date on my accounts, update my website which still has The Human as my latest book, work on sorting out a novella collection and do some editing there. Also there are some other more prosaic things like buying some more clothing. T-shirts are faded and getting stretched around the head hole. Socks are getting thin. And weeks of doing squats have rendered many pairs of underpants too small! đŸ¤£đŸ’ª
How are things going with you lot? What plans do you have for this week?
Feb 15th
Just stuck myself on gettr too @nealasher. With all these (Parler, Gab) it's just a case of posting stuff, following people and seeing what occurs. Mostly not a lot which is why FB and Twitter persist.
Goodness me. I now check someone's timeline when they send a friend request, but before then many got through without vetting. Every now and again one pops up with some dim-witted leftism and I delete them. What's sad, when I check the profiles of those spouting the most egregious woke fuckery, is I so often find the word 'writer' there.
Feb 18th
A somewhat blustery day today. It's flipping the letterbox and just outside there's a red plastic light cover obviously peeled out of a car. I hardly noticed this until writing THE END. Yup, I just finished the first draft of my latest book at 160,000 words. Hack, slash, hammer and chisel, with increasing amounts of sanding and polishing now begins. Some call this editing.
How is your day going?
Feb 19th
I wrote a story years ago for Nature, in which a guy who broke his back walks into a museum to see the wheelchair on display there. This will happen.
This is an old one (podcast). I wonder now, since I've come to enjoy podcasts so much, whether I should say yes the next time someone asks me to come on one. I never really took much notice of them before, but now they're quite a big thing. What do you reckon?
Feb 20th
There's a Greek expression 'making a hole in water' i.e. attempting some task but failing. The figures here make me think vaccinations have been a costly attempt to stave off the inevitable. That the vaccinated are more likely to be infected now is a function of the limited life of the vaccines and that those who have actually been infected have better immunity. The UK government was right about herd immunity at the beginning, before politicians started shitting their pants and chose the Chinese totalitarian route.
Been farting about with internet stuff this morning. Blog posts up comprised of posts from here, Jack Four on my website homepage, security issue sorted with my router and . . . there I stopped. It's like tidying the house sometimes. Where's that potato peeler? Ah, it is in that drawer, best I clear the rubbish out of there. Five hours later all the drawers and cupboards have been sorted and I'm halfway through cleaning the oven.
I got back to editing instead because chores should be in order of priority. And now I want to get in a gym visit. It is Sunday, after all.
Feb 22nd
Editing editing, then in chapter 7 I decided one section was a clumsy segue and needed work. The result was a 2,000 word expansion there with more to do tomorrow. This is required finessing of the first draft, which was essentially getting down the bones of the story. Hours drifted away and no gym time was had, but I'm happy with the results.
Has anything interesting happened in the world while I've been aboard War Factory Room 101? How has your day been?
Feb 24th
Weak, vacillating leaders fiddling while Rome burns, pouring money into non-existent problems, into leaden stifling bureaucracies and into the pockets of their corporate buddies, and then via circuitous routes back into their own. More concerned with how they appear in the world than making a better one - arrogant, psychotic and utterly incapable of admitting to error. Desperate to maintain their con game and its supporting narratives. Then next topping that off with a panicked economy-killing response to a virus and transitioning that into a power and tax grab from the people.
And now, sensing the weakness, the vain turpitude of societies that have lost their way in silly ideologies, the predators are moving. Putin has started the ball rolling and China may be next in Taiwan. Perhaps China and Russia can be regarded as the first components of a new 'Axis'. It's easy to demonize, but the US and its 'Allies' aren't exactly clean. All the wars and proxy wars in the Middle East, while the people there seeing the jets shooting over and the bombs coming down had, and have, the same fears of those now in the Ukraine.
My brief and perhaps incoherent thoughts on present world events - to be updated and altered as I learn more. What do you think?
Ooh, I'm actually enjoying editing this latest book. While writing it to first draft I had reservations about many things, along with the usual generalized angst about whether it would be good enough, but now they are going away.
In retrospect I realise that I've been here before . . . about thirty times! đŸ¤£
Yes, I need a bit more world-building description, and need to spend a bit less time in the protagonist's skull. And yes I need to chop out some repetition and clarify stuff about how a particular entity works. But that's easy stuff going from whole book focus to the specific. Working title, which seems likely to stick: War Bodies.
How has your day been?
Feb 25th
Good grief. The utter lack of rationality about all this. The possibility of world war looms and Biden continues stopping oil and gas drilling in the US, while Kerry bemoans the damage to the climate arising out of war. Meanwhile, deeper down the rabbit hole, Putin's attack is all about white supremacy, or because his mother didn't love him enough.
I'm aware that the silly ideologies of the Western world are going to be its downfall. But It's probably going to happen sooner than I expected, which I hoped would be after I'm pushing up daisies.