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Manish Vij

Manish Vij

manish vij

Fasting, part 3

Plateaued in weight on my third fast, several days without significant change. Think I’ve hit my natural adult weight, low end of my college weight range. Done fasting for now.

Been eating just ~200 kcal a day, curious how body still mostly maintains weight. One homemade muffin and a handful of small cherries. Possibilities:

  • Burning less at lower weight = lower daily loss
  • Body turning down activity and energy level further
  • Retaining water
  • Retaining excreta which isn’t enough to expel yet

Probably can get 10 lbs lighter with hardcore workout / diet like marathoners or Kumail, but think I’m at my healthy adult weight now.

Have definitely been in ketosis at 200 kcal: low energy, body cold, etc.

  • 3 wk strict, 2 wk strict, 1 wk “dirty” (200 kcal)
  • 1 wk 400 kcal caloric restriction
  • From: April 1–June 2
  • Δ : –40 lbs

Down 2 sizes, 4 belt notches. So 1 male clothing size ~20 lbs, 1” belt notch ~ 10 lbs.

There’s a hazing / commitment effect: after weeks skipping food, I’m looking askance at hi-cal junk food ‘cause I know what it took to lose it.

Also got my fill during the breaks in between :) Air fryer, oil-free spicy potato wedges are reasonably healthy though.

So much junk food you drool over during a fast, is unappealing after breaking it. Like going home with Taco Bell at 2 am last call. Fastgoggles :)

‘Across the Spider-Verse’

Leak: Across the Spider-Verse has a long middle act set in “Mumbattan,” an alt universe with a mashup Mumbai / Manhattan: Indian peeps, Mughal arches on the Brooklyn Bridge, a train to Bronxnagar, billboards for Zomato, the Indian Yelp.

Scene opening has Miles Morales falling over Manhattan at high altitude. They missed a step not glitching between that and Bombay, which has a similar peninsula layout.

Morales and Gwen Stacy are hosted by Pavitr Prabhakar, the Indian Spidey with great hair (just coconut oil and good genes, he assures them) who finds the hero biz easy.

He balances atop a pillar mallakhamb-style, hangs upside-down with legs crossed, shoots webs with a yo-yo-like weapon. Has an ok Indian accent, voiced by Karan Soni, dorky as usual. The voice doesn’t match the cool character.

Mumbattan starts with a spray of desi-Am jokes: “chai tea” means “tea tea,” I’m not your Eat Pray Love, next you’re going to tell me saffron is so exotic, etc. Definitely desi writers, or Soni riffing.

The Mumbattan multiverse version of Morales’ cop dad is Prabhakar’s girlfriend Gayatri’s turbaned, cop dad Mr. Singh. Pavitr goes from keeping his gf on the down low to her dad congratulating him on his heroics :)

Prabhakar swoops past a vada pav cart and grabs one from someone’s hand like a super-seagull. It’s a good gag.

Eventually all the fun loops back into the main plot: stopping Portal Man from getting to the Mumbattan supercollider. But it’s quite a long, fun part of the flick 🙌🏽

Wholesome series finales

Watching the “Ted Lasso” series finale reminded me of why I couldn’t get through the “Parks and Rec” finale. In wholesome, upbeat series, the finale saccharine levels are unbearably high, like cheesy high-school valedictories.

Like weddings, graduations and IPOs, they push the illusion that life is about reaching specific milestones rather than a continuous process. In screenwriting, this drives unrealistic endings of character arcs—too neat, tied up with a bow.

A wish-fulfillment, fan-service finale is also just a poor episode of its show: no conflict / drama, no setup for future payoff. Feels like the cap on the end of a shoelace, but superfluous, an especially poor example of its genre.

Drama finales, however: 🤌🏽

This week brought us the Shakespearean series finale of a f’d-up family committing emotional violence in a Darwinian scramble to the top. “Barry,” of course—I assume that’s what everyone’s talking about :)

Bluesky: first impressions

Bluesky first impressions: you don’t have to minimize attack surface on a small forum. Kumail posting politics again, AOC and Tapper sound like normal humans.

Hate that Twitter’s dominated by rage bait, mocked up a good news tab in Good Batch re: real sci / tech, econ, social advancements.

Bsky rolled out custom feeds including a positivity one. Right now it’s mostly cat pics, not my taste, but right direction.

The official app has janky scroll and animate, text too small. It was apparently a quick prototype in React Native for x-platform. Far inferior to the buttery-smooth Moot, an early client in Swift.

There’s some protocol complexity / overhead, not a 1:1 Twitter clone like Mastodon. My power user app may be best forked as a separate Bsky app rather than a multiheaded client.

Bsky has search, discover, quote post built in. Mastodon is really hostile to discoverability because it was also a refuge from Twitter harassment. Bsky tries to solve this at the protocol level with more user and server admin choice.

Bsky’s funded by Jack, who’s also right-wing, so it’s way more free speech absolutist (I’m putting this delicately) than Mastodon.

The velvet rope-ism is annoying, but it’s still in beta and actively developed. Small forum, small forum cliques / dynamics.

Overall experience quite positive. Platform is still early in dev, e.g. no video uploads. But some cool ideas, and way better than Twitter. Most important thing is to block buyout / hijack by a random rich dipshit, at the architecture level.

Caloric restriction

I tried caloric restriction: one 400-kcal meal a day.

Pros

  • No electrolytes or supplements
  • Temporarily satisfies food craving
  • Body isn’t cold

Cons

  • Easy to overeat
  • Hard to track weight progress since not eating enough to excrete daily
  • Still high food craving
  • Lower anti-aging benefits (autophagy, HGH)

I’m going to go back to “dirty” fasting, with a couple of cheats: soy milk in tea / coffee, and a 150-kcal homemade muffin right before a run.