I’m gonna try to get this one out early this month. Thanksgiving and stuff going on, so I’ll probably be pretty busy at the end of the month to be able to get it done.

Fitness Updates

Sorta going along with my back updates, I figured I’d start talking about general fitness stuff that I’m doing. I recently started watching more of what I eat and going back to the gym to try to lose some weight and building back some of the (albeit little) muscle that I had before I hurt my back.

I’ve always been heavier, even when I was a kid I was heaver than people who were taller than me. When I was around 17 or 18 I think I was about the best shape I’ve ever been. I wasn’t skinny, but my belly was much less pronounced and I was a lot stronger. I think I was around 170lbs at 5’ 9", I was eating McDonald’s about every day working construction. When I stopped doing construction and started my current job as a developer, my activity went way down but my fast food eating stayed about the same. I got all the way up to about 210lbs which was my heaviest at the time. Then when I started going to the gym I got down to about 190 going like 3 times a week and I was happy with the progress I was making.

Then I hurt my back, and basically all activity stopped. I was literally on my back for about 11 months, from October 2022 to maybe August/September 2023 I could barely walk and doing anything was really challenging and painful. I’ve talked about it in other posts, so I won’t talk much about it here. A good thing about this was my fast food eating slowed down a lot too because I wouldn’t go out to eat as much or go to the drive thru. I still gained back all that I had lost, so I was around 210 again, but it wasn’t horrible. Now that I’m back to walking and doing things, I feel better, but the fast food intake went up again while the activity stayed non-existent to low. So I got all the way up to about 230lbs.

So, here we are now in November 2024, and I’m finally trying to get back to going to the gym at least twice a week. I’m down to about 224lbs in the mornings when I wake up, so I’m losing a little bit of weight. I’m currently doing a Push/Pull/Legs split (PPL) because that’s what I was doing before. My split probably doesn’t matter so much right now since I’m probably going to have those dormant muscle/noobie kinda gains where your muscles will come back easier after having been away, unless I’ve atrophied so much. But, I think I’m going to switch to doing a full body split 3x a week so I train every muscle more. I could try to do more days, but since I’m easing into it still I want to do 3 days for at least a few months consistently before I up it I think I’m going to try a full body split.

According to some TDEE calculators, my daily expenditure is somewhere between 2100-2700 calories depending on the activity level and the website I use. I am sorta counting calories and protein, I should be a lot more strict about it. I still make some

Unexpected One Piece Break

If you guys didn’t see online, One Piece might be going on an unexpected break for about 2 weeks. This originally spawned from Manga Plus having the next chapter dropping on December 1st, and not November 17th like it was meant to. User pewpiece on twitter (a user I usually have blocked due to twitter consistently showing me his spoilers summary in my notifications) first reported this change on Manga Plus. Many people were worried for Oda’s health as this is very unusual for Oda to not have his breaks planned, and with the rumors around his blood pressure issues. It was actually exactly a year to the date that Oda was unable to finish chapter 1098. I’m not sure if the reason for that was ever disclosed, I’ve heard that it was due to Oda just missing the deadline, I’ve heard health issues, and I’ve heard that he was crying so hard while drawing that chapter that he couldn’t finish it. In any case, I got pretty worried about the unexpected break too, I’m not going to lie. It kinda ruined my Tuesday afternoon.

Other users started to notice that on Manga Plus their dates still said November 17th as planned. Shonen Jump’s website also had not reflected the changes. I’m not sure about how all these sites play a role into the release schedule, and what should be considered official news, but it seemed to be isolated to just the English version of Manga Plus that the date was changed. Within about 12 hours of me first seeing the announcement of a potential break, I checked the English version of Manga Plus and their date had gone back to November 17th and none of the other sources I saw had changed. So, I thought it was a simple mistake and someone had not entered a date correctly or something. Which is reasonable to think, if I flipped the month and date and I entered 17 for the month maybe it would default back to December, and if I missed the 2nd 1 in 11 then I’d end up with December 1st as a date. So we’re all good right? New chapter this weekend? Maybe not

After Manga Plus had fixed their website and people believed it was a mistake, one of the official translators for One Piece has posted on Blue Sky that there is in NOT going to be a chapter this weekend. Stephen Paul is on the official translation team and posted that Shueisha is “fumbling” and that there will be no chapter this week. Unfortunately, this seems like the most official statement we’ve gotten so far. Unless he’s trolling, it’s probably that we won’t be getting a chapter this week. According to several tweets I’ve seen, we should get something official-official from Shonen Jump tomorrow (the 14th). I’m hopeful that it’s untrue, and this is simply just a data entry issue.

Although we’re at a really good place in the manga and I’m excited for each new release, I am totally fine with another break as long as Oda is healthy. I’m not trying to fuel any rumors, but there have been some people speculating around the reason that Oda could be taking the break. The reason for the 2 week break that we just got off of was due to Oda flying out to South Africa in order to help out with the filming of the live action. Some people believe he’s just especially tired from the traveling, some think he may have gotten sick. I’m personally hopeful that he just enjoyed the trip and hanging out with the crew so much that he decided to go back and do it again to ensure the next season is better than the first. But, we’ll see tomorrow I guess.

Reading Update

I finished “Tomie” by Junji Ito at the start of this month. The more I read from this story, the more I enjoyed it. I believe I read this was largely made during his time as a dental assistant. So, as the story went on you could tell he was getting better at drawing and writing plot lines and dialogue. I highly recommend picking it up, I think this one is one that’s on sale pretty frequently. I think it’d be a good starter for people who are looking to get into horror manga. It’s not my favorite manga I’ve read, but I enjoyed it a lot and will look out for more from him. I plan on reading Uzumaki from him next.

I don’t know if I mentioned reading “The Unfettered Mind” by Takuan Soho, but I finally finished that at the start of the month. That one had been on my list for a little while. Takuan Soho was this Japanese Buddhist priest in the 1500-1600s, and he would write letters back and forth to these different samurai. This book is basically excerpts from the letters about Zen Buddhism and how it relates to martial arts. I started reading it in early October when I went on a trip to the Outer Banks. The first part was really good, it was stuff that I could understand pretty well. It was talking about doing things mindlessly and how you shouldn’t keep your mind in one place. It was digestible and I understood most of what it was talking about. The other 2 thirds of the book just did NOT stick. I don’t think this was the best intro to Zen philosophy like I thought it was going to be. The 2nd part was talking about how you interact with your lord as a retainer, or how you interact with your retainers as a lord. It was kind of how you interact with those around you too. I can’t even begin to explain what was going on in the 3rd part. That was super in depth with some Japanese stories I’m not familiar with. One part actually said something like “you’re not gonna understand this unless you study for 30 years”. It was a short read, it wasn’t even a hundred pages I don’t think, but it was hard and took me like a month to get through.

That’s gonna be it for this month’s post. I want to get this out before tomorrow when we find out officially about the break and potentially a reason for why. I might do another post at the end of the month because I’m getting in to watching more anime movies and stuff so I want to give short reviews on them when I have more time.