A Sense of Doubt blog post #4082 - Do You Drink 92 oz of Water Daily?

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4082 - Do You Drink 92 oz of Water Daily?

This article caught my eye, so I am sharing.

92 ounces a day is  A LOT of water. Essentially, the 32 and 64 ounce bottles below.

It's about three-quarters of a gallon.

That's A LOT of water.

I drink water every day. Usually from a pint glass. That's nearly SIX pint glasses of water a day.

Wow.

I am going to try.


MILESTONE: Also, 600 days since Dad died. I am spending it with friends playing D&D, which is also what I did the day before he died.


Thanks for tuning in.

‘I’m a Dietitian, and I Tried Drinking 92 Ounces of Water Every Day’

DRINKING ENOUGH WATER

https://health.yahoo.com/wellness/nutrition/healthy-eating/articles/m-dietitian-tried-drinking-92-130000751.html

Lauren Manaker, M.S., R.D.N., L.D.

Sat, April 18, 2026 at 6:00 AM PDT

As a registered dietitian, I should be the poster child for perfect hydration. I spend my days advising clients on how to fuel their bodies, yet I have a confession to make: I have always struggled to drink enough water. Sure, I will fill my trendy water bottle, but at the end of the day, it is far from empty.

With the weather warming up and the threat of summer dehydration looming, my editor issued a timely challenge. The assignment was simple but daunting: drink the officially recommended amount of water every day for two solid weeks and document the results. I figured there was no better time than now to practice exactly what I preach.

I went into this experiment expecting a few minor changes, but the results surprised me.

What Happened When I Drank Enough Water for Two Weeks

Trying to drink the recommended 11.5 cups (92 ounces) of total fluids per day (the official guideline for women) felt harder to do than expected, likely because it isn't built into my routine. Also, early on, I found myself making more restroom trips than usual—a gentle, if frequent and a bit annoying—reminder of how much more hydrated I suddenly was.

Soon, other unexpected benefits started to appear. My usual afternoon brain fog was nowhere near as noticeable. Could it be that when my brain felt fuzzy, I was actually dehydrated and not in need of more caffeine? Turns out, that is a strong possibility.

Another unexpected outcome? By the end of the two weeks, my husband remarked that my skin looked more refreshed and vibrant, and I also noticed that my physical workouts felt easier. My muscles did not fatigue quite as quickly during my evening walks, and recovery felt smoother. While remembering to carry my water bottle everywhere was a logistical challenge, the physical and mental shifts I experienced over those fourteen days provided all the motivation I needed to keep going.

Benefits of drinking enough water

Here are some things people may notice if they too actually drink enough water and don't simply carry around their gigantic water bottle for the aesthetics of it all.

Healthy skin

Your skin is an organ, and just like any other part of the body, it requires adequate hydration to function at its best. When you do not drink enough fluids, your skin can become dry, tight, and prone to flaking. While drinking water will not magically erase deep wrinkles, it absolutely helps maintain skin elasticity and turgor. Proper hydration may plumps up your skin cells, giving you that supple, healthy appearance my husband noticed.

Additionally, water helps flush out cellular waste and improves blood flow to the skin's surface. This increased circulation delivers essential nutrients to your skin cells, supporting a natural, healthy glow. When you are adequately hydrated, your skin is simply better equipped to protect itself against environmental stressors.

Smooth digestion

Water acts as the great facilitator for your digestive tract. When you consume dietary fiber, it needs fluid to do its job effectively. Soluble fiber absorbs water, turning into a gel-like substance that slows digestion and helps you absorb nutrients. Insoluble fiber uses water to add bulk to your stool, making it much easier to pass.

Without enough water, your colon pulls fluid from your stool to maintain hydration in the rest of your body. This leads to hard, difficult-to-pass stools and uncomfortable constipation. By keeping your fluid intake high, you help make sure that food moves smoothly and efficiently through your gastrointestinal tract, potentially reducing bloating and digestive discomfort.

Steady, sustained energy levels

Even mild dehydration can drag your energy levels down. When you lack sufficient fluids, your blood volume actually decreases. This drop in volume means your heart has to work much harder to pump oxygen and vital nutrients to your brain, skin, and muscles. That extra cardiovascular strain leaves you feeling physically exhausted and sluggish, even if you slept well the night before.

By maintaining proper hydration, you keep your blood volume stable and your cardiovascular system functioning efficiently. This translates to steady, sustained energy throughout the day. Your muscles receive the oxygen they need to perform, which prevents that heavy, tired feeling that often hits in the middle of the afternoon.

Sharper focus and cognitive clarity

Your brain is composed of roughly 75% water, making it incredibly sensitive to shifts in your hydration status. Research consistently shows that losing just a relatively small amount of the body's water content can impair cognitive performance.

Providing your system with adequate water ensures your brain cells have the fluid they need to maintain proper structure and function. During my two-week challenge, I experienced a noticeable improvement in my mental clarity. Tasks that usually felt tedious required less mental strain, and I felt much more patient and emotionally balanced throughout my workday.

Tips for maximizing hydration without overdoing it

Need some help sneaking in more water in your day? Here are some tips to consider:

1. Start your day with water
   Begin each morning by drinking a glass of water to replenish your body after hours without fluids. This sets a solid foundation for hydration throughout the day.

2. Carry a reusable water bottle
   Having water readily available makes it easier to sip consistently. Choose a bottle with measurements to help track your intake. Try filling your bottle the night before so you have it ready to grab on busy mornings.

3. Opt for hydrating foods
   Incorporate fruits and vegetables like cucumbers, watermelon, oranges, and celery into your meals, as they have high water content and contribute to overall hydration.

4. Flavor your water
   Add natural flavors like lemon, mint, or berries to your water to make drinking enjoyable without resorting to sugary alternatives.

5. Pace yourself throughout the day
   Avoid gulping down large amounts of water at once. Instead, focus on sipping water steadily over time to stay hydrated without feeling overfull. If you have a hard time remembering to drink, set an alarm on your phone that will trigger you to sip!

Our expert take

Staying hydrated is an essential part of maintaining overall health. By implementing these strategies, you can ensure your body remains balanced and equipped to perform daily tasks efficiently. Remember, hydration isn't just about drinking water; it's about creating consistent habits that fit seamlessly into your lifestyle.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2604.21 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3946 days ago & DAD = 600 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4081 - "These Days" - St. Vincent - Nico Session - DUMBO Session _ Music Monday 2604.20

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4081 - "These Days" - St. Vincent - Nico Session - DUMBO  Session - Music Monday 2604.20

I had no plan for today's post, and I am creating it a day late.

I had considered a reprint, and then I decided to do one song because that's easy enough.

I clicked open YOU TUBE and BINGO, here was this St. Vincent cover of "These Days."

I am going to confess to ignorance. I do not pay enough attention to notes on albums, and sometimes my knowledge of music, which I think of as pretty good, fails me.

Not only did I not know that Nico covered this song, among MANY, I did not know Jackson Browne wrote it.

I thought it was a 10,000 Maniacs song because that's when I first heard it.

This cover is sick.

And this song feels right for today.

Damn. I love St. Vincent!

Thanks for tuning in.

St. Vincent - These Days (DUMBO Session) (Nico Cover)

4AD

Jul 17, 2007  #StVincent #4AD #4ADRecords

Subscribe to 4AD here: http://bit.ly/2TLt1l7 

This DUMBO Session was shot and recorded live at Atlantic Sound and Union Hall in Brooklyn. It features St. Vincent performing a Nico cover, "These Days."

Check out St. Vincent's discography on 4AD: http://4ad.com/artists/stvincent

4AD on the web:

http://4ad.com/

  / fourad  

  / 4ad_official  

#StVincent #4AD #4ADRecords

 Listen to more St. Vincent's songs here http://bit.ly/39C0wwQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/These_Days_(Jackson_Browne_song)

Lyrics

Well, I've been out walking
I don't do that much talking these days
These days

These days I seem to think a lot
About the things that I forgot to do for you
And all the times I had the chance to

And I had a lover
But it's so hard to risk another, these days
These days

Now, if I seem to be afraid
To live the life that I have made in song
Well, it's just that I've been losin' for so long

Well, I'll keep on movin', movin' on
Things are bound to be improving these days
One of these days

These days I'll sit on corner stones
And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend
Don't confront me with my failures
I had not forgotten them

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Jackson Browne

These Days lyrics © Swallow Turn Music, Open Window Music, Open Window Publishing

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2604.20 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = ## days ago & DAD = ## days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4080 - RPGs are either High Art or FanFic

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4080 - RPGs are either High Art or FanFic

Just a share today.

Busy with homework.

Thanks for tuning in.

https://oldmenrunningtheworld.com/role-playing-games-are-either-high-art-or-fanfic/

Role-playing Games Are Either High Art or Fanfic

Written by

Kieron Gillen

in

blathering

I was probably making a cup of tea, as I usually am.

I just stared into the middle distance and thought “all role-playing games are either High Art or Fanfic” with a force that made me know that it was fundamentally true – which meant, on some level, it must be fundamentally false.

All dichotomies are false. You can never take this too seriously, as it’s a classic The Map Is Not The Territory trap.

However, given a certain definition of Fanfic and High Art, I think it’s can be a useful map. When I say “a certain definition” I mean “Mine.”

Or, at least, the ones I’ve stolen.

Big caveat first: both are used in a purely descriptive way, with no implication of quality. High art is not high quality. Fanfic is not low quality. Both Fanfic and High art are things I love and applaud. I am using them solely to describe what the game is trying to do.

The definition of fanfic I find most useful is one I picked up from Elizabeth Minkel – and I hope Elizabeth will excuse my flattening of a more complicated position.

In short: fanfic is literature plus community.

Specifically, community plus transformative literature – fiction that takes existing things and then does some more, in their own way, in the way they like it. There’s another caveat there, but it’s only going to come back right at the end of the essay.

The “community” aspect is important for various reasons, not least it drills down to what makes modern fanfic what it is. You can say (and I have said) that Inferno is just Dante’s Christian self-insert fic, and while that has a use and illuminates several truths, it also conceals other truths. It’s the sort of error people make when they say “superhero comics are the modern equivalent to mythology!” Yeah, it’s true, as long as you ignore all the things which make them clearly different things, using overlapping techniques, for different reasons, to different effects, in a completely different social system.

Modern fanfic is born of the proliferation of connected fan communities, the ability to share the work and corporate ownership of stories. If you just boil it down to “transformative works” it loses so much.

The point being: the vast majority of RPGs are fanfic. They start with the love of another work, that they want to make their own version thereof, and share it with a community. If fanfic is community (around a table) plus (improvised) literature, one can easily see the vast majority of what we think of as roleplaying games as fanfic.

The success of a fanfic RPG is born of the ability for players to scratch an itch. It is about a shared love and interest. It doesn’t matter if the world you’re in is originally designed. It doesn’t matter if the world is originally created by the players around the table. These games are about satisfying that fannish urge, and the design of those games about how they can best mimic and recreate the things which one loves in another piece of work.

Even if it’s actually itself. Those most successful fanfic works then become new things which create further fanfic. D&D started as a fanfic game about many other things. It became the thing which everyone’s D&D games are fanfic of.

To stress the point, fanfic is a descriptive term – in fact, a celebratory term. This is great. We all love this. In fact, the fanfic games often lead to some of the best design where they work out how best to create games that bring to games what one love in another form. The inspiration and the challenge is the point.

PBTA games and their families are especially good at this. Let’s take Brindlewood Bay by way of illustration. It’s a Murder She Wrote vs Lovecraft mash-up – immediately illustrating that a concept doesn’t need to exist in another genre to fall under fanfic. The game finds mechanics which both add creeping horror to the improvised-no-set-solution mystery system, which leads to a game which follows the structure of a genius detective inevitably solving a mystery. This is all really smart design.

I think that most roleplaying games are living fanfic. Literature we love in a community around the table who also loves it is absolutely the point and the joy. Most games are fanfic. Shout it.

“High Art” is actually simpler, and needs less detail.

The fanfic games are about a community gathering together with a game which lets them have a shared experience of akin to something they love.

High Art games are ones where the game exists to embody the perspective of a designer about something they want to communicate and share with a community who’ve gathered to have this experience. Their appeal is not derivative or transformative works. Their appeal is whatever their appeal is.

A High Art game is one where the designer has something to say, and works out how to structure a game to do whatever they want to do. You may be able to say “if you like this sort of thing, you’ll like this” but you won’t be able to say, “If you like this thing, this is what you need to play to scratch this exact itch”.

To boil it all down?

Fanfic games are primarily inspired by works of art.

High Art games are primarily inspired by the designer’s life.

Let’s do some examples from my own games.

DIE RPG is a fanfic game. Perhaps ironically, it’s a fanfic game of Stephanie and my comic, designed to try and create the experiences and dilemmas of the comic via the rituals and mechanics of the game. But fanfic of your own creation is still fanfic.

How Do Aliens Do It? is a high art game. It exists to put you in the place of teenagers who don’t know how sex works, using the fiction of aliens and the Carved By Brindlewood mechanics to do so. It’s about me trying to explain what it was like being a teenager in the 1990s.

Come Dice With Me is my ultimate fanfic game. It was written after toxic lockdown overexposure to the British Competitive Dinner party show. At one point I saw the matrix, and saw how one could get the appeal of the show into a one-off shortform game. I fear Come Dice With Me is the best design I’ve ever written.

Amble is a high art game, born of talking on the phone to friends while walking during Covid, and thinking about the strangeness of distance and seeing things the other wasn’t, and finding a way to transform that structure into a game. It’s a sleight, throwaway design, designed to do what it does and no more.

My current noodling thing, Working Title Primacy, is about historical and space-fantasy epics, rotating around using the Paragon system for scale and something new-ish to get the sense of historical biographies scale and velocity. It’s got a lot of ideas, but it is all about me trying to create a certain sensation which I know I love, and I know other people do, and wanting them to be part of it.

A thing I’ve abandoned for now, Time To Go, is an interesting one, and shows the strain of my dichotomy. It is based around me watching 2 years of TV kids show In The Night Garden. It is clearly designed to ape the structure of this specific TV show. Its rhythms are that show’s rhythms. Players narrative in simple sentences, and only speak by saying their name repeatedly. The GM – a narrator – speaks evenly, no matter what. You play archetypes inspired by the core cast. It’s surely fanfic, right?

I think it’s firmly in High Art corner.

There’s a Situationist concept called Détournement. It’s complicated, as the Situationists usually are, but the core (for me) is summed up by a quote in the above link: “turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself”. Which I’d bend a little into “turning the expressions of a capitalist system to your entire ends, with no thought to their original purpose or any appeal herein”

Basically, if you transform a media so much that its appeal is entirely separate to whatever it was, it’s probably High Art.

I originally wrote “or antagonistic to” but I think the anger implicit there actually keeps those works in the fanfic corner, the critique of the thing (not the system) being the point. To flip over to music, a cover version is fanfic. Sampling a record and wanting people to recognise the sample is probably fanfic. Sampling a record and using it in a way people will likely never spot is probably high art.

Time To Go is a game about the fact your child will never remember these early years of their life, when their imagination was feral. Its intended vibe is Toy Story meets Millencholia. You may see why I’ve left it alone for now. It’s not exactly a fun game to write.

When I told Quinns about Time To Go, he urged me to lose all that extra stuff, as folks would love the core game. Doing a toddler TV show game would be lots of fun. I agree. That sounds great. I said no, because this isn’t a game about a shared love. It’s about sharing the specific vision of the world. That’s why I’m doing it, and if you lose “why you’re doing it?” from a creative endeavour, it becomes pointless.

If there’s a point to this essay, it’s that. As I said, these tools – these maps – aren’t real, but they are lenses one can observe something and see what they reveal, both about it and you. Some of this will be post hoc – when I rejected Quinns’ fair observation, it was me knowing instinctively that it was moving a game towards the fanfic corner, and that was contrary to my goals. I don’t think I had the words to cleanly then, and I think now I do. They’re these ones.

This dichotomy is a way to question your own work, and your goals, because making a clear decision there guides everything else. Knowing if this is doing one thing or another thing lets you make choices to enhance the desired result. To know what your game’s about requires you to know what the game is about.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2604.19 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3944 days ago & DAD = 598 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.