This is extremely similar to the technique I have used to so successfully lose weight.

Studies discussed in Willpower by Baumeister show that the most successful method of, for example, not eating MnMs is to tell yourself that you can have some later.

People who said they could not have any wore down their willpower and eventually gave in.  People who said sure, they could have some, but not now, didn’t wear down their willpower and in the end, often didn’t have the candy later either.

What I do instead is to have a designated day where I can eat whatever I like. Since it is physically impossible for me to eat more than 4,000 calories or so in the 19-hour period I am awake that day (I don’t sleep much), it allows me to eat with abandon and be done with it without making me fat again.

I see some chocolate I really want? Yum, looks good, if I still crave it on Saturday, I can eat a whole bucket of it.

Damn, that pecan pie at the grocery store looks great. I’ll have it later on Saturday if I really want it.

Etc.

It’s also a great method of eating much better food. I eat far better now than when I just mindlessly stuffed into my gaping maw whatever I pleased – and that includes every day, and not just on what I call “dessert day.” (Though on dessert day, I also tend to eat higher-quality junk food, even.)

That has many advantages. Higher-quality food if you can afford it is far more filling. I can eat less and fewer calories and be full longer. A $20 meal from Fresh Market fills me up for 2-3x as long as a very large meal from a fast food restaurant (about 10-12 hours for Fresh Market, about 4-6 hours for fast food).

But the blog post is perfectly right about helping depletion of willpower. I no longer have to exert all that much willpower at all to resist food I’d like to eat.

I just know that if I really want it, I can eat it all I like on Saturday. Very easy.

And that’s not to say it will work for everyone. I’m an extreme outlier in most areas, so it probably won’t. And frankly I don’t care if it works for anyone but me, as it does in fact very much work for me.

Sometimes – ok, most of the time — I think I was not born on this planet.

“Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.”

From this article.

I rarely these days listen to that much from when I was an adolescent. An occasional Smashing Pumpkins song, perhaps, mixed in with all the other great music I’ve found in the past five or six years.

And yet I know most people listen to what they did when they were 16 for some reason, and ignore all else.

You humans, you are strange and incomprehensible.

One day, I will return to my home planet.

I’ve now upgrowed (new strong past tense of “upgrade”) to Waterfox, a true 64-bit browser.

It’s a little bit slower at day-to-day usage according to benchmarks, but nothing I can notice. It has no 2GB process limit – which I often exceed – so now I can use all 32GB of memory and not have slowdowns when I have more than few dozen tabs open for a while.

I told ya’ll I’m a heavy user.

Was there an inauguration or something yesterday?

Great, another four years of a granny-starvin’ drone murderer. Just what the country needs.

To be fair, it’ll probably be better on the margins than the other granny-starvin’ murderer who didn’t get elected, but if it only matters on the margins, it doesn’t matter much.