I have returned to Google. It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course. I went on-and-on in multiple posts out the ickiness of Google—OK, maybe two posts. I deleted Google and moved on to ProtonMail and I was fine with it...

Until LibreOffice.

OK, it was more than just LibreOffice.

I've written before how I enjoy FocusWriter with a white text on black schema. Additionally, my website basically follows the same schema. There are additional tools out there, whether Sublime Text or the Intellij IDE, where they provide a dark mode option. And as I've found that Windows 10 provides it as well, I'm aboard.

But, who isn't on board? The developers of LibreOffice. They love to blow up my eyeballs! Seriously, I ran down the log thread of its discussion of implementation requests and it's just not something they want to do...which doesn't surprise me coming from an application that doesn't provide an autosave. The last time checked, it wasn't 2003.

So, I scrambled for a replacement of LibreCalc. And guess what I realized...

...and I'm back on Google!

And with my return, I finally looked at YouTube Music, the upcoming replacement of Google Play Music. To be fair, I always thought that was an awkward name for a music service and I never could wrap my mind around why they ran two music services. Nevertheless, I moved my uploaded music from the outgoing service to the new one. I don't have a lot there, but, it's basically stuff that other services don't have, the soundtracks to all four Battlestar Galactica seasons and 8 albums of Garth Brooks.

How do I feel about returning to Google? Resigned, I suppose. Look, it's bigger than anything I can do about it, right? The tools are outstanding....and yet...the price of admission is submission. Frankly, we cannot practically exist online and dodge Google. We'd have to completely unplug. And in the right context, with a mojito in hand on that fabled Pacific island beach with Rex, my banana-fueled chimpanzee manservant, I might be able to pull such a life off. But, for now...

YouTube Link

Playing off my post title from yesterday, I now use the Toy Story-inspired category for this new era of writing: To Infinity and Beyond! It feels peculiar to purposely move beyond The Expeditions. Sure, I'd go on a long, food binge and set them aside for a season, but, when I'm actively pursuing fitness, it's something new to abandon an approach I've been doing since April 2018.

And I welcome the move as I suspect it'll charge up innovation for more changes.

For the last week or so, I've finally gone full-throttle on Bulletproof Coffee. Sure, I've been doing butter & coconut oil for sometime as my breakfast. However, only recently did I make the leap into MCT oil and using Kerrygold grassfed butter AND I LOVE IT! Now, I'm not the type to say that you ought to know the first crush along with of the other backstory of my meat, but, I gotta admit, grassfed butter just tastes better. Add a tbsp of that and another of MCT oil into 12 oz. of dark roast coming out of a French press, and you've got one succulent morning brew. Run it back a second time and you'll have no desire to eat until lunch—DESPITE skipping last night's dinner! And you'll have a mind pulsating with electrical activity!

I have retired my Expeditionary construct for weightloss. It's not that I don't remain focused on optimizing my fitness, rather, that which defined The Expeditions, is no longer applicable.

Until the 13th, they were:

• Designed to be a low-calorie, low-carb approach with fat as a macro only in the 40% range;
• Scheduled workouts Monday-Friday 2+ hour, pre-sunrise sessions with options for the rest of the time, culminating into a 30,000 daily step goal;
• Spaced out to 6-week intervals for weigh-ins;
• Bracketed by a selection of songs to act as a soundtrack.

While it always took a lot of willpower to reach liftoff, I cut a LOT of weight. The thing is, The Expeditions were susceptible to blowing up, leaving me in a place of daily trending upward on the scale, dropping me off at the same place I started. The 11th Expedition is a great example of this in 2020 (chart).

The great takeaway from The 11th (and really the nameless 12th), is the need for re-evaluation, and fortunately, I ran across Gary Taubes's The Case Against Sugar, which opened the doorway to an entire realm of cascading keto books.

With this new focus on fat power, the 13th and the 14th have not required such a herculean passion to pull off. I do not feel the need to proudly keep score of each passing day, because, frankly, it's not that hard. From an aesthetics perspective, I do miss my Galaga arcade style HIGH SCORE on the top of this site, but, it's no longer needed for motivation.

And the weird thing is that I don't feel the need to work out daily—not in the conventional sense, anyway. I'm considering an eccentric movement workout—no, not a Michael Scott's "primal art form" on a booze cruise type of eccentricity—it has to do with the lengthening of the muscle. I'm planning a once-a-week session, but, it remains on the drawing board. Overall, I'm looking for greater meditation and strategies of mitigating & lowering cortisol levels—yeah, I'm evolving beyond my past's⚡ THUNDER ROCK 🤘 sessions.

Is all of this in my fruit basket the bounty from my departure from Spotify? I think so. There's no longer this tension between listening to audio books and feeding stats to Last.FM. With no playlist to follow, the spirit of an Expedition dissipates into the timeless mists. And if I'm not absorbed within a Spotify playlist during a workout, what do I consider? The End Game, of course!