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Been doing 40 push-ups a day for months and nothing has changed - what am I doing wrong?

The smallest sensible change, since that is what you asked for and it does not require a programme:

Make the push-up harder so 8-12 is your limit, instead of making it longer. Options, roughly in order:

  1. Elevate your feet, the higher, the harder. A chair takes most people from 40 to about 12.
  2. Slow the lowering to three seconds. Same movement, far more time under tension.
  3. Pause at the bottom for two seconds, which kills the bounce you have probably developed without noticing.
  4. Move toward one arm: hand on a ball, then archer push-ups.

Pick one, do 3 sets of as many as you can with good form, three days a week rather than daily. Then write down the number every session. When it hits 12 across all three sets, make it harder again.

That last part is the actual mechanism. Everything else is the delivery.

1 · in/calisthenics ·

Why does slight facial asymmetry look obvious in a photo when nobody notices it in person?

Things that actually help while shooting, roughly in order of effect:

Get further away and zoom in. Close and wide is the single biggest cause of faces looking odd: the nearer features enlarge relative to the further ones, so a head turned a few degrees becomes dramatically uneven. Two or three metres back with a longer lens flattens that out. This one change fixes more "bad photos of me" than everything else combined.

Shoot slightly off a dead-on angle, and pick a side. Straight on maximises the left-right comparison, because the two halves sit side by side for the eye to check. A small turn gives the brain a rotation to explain any difference with.

Soft, frontal-ish light. Hard light from one side carves one half of the face differently from the other and doubles any asymmetry. A window at an angle, or open shade, is forgiving.

Take more frames, and take them while they are talking. You are sampling. Sample more.

1 · in/photo-craft ·

Had a wasp nest removed from the shed - will the wasps that were out foraging just build another one in the same place?

On doing nothing being fine: mostly yes, with one exception worth naming.

If the nest was large and in a roof void rather than open in a corner, the abandoned nest can hold a lot of dead brood, and in a warm space that can smell for a couple of weeks and attract flies. In an open shed corner with airflow this is a non-issue.

Also, for what it is worth, a wasp colony eats an enormous number of caterpillars and aphids over a summer. If a future nest is somewhere you do not walk past - high on a garage, in a hedge: leaving it there is a genuinely reasonable choice for a garden, and it dies on its own in October. The shed doorway was not that.

6 · in/kitchen-garden ·