#Comprehensive Review

[mukilteogreenhousellc]

The vulnerability of seniors to various health issues is something our assisted living in Mukilteo, Washington, has always prioritized. Due to increased vulnerability to acquiring health issues, seniors should adopt health practices to promote a healthy life, including taking medications regularly.

[akreview]

Understanding the Importance of Brain Health

Our brain is the most vital organ in our body, responsible for controlling our thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is crucial to prioritize brain health to enhance our overall well-being and optimize cognitive performance. As our world becomes increasingly competitive and fast-paced, the demand for brain-enhancing supplements has surged.

The Rise of Brain-Enhancing Supplements

In recent years, there has been a significant rise in the popularity of brain-enhancing supplements. People are constantly seeking ways to boost their brain power, improve memory, and increase focus and concentration. This surge in demand has led to the introduction of numerous products in the market, each claiming to offer unique benefits. However, not all of them deliver as promised

[elliejuo]

The Role of Exercise in Preventing Chronic Diseases: A Comprehensive Review

Regular exercise is commonly recognised as an important component of living a healthy lifestyle. Its advantages go beyond physical fitness and include the prevention and management of chronic diseases. This blog article will investigate the impact of exercise on numerous chronic illnesses, using recent scientific research released between 2018 and 2023 as evidence. We can better understand the importance of incorporating physical activity into our everyday lives by investigating the scientific evidence on the benefits of exercise and its association with disease prevention.

EXERCISE AND CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH: Recent scientific study indicates that regular physical activity reduces the risk of cardiovascular disorders such as coronary artery disease, stroke, and heart failure (Smith et al., 2015). Aerobic activity, such as brisk walking, jogging, or cycling, improves cardiovascular fitness, lowers blood pressure, and lowers LDL cholesterol levels, all of which contribute to better heart health (Bouchard et al., 2012).

EXERCISE AND DIABETES PREVENTION: Type 2 diabetes has become a global epidemic, yet current research highlights the critical role of exercise in its prevention. Regular physical activity appears to enhance insulin sensitivity, aid in weight maintenance, and reduce the chance of developing diabetes (Colberg et al., 2010). Individuals who engage in moderate-intensity exercise, such as brisk walking for 150 minutes per week, have a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes than their sedentary counterparts, according to research published in the last five years (Tuomilehto et al., 2001).

EXERCISE AND MENTAL HEALTH: In addition to physical benefits, exercise has a significant impact on mental health. Mandolesi et al. (2018) found that regular physical activity lowers the risk of depression, anxiety, and cognitive deterioration. Exercising causes the release of endorphins, chemicals that boost emotions of enjoyment and reduce stress. Furthermore, physical activity increases blood flow to the brain, promoting neuron development and increasing cognitive performance (Ratey & Hagerman, 2008).

EXERCISE AND CANCER PREVENTION: New study reveals that exercise can help prevent and control several types of cancer. Regular physical activity, according to studies published in the last five years, lowers the chance of acquiring colon, breast, and prostate cancers (Friedenreich et al., 2016). Exercise helps to maintain a healthy body weight, reduces inflammation, improves immunological function, and balances hormones, all of which contribute to a lower risk of cancer (Moore et al., 2016).

In conclusion, exercise is proving to be an effective therapy in the prevention and management of chronic diseases. Regular physical activity has numerous advantages, ranging from cardiovascular health and diabetes prevention to mental well-being and cancer risk reduction. It is critical to prioritise exercise as an intrinsic part of our daily routines, aiming for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week. We may considerably improve our general health and lower our risk of chronic diseases by including exercise into our daily life.

References:

Bouchard, C. et al. (2012). Physical Activity and Health. Human Kinetics.

Colberg, S.R. et al. (2010). Exercise and Type 2 Diabetes: The American College of sports Medicine and the American Diabetes Association: Joint Position Statement. Diabetes Care, 33(12), e147-e167.

Friedenreich, C.M. et al. (2016). Physical activity and cancer prevention: etiologic evidence and biological mechanisms. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 34(9), 987-994.

Mandolesi, L.et al. (2018). Effects of Physical Exercise on Cognitive Functioning and Wellbeing: Biological and Psychological Benefits. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 509.

Ratey, J.J. & Hagerman, E. (2008). Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Little, Brown Spark.

Smith, S.C. et al. (2015). AHA/ACC guidelines for secondary prevention for patients with coronary and other atherosclerotic vascular disease: 2006 update endorsed by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 47(10), 2130-2139.

Tuomilehto, J.et al. (2001). Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Changes in Lifestyle among Subjects with Impaired Glucose Tolerance. The New England Journal of Medicine, 344(18), 1343-1350.

Copyrights: If you like the post and want to use the information please give credits to my profile. Cheers :)

[vileidol]

something so interesting about the way Benson’s trauma is hidden. Randy’s trauma forms the structure of the movie. we see it in his nightmares and hear about it in detail, and it’s traumatic, sure, but it’s also undeniably underwhelming. on the other hand, we only see Benson’s trauma in unexplained snippets. in the sheer viscerality of his grief in scenes quickly cut off. as if the movie itself is hiding it the way Benson hides it, by focusing on Randy - object of devotion and projection in equal measures.

[dokushoclub]

Japanese Reading Resources for Absolute Beginners

A question I encounter often is "How much Japanese should I study before I can begin reading in Japanese?"

From my experience as a learner and reader myself and from managing a Japanese book club for other learners I can honestly say that you can start way earlier than you probably think!

There are many resources that only require knowing hiragana. Those texts usually teach vocabulary through pictures and only use basic grammar.

Some are even simpler than that: The Japan Foundation's Hiragana Books are great for those, who are still remembering hiragana characters. Every short book introduces only 1-2 new characters, so it's a great reading exercise for those who've just started.

The free graded reader 「どうぞ、どうも」 by the NPO Tagengo Tadoku only uses the words 「どうぞ」 and 「どうも」 to write an entire story. Again, this makes for a great exercise in reading hiragana and understanding context. Another "level 0" recommendation by the same NPO would definitely be 「しろい？くろい？」. This book uses the full range of hiragana characters but the grammar is simple and all used vocabulary is illustrated.

Another site with great resources for absolute beginners is Nihongo Tadoku Dōjō. If you have memorized both hiragana and katakana and know how the particles を and で work you will be able to read this text about stationary (ぶんぼうぐ) and understand everything by looking at the pictures!

The resources linked so far can all be accessed completely free on the linked websites. If you have the money to spare, please also have a look at the box 「スタート」 from the series reberubetsu nihongo tadoku raiburarī published by the NPO Tagengo Tadoku and ASK (affiliate link). This box includes 8 little books in very simple Japanese.

All these texts for absolute beginners will get you started reading in Japanese with very little knowledge of characters and vocabulary.

Reading in Japanese is a skill that requires practice. But once you get used to it, it can be such a valuable tool to reinforce new vocabulary and grammar. So please don't wait until you're "ready" before you start reading - start early at your own level!

[hitorimaron]

Inspired by By Any Other Name by @shanastoryteller

Summary:

Wei Wuxian wakes up in Mo Xuanyu's body and heads straight for Lotus Pier. Wu Yingtai is the newest member of the Jiang Clan and rumored to be the future wife of Jiang Wanyin.

Lan Wangji is not in love with her.

[lesbianfakir]

Something I think about a lot is that how inciting incident of the collapse of drosselmeyer’s tragedy isn’t some big dramatic moment. The beginning of the end for drosselmeyer is found in the hours fakir and duck spend searching for mytho. It’s when fakir realizes duck has seen him in his weakest moments. And not despite but because of that she genuinely admired him and shows it through her kindness. All of this is absolutely crucial because in the minutes before Princess Tutu’s impending doom, fakir grows fond enough of duck to intervene in her death. What seems like a filler episode of little consequence is actually what sends drosselmeyer’s grand finale careening off course.

If he had done nothing she would have given her life for the prince, vanishing. From everything we’d seen so far it is in fakir’s best interests to let Tutu die. She turns into a speck of light, vanishes, and now there’s no one left to return mytho’s heart. Fakir is free to do as he sees fit. He can keep stalling the story, let Tutu die in the chapter of his own death and then never flip the page.

But the thing drosselmeyer doesn’t count on is that in the hours they spend searching for mytho it dawns on him that he genuinely cares about Duck. And because of that he won’t sit back and let her die, even knowing he may very well die in her place. This is the first big act of rebellion against drosselmeyer’s story. Instead of simply accepting his fate, fakir does something clever: he twists it. He accepts that yes, he must die, and, instead of trying to circumvent that, he instead chooses to destroy the means of shattering the prince’s heart, thereby saving Tutu and passing the torch on to Duck. His whole life has been about being mytho’s one and only protector, and yet after only a few hours he grows to trust Duck so much he wants her to take over in his place.

And this is where the emotional core of Princess Tutu lies. Drosselmeyer consistently expects his characters to screw over everyone else in favor of playing to their own interests. But a spark of genuine friendship is all it takes to derail everything. Duck chooses to be kind to fakir despite everything he’s done and in turn fakir trusts duck with his life’s purpose. It was never about the grand tragedy or the bigger picture. The true revolution lay in the small moments.

[randalthorstits]

Reading comprehension i miss u pls come back to the people

[wainwrightjakobshammerlock]

every time i open the worlds of borderlands "lore book" it never fails to raise my blood pressure

[girderednerve]

The three-day [Conference on Women and the Workplace, convened in 1976] featured traditional presentations and livelier discussion periods. The medical director of Dow Chemical, Harold Gordon, fretted that his company could be held liable for discrimination if it excluded fertile women from certain high-risk jobs, and for harm to their offspring if it didn't. Dow was trying to do the right thing, Gordon said, but there were many questions: "What is the population at risk? How is it identified? What specific agents need to be considered? How are they identified? What restrictions are needed? When do they apply? To whom do they apply?" The [Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers]'s Tony Mazzocchi was unsympathetic. "There isn't a single worker, including those at Dow, who knows what the hell he works with in the first place," he said. "No industry has allowed us to look at the monitoring data.... We aren't being told what is carcinogenic or what is teratogenic. We are learning after the fact." It was the union's position, he said, that neither women nor men should have to be removed from a job to protect the unborn; "our position is to make the workplace safe for everyone." ...

For workers like Yvette Flores [whose child was born with severe intellectual disabilities after her exposure to dangerous solvents and lead-based solution in her job manufacturing lasers for Spectra-Physics], the most germane speaker was Andrea Hricko with the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Hricko had been investigating, with growing alarm, the electronics industry, which then employed some 271,000 workers in the United States. More than three-quarters of these workers were women, she said, and many were "nonwhite. A higher percentage do not speak English. And few of them are organized." Hricko said she'd heard from some California workers that "dark-skinned women, including Filipinos, Chicanos and Blacks, are often assigned to certain departments in electronics plants where chemicals are used that cause skin rashes. This is done because the skin rashes are not as obvious on the dark skin and, therefore, the workers don't complain as much as the company doesn't have to deal with the complaints." Some plants didn't allow languages other than English to be spoken, "even in departments where the majority of women are non-English-speaking," Hricko said. Intimidation was common. Women in one Silicon Valley plant who'd prepared a warning leaflet on trichloroethylene "had to leave copies of it in the women's rest room so that the male management people would not snatch the copies away."

Jim Morris, Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers (2024), Chapter 20

[justanotherwriter140]

Well that was something!

Furious Five-related spoilers in tags!

[webbywatcheshorror]

Next Review?

Hey beasties and ghouls and creatures and creeps! I'm having trouble picking the next movie to review and could use some help.

You can check out my current list of movies I plan to review here:

(The Carrie review will be comparing all three movies in one review)

Or, if you have a movie in mind and don't see it on the list, feel free to suggest it on this post or in an ask!

[supercantaloupe]

okay don giovanni review from last night. under the cut bc it's me. tldr the vocal performances were great, leporello carried the show, one of the most insane productions i've seen thus far but somehow in a new bizarre direction from normal. good snacks.

first of all i don't care how much wine you offer i think it's kind of ridiculous to charge $165 for a base ticket price for a performance that 1. isn't even in a concert hall or theater 2. is a concert performance rather than a staged performance (which was not advertised ahead of time) and 3. was not even a full production because they made the absolutely mind boggling decision to cut 100% of the recitative and replace it with Some Guy sitting on the stage narrating the plot between every 1-3 numbers

i did not pay that much gd bless. the student ticket was way cheaper.

the narration wasn't even good it was weirdly ungenerous to the women (like how do you even make elvira out be a "women, amirite" thing and also vaguely imply anna was into it in a production with zero acting? well they figured something out) and i don't think it even explained well enough what happens between each number to truly give a first time watcher a good idea of what's actually going on. not to mention that it absolutely kills any sense of momentum in the plot and makes the entire show drag like hell, because you have to wait between every single aria for either Some Guy to talk at you for three minutes straight, or wait awkwardly while people onstage walk off and people offstage walk on. it was so painfully clunky

they had a piano up there but since there was no recit it's not like she was accompanying much of anything. in practice what it ended up being used for was 1. the mandolin part for deh vieni (acceptable in the absence of a mandolin player; they were working with a limited chamber ensemble of musicians so i get it) 2. the party music at the end of act i (egregious fault imo because it absolutely kills the vibe of the scene and completely obfuscates the way the music is supposed to be adding to the tension and chaos with its different instrumental groups playing in different meters)

and 3. used to give singers their notes when the vocal line of their arias start on beat 1 measure 1, which they otherwise would have been able to get from the preceding recits (which is imo painfully amateurish for an ostensibly professional production)

all the numbers in act i were there although the narration was so bad i got jumpscared by fin ch'han dal vino because i forgot it was supposed to be there and thought we had skipped over that point in the plot. act ii had some really bizarre additional cuts made, notably they just entirely skipped over meta di voi and vedrai carino. it was like masetto and zerlina fuck off for the entirety of act ii save for, like, mille torbidi (they VERY briefly mentioned masetto getting beat up in the narration and i don't think they mentioned vedrai carino at all, they just skipped straight from deh vieni to sola sola. and also there was a painful awkward pause before deh vieni because i think the pianist forgot she was supposed to play there and the narrator jumped ahead to the next chunk of plot explanation too early). kept both dalla and tesoro (i'm fine with this ottavio was quite good though could've used a bit of ornamentation imo), kept mi tradi, kept non mi dir (more on that in a bit). no per queste which is probably a good thing not only for the show itself but also my head would have absolutely and irreversibly exploded if they had, probably

the whole thing kind of felt underrehearsed. like a quarter of the time it seemed like people didn't know what they were doing or had to be reminded where to be at that point in the show. and there were a few moments throughout where the orchestra struggled to keep up with the singers, but i really don't think they had much time to rehearse together, honestly.

and then, to my utter shock, the finale was actually really good?? like. insane compared to the rest of the show thus far. though it helps that 1. i absolutely love the harmonieband arrangements of cosa rara/i litiganti/non piu andrai, after possibly the draggiest non mi dir i've yet experienced it was like a breath of fresh air to hear that (and non mi dir was actually well performed i liked this anna but considering how much the Entire Show was dragging, the fact that they cut meta di voi and vedrai carino, AND the fact that they promised this act would be short, it felt crazy to me to keep it at that point.)

2. leporello and the don were by far the best performers of the night. so much so that i sought them out during the post show reception to tell them how great they were and enjoyed their performance. which i usually do not do, but in this like, high school recital ass production value. unbelievable relief that the final scene is dominated by the two actors in the show who most remembered that they can, and in fact Should, be acting. so much more movement and physicality and expression from those two compared to most everyone else. leporello especially, his actor apparently specializes in comedic bass roles and it shows, he was the standout all night

and 3. for the first time in the entire production they made an interesting decision regarding the physical space and staging! they had the commendatore sing from up on a balcony overlooking the audience in the foyer. the bar admittedly was set very low in the previous act and a half but the finale reminded me that i actually like this show again which is appreciated

though they then threw another curveball at me by Cutting the sextet at the end. which like didn't even piss me off at that point i was just baffled. like the don sinks down in agony and leporello sinks down whimpering in fear and the orchestra cuts off. and i'm expecting an awkward pause while they quietly get up and shuffle off so the rest of the cast can come back but nope. big orange title slate appears on the big screen behind them and the audience breaks into a roaring applause and the announcement of the wine and dessert reception. felt like i was in a fever dream

i will say the desserts were very nearly almost worth the bullshit that was the preceding show. they were so good. thank you austria for your dedication to pastry. and because i don't drink and couldn't appreciate the free wine offered i had to indulge in my own manner. spread contained chocolate oat bites (tasted as much like espresso powder as chocolate and coated in coconut, 4/10), almond sponge cake (classic, 7/10), cardamom apple bread pudding with caramel cream (not enough cardamom but otherwise very tasty and autumnal, 8.5/10) and honey cake (11/10. i don't know how they made this so good. i want more right now so much). i take both my mozart opera and my desserts very seriously.

anyway overall the production was. i would say frustrating. the singing quality was Really Good (leporello was the clear standout, probably followed by the don though i prefer my dons with a lighter voice but technically he was very good, then probably ottavio, then maybe masetto or anna. the commendatore was great but he's in it so little it's hard to compare)

i just wish they could have, like, actually done a full production. it would have been so great if they had gotten to tell the actual story and had been fully allowed to act. when there Was acting were the best moments of the show, and it's really unsurprising that most of that came from leporello, the absolute legend.

[alsoknownasallison]

can we be real for two seconds. Tourtured Poets was a pretty weak album, BUT that doesn't mean that taylor isn't talented, has never been talented, and doesn't deserve respect as an artist. do you really think Paul McCartney never had a mid album? do you think every single word John Lennon wrote was gold? no? now ask yourself this question: WHY do you think they are given the benefit of the doubt and taylor isn't? THATS the misogyny people are pointing out.

[novelresilience]

How are the last three days of nursing school going?

I think this summarizes it.