#so old. so slow. does not of the protective measures. takes 15 minutes to show up to an online appt. asks questions then asnwers them hrself | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

recentanimenews · 4 years ago

Text

3 Winning Snacks for the Anime Awards

It’s the best time of year – Anime Awards season! There are lots of things up in the air like: Who will win best boy? (Satoru Gojo please!) What about best couple? And what show will be crowned anime of the year?! While these answers will remain unknown until the big day, what you eat during the awards doesn’t have to be a mystery.

Here are 3 anime-inspired snacks for the show! Because what’s an awards show without HAIKYU!! TO THE TOP popcorn, Hime’s coffee cat donuts, and JUJUTSU KAISEN’s bacon-wrapped fingers.

JUJUTSU KAISEN “Fingers”

Yuji Itadori’s ravenous appetite for fingers unleashes the powerful King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna. With every finger consumed, Ryomen Sukuna grows stronger. Inspired by the fingers on the show, it only made sense to have some “fingers” as a snack. These little smoked sausages are wrapped in bacon and finished with a sticky sweet maple glaze. I can’t promise that they’ll protect you from curses, but it probably won’t hurt.

Maple Glazed Bacon Wrapped “Fingers” Recipe

Serves: 2-3 | Time: 25 minutes

Ingredients:

1 12-oz. package cocktail sausages

9 bacon slices

1/4 cup maple syrup

2 Tablespoons brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika

Pinch of salt

Directions:

Step 1

Cut bacon in half and slice each strip lengthwise into two or three pieces (depending on the width of the bacon). Set aside.

Step 2

Heat oven to 425°F degrees. Wrap each sausage with one slice of bacon. To avoid it unraveling in the oven, tuck both ends of the bacon onto itself or secure the ends with toothpicks.

Step 3

Place wrapped sausages on an aluminum foil-lined baking sheet. Cook until bacon begins to crisp and the sausages get some browning, about 15 to 20 minutes.

Step 4

While the sausages are cooking, prepare the glaze. Combine syrup, brown sugar, and spices in a medium measuring cup. Set aside.

Step 5

Remove sausages from oven once ready and take out toothpicks. Heat the broiler. Pour the glaze over the sausages and gently mix until each one is glossy.

Step 6

Cook in the broiler until the glaze thickens and begins to caramelize, about 3 to 5 minutes. Do not walk from the oven. Keep a close eye on it to avoid burning.

Step 7

Remove from oven. Serve immediately.

---

HAIKYU!! TO THE TOP Caramel and Cheddar Popcorn

For me, when it comes to popcorn, there’s no competition on which kind is best. A big bowl of caramel and cheddar popcorn is the clear winner. If you’re not familiar with this iconic duo, it was popularized in Chicago for being the perfect blend of sweet and salty. The vibrant orange of the cheddar is reminiscent of the Karasuno High boys from HAIKYU!! TO THE TOP. Serve this while streaming the awards and you’ll score big.

Caramel and Cheddar Popcorn Recipe

Serves: 3-4 | Time: 30 minutes, plus cooling

Popcorn Ingredients:

2 Tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 cup popcorn kernels

Caramel Popcorn Ingredients:

6 Tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup light corn syrup

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

Cheddar Popcorn Ingredients:

1/4 cup powdered cheddar cheese

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika

1/4 teaspoon chili powder (optional)

Directions:

Step 1

In a large pot over medium heat, add butter. Once fully melted, add popcorn kernels and cover pot.

Step 2

While covered, gently shake the pot to ensure the kernels are cooking evenly until it begins to pop, about 1 to 2 minutes. Continue to shake until the popping slows to about one pop every 3 seconds and most of the popcorn is cooked. Turn off heat and dump the popcorn evenly into two serving bowls, about 5 1/2 cups of popped popcorn in each bowl.

Step 3

Heat oven to 300°F degrees. Starting with the caramel popcorn, combine butter, brown sugar, corn syrup, and salt in a small saucepan over medium high heat. Stir occasionally until it begins to boil and then turn off heat.

Step 4

While still very hot, carefully add vanilla (it will bubble up a little) and baking soda. Add one half of the popcorn and gently toss with a wooden spoon until it’s fully coated.

Step 5

On a parchment-lined baking sheet, spread out caramel popcorn. Bake for 20 minutes, rotating the pan once halfway through.

Step 6

Remove from oven. While still hot, gently toss again to reincorporate any loose caramel. Let cool completely before eating. The longer it cools, the firmer the caramel coating will get. If you wish to speed the process up a little, transfer the popcorn to a cool, parchment-lined baking sheet.

Step 7

For the cheddar popcorn, combine cheese powder and spices into the reserved second half of popcorn. Gently toss with a large until full coated. Serve both popcorns combined in a large bowl.

---

Hime’s Coffee Cat Donuts

Did you know Hime’s favorite food is old-fashioned donuts? Same. These coffee cat donuts are what I imagine the ultimate Hime food to be: They’re cute, sweet....and bear a striking resemblance to Best Cat, Yuzu! This recipe does call for extra glaze to easily dip the donuts, so be sure to save the leftovers for brownies or even more donuts. If you want to keep things simple and skip the cat decorating part (Yuzu will forgive you, I suppose), you can just toss on some rainbow sprinkles. Enjoy these coffee cat donuts while doing your best Hime impression.

Coffee Cat Donuts Recipe

Yields: 10-12 donuts | Time: 15 minutes, plus decorating

Donut Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon nutmeg, preferably fresh

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 cup whole milk

4 teaspoons instant coffee

1 egg

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup sour cream or whole-fat yogurt

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Glaze Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/4 cup coffee or water, plus more for rehydrating

Pinch of kosher salt

Cat Decorations Ingredients:

24 whole almonds

1/4 cup white chocolate

Directions:

Step 1

Heat oven to 350°F degrees. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, nutmeg, and salt. Whisk together and set aside.

Step 2

In a small bowl, whisk together milk and instant coffee until dissolved. Then combine egg, sugars, vegetable oil, sour cream, and vanilla extract. Whisk until combined.

Step 3

Using a wooden spoon, gradually add the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Mix until just incorporated.

Step 4

Spray two donut pans with nonstick spray. Place batter into a piping bag (or gallon ziploc bag with the corner cut) and pipe donuts into the pans.

Step 5

Bake for until the donuts are golden brown along the edges, about 10 to 12 minutes. Test to see if they’re done with a toothpick. If it comes out clean, take out and cool for 2 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Step 6

While donuts are cooling, make the glaze. In a medium bowl, combine powdered sugar, cocoa powder, coffee, and salt. Whisk until completely smooth. If you like the glaze to be on the thinner side, add more coffee until desired consistency.

Step 7

To make the cat ears, take two almonds and stick them into one side of the top of a donut, leaving the pointed edges out. Repeat for remaining donuts.

Step 8

Dip the ear-side down into the glaze, coating each donut halfway. Gently shake off excess and place back onto the wire rack while glaze sets, about 3 to 5 minutes.

Step 9

In a small bowl, microwave white chocolate in 15-second intervals until melted. You have two options to decorate the face, you can use the end of a toothpick or place the white chocolate into a small piping bag. Decorate each donut with eyes, a nose, and mouth. Place back onto the wire rack until it’s set, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Enjoy the snacks for the Anime Awards! Which one are you most excited to eat first? Let us know in the comments below!

By: Kiera Wright-Ruiz

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

3 notes · View notes

jemej3m · 6 years ago

Note

Random au idea I had but will never work on but you might enjoy: Andrew is Kevin's bodyguard. Neil is hired to kill Kevin. (in my mind it was also a fantasy au because that's what I'm writing atm but it could work either way tbh idk)

i love this idea!!!! if you’re looking for something similar, with old courts and alliances, i can recommend @gluupor‘s version here!! its amazing

but ur wish is my command lmao so heres 2000 words on neil and andrew with the assassin/bodyguard trope lmao

Neil eyed the gun with mild distaste. He knew Ichirou liked the finality of the gun, the fear it inspired in one’s eyes, but Neil just thought it was messy.

Efficient, sure, but loud. And cumbersome. And so obvious you’re holding a gun.

He had knives instead.

Like father like son, his mother said scathingly. She was long gone, having taken his father right down to hell with her, but that left Neil with a criminal empire and his father’s shoes to fill.

“Get rid of Kevin Day.” Ichirou had said, lounging in front of a fire. Neil had been seated next to him, taut and rigid, like he always was around Ichirou.

Neil wasn’t insane enough to ask why, but Ichirou soldiered on anyway.

“My father wanted him as an asset but I see him as a loose end. I had to get rid of Riko because of that man and my brother’s jealous tendencies: He knows too much.”

Neil remembered that. He’d handed Ichirou the gun.

“He’ll be dead within a month.” Neil promised, trying to not let his voice betray how husk-like he felt.

The first problem he encountered was: Kevin Day was loved publicly, and for good reason.

Whatever. Neil would poison him and he’d be dead before the weekend arrived, with slow-acting Ricin to put distance between Neil and Kevin’s soon-to-be-corpse.

That would be, if Neil could even get remotely close to Kevin.

But he couldn’t.

He’d commandeered the neighbouring flat to Kevin’s, among the gorgeously glittering glass scapes of New York City. He lived here, too, but it was never in the metropolitan area. He lived on Ichirou’s estate with was further north, or spent time in his Baltimore jurisdiction.

Becoming Kevin’s new neighbour was relatively simple: He’d simply sent the old woman an invitation to an eternal retreat up in Canada, after looking at her search history (he never wanted to look at an elderly woman’s search history again). She packed up her bags, and Neil slipped in easily, paying the first three months of rent up-front and bypassing the security checks for such a prestigious living space with his new alias: Neil Josten.

He liked the name Neil. Sue him. It was more comfortable to wear than Nathaniel.

It was upon moving into the apartment that he realised: Kevin Day was never alone. He was with his fianceé, Thea Muldani, who looked as equally adept in militant training as she was in Exy. He was surrounded by his team or the press.

Or, as Neil reluctantly discovered, he was being watched by Andrew Minyard’s careful eye.

A quick search on Minyard revealed many things. He’d been a Doe, he’d been to juvie, he’d been involved in multiple cases on child sexual assault as a witness. This wasn’t public information: This was just Neil’s awfully good technological ministrations.

He also had a degree in criminology from Palmetto, which was where Neil assumed he and Kevin grew close enough that Kevin would trust his protection to Andrew.

Context was great and all, but Neil couldn’t figure out a way around Minyard for the life of him. Sometimes, when they went out clubbing to a downtown establishment called Eden’s, he would disappear for ten minutes. It was an impossible window, seeing as Kevin was never alone.

Neil decided the only solution was to grow close enough to Andrew that he could gain the man’s trust and slip around him. His habits were routine, and he took his smoke breaks on the balcony that aligned with Neil’s.

So every morning, Neil would be leaning on the railing with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Every morning, Minyard would slid open the door, and step out. He usually wouldn’t even look in Neil’s direction. No cordial good morning, not even a nod.

Neil would have to catch the man’s interest.

He’d been lucky in that his father had kept his scar-making to Neil’s torso. If Neil’d face had been disfigured, he’d be too noticeable as an assassin. He had recognisable features as it was: His red hair and blue eyes were recognisable as it was.

So he wore an over-sized t-shirt that slipped off his shoulder and showed the worst of his scarring: a puckered bullet wound with an arc of a knife-blade through it for good measure, and the imprint of a clothes iron on his shoulder. Both were bright red against his skin and impossible to miss.

A phone was jammed between his shoulder and his chin as he took a drag from his cigarette, hearing the door slide open.

“…No, don’t be fucking stupid. No one can know about this. Can you imagine how much scrutiny I’d be under if they found out who it was? They wouldn’t be able to bring me down but I’d have a hell of a lot of work to do to avoid that. No, I have to go. Don’t fuck up whilst I’m gone.”

He threw his phone onto the ottoman and let out an aggravated huff, stamping out his cigarette on the railing. He shook his pack and found only a lighter, throwing the empty cartridge over the balcony with faux-frustration.

“Quit being dramatic.” Came a voice to his right.

Neil glanced to where Minyard was standing at the near-edge of the balcony, offering his pack. The two balconies were close enough that Neil could reach out, remaining hesitant, to take one.

He lit it and brought it to his jaw, as was habit. “Thank you.”

“You’re wasting the nicotine.” The man insisted, with a detached gaze at Neil’s shoulder.

Neil rose an eyebrow, pulling the shirt’s neckline up and over his scars to cover them once more. The man let his gaze flit from the shoulder to Neil’s face. “I’m more of a passive smoker.”

“Pathetic.” Minyard muttered. “You owe me a whole pack.”

Neil grinned. “Seems like a bit of a steep price.”

“Interest rates are a killer.” He mulled. “I’m expecting it tomorrow morning, or I’ll hike the debt up to two packs.”

“Seems reasonable.” Neil let the smoke curl over his tongue before breathing it out through his nose. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll finish that if you won’t.” Andrew gestured to the coffee in Neil’s other hand.

“Black and bitter? Not many people have my taste.”

The man made a scathing noise. “You’re a detriment to the human race.”

Neil put the cigarette between his lips and gave Minyard a two-finger salute. “See you tomorrow.”

Minyard hummed.

Neil slid the balcony door shut behind him and grinned to himself. This would be fucking easy.

Andrew didn’t know who Kevin’s (and by proxy, his) new neighbour was, but he was intrigued. By the sounds of the phone-call, he didn’t seem so noble, and neither did the curl to his grin. He owed Andrew for the cigarette which meant he’d see him again, and would be able to assess him once more.

Kevin had slept like a black-out drunk after getting home from his away game, almost collapsing onto the couch. He hadn’t actually gotten black-out drunk for years, but sometimes Andrew wondered how someone acted like such a hangover without a single drop of alcohol in their system.

He’d woken at six, as he usually did, feeling more than a little sleep-deprived. After a light workout on the rowing machine and breakfast in front of the TV, he took his coffee outside.

There he was again. Andrew would be lying if he said the man wasn’t absolutely blessed in the appearance department, but it’d be entirely inappropriate to get with someone he’d have to see regularly after the fact.

The man smiled from behind his mug, wearing a tight wife-beater and sweatpants that hung deliciously low on his hips with a dressing gown thrown over the top. No scars were on show, barring the slight raised bump across his hip that the tightness of his shirt revealed.

“Here,” He said, throwing the pack at Andrew despite being probably 15 storeys above the ground. “I took one. Cash exchange percentage.”

Andrew scoffed.

“I’m Neil, by the way.” He offered. “Neil Josten.”

“Andrew Minyard.”

“Thought so.” The man sipped on his coffee. Neil Josten. An ordinary name for such an eccentric person. “Didn’t want seem like a creep and start gushing about Day’s stats when we hadn’t even introduced ourselves yet.”

“Don’t you dare.” Andrew grunted. “I hear enough from the man himself.”

Neil laugh was a singular huff, twisting his face into something more gleeful. He leaned his elbow on the railing, facing Andrew with his head in his palm. “You’re not an Exy fan?”

“Over-exposed, you could say.” Andrew wanted to figure out Neil’s intentions. Not many continued to talk to Andrew, not when his resting gaze was somewhat murderous. What had Nicky once said? Bored murderer. Andrew would kill you and probably yawn whilst doing so.

“I gave up on pursuing it a while ago for more…” He cocked his head to the other side. “Lucrative occupations. But it’s still good to see a game every now and then. What are you, his boyfriend?”

Now that was an obvious question. “Bodyguard. Fucker seems to attract just as much bad attention as he does good attention. I’d rather throw myself off this balcony than date that mess of a human being.”

Neil laughed again. He didn’t have a coffee or a cigarette: He’d come purely for conversation.

Interesting, Andrew mused.

Neil was getting bored, and the time constraint he’d set himself was coming to an end. He’d been living next to Kevin and Andrew for three weeks now, and Ichirou would be expecting some form of results in a few days’ time.

Neil had met with Andrew for evening smoke breaks rather frequently, though mornings had become staple. Tonight Neil had offered a cigarette, self-rolled with a relaxant mixed into it so that he’d sleep heavily and let Neil do his snooping.

When midnight had passed, Neil pulled his hood up and his scarf over his nose, swinging from his balcony onto Andrew’s. With a soft snick! the lock came clean under the ministrations of his picks and he slipped inside.

He thought the place would be like Neil’s: Neither Kevin nor Andrew really seemed sentimental, or materialistic.

Neil was horribly wrong. There was an old couch that looked like they’d hauled it from their college years all the way through to now. A knitted blanket throw was across the back cushions, facing the television. A gas fire-place had various photos on the mantelpiece, including Kevin proposing to Thea, Kevin and an older man who had to be his father and someone who would have looked like Andrew if it weren’t for the quiet smile hugging a heavily pregnant woman. Neil realised Andrew had a twin: Another photo of him showed Andrew, his brother, and a taller man with a darker complexion and a wide grin to contrast the twin’s blank faces sat toward the edge of the photo collection.

It was odd, seeing how one’s life could expand to so many others. There was an odd sensation at the pit of Neil’s stomach: He grit his teeth and continued to the bedrooms.

One was locked, the other wasn’t: Neil was right in assuming Kevin’s was the unlocked door and walked into his room.

He was asleep, sprawled on his bed with his sheets wrapped around his waist. His fianceé was lying next to him, curled into his side with only a bra on. Neil wasn’t fazed: He’d killed people in far less favourable conditions, like that corrupt debt tycoon who’d hired Neil as a prostitute and welcomed him in only a leather harness. And when Neil said only, he meant only.

Neil looked around the room. It was small, relatively neat, with large windows and an ensuite bathroom. He could stage an overdose: Kevin did have an alcohol problem in college. It seemed like the only viable option, seeing as Kevin was a world-class athlete with no recorded cardiovascular problems, no other drug abuses or suicidal tendencies.

Neil sighed. He wished Ichirou would give him simpler jobs sometimes. He supposed that was his designed purpose: What was the point of sending out your incredibly precise and professional assassin to knock heads when their talents were best sharpened by intricate puzzles, forcing them to be as elusive as shadows in a crowd?

Neil brushed his fingers along the dresser, ignoring the photo hung on the wall of Kevin and Thea, not smiling, but completely vulnerable and open when looking into one another’s eyes.

Neil wouldn’t lie and tell someone this job wasn’t isolating. He just didn’t have a choice.

I don’t have a choice, He repeated to himself. I don’t have a choice.

A shift on the mattress caught his attention. He glanced over: Thea was blinking up at him, rubbing one eye.

“Andrew?” She muttered. “Is that you?”

Neil said nothing, slipping out of the room and out onto the balcony once more, retreated back into his apartment.

He’d have to ask Ichirou for more time. He needed a better plan.

Andrew seemed irritated the next morning when they met up again for a smoke and lazy conversation.

“Are you alright?” Neil asked.

Andrew sent Neil a scathing look and said nothing. He went through his smoke too fast and drained the coffee: Neil handed him another cigarette, free of relaxant this time. “Did you see anything of interest last night?”

“Not that I can recall.” Neil leaned a little closer. “Have you checked cameras?”

“Nothing.” He said sourly. “Kevin’s infantile lover-girl swore she saw me in their room last night, but I was dead asleep all night. If anyone had been walking around the apartment I would have woken up.”

“Interesting.” Neil said, hiding his smile behind his mug. “I’ll let you know if I ever notice something out of the ordinary.”

Andrew nodded.

The rest of their routine meeting passed in silence.

im gonna write a p.2……how many times have i said that over the past few days lmao im a mess

#andreil #neil josten #andrew minyard #assassin!neil #bodyguard!andrew #all for the game #this is FUN #jem writes

236 notes · View notes

pan-delure · 5 years ago

Note

hey I'm starting dice casting in resin as a quarantine activity! anything you think I should know? (I have researched a decent amount about what to do or not do but I feel like it'd be better to get the opinion of someone who knows things!) thanks for your time! I love your blog btw

Oh my gosh, thank you! Wow... okay where to start... (Just a heads up to anyone reading, this is going to be a long and probably rambling post)

There's definitely a large learning curve for dice making, so like you said it's really good to do your research! Experimentation is important, but I'll try to share as much as I can to help!

There are a few important stages that help improve the quality of your dice, and the quality bumps up a bit each time you go up a stage. Each stage would cost a fair bit to bump up, but it does show an improvement and most importantly, each one reduces the amount of time and effort you have to put into completely finishing a set of dice. If you ever get discouraged, remember that failure is part of learning, and of course your results will get better with experience! I'll include some pics of my first dice versus my most recent ones for comparison.

The first tests I ever tried with making dice, I had barely a clue as to what to try. The first molds I ever made were made with a small, extremely expensive Hobby Lobby silicone mold kit, and a small bottle of Alumilite casting resin.

At the time, I knew from watching King of Random videos that the best thing to use to remove the bubbles from silicone (improving the quality of your molds and final product DRAMATICALLY) was to use a vacuum chamber to "degass" the silicone as much as possible. At the time I couldn't afford one, so my old molds often had tiny bubbles that would leave small, stippled pieces of resin all over the surface of my dice. So, how do we get around all of this?

Well, one way would be to buy a vacuum chamber, but I recently found a better way to make sure there are no bubbles! But, I'll talk a bit more about this later.

(Side Note: I do not support Hobby Lobby or their policies in the slightest, but at the time it was the only place in my town that offered silicone or resin, and it still is. I now buy almost all of my supplies online, and buy direct from the manufacturer if they have a website to avoid using Amazon.)

So first off, what kind of resin should you use?

This is normally just determined by personal preference, but I really enjoy using Art n Glow casting resin for all of my dice. You measure the two parts in a 1:1 ratio by volume, and it hardens pretty well as long as you mix it for 3-4 minutes before adding any pigments or dyes. I'll add a link to their website here, but keep in mind they also sell a lot of interesting pigment options besides just resin.

So what about silicone?

So after my first unfortunate mishaps with my old Hobby Lobby silicone, I decided to do some digging and see what would actually work the best. After watching a lot of Rybonator's videos on youtube about making molds, I went with Smooth-On brand Mold Star Slow 15 silicone for my first serious molds. This specific silicone is a two-part, green platinum cure silicone, which basically means it will last a lot longer than something like a tin cured silicone. (I would add a link for where to buy it, but there is another silicone that I like much better that I'll talk about in a moment.)

This worked pretty well for me, but there is a major downside. When you use an opaque silicone, you can't see the resin as you fill up your molds. This works for a LOT of applications, but if you're interested in doing layered, swirled, or pride themed dice, I would instead go with Smooth-On Sorta-Clear 37 silicone (link included). One trial kit is more than enough for one full set of dice molds, with a bit extra left over for other projects. Not only do the clear molds leave you open to being able to make layered or pride dice, but the silicone itself is a bit firmer than Slow 15, which makes it easier to secure the mold together before you pour resin into it, and the mold is a bit more durable overall.

(Comparison photos of molds I've made with Slow 15 and Sorta-Clear 37, and my og molds)

But how do we deal with all of the pesky bubbles in the silicone and resin?

Well, I'm glad you asked. So, normally a vacuum chamber would be used to remove the bubbles from the silicone, and then you would use a pressure pot after you fill them with resin to basically crush down any bubbles that are suspended in your resin while it hardens and cures. When I wasn't unemployed and had a decently steady stream of income, I went out of my way to track down a decent vacuum chamber and a vacuum pump (which I had to buy separately). However, with a bit of experimentation, I found that you don't really need a vacuum chamber at all! Instead of buying both pieces, which would (if you're lucky) would cost around ~$75 for the vacuum chamber and pump, and $100 for the pressure pot, just using a pressure pot in place of a vacuum chamber will save on both time and a TON of money.

Using a pressure pot is one of the main stages that helps improve the quality and time spent sanding dramatically, and both Rybonator and Peter Brown have great videos on setting up your pressure pot. Harbor Freight sells a great model that has a massive capacity and is absolutely perfect for dice making! The technique for using a pressure pot for curing silicone is rather simple, just pour your silicone into your molds and place into the pressure pot, then let them cure for the length of time given on the packaging instructions.

In terms of actually preparing dice for molds, I would follow this guide from Rybonator, which is pretty much what I've followed in making mine. My molds are slightly different, but it's just trial and error to see what works for you!

Hey, so how do you pigment your dice?

Pretty much any way you want! There are lots of different ways to color and tinted resin, and nearly infinite things you can inset into them!

A few of the things I use are the cheap $0.50 bottles of acrylic paint you can buy at Walmart or any hobby store, alcohol based inks, liquid glitter, glow powder from Art n Glow, mica powders, pearl powder, cocoa powder, gold leaf, so pretty much anything! Peter Brown has an amazing video series where he takes household items and tests how well they work as resin dyes (link), and it serves as a pretty good source of inspiration for what to use!

Oh lord, am I going to have to sand these?

IMPORTANT NOTE: ALWAYS WEAR A RESPIRATOR OR FACE MASK, EYE PROTECTION, AND GLOVES WHEN WORKING WITH RESIN! (Yes, always!)

Unfortunately, sanding your dice can be one of the most tedious parts of this hobby, but each of the stages I've mentioned such as using a pressure pot or even getting your own dice masters can really cut down on the amount of time that you have to spend sanding and polishing. Personally, I use a mix of different wet sanding grits (normally the grits I use are 300, 600, 800, 1200, and 2000), and once I'm happy with the surface finish I move on to something called Zona papers (link), which work amazingly well compared to things like micro mesh pads that I've used in the past. I normally sand each face, including when polishing them, for about a minute or so on each face in a figure-8 motion, making sure that there is plenty of water to keep both dust from clogging the sand paper, as well as to reduce the amount you are breathing in. Buying master dice, such as those from Blue Mimic, can really reduce the amount of time you have to sand, but most hobby dice makers may not go so far as they can cost over hundreds of dollars, but are necessary if you ever plan on selling them or starting a business with them.

That's about most of the advice I have when it comes to making dice, but if anyone has any questions please don't hesitate to ask!! If I think of anything else I'll add a reblog onto this with any extra info. Remember, any failures you make are absolutely part of the process, and make sure you keep them to remember how far you've come!

5 notes · View notes

travisandersondatingblog · 6 years ago

Text

59 Dating Statistics All Singles Need to Know from 2019

My mission in life is to help amazing women like you create their own love stories. And I’m committed to giving you advice on this blog that I’ve seen work for my dating coaching clients.

Today I’ve got something super special for you: a deep dive into dating statistics. Why? I want you to realize that your situation — whether you’re single, dating, or somewhere in between — is completely normal, and to give you some insight into what other women are experiencing as they navigate the world of dating and relationships.

Must-Know Dating Statistics

We surveyed 1,143 women about their dating experiences, and found some pretty interesting stuff:

Commitment: The majority of women are looking for a serious relationship.

Where: It’s still hard to know where to find great, single men.

Frequency: Women aren’t dating as much as you’d think.

Here are both the results from our research as well as other dating statistics you need to know if you’re dating, trying to date, or just simply having casual flings.

A Word on Dating

What are other women experiencing in dating?

Maybe you’re groaning right now because you’re feeling like you’re in a hamster wheel, dating guy after guy and still looking for the one that will get you off of this wheel. Or maybe you’re smiling because you’re having a blast getting to know men and going on dates at this point in your life.

Either way, here are some dating statistics to give you insight into the big world of dating.

Think everyone but you is out there going on dates? Think again. According to our research, 43% of women have been on no dates in the last three months, and 27% have only been on one or two dates.

So if you’re having a dry spell right now, you’re not alone. Don’t assume that all of the women who haven’t been on dates are sad because of that fact. Many, I suspect, are happy being single.

And even if you are going on dates, it doesn’t mean they’re going to work out: 67% of women report that all of their dates in the past three months haven’t been a good match.

It can be frustrating to go on dates that you hope will work out only to have them turn out to be duds, but the key is to keep trying. He’s out there, I promise.

First Date Fun

via GIPHY

So now let’s talk about first dates. If you’re like many women, you know within four minutes whether or not you are into the guy. Trust your gut on this one, because it’s usually right. If it’s going to work out, you’ll feel something click, usually within minutes of meeting him (but not always!).

Stressing over whether to offer to pay for the check on a first date? You’re a modern woman, after all! An Esquire survey found that 51% of women offer to pick up the check. No word on how many men actually let them…

After a first date, do you bite your nails, waiting to hear from him? If it’s been more than 24 hours, save your nails, because there’s only a 12% chance he will call. Move on to the next guy or find something better to do with your time than waste it fretting over a man.

Online Dating

Can you really find love on an app?

I know a lot of Sexy Confidence fans are on the fence about whether to start online dating. It’s really a mixed bag: I know women who have ended up marrying a man they met through a dating app…and women who complain about the dick picks and catfishing that goes on there.

In our survey, we found that only 27% of women think online dating is a good way to meet new people. The majority — 45% of women — are still unsure of the value of online dating, though they have hope that they will meet a quality man. And when it comes to whether or not dating apps are a good resource for finding true love, 68.4% of you think they’re actually making it harder to find love!

Dating apps can eat up a lot of time! On average, people are spending about an hour and a half every day on dating apps looking for someone special. That’s a lot of time!

But Dr. Jess Carbino, Bumble’s in-house sociologist, says you really shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes a day on the apps: 15 minutes in the morning and 15 in the evening.

Many women feel like online dating is a waste of time; they match with a guy who never starts a conversation, or it is a dead end when they realize they have nothing in common. You’re not the only one frustrated: only 66% of people on dating sites actually end up going on dates.

Here’s something I don’t get: men and women lie on dating apps. Men lie about their age, height, and income, while women lie about their weight, age, and physical build. Can’t we all just be honest??

Another interesting dating statistic: young women (26-year-olds) have more online pursuers than men that age, but the older they get, the more the tables turn: 48-year-old men have twice as many people after them than women the same age.

If you’re like the majority of women on dating apps, you are looking for a nice guy, not a bad guy…or actually, you might want a bit of both. Men are looking for the modern career girl rather than the girl next door. Good information to know!

Communication

mbrace technology in your relationship!

Those of you who regularly read the Sexy Confidence Blog know how big I am on communication in dating and relationships. If you’re back in the dating pool after a year (or decade!) of being in a relationship, you may not know how to navigate the intricate rules of communication in today’s tech-driven world.

Many relationships center around texting, not phone calls, which might frustrate you.

But technology can be a good thing! In our research, we discovered that 45% of our survey respondents think texting is improving their relationship. It can definitely be another channel to communicate with and get to know someone you’re dating, but just don’t rely on texting alone. Bring back those old-school phone calls!

Here’s one of those dating statistics that will make you sit up and take notice: 47% of women and 50% of men have texted nude photos. That in no way means you have to if you’re uncomfortable doing so!

Past Relationships

IDon’t worry. We all have our baggage.

If you’re 40 or older (like 64% of our survey takers), you may have been married or in one or more long relationships in the past. But what about other women? What are their stories?

Not surprisingly, many of you are divorced. Here are a few statistics about divorce you might find interesting:

Every 13 seconds, there’s a divorce in America.

Wives are more likely to file for divorce than husbands.

Virginia, Nebraska, and Delaware have the highest divorce rates.

The US has the third highest divorce rate in the world.

If you’ve been divorced, does that necessarily means a second marriage will end in divorce? The odds are high, unfortunately: 60% of second marriages end in divorce.

My suggestion is to roll slow in a committed relationship after you’ve been divorced once. Remember the mistakes you made in the first marriage and work to not make them again. Don’t rush into marriage a second time!

While the average length of a marriage is eight years, the average length of a second marriage is less than that.

Check this out: while divorce rates are declining for younger people, they have doubled since the 1990s for Americans over 50. I guess it’s never too late to start over.

It turns out the experts argue about how long to wait after a divorce before dating again. Some say you need to wait one year for every five to seven years of marriage, while others say you need one month of healing for every year. What do I say? Wait until you are 1,000% healed, and realize that might take more time than you think you need.

But not everyone is divorced; 7% of American adults are widowed. And 11.3% of people over the age of 40 have never been married. The bottom line is: everyone’s got past baggage of one kind or another when it comes to dating and relationships.

Where to Meet People

If you’re open to it, you might meet someone while on vacation!

I can’t go a week without a woman saying to me, “Adam, I just don’t know where to meet men!!’

I get that it’s frustrating. But you’ve got to keep trying…in the right places. Dating statistics show that only 9% of women have ever ended up in a relationship with someone they met in a bar. So clearly, a bar is not the right place to meet a man!

Where you live can impact how easy or difficult you find it to meet men. Though you might expect bigger cities to be great for meeting men (more men, more opportunity?) cities like Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Houston are actually bad for meeting people.

So where should you relocate to up your odds of meeting great men? Austin, Colorado Springs, and San Diego top the list. And hey, even if you don’t meet a guy, these are cool cities to live in!

If you don’t live in a city that’s great for meeting people, consider taking a vacation: 70% of people are open to meeting someone special while on vacation, so your next boyfriend might be the passenger in seat 25E or the guy swimming in the hotel pool!

Let’s Talk About Sex

via GIPHY

If there’s a loaded topic around dating, it’s definitely sex. To have it or not to have it? How soon to have it? How frequently? Who with?

If you’re trying to decide when to give it up to a guy, know that 1/3 of women who use online dating have sex on the first date. But only one in four women use protection with first-date sex! C’mon ladies! You’ve got to protect yourself!

I am glad that we’re moving away from the whole sex “rule” of thou shalt not have sex for exactly 5 dates thinking, though women still have a ways to go: only 54% of you have positive feelings about casual sex, compared to 80% of men feeling hunky dory after a hookup.

And this is interesting: researchers have found that women with wider hips are more likely to have one-night stands. Women whose hips measure at least .8 inches wider than other women have had one-night stands for three out of four of their past sexual relationships! Fascinating stuff.

But let’s dive even deeper into these dating stati from Meet Positives SM Feed 3 https://sexyconfidence.com/dating-statistics/ via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Meet Positives SM Feed 3

0 notes

fayecallasdatingblog · 6 years ago

Text

59 Dating Statistics All Singles Need to Know from 2019

My mission in life is to help amazing women like you create their own love stories. And I’m committed to giving you advice on this blog that I’ve seen work for my dating coaching clients.

Must-Know Dating Statistics

We surveyed 1,143 women about their dating experiences, and found some pretty interesting stuff:

Commitment: The majority of women are looking for a serious relationship.

Where: It’s still hard to know where to find great, single men.

Frequency: Women aren’t dating as much as you’d think.

Here are both the results from our research as well as other dating statistics you need to know if you’re dating, trying to date, or just simply having casual flings.

A Word on Dating

What are other women experiencing in dating?

Either way, here are some dating statistics to give you insight into the big world of dating.

Think everyone but you is out there going on dates? Think again. According to our research, 43% of women have been on no dates in the last three months, and 27% have only been on one or two dates.

And even if you are going on dates, it doesn’t mean they’re going to work out: 67% of women report that all of their dates in the past three months haven’t been a good match.

It can be frustrating to go on dates that you hope will work out only to have them turn out to be duds, but the key is to keep trying. He’s out there, I promise.

First Date Fun

via GIPHY

Online Dating

Can you really find love on an app?

Dating apps can eat up a lot of time! On average, people are spending about an hour and a half every day on dating apps looking for someone special. That’s a lot of time!

But Dr. Jess Carbino, Bumble’s in-house sociologist, says you really shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes a day on the apps: 15 minutes in the morning and 15 in the evening.

Communication

mbrace technology in your relationship!

Many relationships center around texting, not phone calls, which might frustrate you.

Past Relationships

IDon’t worry. We all have our baggage.

If you’re 40 or older (like 64% of our survey takers), you may have been married or in one or more long relationships in the past. But what about other women? What are their stories?

Not surprisingly, many of you are divorced. Here are a few statistics about divorce you might find interesting:

Every 13 seconds, there’s a divorce in America.

Wives are more likely to file for divorce than husbands.

Virginia, Nebraska, and Delaware have the highest divorce rates.

The US has the third highest divorce rate in the world.

If you’ve been divorced, does that necessarily means a second marriage will end in divorce? The odds are high, unfortunately: 60% of second marriages end in divorce.

While the average length of a marriage is eight years, the average length of a second marriage is less than that.

Check this out: while divorce rates are declining for younger people, they have doubled since the 1990s for Americans over 50. I guess it’s never too late to start over.

Where to Meet People

If you’re open to it, you might meet someone while on vacation!

I can’t go a week without a woman saying to me, “Adam, I just don’t know where to meet men!!’

So where should you relocate to up your odds of meeting great men? Austin, Colorado Springs, and San Diego top the list. And hey, even if you don’t meet a guy, these are cool cities to live in!

Let’s Talk About Sex

via GIPHY

If there’s a loaded topic around dating, it’s definitely sex. To have it or not to have it? How soon to have it? How frequently? Who with?

But let’s dive even deeper into these dating stati from Meet Positives SM Feed https://sexyconfidence.com/dating-statistics/ via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Meet Positives SM Feed

0 notes

funnycutcats · 6 years ago

Text

Chartreux Cat - The Frensh Breed Cat

Chartreux Cat - the French Breed Cat

"In nine lifetimes," we are told, "you'll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you." This inequity prevails, no doubt, because cats are born with certain insights into human nature while humans are obliged to make inductive sense of cats, whose first and last words on most nonedible subjects are "no comment." Thus we should not be surprised to find that people often resort to speculation and conjecture when attempting to explain the origins of cat breeds. Steeling a March of Chartreux Cat

chartreux cat 2 Sometimes these cat-origin hypotheses find their way into encyclopedias, websites, breed articles and other repositories of knowledge. Microsoft's Encarta 98, for example, solemnly declares that monks in the Le Grande Chartreux cat monastery near Grenoble, France, "may have developed the Chartreux cat in the 16th century. The monks favored this cat for its skill as a hunter, and used it to protect the abbey's stores of grain from rats and mice." The switch from contingency ("may have developed") to certitude ("favored this cat") is an interesting example of begging the answer, but once begged is well-begun. To be sure, the Carthusian order, founded by Saint Bruno in 1084, was home to accomplished steelworkers who provided armament for the Crusades. (Perhaps the illusory link between the Carthusians and the Chartreux cat was born of the similarity between the color of steel, blue-gray, and the color of the cats in question.) The monks of Le Grande Chartreux cat also forged a potent, green, herbal liqueur whose trade-secret recipe, which contains 130 plants cultivated by the monks, was given to them in 1605 by Marechal d'Estrees, the legendary French field marshal — and seized for a short time by Napoleon in 1810 when he went about confiscating all secret recipes that might have been useful to the state. (Could he have been after the secret recipe for a certain kind of pastry?) For all that is known about the Carthusians, there is no evidence that the good fathers also cultivated cats or obtained cats from monastic knights returning from the Crusades or brought cats back to France from the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century. Nor is there any evidence that the monks even named the Chartreux cat. Carthusian archives, we are told, do not mention un chat, the cat of any other color at all. Diderot to du Bellay One mustn't grieve if the monastery connection is ultimately enveloped in sackcloth and silence, for there is still much factual information by which to chart the Chartreux's development. Diderot — the French critic, philosopher, and novelist — referred to the Chartreux cat in Les Bijoux Indiscrets, published in 1848. The Comte de Buffon, the most prominent theoretical biologist of his era and the chief author of the 44-volume Histoire Naturelle, published between 1749 and 1804, listed four cat breeds then common in Europe: the domestic, the Spanish, the Angora and the Chartreux. The 1723 edition of the Universal Dictionary of Commerce, of Natural History and of the Arts and Trades reported that Chartreux was a common appellation for cats with blue-gray fur; and 165 years earlier the poet Joachim du Bellay noted that "entirely gray" cats were common in France. The 441-year-old trail grows cold as steel at that point. Some writers maintain that Chartreux cat descended from Syrian cats — stocky individuals with wooly, ash-gray coats and copper eyes — which were brought to Europe during the Crusades. Other authorities, citing the omniscient and ubiquitous "recent research," argue that Chartreux cats were named neither by nor for Carthusian monks but after "well-known Spanish wool of the early 18th century" instead. The cat, of course, adheres to a vow of silence on these matters, and the reader is well advised to take all theories with a grain of steel when sorting through the claims and counterclaims attending the origin of any breed. Legers' Domain The Chartreux's long natural history notwithstanding, the breed's modern-day chronicle does not begin until 1931, when several Chartreux cats were exhibited under that heading at a cat show in Paris. Those cats belonged to a Mlle. Leger, who lived with her sister on the small Brittany island of Belle-lle-sur-Mere off the northwest coast of France. Cat-show records indicate that Mlle. Leger was the first person to exhibit Chartreux cat in France. The Leger sisters, whose cattery name was de Guerveur, also bred Persians and Siamese. They moved from the mainland to Belle-lle-sur-Mere in the late 1920s, and shortly after they had arrived on the island, they discovered a bountiful population of blue-gray cats in Le Palais, the island's principal city. Because many of these free-roaming cats frequented the grounds of the hospital in Le Palais, they were known in that vicinity as "hospital cats." Though we haven't a clue about how the blue-gray cats of Belle-lle-sur-Mere arrived from the French mainland (unless the monks operated a water taxi), we do know that World War II left many cats homeless throughout France, obliging them to fend for themselves and to arrange their own breedings. In addition, cats were sometimes killed for food, and several French observers have reported that Chartreux cats were also killed for their plush coats. When a heroic and dedicated band of breeders determined to preserve the Chartreux cat in the early 1950s, they attempted to strengthen the breed by outcrossing to other blue cats — Persians, British Shorthairs and whatever non-pedigreed types approximating the Chartreux standard were then available in France. Because blue was the sine qua non of that standard and blue cats were in generous supply, Chartreux fanciers had many breeds and varieties to choose from in their efforts to revitalize the breed. Reconstructive surgeons do not always color between the lines, however, and by 1970 there was so little difference between the Chartreux cat and the blue British Shorthair that the Feline International Federation (FIFe) declared the two cats should be judged in the same category as a single breed. This decree was in force for seven years until European breeders, aided by the writing and scholarship of Chartreux fancier Jean Simonnet, succeeded in convincing FIFe that the Chartreux was a separate breed deserving its own classification. England remained unconvinced, withal, and to this day the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy does not recognize the Chartreux as a separate breed. Bonhomous Beginning Chartreux Cat In 1970, Helen Gamon, a cat fancier from La Jolla, California, brought the first Chartreux to the United States. Three of the initial 10 Chartreux cat imported by American breeders were supplied by the aforementioned and long-lived Leger sisters. Thanks to the efforts of Gamon and other breeders in this country who began to talk about Chartreux, the breed was accepted first by one then by another of the cat registries in North America until, in 1987, with the Chartreux's elevation to championship status by the Cat Fanciers' Association, the breed had achieved universal acceptance. Personality Profile of Chartreux Cat "Living with Chartreux cat has its ups and downs," says one of the breed's admirers. "The curious rascals' maneuvers range from hiding under sofas and chairs to climbing precious lace curtains. Fortunately, Chartreux cats have short activity spans. After 15 minutes of exasperating antics, the cats settle down like couch potatoes for the rest of the day. "Of all the charming qualities a Chartreux cat embodies, however, it is still the coat that enchants an owner most. The dense, water- repellant fur feels like no other; and holding that soft, furry-purry body close after a bad day warms the heart of every Chartreux person." According to the 5.1M version of Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, the Chartreux "loves to view things from heights and can deftly leap from floor to top of the refrigerator." We can believe the lofty-view part. Many cats like heights, but unless the refrigerators in France are no taller than Napoleon, we doubt that any domestic cat can leap to the top of them deftly. Back on terra firma, the Chartreux cat is known for its delicate voice, measured approach to life, devotion to its owner, skill at harvesting smaller animals, and Mona Lisa smile. Neither hail-fellow nor hermit, this stout companion " accommodate itself to everything," wrote Fernand Mery in The Life, History, and Magic of the Cat. "It is a simple and good-natured peasant, but a sure friend." The Building Code of Chartreux Cat The Chartreux cat balances a deep-chested, broad-shouldered, well-muscled body on fine-boned, comparatively short legs. Its plentiful torso is connected by a short, stevedore neck to a head that's large and broad, but not round. The contrast between the Chartreux's wide forehead and its narrow, though rounded, muzzle creates the impression that the cat is smiling. This meditation is enhanced by large, round, moderately wide-set eyes, separated by at least the width of an eye, that range in color from gold to copper. The Chartreux's nose is straight, and short to medium in length. Small- to medium-size ears, rounded slightly at the tips, are set high and erect on the head. The Chartreux's coat, soft and dense in texture, is medium-short to medium in length and may be slightly wooly. It may not, however, be any color but blue-gray — in shades that range from slate to ash — with tips that are lightly brushed with silver. The Chartreux cat is a massive, slow-maturing breed. Males may take as long as four to five years to reach their full-monty adult weight, 12 to 16 pounds. Females usually weigh what they're going to weigh, seven to 10 pounds, by the age of 3. The Chartreux's unique combination of stocky body and slim legs — described occasionally as resembling "a potato on toothpicks" — has been achieved at some risk of patellar luxation (displacement of the kneecap). Indeed, the Chartreux cat is only one of two breeds — the Cornish Rex is the other — for which lameness in the hindquarters is a disqualifying factor in the Cat Fanciers' Association's breed standards. This is not to say that only two cat breeds are prone to patellar luxation, but it is to note that the condition must be significant enough to have warranted the attention of breeders. Patellar luxation, "when mild, does not usually cause any symptoms in the cat," says one observer, "but if it is severe, it can cause lameness. Because this condition is hereditary, most reputable breeders screen their breeding animals for it and do not use questionable animals for breeding." (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push({}); Follow us on : Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Read the full article

#cat #catbreed #CatBreeds #cats #catsbreed #Chartreuxcat #cutecats #frenshcat #frenshcats #funnycats

0 notes

biofunmy · 6 years ago

Text

Tech Products We Tried And Loved In 2018

As tech and business reporters at BuzzFeed News, we love consuming stuff. This year, our obsessions weren’t limited to the buzziest new gadgets (we recommend LAST year’s iPhone, and the Facebook Portal is conspicuously absent from this list). We were also into all sorts of new apps, fun social media accounts, productivity hacks, and even just ways to…disconnect from technology. (Reading books! Doing jigsaw puzzles!) And yes, we also enjoyed weed vape pens.

Here are all the things that the BuzzFeed Tech and Business team tried this year and wholeheartedly recommends.

Customizing my PopSockets to show my cats’ faces — $15 each

I don’t need to go into all the ways that PopSockets greatly improve your life; my colleague Katie has already done that, naming it as her favorite tech thing of 2017 and talking about it nonstop all of last year. (I should know. I sit next to her in the BuzzFeed newsroom.)

Long story short, Katie convinced me too, but I took it a step even further by customizing my PopSockets with my cats’ faces. This is an easy thing. You basically take a picture of your beloved pet (or pets), photoshop out the background, and head over to the PopSocket “customizer” page. A pair cost me only $30. And you can switch out the design by popping off the top, so both Laser Beam and Vivienne get play on my phone.

Yes, this is something I show off to people at parties, frequently and obnoxiously. But now you can be that person too! Also, I’m planning to get a friend of ours a customized PopSocket with the face of his girlfriend on it as a prank Christmas gift. It’s gonna be great.

—Davey Alba

I don’t get why people like PopSockets. They are extremely uncool and bulky. Since I have a deep-seated fear of developing iPhone claw hand and a long history of dropping my phone and shattering screens (my claim to fame is that Bella Hadid and I go to the same screen repair place), I needed to find something that allowed me to hold my phone with my fingers but wasn’t totally lame. I noticed that my friend’s cool German mom was using a sleek iPhone strap at dinner one night, and I ordered one on Amazon for $2.50 less than a standard PopSocket. It lays completely flat and is the perfect size for my middle and ring finger. While I hear that PopSockets constantly break, my sturdy phone strap has never failed me. One time, a stranger on the subway asked me where I got it! I am a trendsetter.

—Maggie Schultz

The thing everyone asks me when I wear my computer glasses is: Do those things work? Well, if by “work,” you mean, “Do they make me look smart and cool?” — then yes. They work great. Do they actually do anything to protect my eyes from blue light? Idk, the science is fuzzy here.

I’ve been blessed with perfect vision, and I don’t need prescription glasses of any kind. But I’ve also been cursed with looking great in glasses! What’s a gal like me to do? Wearing fake glasses with no prescription is embarrassing; it’s something a mall emo teen would do. Computer glasses allow me all the glory of wearing “real” glasses without any visual impairment requirements!

The only downside is they have a slight blue tint, which makes them look different from actual glasses. But it’s probably not that noticeable, so I’m able to walk around looking like a certified genius while still maintaining my idiot lifestyle.

There are fancier versions of these glasses, and maybe those lenses actually do a better job of protecting your eyes. But I was in the market for something cheap, and Amazon had lots of styles under $25. I got a second pair for about $15 in pink plastic frames as well.

—Katie Notopoulos

Dosist pen — $40–$100 on Eaze (availability based on local state law)

I’m 46 and, frankly, I don’t want to get too high. Or arrested. Or smoke dope that’s been treated with something I use to drive my Honda. I don’t want to get blasted or brain-hammered. I have shit to do! But every once in a while I do like to, you know, take the edge off of life?

This is why I like the Dosist pen vape. It’s a self-contained oil vaporizer that delivers a measured dose of THC and CBD as you inhale, and then vibrates to let you know to stop. There are various “formulas” with different THC to CBD ratios, and other terpenes, designed to deliver specific types of highs. (I like Bliss.) It’s also reusable. When empty, you can bring it back to a store that sells them for a $5 deposit. Plus it’s available from various on-demand delivery services, such as Eaze, so you can have it at your door within about 10 minutes of deciding you need to, uh, unwind. Not bad!

—Mat Honan

Infinite content feeds that aren’t social media — various prices

2018 was the year I embraced the continuous scroll and the back catalogue. Long live the podcast feed, the extended playlist, and the audiobook. There were too many moments in 2017 when I was browsing Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram and asked myself, “What am I doing here? How have two hours passed? Is this why I can’t finish a book?” or exclaimed, “Holyshiteverythingissobad!” I was receding-hairline-deep in inane and stressful content, a condition that only encouraged stress and self-loathing. I needed a change.

So did I really listen to two years’ worth of Who? Weekly, a gossip podcast about C-list celebrities? The alternative was reading more Twitter takes about how and why the Russia investigation wound torturously on, so you fucking bet I did! Did I stream Abba’s entire discography on Spotify? It distracted me from the hellfires shrouding my apartment in ash, so I sure did! Was listening to 37 hours of The Brothers Karamazov‘s intellectual Russian family drama better than clicking on three gay thirst trap accounts in a row? YES.

—Blake Montgomery

Tabs. I tend to have a lot of them. As of writing this, I have 67 open across six windows, and many I don’t even remember clicking. There’s that big New York Times exposé on Donald Trump’s tax schemes, which I got halfway through before I was probably distracted by something dumb and meaningless on Twitter. There’s a friend’s 10,000-word essay I promised myself I’d read eventually. And there are three tabs of stale Twitter feeds I forgot to exit out of.

Tabs are the most obvious byproduct of my internet attention deficit disorder, the online exoskeletons of things my addled mind was interested in for about 10 minutes until a new shiny notification fluttered across my screen. Compared to others, my problem is probably mild. A colleague, whom I’ll leave unnamed, confided to me the other day that he had 2,193 tabs that he’s archived with an online tool. [Editor’s note: BuzzFeed News does NOT endorse Ryan’s tab strategy; it will slow your computer to a crawl.]

I have yet to download a tab manager — it’d probably just feed my habit — but I have found something else to cope with my issue. Audm, an iPhone app, streams audio read aloud by professional narrators of longform articles from outlets including the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and BuzzFeed News. Priced comparably with a newspaper or magazine subscription at $7.99 a month, Audm is perfect for long commutes and vacation road trips. Stories, of which there are more than 1,000 on the app, run anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours, and they sound exactly like a well-done audiobook. The content is also surprisingly fresh, with releases timed to magazine publication dates or within a few days of a story appearing online.

While the app is buggy (it takes a full minute to load and crashes about three times before I can get a working stream), it’s worth the wait. It’s transformed my morning train rides from a constant refreshing of Twitter, email, and Slack to one where I’m able to catch up on a subject I actually wanted to read about, a distraction from the distractions. And the best part is, when I get to work, I’m finally able to X out of one those tabs that I forgot about a few months ago.

—Ryan Mac

@_personals_ Instagram

I spend way too many nights scrolling through Instagram until I finally fall asleep. Some of my favorite posts are the ads on @_personals_, an Instagram-based dating community for queers. The account is inspired by old-school newspaper personals, and it’s so damn good.

The way it works: The small group running the account holds an open call for ad submissions and asks for a $5 donation. Throughout that month, the account posts the ads, including a cute emoji and the submitter’s Instagram handle so interested people can get in touch.

Here’s a sampling of the ads:

“Androfemme lesbian boy-child seeks co-collaborator in all things to eventually farm sheep, write books, & build a house with.”

“22/aries/tiny faggy nb boy iso non-monog partners for crafts & crafty fucking”

“25,enby femme. Half puppy half little. Bottom bitch. Lives to please but bratty & will make you earn it. Ask my mami. I’m worth it.”

“Wry & romantic, reserved (not timid) femme into questioning, clumsily cooking with patient people, & song. Actual tragic for musos, gentle tradies, & enthusiastic nerds.”

And all of this was posted just in the last week! I was introduced to this account to expand my dating options. But now I mainly read this account for the prose.

—Leticia Miranda

For the last few months, my world has been dark. It started when Apple added a new feature in the latest version of its Mac operating system that switches all menus and other parts of the user interface to blacks and grays. This makes it easier to look at your computer at night or in a dark room without squinting. Eventually I got so used to the look that all bright colors on any screen made my eyes hurt.

Fortunately, more and more tech companies seem to be building a “Dark Mode” into their products, and I’ve since switched to it on all the apps I use the most: on Instapaper to catch up on my reading, on Twitter when I’m scrolling through my timeline for hours, on the Kindle app to read books, on YouTube, and on Reddit, which added it earlier this year. Last week, I installed Dark Reader, a Chrome extension that makes all web pages dark by default, and a dark theme for Chrome that makes the browser’s tabs jet black.

Most of us can’t help being chained to our screens for unhealthy amounts of time each day, but turning on dark mode wherever possible is a tiny luxury we should all indulge in.

—Pranav Dixit

Headspace — $95.88/year subscription

For most of my life, hearing people talk about meditation would conjure up New Age visions of crossed legs and om-ing and marathon stretches of Nirvana-achieving trances. From afar, it seemed like an activity that required endless hours of devotion — more like a way of life than a healthy hobby. So to say I was extremely skeptical of app-based meditation would’ve been an understatement. At worst, it sounded like a scam; at best, a bastardization of a sacred kind of ritual.

I was wrong. A friend introduced me to Headspace after a conversation we had about productivity — specifically, how I’d found it nearly impossible to focus and structure my days without jumping haphazardly from tab to tab in my browser. And how I’d end even my best days feeling frazzled, detached, and legitimately unsure of what I’d just accomplished. On their advice, I bought myself a year’s subscription in order to incentivize actually creating a routine. I chose the Basics tutorial and tried a couple of five-minute sessions.

Unsurprisingly for a mindfulness app, the introduction to meditation is very calming and gentle. I learned that I’d been mostly wrong about the entire practice — devoting just 10 or 20 minutes a day (or whenever you have some downtime) can pay dividends quickly and improve focus. And the app — despite some corny animations — is full of guided, unguided, and semi-guided sessions that you can tailor to your day (helping to fall asleep, unwinding at the end of the day, focus before or after a workout, or just taking a breather).

I’m still no guru and I’ll admit I’ve struggled to sit down with Headspace reliably every day. But when I do, it’s immediately satisfying and is maybe the only thing on my phone that makes me feel good. The app-based part, of which I’d been so skeptical, is actually the part I find most essential in that it helps me take a few minutes for myself during random bits of downtime. It’s technology that introduces a little friction and reflection into my life, and for that I’m thankful.

—Charlie Warzel

10.

/remind command in Slack

You can set a bot to remind you of anything by just typing a command. It’s like having a personal assistant in the future, and it’s great for someone like me, who never leverages to-do lists or calendars to their full potential. You can set these reminders hours, days, or even weeks in advance by just typing a command. So for example, if I know I need to mail something when I get to work but am afraid I’ll forget to take it out of my backpack, I just set a Slack reminder for about 10 minutes after I expect to arrive at the office, and it reminds me to do it!

—Caroline O’Donovan

11.

Cutting the cord — Savings: $125.79/month

I can’t believe how long I let my cable company pump cash from my bank account. The last time I got a bill from Spectrum was in March. It was $208.26 for a “Triple Play” bundle: allegedly “fast and reliable” internet, cable (with HBO and DVR), and a fucking landline that I never even bothered to get a phone for. This package, according to a dubious customer service rep, was inexplicably cheaper than just ordering internet and cable separately without the unused landline, and it was the lowest price they could offer me, a customer of 10 years. Shit, right? The point had clearly arrived in my life when I had to decide whether I was willing to pay $2,499.12 a year to mindlessly flip through a-hundred-something channels when I was too bored to do anything else. But lame habits die hard, and it was comforting to know that I could always pull up some channel playing Friends reruns at the end of a long day. After painstakingly convincing my husband that he’d still have access to his precious, vital, life-sustaining ESPN through any number of streaming services, we made the irreversible leap to the land of the cordless, and my GOD, it has been wonderful.

We rebuilt our media habitat like this:

– An internet-only account on Verizon for $42.48 per month

– The cheapest Sling TV subscription (it has my essentials like CNN, Comedy Central, HGTV, BBC America for those great animal series, and TBS for Friends reruns, as well as ESPN for hubby) for $25 per month, and it came with a free Roku

– An HBO Now account that’s $14.99 per month

We also got a digital antenna for $14.99 plus tax, a one-time cost. There’s less content, but there hasn’t been a microsecond when I thought, Man, there’s not enough to watch. In fact, I might even say the quality of my media consumption has slightly improved since we cut the cord, as there are fewer channels that lure me into hours of accidental, regretful viewing. My programming has become more intentional. And the Roku universe is full of apps for free content like YouTube (and, ahem, BuzzFeed) and PBS Kids for my toddler. The free Roku Channel also has a boatload of free movies — not new releases, but stuff like Brooklyn, The Fighter, Spaceballs, and Braveheart: things you might have previously watched on DVD.

So I went from paying $208.26 per month to veg out with my TV to paying $82.47 to veg out with my TV. I am a step closer to entertainment enlightenment, my friends. As for the math: I’m saving $125.79 a month; which adds up to $1,509.48 per year! I intend on taking my family on a low-key getaway with this money, which is definitely going to be more memorable than 200 hours of MTV. I know people will ask “But what about DVR?” (it’s an extra $5 a month on Sling) and “Won’t all the streaming services you get to replace cable add up?” (it depends entirely on what you need, but a lot of my friends who have cable are ALSO paying for HBO or Netflix or Hulu already, so we’re possibly all oversubscribed). If there are cable-only programs that really add value to your life, then by all means, keep the cord and stay happy — I’ve just found that isn’t the case for me.

It’s possible that one day we’ll all be so dependent on cordless services that they will find ways to force customers to subscribe to bloated media packages. But for now, what’s not to love?

—Venessa Wong

12.

Buying last year’s model iPhone X (256GB edition) – $710

This year, I decided to switch from my Android back to an iPhone. I fly a lot to visit my parents in the Philippines, so I loved the cheap, convenient international coverage my Pixel’s Google’s Project Fi offered me ($10 per 1GB of data plus $20 for unlimited calls and texts!). But I missed the easy compatibility of the iPhone with other gadgets in my home, like my finicky Vizio soundbar.

But another difficult decision awaited me because 2018 was the year when choosing an iPhone became confusing as hell. The new iPhone XR’s upgrades were minimal compared to last year’s X, but the phone got wildly more expensive. So I got a used iPhone X (for a great deal, I might add) on the website Swappa.

My colleague Nicole Nguyen convinced me to make this call in her (excellent) iPhone XR review. Basically, a used iPhone X checks all the boxes in terms of positive qualities: It’s small-hand-friendly, has a super high-res screen, extra zoom, portrait mode, and is less than $1,000 to boot.

And hey, I was glad to hear some year-end 2018 news that aligns well with my choice: In November, Google renamed Project Fi to “Google Fi,” and announced that it would soon support a lot more phones, including my iPhone X. Huzzah!

—Davey Alba

13.

@girlshredclips Instagram

Back when I was a little girl living in the middle of nowhere and roaming around my rural town (population: 125) on my skateboard, I couldn’t have imagined that there were other girls who liked skating as much as I did. Anything I ever found online or in Thrasher magazine featured boys. Yes, there was occasionally Elissa Streamer, generally considered to be the first woman skater to go pro, and there were always bikini babes… but I couldn’t relate much to Ms. Streamer (more badass than I could ever hope to be), and I certainly was not a bikini babe. I never saw another skater like me (which is maybe not a surprise, considering how rarely I saw other people at all back then).

Now I’m a grown woman in a big city and skating less often than I used to, but my heart skips a beat anytime a post from @girlshredclips, @meowskateboards, or @skatelikeagirlsfbay pops up on my Instagram feed. Holy shit, these girls can shred.

Some are just little kids, some are my age, some are moms. Although they all skate better than me, I can see myself in them — past, present, and future — and it delights me to think that skater girls growing up in 2018 have plenty of relatable examples to keep in mind whenever some dude tells them that they’re posers. Yes, the internet can be a facilitator of chaos; Instagram and the other social media platforms can sometimes make you feel like you have a garbage life. But lady skater Instagram accounts bring me joy every day. (Pro tip: Unfollow people who make you feel bad about yourself; follow a few women who shred instead.)

—Samantha Oltman

When I go to a bar, I want to be able to hang out with friends and just, you know, talk to them at a normal human volume. But many food and drink establishments are so dang loud that you end up gesturing at, instead of conversing with, people. That’s why I am very into the free Soundprint app, which is only available for iOS but also has a website version. Soundprint publishes a list of quiet places in major cities, including New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas.

The Soundprint app shows you an average noise rating in decibels of the restaurants, bars, and coffee shops near you. The app calculates the rating based on “SoundCheck” submissions from users who allow the app to access their iPhone’s microphone to measure how loud the environment is. According to the app, a red rating (over 81 decibels) means a place is so loud that long exposure can cause hearing loss — and there are over a dozen establishments within a square mile of our office that fit that profile! Anyway, if you, like me, are a grumpy curmudgeon, this app is great if you want to find a quiet place to chat.

—Nicole Nguyen

The best thing to happen to my cat in 2018 was Mousr, a small, wheeled, AI robo-mouse he has embraced in a Milo and Otis kind of way — if Otis was a cat toy and Milo was a cat hellbent on its destruction. This is in no way an exaggeration. My cat has developed an almost pathological addiction to “Mr. Roboto,” which uses a small array of cameras, a “time-of-flight” sensor, and some other whiz-bang tech to convince him that it’s an actual mouse. Watching my cat playing with Mousr is like watching one of those slow-motion YouTube videos of cheetahs surprise-attacking gazelles. My cat talks to Mousr — with those same sinister chattering, chirping cat-sounds that typically signal imminent murder. My cat drags Mr. Roboto off its charging station when it’s recharging. This has become such a problem that we recently moved the charging station to the top of an armoire. The other night we heard a small crash downstairs. A few minutes later, our cat came upstairs proudly dragging Mr. Roboto by one of its custom tail attachments. He mewled at us until I pulled out a phone and fired up the app, which allows for both autonomous (wander, wall-hugger, and stationary) and remote control modes. Then he stalked, captured, and mercilessly beat the absolute shit out of it (donkey kick!). Happy kitty. Mousr retails for $149, which is outrageously expensive for a cat toy. But we are probably going to invest in one anyway (ours is a loaner); frankly, I’m not sure there’s any other option. My cat would kill me.

—John Paczkowski

Instagram is by far the app I am most addicted to — sometimes I’ll be scrolling through it, close the app, look around, and mechanically reopen it like some kind of zombie. I have the timer set to 20 minutes, which means I get the alert that it’s time to stop basically every day, sometimes even first thing in the morning! But even though the pop-up message usually makes me stick my tongue out at my phone and roll my eyes, it does break the spell and remind me to do something more useful with my time, like practice Italian on Duolingo. It’s not a cure-all, but it’s a nudge in the right direction in a world where software is almost always nudging you in the wrong direction.

—Caroline O’Donovan

17.

Sonos One — $199 (currently on sale for $179)

You move into an apartment and you get a couch, kitchenware, your bed. But after all those basics are set? An essential upgrade is filling your home with sound. In the continuing hellscape year that was 2018, there was one thing I realized could shift my mood in a small but significant way: playing whatever jam I was currently obsessed with on my Sonos One.

Sure, you can just blast your fave song loudly on your laptop, which I used to do. But then I decided I was going to be the grown-ass 30-year-old woman I am and splurged on a nice-sounding speaker. I went with Sonos because it’s the wireless speaker brand that’s widely known for high-quality sound. Against the wishes of my boyfriend, I bought a Sonos One, a speaker that integrates with voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa. My boyfriend is freaked out by the idea of an always-on mic listening for a wake word. When I brought the Sonos home, I left the mic deactivated for weeks after setting it up — but I liked to know the option to use Alexa was there if I wanted it.

Then one day… I turned it on. I didn’t tell my boyfriend, I just set up the Sonos One with Alexa when he wasn’t around, and started talking to her. Whenever he came by, I pretended I was still committed to a life lived free of voice commands. But eventually, when we were talking about some song, I just blurted out: “Alexa. Play [song].”

Look, that first reveal wasn’t pleasant, but now my boyfriend has totally come around and yells at Alexa too. “What’s the weather?” “What time is it?” “Play [podcast].” My best troll is commanding Alexa to read an excerpt of an Atavist story he wrote a few years back out loud. He narrated it, so his voice comes through the speakers; you’ve never seen anyone shout, “Alexa, STOP!” so fast.

There are times when the speaker conks out and refuses to respond to me, but you know what? It’s a lot more fun having the thing in my apartment than not. And yeah, to a certain extent, my boyfriend and I have both warmed up to having a voice-activated gadget. The Sonos One is the first and last one I’ll be getting for my home, though. I promise, Joseph.

—Davey Alba

Hosted by Jane Marie, The Dream dives into the multilevel-marketing schemes that have overrun social media. MLMs like Herbalife, Mary Kay, and Amway have been around for a while, but a whole slew of weird new female-friendly ones that sell essential oils or athletic leggings have popped up recently. I’m fascinated by the role the internet has played in their explosion. The podcast talks to people who have been burned and lost money from these schemes. It also dives into the history of how MLMs came to be so popular over the last 50 years, and how the government has failed to rein them in. My favorite episodes are when a producer signs up for a cosmetic MLM and we get to see the details of just how it tricks the sellers into buying the product, losing money outright, and selling within a closed system.

—Katie Notopoulos

19.

2013 MacBook Pro — around $500 on eBay

I’m a sucker for shiny new gadgets, but my favorite piece of tech this year was my five-year-old MacBook Pro. It’s a late 2013 model with a 13-inch display and middling innards, and it’s been the workhorse I have relied on for everything from live-blogging Apple events to reporting from remote corners of the country.

OK, so it’s got some spots across the screen. The battery only runs about five hours before it needs to be plugged in. The spaces between the keys are grubby from the time I spilled tea into the keyboard and never quite managed to get the stains out completely (I let the laptop dry and it still worked like a champ!). And one of the speaker grills is bent from the time I banged it on my bed when I was annoyed with someone on the internet.

But I wouldn’t trade this for anything else, not even for one of Apple’s modern laptops that are thinner, lighter, sexier, pricier, and full of frills like a Touch Bar that nobody asked for or keyboards that can be destroyed by a single speck of dust.

As long as I can stream Netflix and browse the web without Chrome grinding to a halt, my old Macbook Pro is all I need.

—Pranav Dixit

Biking to work is awesome. You don’t have to be face-to-armpit against complete strangers on the bus. You get a little work out. It’s good for the environment, too! What’s not awesome is how dangerous biking on crowded city streets are. I was constantly yelling, “HEY, AHGGHBLERGH” after getting cut off by drivers or pummeled by Uber/Lyft passengers that don’t look over their shoulders before opening the car door.

That is, until I got this rad bell (lol, yes — a RAD BELL) called Spurcycle. It was a birthday gift, which I highly recommend, because at $49, it’s certainly pricier than other bike bells. I like this bell because it’s really small, but it rings very loudly, for an absurdly long time. If you don’t believe me, believe the thousands of people that backed this on Kickstarter in 2013, because they too were into loud little bike bells.

The ring isn’t obnoxious, like a car alarm. It’s nice, and using it is a really lovely way to tell cars, pedestrians, and ride-hail passengers “I’M HERE!!” without having to shout “I’M HERE!!”

—Nicole Nguyen

21.

Shortcut to creating a new Google Doc

I can’t believe I didn’t know about this until just recently, until after I saw someone tweet about it. As someone who primarily works in Google Docs — I use it for all my note-taking and writing — I open new docs all the time!

The shortcut lets you skip all the usual clicks required to open a new doc. Instead, you just type this URL: http://bit.ly/2VnNPmb. But even that’s not really convenient enough. So I dragged it onto my bookmarks bar, and now I have a handy button right in the middle of my browser for NEW DOC.

—Katie Notopoulos

22.

Wireless charging pad — $4

I got my wireless charger in the most discount scenario possible: on a Sunday evening as the Black Friday weekend sales entered their desperate final hours, in a Neiman Marcus outlet store where everything was 40% off, fished out of a giant bin of extra, extra discounted garbage positioned near the registers. It was four levels deep into an Inception-style discount world, it’s some no-brand piece of suspiciously light and hollow junk, and it ended up costing like four bucks. It was the best thing I bought in 2018.

The reason why is pretty simple: The first time you just put your phone down on the table and watch it begin charging — without any plugging in or fiddling around with a cable — is a legitimately magical experience. It’s one of those moments when a thing finally works the way you always wanted it to work, even if you didn’t know you wanted it to work that way. Think of the first time you experienced a real touchscreen phone — i.e., the first time you played with an iPhone — or the first time you put in your AirPods and experienced headphones the correct way.

It’s not a coincidence that both those examples were Apple products — while the company doesn’t tend to be the first to market with a new technology, it’s typically the first to bring a good version to market. There were crappy touchscreen Nokias years before the iPhone, and Bluetooth headphones have been a thing since those dorky headsets people were wearing in the early 2000s. They were all junk, and then Apple made the Correct Thing.

Maybe that’s what’s going on with wireless chargers now, because hardly anybody seems to be using them, despite them being pretty good. Apple seems to have completely screwed up in its attempts to launch its own extremely fancy one (and maybe given up entirely?) and the result is that the market lacks a certain halo of Apple approval and encouragement. But don’t let that stop you! Even my $4 piece of crap is *fantastic*, and everyone should have a wireless charging pad sitting on their desk at work and their bedside table at home.

Start by buying the cheapest one possible to get a feel for how they work; because they don’t need to pay the Apple tax levied on anything with a Lightning connector, they’re wildly cheap — cheaper than all but the cheapest regular iPhone charging cables. Here’s a probably-perfectly-fine Anker wireless charger for $12 — the same price as a six-foot Lightning cable from Amazon Basics. What are you waiting for? You have nothing to lose but your chains.

—Tom Gara

23.

Band Memes on Instagram

If you’ve read this far, I’m going to go ahead and guess you might have been not the coolest person in your high school (no offense). Perhaps you were even like me and played in the middle school or high school band — if so, these memes will be very relatable. I have found myself strangely overjoyed to find extremely niche relatable memes that are mostly made by and for high school students, but that I, an adult, can enjoy as well. This year, I joined an adult community concert band, and I’ve been so happy to play the bassoon in a group setting again. It also gives me an excuse to revive “playing in band” as part of my Personal Brand. And as part of my Personal Brand, I deserve to enjoy these wholesome memes.

—Katie Notopoulos

I love Apple’s AirPods wireless earbuds. I think they’re among the company’s best products and a reminder that Apple still has the chops to inspire that “sense of childlike wonder” that Steve Jobs used to talk about. Problem is, I no longer use them. For whatever reason — my overly large head, my poorly designed auricles, a shitty external auditory meatus — I have difficulty keeping my AirPods in my ears, or getting the type of fit that delivers good sound. I do not have this problem with Master & Dynamic’s MW07 True Wireless Earphones. They have detachable “Silicone Fit Wings,” which slot them securely into my outer ear, and they sound fucking fantastic. In fact, they are by far the best-sounding buds I’ve used. And they’d better be because they cost $299 (double Airpods’ $149). This is perhaps because they feature “custom 10mm high-performance Beryllium drivers,” are cloaked in “handcrafted acetate,” and come with a hefty stainless steel charging case (14 hours of additional charge) that might break a toe were you to drop it on one. I don’t need or care about any of those things. But as a big-headed, recovering audiophile, I am happy to pay for them if it means my earbuds will stay in my ears and reliably play “Master of Puppets” into them with solid sonic accuracy.

—John Paczkowski

In August, my wife, my dog, and I spent a weekend with friends in a rental cabin in New York’s Hudson River Valley. We planned on hiking the whole time, so of course it rained for two days straight. The options inside were limited to books, conversation, and wine — good enough for the Greeks, but not for me. I ransacked the cabinets. Scrabble, been there. Monopoly, done that. Then, at the back of the bottom shelf, I spied it: a jigsaw puzzle. And not any jigsaw puzzle, but a 1,000-piece warhorse from the bad boys at Ravensburger. When completed, “The Sanctuary of Knowledge” depicts an old couple reading by the fire in a cavernous Baroque library as fairies fly around them. (I took the fairies to be a metaphor for the magic of reading.) I’m like any other tech-addled thirtysomething (i.e., delayed gratification averse) but something about this wee old couple and their whimsical retirement made me want to dump the box out and get to work. So I did! — to the polite ambivalence of my friends.

I didn’t finish it. I got about a quarter of the way there and then we had to leave. But those few hours I spent matching shades of brown for the inlays on the vaulted shelves felt, I don’t know, therapeutic? Meditative? Purposeful? The puzzle didn’t come with an app or a leaderboard; it didn’t want to know anything about me or my friends; it couldn’t tell me the weather. Instead, it drew my mind and my fingers into a soothing little loop, never popping up with notifications, never leading me to other puzzles that secretly advocate for fascism, always with a discrete ending in sight. Good for me! I thought at the time, the completion of one-fourth of a moderately challenging puzzle was proof that there was still some gray matter left between the internet-sized holes in my brain. Bully for puzzles!

I ordered “The Sanctuary of Knowledge” on the car ride home. I’m saving it for a rainy day.

—Joseph Bernstein

Sahred From Source link Business

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2vKnPSL via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes

marriagebase · 7 years ago

Text

17 Innovative Products At Photo Plus Expo 2018

Another part of our series of articles involving the Photo Plus Expo 2018 this past weekend, Resource reviews some of the event’s most outstanding products. From Video to Lighting, Mobile to Gear, we give you the latest 2018 products highlighted at the expo.

Playing with Cameras at the Sony Booth at the Photo Plus Expo 2018

Video

1. INSTA360

The INSTA360 won a Lucie Technical Award for best Best 360 Camera, and for good reason. These are its newest features:

Groundbreaking six-lens professional VR camera that won a Lucie Technical Award this year

Ready to shoot 8K per Eye

3D 360 Video

Effortless FlowState stabilization

Long range live to monitor

Simplified post-production in partnership with Adobe

New technology that delivers 8K VR to viewers regardless of whether they have high-end playback devices.

2. ANAFI’s PARROT

ANAFI claims to be the new generation of drone. In other words, ANAFI says their new drone is an ideal go-to solution for filming high-quality videos and taking vibrant photos. Here are its features:

Flying 4K HDR camera with both video and photo shooting capability with unique 180-degree tilt gimbal

Up to 2.9 lossless zoom

ANAFI’s ultra compact and foldable form is great for portable means

Quiet and resistant to weather conditions

25 minutes flight time

Embedded Artifical intelligence to automate light modes for spectacular shots

3. Panasonic GH5S

The Panasonic GH5S blurs the distinction between a cinema camera and a traditional mirrorless. Here are its features:

10-megapixel image sensor offers dual native ISO technology for optimized low-light performance and dynamic range

Focus on lighting as dark as -5EV and delivers 4K/60p recording (New for mirrorless cameras)

Also records 4K/30p at 10bit, 4:2:2 in camera

Full HD video can also be captured at a motion-slowing 240fps

Odyssey 7Q+ at Photo Plus Expo 2018

4. Odyssey 7Q

The Odyssey7Q+ combines Convergent Design’s knowledge and experience of both broadcast and cinematography recorders while adding the capabilities of a high-end professional monitor. Here are some of its features:

7.7″ OLED Monitor with 3400:1 contrast, true blacks, 1280×800 resolution, and powerful monitoring tools

Tools include: Zebra, histogram, vectorscope, and focus assist

Customizable routable 3D-LUTs (See what you got and show what it looks like after color grading)

Atomos Ninja V at Photo Plus 2018

5. Atomos Ninja V

The Ninja V claims to eliminate internal compression and time limits with its rivaled 150 minutes of 4K recording on a single drive. Here are its newest features:

Records up to 4k/60p video in Apple ProRes HQ422 (10 bits) or in AVIDS’s format from your camera

Records full HD video at up to 240 fps.

5-inch touchscreen delivers 1000 nit brightness for HDR previews

Coated in an anti-reflective finish

Deliver over 10 stops of dynamic range from Log camera signals

Supports LUTs, histogram, false color, peaking, and 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 pixel magnification

Footage saved to SSF up to 2TB

HDMI 2.0 input, mic input, plus a headphone jack and built-in speakers for playback audio

Nikon’s Light Feature at Photo Plus Expo 2018

Lighting

6. Chimera Lighting [POP] Bank

Designed and manufactured for a long, durable lifespan, [POP] banks protect your lights and mounts without a Speed Ring. Here are its newest features:

Built for square and rectangular LED Fixture

Don’t require speed rings for mounting on lights

Modifiers available for a range of brands including ARRI, Cineo, Litepanels, Rotolight, and more

[POP] banks can be folded down for easy transport

7. ARRI SkyPanel

SkyPanel is compact and bright LED soft light that claim to set the new standard for the industry. Their design focuses on form, color, beam field, and output. Moreover, the SkyPanel is supposed to reflect all of those features with more than a decade of research and development of LED technology at ARRI. Here are some of their features:

Extended color control (lets you pick a starting color)

Eight color adjustments to push the light towards the color you want

Remote control via DMX advances in practicality as each light engine in SkyPanel can now be controlled individually (number of light engines in a panel vary)

New lighting effects: welding and fluorescent flickering

8. Cactus Lighting RQ250

Beloved due to its size and impact, The Hong Kong-based camera equipment company Cactus is tiny enough to fit in your hand. Here’s what it also does:

Compact 250 W/s battery-powered monolight

Specialized flash head works with a reflector to keep hotspots to a minimum

Delivers 520 full-power flashes on a single charge

LED Modeling light/AF assist lamp

Cactus mount for light modifiers

Flash supports TTL and HSS for a number of brands

Mobile

9. Insta360 ONE

Equipped with similar features as the INSTA360 video, this camera is able to Livestream and function all from your smartphone device. Here’s what it does:

This 360-Degree camera that can live-stream 360 footage when connected to an iPhone

Functions as a standalone camera when disconnected

Records 4K/40p video

Snaps 24-megapixel stills

Features a fixed aperture f/2.2 lens

Insta360’s FlowState image stabilizer and 6-axis stabilization for silky smooth photos

Bullet-time effect isolates a static subject and quickly pans around them at up to 240fps

SmartTrack function lets you select a subject on your phone for the camera to track as they move across or around your scene

ONE’s app can automatically remove a selfie stick from the frame (your hand will still be visible though)

Instax Square Prints at Photo Plus Expo 2018

10. Fujifilm Instax Share SP-3 SQ

Now you can turn your social media pictures into actual, printed polaroids! In addition to the Polaroid film aspect, you can send photos straight from your phone and get a print in 13 seconds. Here are its newest features:

Create Instax Square prints directly from your smartphone using Fujifilm’s free Instax Share app

Prints take about 13 seconds to print

Prints are all 800×800 resolution

On the app, you can add text and borders, as well as collages or split an image across multiple prints

The option of a real-time template to inscribe date, time, location, and weather the time you snapped the photo

Canon Ivy Printers at Photo Plus Expo 2018

11. Canon Ivy

Taking the next step towards economical, environmentally friendly mobile printing solutions, Canon presents a portable printer using ZINK with no ink. Above all, here’s what it features:

Pocketable printer lets you transform your phone pics to prints using inkless Zink technology

Connect mobile device via Bluetooth and use Canon’s Mini Print App to produce 2×3-inch prints with resolutions up to 314x400dpi

The app also allows you to add filters, frames, and doodles

Takes the printer about a minute to create a print

Ivy’s Battery is good for 20 prints and recharges in 90 minutes

Gear

12. Tamron SP 15-30mm f/2.8 Di VC USD G2 Lens

Wide-angle zoom for full-frame DSLRs

Anti-reflection coating to reduce flare and ghosting

Built-in Dual MPU to give the lens faster and more precise autofocusing

Improved image stabilization over its predecessor

13. Eizo ColorEdge CG319X Monitor

If you want to produce HDR content, the CG319X monitor supports a wide color gamut and 4K resolution. In short, this is what it does:

Supports wide color gamut and 4K resolution

The 31-inch display delivers 98% of the DCI-P3 color space with optimized gamma curves to render more true-to-life images

Number of video-friendly preset modes to automatically put the monitor into the proper color space

The built-in sensor you can use to calibrate the monitor automatically at set times (do not need third party monitor calibration device)

Nikon Booth at Photo Plus Expo 2018

Camera

14. Nikon Z7 and Z6

The new Z-series Nikon Full-frame mirrorless cameras are packed with pro-level features. Here’s what it features:

4K video capture with 10-bit output via HDMI

Weather-sealed builds

New, wider diameter lens mount

Faster continuous shooting at 12fps

Both models work with Mount Adapter FTZ (can mount existing F-mount lenses to the Z-series)

15. Panasonic LX100 II

Winning a Lucie Technical Award for Best Small Format Camera System, the Panasonic LX100 II really provides. These are its intimate features:

21-megapixel sensor on the LX100 II delivers a 17-megapixel image

Leverage the camera’s Multi-aspect bracketing mode and shoot all aspect ratios at once (4:3, 3:2, 1:1, and 16:9)

Fixed 24-75mm f/1.7-2.8 lens with nine aperture blades

The lens is optically stabilized

New higher resolution 3-inch touch display alongside a Live Viewfinder with 100% field of view and 2760K dot equivalent resolution

Software/Services

16. LAPIXA

LAPIXA acts as a virtual watchdog, defending pictures from Internet thieves. In other words, consider LAPIXA the groundbreaking security measure to better control who steals your photography. Here’s the magic that happens:

Scours the web for instances of copyright infringement

Supports a reverse image so you can actively seek out infringers

Capable of finding infringed images even if they’ve been cropped or applied with filters

You can tap the company’s global network of lawyers when its time to press a legal claim

You only pay LAPIXA if your effort is successful!

17. Topaz Labs A.I. Gigapixel

Finally, for our last innovation, Resource presents to you a groundbreaking imaging software. Using Artifical Intelligence to tackle what Topaz Labs calls an “age-old problem of digital photography,” How does a photographer add more resolution to low-resolution files? With A.I. Gigapixel, they think they have a solution:

A batch processor can transform 12-megapixel files into those with 100- or 1000-megapixel resolution

In addition, it also allows you to crop in on a high-res photo to blow up the resulting crop back to the original photo’s starting resolution (or even larger)

The post 17 Innovative Products At Photo Plus Expo 2018 appeared first on Resource.

#Resource Jasmine Healymarketing seo instagram android apk website news

0 notes

siriuswit · 7 years ago

Text

The Veils Between Worlds: Mind, Language & Time

To understand why the Veil between worlds is thinning you first have to have an idea about what exactly this veil is, how it functions and what impact this thinning might have on day to day life.

First, the famous (and infamous) Veil Between Worlds, the separation between the lands of the dead, the pits of hell and the Other realms and our own world is not exactly a physical wall that keeps thing separated. It is a mental construct built into (almost) all humans that keeps our subconscious awareness at a distance from what we consciously believe. By keeping ourselves isolated from knowledge of the other worlds, we have some small bit of protection from them built into ourselves.

A few hundred thousand years ago, some say as few as five thousand years ago, our minds worked differently. The connections between our conscious and subconscious minds were both stronger and more distant from each other at the same time. We heard our higher selves not as a vague suggestion, as we often do now) but as the literal “Voice of God” leading us to find reality as if something outside of ourselves. We now accept this voice as our own inner self, and it’s purpose (though most don’t understand it this way, science does…) is to tell us a story about what reality is. This is the first and strongest of the Veils.

What this means is simply that the first Veil between worlds is the one in our mind, all of our minds, that “makes up” the story of reality.

We do NOT live in reality, not consciously, but rather live in a personally generated story, one that is most often very, very different from what is actually going on around us!

This is, as was stated above, the first Veil.

The Second Veil is Language.

We have all learned, most have at least, to think in words.

This is normal to us and indeed, it’s a virtual “super power” in a world of animals that don’t do so! I can use words to communicate complex ideas at a distance (like this article for instance) that no other animal on the planet can easily do!

But before we had words, we thought in concepts. Raw ideas. Our subconscious minds still do. If you can relearn to do so now, you can reopen direct communications with the subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind deals with reality directly, without the buffering of the “Story Teller” our conscious perception of the world. Language keeps the distance between these two solid.

The second Veil is language. The language of the mind. Right now this is the most stable of the divisions.

The Third Veil is Our Perception of Time.

We all “know” on some level two things about time itself. The first is that we “feel” it passing and can measure it using clocks and events outside ourselves.

The second is that we sometimes “feel” as if it goes faster, slower, jumps or stands still.

We have a natural perception of time and a learned perception of time…

And it turns out that both are inherently flawed!

Time itself is different than we expect or accept. It is all at once, with everything happening now. We can’t deal with this, so we part it out, seeing things as happening in a linear fashion. (Which, really, thank goodness! It can be hard enough to get through a single day much less all of them at once!)

The third Veil is our perception of time. Not time itself, but how we see it individually and as a group.

So of these three Veils, these artificial divisions, two of them are at great risk of breaking down, allowing not just “glimpses” into other, unseen, worlds, but a fairly rapid decent into them. This is the break down of the conscious Storyteller and the perception of time. Language is safe for now, possibly as strong as it has ever been in all of human history, unfortunately though, this may only add to the coming problems as the other Veils weaken and eventually fall as will be discussed below.

Why are the Veils falling?

The conscious Storyteller (our day to day mind, which presents us with what we believe to be reality!) and the subconscious mind have worked together well for a long, long time, thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of years.

The subconscious mind sees reality unfiltered, sees the ghosts, the Goblins, the demons and the minds of others, knows what is about to happen and what has happened, and holds most of this in, calling out suggestions to the conscious mind at times, but mainly keeping us from having to deal with every little strange thing that happens.

Here is an example you can use to test this effect in yourself:

Go to the first link, watch the video and participate as you are asked.

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

When done, go directly to the second link:

http://free.mailinfo.com/web/reality/step2.htm

*Note, this is a real psychological experiment. This isn’t a trick or visual illusion!

The experiment above shows us how well most people’s internal Storyteller filters reality for us. Image what else most people miss most of the time? (And don’t imagine that just because you are one of the people that saw the extra bit on the video that everything else will be as clear to you! It doesn’t work that way.)

This is how we all live, most of the time, protected consciously from reality, while subconsciously being immersed in it.

But there is a loophole that modern man has begun to exploit more and more, without understanding that we are doing so, which is slowly blurring the line between the Storyteller and the “True Observer” of reality.

Fiction.

More to the point, advanced visual fiction. When we see and hear immersive experiences for a long enough time period (about 40 minutes for most people) our subconscious mind begins to accept these images as being part of reality. We begin to respond to what we are seeing as if it is really happening in front of us, on the deeper levels of mind. Even though we consciously “Know” that this is not happening, we subconsciously “KNOW” that it is.

Generally speaking, this is not that big of a deal. The subconscious mind is designed to react to reality while the conscious mind filters it. The danger here is not that we react and respond to fiction as if it is real, but that we are using vast amounts of fiction to train our conscious minds to see strange and unusual things!

We are training our protective Storyteller to allow in strange bits of data that historically would be ignored and perceived only by the subconscious parts of our being. A small bit of this is probably harmless, of course, but we live in a world where many people are spending hours at a time immersed in strange fictional realities that require the conscious mind to be limber and float from one hard to believe scenario to another!

Simply watching a television program does this. It doesn’t take 3-d or virtual reality to allow this to take place. Movies, video games, television and even vividly imagined scenes can all have this “loophole” training effect.

The danger isn’t just within each of us though. If that was the case, we could just protect ourselves from unpleasant realities by individually reducing our exposure to such stimulus, right? What happens though is that as more and more people become aware of a strange thing in our midst, the more likely we all are to be able to see it.

When enough people see what is really there, even the most hard headed individual will see it too!

And at that point, the Veil will have fallen and we won’t be able to put it back.

At the same time we are breaking down the the divisions carefully crafted by the Storyteller, we are using the same media to skew our perceptions of time.

In fiction, time is a far more fluid thing. We see events both before and after they have happened in the story. We often see things in slow motion, as if time itself has slowed, or, more rarely, zooming by us at a faster than normal pace. We see people one week, and the next time we see them, a week later, we are given information that says it is a day later, or a year!

All of this causes us to lose track of our innate and trained sense of time, just a little bit, wearing away at our natural pacing. It makes it a little easier to accept slips and jumps in time, rather than ignoring them or pretending that they didn’t happen as we normally do.

And if the Veils break down, so what? How will this effect our regular lives?

These divisions, The Veils, keep us more or less inside the boundaries of consensual reality. Without them we will all begin to see the world as it really is. All the ghosts, the demons, the mythical creatures and elves around us will be able to see us and interact with us as well.

Our ability to ignore such beings has, it seems, been our main protection from them over the millennium. As this protection weakens, we will have to learn to deal with such things directly again, and live in fear of them if we cannot do so well enough.

As an example, let’s look at driving.

You are driving along at night, when a hooded figure steps out in front of your car, an old man it seems. Do you slam on the breaks, possibly causing the people behind you to crash into you or each other, or do you keep driving, taking the chance of hitting an elderly person that is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?

If it is a ghost, you would have simply passed through it. In fact, you do this all the time without knowing it already! But seeing it clearly will alter your ability to function in the world.

This is just one example.

Imagine for instance, trying to explain to your child that there is not monster in the closet, opening the closet to show them, only to find a creature of vile darkness sitting there waiting for you to leave?

There is also a chance that our focused attention will add to the power of many of these beings. That when we cannot help but notice them, they will gain real, physical level abilities within this realm. The ability to harm people, to move and break objects, to build structures and so on.

This is not to say that everything will be horrible for all people all the time if the Veils fall, but it will be very confusing at first, and probably change the nature of how we function in the world greatly.

So, why is this being brought up now?

Because the Thinning is already beginning to happen. We are already seeing more and more of the world around us. Not all people equally, but enough that things once kept out of our world are making their way through.

It means that during this, and future Halloween seasons, we all need to become aware that things that we learned to view as harmless jokes as children, the Goblins and Ghouls and Vampires and Demons, may, in some fashion, be out walking the world now.

It is time and past time to start taking things seriously and to learn to protect yourself and those you love from things that go bump in the night. Because as the Veils thin, you may find yourself suddenly having to face your worst nightmares one day. Possibly one day soon.

DISCLAIMER: This was written over 10 years ago by Dale. Although the information pertaining the veils is accurate, we don’t believe the veils are thinning to the extent that you would all have to worry. In fact, we don’t feel that this is happening any time soon.

The post The Veils Between Worlds: Mind, Language & Time appeared first on Transcend Your Human Potential.

Source: http://enlightenedstates.com/index.php/2018/08/17/the-veils-between-worlds-mind-language-time/

0 notes

recentnews18-blog · 7 years ago

Photo

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/essay-plan-think-and-dont-be-stupid-in-a-national-park/

Essay | Plan, Think, And Don't Be Stupid In A National Park

Looking at something along the nature trail other than the geysers, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

I recently completed a three-week road trip and move from southeast Texas up to central Washington State. All by my lonesome, in my little, loaded down, Honda Fit (ok, with the help of a moving company to transfer the big stuff later on). En route to Yakima, I visited and photographed five national parks: Petrified Forest National Park, the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park.

During that time, I saw plenty of things resulting from poor planning or simply not thinking on the part of the park visitor. Some things I saw made me roll my eyes, while other things really torqued my jaw (metaphorically). Thus, I felt the need to write about what I saw and to give visitors a little bit of advice on how not to be stupid. I’m pretty sure I’m going to irritate some of you. Nobody likes to be reminded of dumb things they do. At the same time, I’m sure there are many of you out there who will agree with me. I can’t please everybody with my articles. Note: These observations are my own and thus may not be the opinion of the Traveler.

1) Footwear

There are many locations within national parks where a wonderful job has been done of creating and maintaining trails suitable for everybody, including people in walkers and wheelchairs. As I write this, I’m thinking of the boardwalks and paved paths in the Upper Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park. Kudos to the NPS for producing these accessible routes to stunning venues. Even people wearing flimsy sandals and jogging shoes can maneuver around without too much issue.

However … there are other trails where people really need to think about their footwear choice.

I’m sure you, yourself, have noticed this. Most of the tour buses disgorging their human cargo don’t apparently delve much into detail regarding the type of shoes their passengers might need to consider when visiting a place far away from metropolitan infrastructure. Having watched the tour buses along the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, I know that most of those organized tours aren’t going to do more than allow for a 20-minute stop before heading on to the next sight.

Nonetheless, I can’t tell you how many people (primarily from those tours) I saw wearing Keds-type no-traction tennis shoes on the trail. Yes, I will own up to the fact that most of those particular trails are either paved or really well-maintained, but, at one point while hiking the Fairyland Loop Trail toward Tower Bridge in Bryce Canyon National Park, I saw a line of ladies holding their little umbrellas against the sun, inching carefully down a steep portion of the unpaved trail wearing nothing but no-tread trainers guaranteed to twist an ankle at some point in time.

It can get a little steep on the Fairyland Loop Trail, Bryce Canyon National Park / Rebecca Latson

Here’s another example. If you’ve ever been to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, you’ll know of two small overlooks below the Grand Canyon Lodge. The trail to reach either view is unpaved and uneven in places. You must then take a short series of very uneven steps down to a short paved path to the fenced-in views, where the ground of the view area is rocky and uneven to the point that even I, in my hiking boots, must watch my step so as not to stumble.

Quite a view at the North Rim, Grand Canyon National Park / Rebecca Latson

All of this is a preamble to the day I stood at one of those view areas to capture a sunrise shot. I’d set up my tripod and had my eye to the viewfinder. I heard this slow, measured “flip flip” behind me. Turning, I saw a young man wearing flip flops, slowly and carefully wending his way to where I stood. Talk about the surest way to twist an ankle.

Here’s the deal with flip flops: They have no tread, you have to keep squeezing your toes to keep them on, they have no foot or ankle support on uneven ground (even uneven paved ground), and if you lose one of them down a steep precipice or while standing in a river or the sea (and they are easy to lose), you’ve effectively littered in the park. Ditch the flip flops on a trail, people. Get some hiking shoes or boots. You are not in the city.

2.) Perfume and Aftershave

When I am out in a national park, I revel in the fragrance of fresh air filled with cedar, fir, pine or sage. My nose thanks me for those sumptuous scents. And then, I pass a woman wearing perfume or a man wearing strong aftershave. These are the people who not only invade my fresh air space, but also can’t smell anything other than their Chanel #5 or Old Spice. In case you are wondering, does self-administered fragrance affect the wildlife? A quick Google search pulled up nothing of note, but perfume and aftershave certainly affect *this* writer. Leave the perfume and aftershave for your office or an evening out.

3.) Hats

We all wear hats when visiting a national park. That sun (or rain) beats down on us and we need protection. We need a hat to keep the wind from blowing our tresses into our face; nothing worse than a mouthful of hair, believe me. I wear a hat every time I am out with my camera. But, you need to remember to affix that hat FIRMLY to your head. National parks get windy – really windy – and if you don’t have your hat tied down, it will blow off and litter the park.

The following images show you the number of hats spoiling portions of hot springs and bacterial mats in Yellowstone National Park. All that natural beauty marred by a clothing item that the wearer should have taken time (and a little thought) to tie down firmly to their head before touring the sights.

A hat in the bacterial mat, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

A hat at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

A hat near Canary Spring, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

4.) Drive the Damned Speed Limit

The national parks I visited all had a maximum speed limit of 45mph (72 kph), and sometimes, 25mph – 35mph. They do that for a reason. You know, it’s kinda nice to drive that 45mph and admire all the beautiful scenery for which a national park is famous, but a slower speed limit is also for your safety and wildlife safety. I can’t tell you how many times a chipmunk, bunny, or deer (and even a bear, once) crossed the road in front of me. Had I been driving beyond the posted speed limit, that wildlife and my vehicle would have both been toast. I invariably saw people (usually with California license plates), pass me on the narrow road because I was going the posted speed limit and they wanted to apparently drive 65 mph or whatever speed limit du jour of the state in which they reside.

If you want to drive fast, don’t do it in a national park. Rent some time on a speedway, instead, and get it out of your system.

5.) Parking

In each of the parks I visited, there are signs all along the roads prohibiting parking in anything other than the designated parking spaces, pullouts, or specific widened road shoulders. Yet, I saw it time and time again – parking anywhere people could pull over after all the legal spaces were taken up. There are a lot of drivers unfamiliar with the route, or just plain poor drivers to begin with. As drivers park their cars or RVs on both sides of the narrow roads, then walk down the roads to the site, they don’t make it any safe for other drivers or walkers. Unfortunately, there are currently not enough rangers out there to enforce the rules. It’s encumbent upon you, the driver, to slow down to 15 mph when passing heavily-congested areas and to PLEASE park only in designated areas.

Nowhere to park at Grand Prismatic, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

6.) Litter

There are signs all over the place to not litter. And yet, people still do it. I remember sitting on one of those benches curving around Old Faithful near the Old Faithful Lodge and discovering an empty yogurt cup and plastic spoon underneath my seat. The trash bin was just a few steps away. And yet, the eater of the yogurt was too lazy to get up, walk over, and place the cup in the trash. A robust wind might have blown that empty container off the boardwalk and onto ground beyond the boardwalk where visitors are prohibited from walking. I saw empty cups, cellophane wrappings, and paper receipts marring the bacterial mats and thermal pools. I will grant that perhaps the wind blew some un-secured trash item, but that’s even more reason to THINK and SECURELY stash your trash.

A paper cup off the boardwalk at Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

Paper receipt in a runoff stream, Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

Oh, and one other thing. Just because your orange peels or banana skins are compostable, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to simply throw them to the side once you are done eating In a June 19, 2018 online article, Glacier National Park officials warned that while we think of fruit peels as biodegradeable, it really takes them a long time to biodegrade (I believe their word is “rot”) and it’s dangerous for the wildlife. Litter is litter, folks. Pack out what you pack in. It’s really not that difficult to bring along a little bag in which to put your used Kleenex, food peels, etc. and then put that little bag in your purse, backpack, or photographer vest pocket.

Litter the photographer picked up at Yellowstone National Park / Rebecca Latson

I’ll bet you readers have seen some pretty stupid stuff out in the national parks (including people harassing the wildlife … and later getting arrested for it). I’d be interested to know what you’ve witnessed, and I’m sure the Traveler would, too. If you’ve experienced up close and personal the lack of planning, laziness, or unthinking stuff people have done, put that in your commentary below this article. Regardless of the fact that people don’t like to be reminded of their – er – transgressions, I’m hoping they do a better job of remembering those actions the next time they are out enjoying a national park.

Please, don’t feed the wildlife, Glacier National Park / Rebecca Latson

Source: https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2018/08/essay-plan-think-and-dont-be-stupid-national-park

0 notes

gta-5-cheats · 7 years ago

Text

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 Review

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/dell-inspiron-15-5575-review/

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 Review

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

.wzzqy5b19b617b8a93 margin: 5px; padding: 0px; @media screen and (min-width: 1201px) .wzzqy5b19b617b8a93 display: block; @media screen and (min-width: 993px) and (max-width: 1200px) .wzzqy5b19b617b8a93 display: block; @media screen and (min-width: 769px) and (max-width: 992px) .wzzqy5b19b617b8a93 display: block; @media screen and (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 768px) .wzzqy5b19b617b8a93 display: block; @media screen and (max-width: 767px) .wzzqy5b19b617b8a93 display: block;

Shortly after Intel announced the first of its 8th gen core CPUs back in August, AMD unveiled its new Ryzen Mobile series. Thanks to both companies increasing core counts across various product lines, we’re seeing big performance improvements over last year’s laptops. Intel’s dominance in this space is being challenged for the first time in years.

With just four models out right now, these new CPUs are built using AMD’s ‘Zen’ CPU cores and feature integrated graphics based on the recently launched Vega architecture. Intel’s new 8th gen CPUs have proven to have strong compute performance, but integrated graphics has never been the company’s strong suit, especially when it comes to gaming. This is the main area in which AMD hopes to have the upper hand. There are a couple of laptops already in the market with AMD CPUs, and today, we’ll be reviewing one from Dell’s recently launched Inspiron 15 5575 series.

This series is currently available with Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 CPUs, and you have various options in terms of colours, display resolutions, and RAM. Our review unit today is the top-end SKU in the series, according to Dell India’s website. It features an AMD Ryzen 5 CPU and is priced at Rs. 50,690. Let’s see if AMD’s technology has the chops to challenge the Intel stronghold.

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 design

The Inspiron 15 5575 is a pretty basic-looking laptop. Dell has given the plastic parts a metallic finish but once you hold it, it’s easy to tell that it’s not real aluminium. The build quality is quite solid though, and the body of the laptop doesn’t flex easily even if you apply pressure. It feels as though it will be durable enough for long-term usage. On its website, Dell advertises a host of different colour options for the 5575, but at the time of this review, our particular variant was only on sale in a Licorice Black trim. The silver unit that we received doesn’t look bad, but it does seem a bit bland.

The lid offers good protection to the 15.6-inch LCD screen. The resolution is decently high at 1920×1080, and the edges of text and icons don’t appear overly jagged. There’s also an anti-glare coating so reflections aren’t much of an issue. However, the panel used here is clearly not IPS quality, and so viewing angles are poor, and colours are dull. The brightness is sufficient, but at full brightness, whites tend to burn out easily when not viewed head-on. You also get a thick, old-fashioned bezel all around the screen, and a HD webcam in the usual spot.

You get a single hinge in the middle of the display, which also conceals all the vents. This laptop is quite thick, and even with the lid open, the base alone measures 22.7mm in thickness. In order to give it an illusion of slimness, Dell has tapered the sides and front of the laptop a bit.

Connectivity is good, and includes two USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, Ethernet, an SD card slot, a microphone and headphones combo socket, and a DVD writer, which is something we haven’t seen in a long time. There’s only one LED indicator near the power inlet, which glows white when you’re plugged in and amber when the battery is low. What’s missing here is a USB Type-C port.

The palm rest and trackpad are quite spacious, and Dell has managed to fit in a full-sized keyboard complete with a number pad. The chiclet keys are well spaced but aren’t backlit, and we didn’t find the tactile response to be very good either. They’re also quite noisy. The direction keys are nicely separated from the others, and the power button is isolated above the keyboard to avoid accidental presses. However, there’s no fingerprint sensor, even with this top-end configuration. The surface of the trackpad isn’t the smoothest. We found tracking to be a little jumpy at times and gestures don’t always work flawlessly.

On the bottom, you have four rubber feet to help get some clearance. The stereo speakers are also placed at the bottom, towards the front. There’s no hatch for accessing any of the components and the battery isn’t removable either. Overall, the Inspiron 15 5575 isn’t much to look at. It’s built to be utilitarian, and that seems to be the end of it. This laptop isn’t very light either, at 2.5kg, so carrying it around every day won’t be very pleasant.

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 specifications

As we stated earlier, the Inspiron 15 5575 model that we have is powered by a Ryzen 5 2500U CPU, which features four multi-threaded cores, giving you a total of eight threads. The base clock is set at 2GHz but that can be boosted to 3.6GHz, depending on the task at hand. Graphics duties are handled by the integrated Radeon Vega 8 GPU, which has eight compute units and a base clock of 1,100MHz. It also supports AMD’s FreeSync variable refresh rate scheme, when connected to a compatible monitor.

The laptop has 8GB of DDR4 RAM running in dual-channel mode, a 1TB (5400rpm) hard drive, dual band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and a 42WHr battery. You get Windows 10 Home preinstalled, along with Microsoft Office 2016 Home and Student Edition and a 30-day trial of McAfee LiveSafe. Dell also bundles its own software like Dell Recovery Environment, Support Assist, and Dell Mobile Connect. The latter lets you sync your phone to your laptop using Bluetooth, so you can receive calls and check SMS messages directly from your laptop, just like we first saw on the Dell XPS 13 9370.

Dell Inspiron 15 5575 performance and battery life

From the moment you power it on, this laptop doesn’t seem very responsive. This impression persisted with us even days after we set it up. This is most likely because of the slow mechanical hard drive being used. There’s an inherent sense of lag when loading apps or even opening new Windows dialogue boxes. Once your programs are loaded though, things are a bit smoother and even multitasking is quick.

Shop On SecondCovers

.mgwve5b19b617b8bef margin: 5px; padding: 0px; @media screen and (min-width: 1201px) .mgwve5b19b617b8bef display: block; @media screen and (min-width: 993px) and (max-width: 1200px) .mgwve5b19b617b8bef display: block; @media screen and (min-width: 769px) and (max-width: 992px) .mgwve5b19b617b8bef display: block; @media screen and (min-width: 768px) and (max-width: 768px) .mgwve5b19b617b8bef display: block; @media screen and (max-width: 767px) .mgwve5b19b617b8bef display: block;

The Inspiron 15 5575 runs slightly warm. After about an hour of streaming video using Chrome on battery power, we found that the bottom and the area behind the keyboard got rather warm. Thankfully, this didn’t spread to the palm rest area, and the keys and other parts of the laptop stayed cool.

In terms of performance, the Rzyen 5 2500U is best compared to Intel’s new Core i5-8250U. The Ryzen 5 pulled ahead of Intel’s offering in some synthetic tests. In 3DMark Fire Strike, the Inspiron 15 5575 scored 1,639 points, which is roughly 600-700 points more than what a Core i5-8250U laptop would typically achieve. In CPU benchmarks, we’ve seen slightly better results from Intel, both for single and multi-threaded tests. Our real-world file compression and video encoding tests showed that the Ryzen 5 doesn’t quite match the speed of Intel’s counterpart, taking up to a whole minute extra when compressing files and encoding videos.

In games, the integrated Vega8 GPU is an advantage over Intel’s integrated solution. In Rise of The Tomb Raider’s in-built benchmark, we typically get a single-digit with Intel’s Core i5 offerings, with the resolution set to 1080p and the ‘Low’ graphics preset. The Inspiron 15 5575 on the other hand returned 15.7fps with the same settings. The laptop doesn’t get too hot when gaming, which is something we liked. The exhaust fans are audible but they’re not too distracting.

Games downloaded from the Windows store, such as Asphalt 8, ran smoothly. We also tried FarCry 4, which gave us a semi-playable average framerate of 20fps, but only after dropping the resolution to 1600×900 and the graphics to the ‘Low’ preset. We managed to get GTA V running too, and we averaged around 27fps. However, we had to drop the resolution all the way down to 1280×720, with most of the graphics settings either at ’Normal’ or turned off. Finally, we were able to get a smooth 30+ frames per second in DOTA 2 at the native resolution, and with the graphics slider pushed all the way to the right for best quality.

The Dell Inspiron 15 5575 has no trouble playing 4K video files, although it’s hard to truly enjoy media due to the lacklustre display. Audio quality is decent but not great. Even with the MaxxAudioPro enhancement, audio sounds a bit hollow. On the bright side, the volume level gets quite loud.

Battery life is disappointing, as the 3-cell battery only managed to deliver about four hours of runtime on a single charge. This was with light to medium usage, which typically involved using Chrome and watching videos. In Battery Eater Pro, the laptop ran for just 1 hour, 36 minutes, which isn’t great either.

Verdict The Inspiron 15 5575 series is currently Dell’s only lineup with AMD Ryzen CPUs. The onboard Vega 8 GPU performs quite well for an integrated graphics processor, but is still no replacement for a high-end discrete one. The most expensive variant that we reviewed doesn’t quite suit its Rs. 50,690 asking price, as the overall package leaves a lot to be desired. Windows 10 feels laggy, the display has weak viewing angles and dull colours, battery life is disappointing, and this laptop tends to run warm even on battery power.

The Vega 8 graphics do give AMD an edge over Intel’s integrated solution in most 3D games, but if that’s all you’re after, then Acer’s Swift 3 with this very same configuration, looks a lot better at an online price of roughly Rs. 43,000. You lose out on the DVD drive and Ethernet port (which aren’t a huge loss for many people), but in place of that, you do get a Type-C port, backlit keyboard, and a fingerprint sensor.

If you’re looking for better gaming performance but don’t have the budget for a high-end laptop, then something like the Acer Aspire 5 A515-51G with an entry-level discrete GPU is still a better bet at the same price level as the Inspiron 15 5575. When we reviewed it, this model with the Nvidia MX150 GPU featured just 4GB of RAM, which was our main gripe, but it seems like there’s now an 8GB RAM option, available for roughly the same price as the Inspiron 15 5575.

The Dell Inspiron 15 5575 is built well, but other than this, it’s hard to think of a good enough reason to buy or recommend it.

Price (MRP): Rs. 50,690

Pros

Sturdy body

Competent integrated GPU

Cons

Lacklustre display

Runs warm

Weak battery life

Sluggish performance

Ratings (Out of 5)

Design: 3

Display: 3

Performance: 3

Software: 4

Value for Money: 3

Overall: 3

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push();

0 notes

sherristockman · 8 years ago

Link

Can You Really Get Fit in Six Minutes Per Week? Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola You’ve probably heard that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) can significantly cut the time needed in the gym, but just how little can you get away with? Could you actually get fit in as little as six minutes per week? The featured ABC Catalyst program investigates this claim. A significant piece of the puzzle relates to how HIIT affects your mitochondria, tiny organelles found in most of your cells, responsible for production of energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Your mitochondria have a series of proteins in the electron transport chain, in which they pass electrons from the reduced form of a metabolized portion of the food you eat to combine it with oxygen from the air you breathe and ultimately form water. As noted in the featured program, the more mitochondria you have and the healthier they are, the more energy your body can generate and the lower your risk of chronic disease. Disturbingly, research suggests half of people under the age of 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction, which is one of the primary contributors to virtually all chronic degenerative disease, like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and Alzheimer’s. The good news is, studies also show HIIT is very effective for boosting mitochondria and improving their function — and that results can be gained incredibly fast. Fit in Six Minutes a Week Your over 1 quadrillion mitochondria comprise an estimated 10 percent of your total body mass, so they make up a significant portion of your body and produce your body weight in ATP every day. In addition to generating ATP, your mitochondria are responsible for apoptosis (programmed cell death), and also serve as important signaling molecules that help regulate the expression of your genes. This is a function that even most doctors are unaware of. Aerobic fitness is determined by measuring the amount of oxygen your mitochondria can consume when you push yourself to the limit, a measurement called VO2 max. The lower your VO2 max, the higher your risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and more, and the higher your VO2 max, the greater your level of fitness and general health. Top athletes typically register in the 60 to 70 milliliters per kilo (2.2 pounds) per minute (mL/kg/min) range. The ABC reporter tested her VO2 max at the outset of her 15-week program, scoring a measurement of 36 mL/kg/min, which is a high average. The conventional recommendation is to get 150 minutes of moderate exercise each week. The problem is most people simply do not have that kind of spare time, and thus end up not exercising at all. But in recent years, scientists have demonstrated you can make great fitness gains in a fraction of that time. Three Minutes of HIIT Is as Effective as 150 Minutes of Moderate Exercise A 2016 study1 involving three groups of exercising men — a control group, a group doing sprint interval training and a group doing moderate-intensity continuous training (MICT) — underscored the value of HIIT. After 12 weeks of workouts, the researchers concluded that three minutes of interval sprints per week (totaling 30 minutes in the gym) was as effective as 150 minutes of MICT, improving insulin sensitivity, cardiorespiratory fitness and the mitochondrial content in skeletal muscle to the same extent. HIIT also triggers mitochondrial biogenesis,2 which is important for longevity. By reversing age-associated declines in mitochondrial mass, you effectively slow down the aging process. As you’ll see later, this even includes some of the more visible signs of aging. As explained in my new book, “Fat for Fuel,” because mitochondrial dysfunction seems to be at the core of most chronic disease, activities like HIIT that support mitochondrial biogenesis will strengthen your body and help it fight the ravages of time. Just be sure to allow ample recovery time between workout sessions because as intensity increases, frequency needs to diminish. Doing HIIT more than three times a week can be counterproductive. Intensity Is the Key The key that opens the proverbial door to all of HIIT’s health benefits is to make sure the intensity is high enough. McMaster University exercise physiologist Martin Gibala, who has led many HIIT studies, describe the intensity required as “sprinting from danger-kind of intensity.” In other words, you need to give it all you’ve got, but only for about 30 seconds, repeated four to six times with a minute or so recovery time in between sprints. Your actual exertion time ends up totaling just two to three minutes per workout session. In one HIIT study, participants increased their endurance capacity by 50 percent on this kind of program. Typically, your VO2 max will improve by 10 to 15 percent in as little as a few weeks. Blood pressure and body composition also typically improves in that short amount of time. The improvement in VO2 max is largely dependent on the adaptation of your mitochondria. They’re what allows your body to process greater amounts of oxygen, resulting in greater energy production and thus power, strength and endurance. Not only does HIIT boost the number of mitochondria in your cells, it also improves their function and replaces old, worn-out mitochondria with new, better-functioning ones. Tests reveal subjects were able to increase mitochondrial function by 30 percent in as little as one month of HIIT. While the above information represents the current conventional view on the value of intense exercise, I have learned that it needs a radical revision to optimize long-term health. A far wiser approach would be less intense exercise more regularly. I describe my current view on intense exercise in the last section, and have a video to expand on it. Rather than going all-out two to three times a week, it is far more rational to do it two to three times every day for three minutes. I am convinced that spreading the exercise out over time is more beneficial. Exercise Can Slow or Even Turn Back Your Biological Clock Researchers are also honing in on the mitochondria’s influence on the aging process itself. It stands to reason that the two are linked. Indeed, one of the reasons your skin sags and wrinkles with age is because of the loss of mitochondria in your skin. Interestingly, HIIT may even reverse these superficial signs of aging. Mice genetically bred with a faulty mitochondrial system have only half the life span of regular mice; have thin, weak muscles, and develop gray hair and wrinkled skin very early on in life. When these mice exercised at a brisk pace three times a week, all of these symptoms of mitochondrial dysfunction were eliminated, including the premature graying and skin wrinkling. Human tests have produced similar results. In one test, skin biopsies were taken from sedentary seniors before and after three months of endurance training. After three months, their skin samples were indistinguishable from much younger skin under the microscope. The exercise basically turned back the clock by as much as 30 years. As noted in the program, this does not mean all of their wrinkles vanished, but the dead skin layer thinned, and the layer of collagen fibers thickened. It’s conceivably possible to dramatically reduce the number of wrinkles you end up with in old age by maintaining an exercise program throughout your life, thereby preventing the breakdown of mitochondria in your skin in the first place. Exercise physiologist Stephen Boutcher, featured on the show, is also using a modified HIIT program to address menopause and the visceral fat accumulation that tends to go hand in hand with the loss of estrogen. The women taking part in his program do eight-second sprints at very light resistance, with 12 seconds of light pedaling in between sprints. After 20 minutes, they have sprinted for a total of eight minutes. All of the participants report feeling better. Some have completely eliminated their hot flashes and night sweats, for example. What Fitness Gains Can You Get From Four Months of HIIT? The ABC reporter in the program did four 30-second sprints, three times a week for four months, equating to just six minutes of all-out exercise per week. What fitness gains did she reap? Here’s what her follow-up tests revealed: Body fat went from 26.6 percent to 25.1 percent In all, she lost 3.5 pounds (1.5 kilos) of body fat (mostly from her lower trunk and upper legs) and nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) from her waist VO2 max increased by 10 percent, from 36 mL/kg/min to 40 mL/kg/min, moving her into the “fit” category Her endurance dramatically improved, from barely being able to complete a 3-kilometer (1.86-mile) jog to comfortably running 9 kilometers (5.59 miles) HIIT Works Best for Aging Muscles While many still believe intense exercise is a recipe for a heart attack, research negates such worries. In fact, HIIT is suitable even for the elderly. In a study by Mayo Clinic researchers, three types of exercise were pitted against each other and a non-exercising control group, to determine which type of exercise works best to protect aging muscles.3 HIIT was a clear winner. The study involved 72 sedentary people aged either 30 or younger or 64 and over. They engaged in 12 weeks of HIIT on stationary bikes, vigorous resistance training or a combination of exercises (moderate pace stationary bike combined with light weightlifting). All of the exercisers experienced improvements in lean body mass and insulin sensitivity, and those who engaged in resistance training had boosts in muscle mass and strength. Among the HIIT group, improvements in endurance were particularly noted. However, additional notable differences were revealed when the participants' muscle cells were biopsied, revealing genetic changes. Among the younger exercisers, the HIIT group had changes in 274 genes, compared to 170 genes for the moderate combination exercisers and 74 among the resistance group. The changes among the older exercisers were even more striking. In the elderly, nearly 400 genes were upregulated, compared to 33 for the resistance group and only 19 for those doing moderate exercise, and many of the genes affected specifically influence mitochondria’s ability to produce energy for muscle cells. Boost Your Health With the Nitric Oxide Dump I now believe one of the best high-intensity exercises is the Nitric Oxide dump that I demonstrate in the video above, which is a modified version of one developed by Dr. Zach Bush. If you have previously watched this video, please review it again as it has been edited to show you how to perform this exercise properly. I do this exercise two to three times virtually every day, unless my schedule is massively overbooked. I use 8-pound weights in the video but it’s best to forgo the weights when you first start out. The whole routine takes about three to four minutes and is typically done two to three times a day every day, with at least two hours between sessions. I am now convinced that this gentler strategy, which has not been evaluated or compared to the HIIT protocols discussed above, is a far healthier strategy to obtain the benefits of HIIT without the downside. I only wish I had known about this more effective approach earlier. As noted in the featured program, mitochondrial decline with age is closely linked to reduced cardiorespiratory fitness, and decreased resting mitochondrial ATP production may be involved in the development of insulin resistance with aging.4 Exercise promotes mitochondrial health by forcing your mitochondria to work harder. One of the side effects of mitochondria working harder is that they're making reactive oxygen species, or free radicals, which act as signaling molecules. One of the functions they signal is to make more mitochondria. So, when you exercise, your body responds by creating more mitochondria to keep up with the heightened energy requirement. Aging is inevitable, but your biological age can be quite different from your chronological age, and your mitochondria have a lot to do with your biological aging. As noted in this program, HIIT appears to be an excellent way to boost the number of mitochondria in your body and improve their function. The end result is improved body composition and cardiometabolic health, and research shows it’s really never too late to start. Some of the studies discussed in the program involved people in their 70s, and even at that advanced age they were able to achieve significant health improvements.

#VitalityPath

0 notes

afriendofmara · 2 years ago

Text

i THINK if I get fined for having to reschedule day of then my dr should get fined for !?!?!?!?!! NOT SHOWING UP FOR AN APPT UNTIL ITS 20 MINUTES AFTER THE TIME

At what point can I fine my psychologist as a No Show. Say its been 10 minutes since our appt was supposed to start. How do I sue for time loss

#ohp its me again #psychologists are either just so lovely or like. working with the slowest clay you've ever seen.#first one was great. reminded me of terezi in a lot of ways #this new one is.#:/#so old. so slow. does not of the protective measures. takes 15 minutes to show up to an online appt. asks questions then asnwers them hrself #and her name has Dix in it #how am i not auppose to correlate

5 notes · View notes

funnycutcats · 6 years ago

Text

Chartreux Cat – The Frensh Breed Cat

Chartreux Cat – the French Breed Cat

“In nine lifetimes,” we are told, “you’ll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.” This inequity prevails, no doubt, because cats are born with certain insights into human nature while humans are obliged to make inductive sense of cats, whose first and last words on most nonedible subjects are “no comment.” Thus we should not be surprised to find that people often resort to speculation and conjecture when attempting to explain the origins of cat breeds.

Steeling a March of Chartreux Cat

chartreux cat 2

Sometimes these cat-origin hypotheses find their way into encyclopedias, websites, breed articles and other repositories of knowledge. Microsoft’s Encarta 98, for example, solemnly declares that monks in the Le Grande Chartreux cat monastery near Grenoble, France, “may have developed the Chartreux cat in the 16th century. The monks favored this cat for its skill as a hunter, and used it to protect the abbey’s stores of grain from rats and mice.”

The switch from contingency (“may have developed”) to certitude (“favored this cat”) is an interesting example of begging the answer, but once begged is well-begun. To be sure, the Carthusian order, founded by Saint Bruno in 1084, was home to accomplished steelworkers who provided armament for the Crusades. (Perhaps the illusory link between the Carthusians and the Chartreux cat was born of the similarity between the color of steel, blue-gray, and the color of the cats in question.)

The monks of Le Grande Chartreux cat also forged a potent, green, herbal liqueur whose trade-secret recipe, which contains 130 plants cultivated by the monks, was given to them in 1605 by Marechal d’Estrees, the legendary French field marshal — and seized for a short time by Napoleon in 1810 when he went about confiscating all secret recipes that might have been useful to the state. (Could he have been after the secret recipe for a certain kind of pastry?)

For all that is known about the Carthusians, there is no evidence that the good fathers also cultivated cats or obtained cats from monastic knights returning from the Crusades or brought cats back to France from the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th century. Nor is there any evidence that the monks even named the Chartreux cat. Carthusian archives, we are told, do not mention un chat, the cat of any other color at all.

Diderot to du Bellay

One mustn’t grieve if the monastery connection is ultimately enveloped in sackcloth and silence, for there is still much factual information by which to chart the Chartreux’s development. Diderot — the French critic, philosopher, and novelist — referred to the Chartreux cat in Les Bijoux Indiscrets, published in 1848. The Comte de Buffon, the most prominent theoretical biologist of his era and the chief author of the 44-volume Histoire Naturelle, published between 1749 and 1804, listed four cat breeds then common in Europe: the domestic, the Spanish, the Angora and the Chartreux. The 1723 edition of the Universal Dictionary of Commerce, of Natural History and of the Arts and Trades reported that Chartreux was a common appellation for cats with blue-gray fur; and 165 years earlier the poet Joachim du Bellay noted that “entirely gray” cats were common in France.

The 441-year-old trail grows cold as steel at that point. Some writers maintain that Chartreux cat descended from Syrian cats — stocky individuals with wooly, ash-gray coats and copper eyes — which were brought to Europe during the Crusades. Other authorities, citing the omniscient and ubiquitous “recent research,” argue that Chartreux cats were named neither by nor for Carthusian monks but after “well-known Spanish wool of the early 18th century” instead. The cat, of course, adheres to a vow of silence on these matters, and the reader is well advised to take all theories with a grain of steel when sorting through the claims and counterclaims attending the origin of any breed.

Legers’ Domain

The Chartreux’s long natural history notwithstanding, the breed’s modern-day chronicle does not begin until 1931, when several Chartreux cats were exhibited under that heading at a cat show in Paris. Those cats belonged to a Mlle. Leger, who lived with her sister on the small Brittany island of Belle-lle-sur-Mere off the northwest coast of France. Cat-show records indicate that Mlle. Leger was the first person to exhibit Chartreux cat in France.

The Leger sisters, whose cattery name was de Guerveur, also bred Persians and Siamese. They moved from the mainland to Belle-lle-sur-Mere in the late 1920s, and shortly after they had arrived on the island, they discovered a bountiful population of blue-gray cats in Le Palais, the island’s principal city. Because many of these free-roaming cats frequented the grounds of the hospital in Le Palais, they were known in that vicinity as “hospital cats.”

Though we haven’t a clue about how the blue-gray cats of Belle-lle-sur-Mere arrived from the French mainland (unless the monks operated a water taxi), we do know that World War II left many cats homeless throughout France, obliging them to fend for themselves and to arrange their own breedings. In addition, cats were sometimes killed for food, and several French observers have reported that Chartreux cats were also killed for their plush coats.

When a heroic and dedicated band of breeders determined to preserve the Chartreux cat in the early 1950s, they attempted to strengthen the breed by outcrossing to other blue cats — Persians, British Shorthairs and whatever non-pedigreed types approximating the Chartreux standard were then available in France. Because blue was the sine qua non of that standard and blue cats were in generous supply, Chartreux fanciers had many breeds and varieties to choose from in their efforts to revitalize the breed.

Reconstructive surgeons do not always color between the lines, however, and by 1970 there was so little difference between the Chartreux cat and the blue British Shorthair that the Feline International Federation (FIFe) declared the two cats should be judged in the same category as a single breed. This decree was in force for seven years until European breeders, aided by the writing and scholarship of Chartreux fancier Jean Simonnet, succeeded in convincing FIFe that the Chartreux was a separate breed deserving its own classification. England remained unconvinced, withal, and to this day the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy does not recognize the Chartreux as a separate breed.

Bonhomous Beginning Chartreux Cat

In 1970, Helen Gamon, a cat fancier from La Jolla, California, brought the first Chartreux to the United States. Three of the initial 10 Chartreux cat imported by American breeders were supplied by the aforementioned and long-lived Leger sisters. Thanks to the efforts of Gamon and other breeders in this country who began to talk about Chartreux, the breed was accepted first by one then by another of the cat registries in North America until, in 1987, with the Chartreux’s elevation to championship status by the Cat Fanciers’ Association, the breed had achieved universal acceptance.

Personality Profile of Chartreux Cat

“Living with Chartreux cat has its ups and downs,” says one of the breed’s admirers. “The curious rascals’ maneuvers range from hiding under sofas and chairs to climbing precious lace curtains. Fortunately, Chartreux cats have short activity spans. After 15 minutes of exasperating antics, the cats settle down like couch potatoes for the rest of the day.

“Of all the charming qualities a Chartreux cat embodies, however, it is still the coat that enchants an owner most. The dense, water- repellant fur feels like no other; and holding that soft, furry-purry body close after a bad day warms the heart of every Chartreux person.”

According to the 5.1M version of Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia, the Chartreux “loves to view things from heights and can deftly leap from floor to top of the refrigerator.” We can believe the lofty-view part. Many cats like heights, but unless the refrigerators in France are no taller than Napoleon, we doubt that any domestic cat can leap to the top of them deftly.

Back on terra firma, the Chartreux cat is known for its delicate voice, measured approach to life, devotion to its owner, skill at harvesting smaller animals, and Mona Lisa smile. Neither hail-fellow nor hermit, this stout companion ” accommodate itself to everything,” wrote Fernand Mery in The Life, History, and Magic of the Cat. “It is a simple and good-natured peasant, but a sure friend.”

The Building Code of Chartreux Cat

The Chartreux cat balances a deep-chested, broad-shouldered, well-muscled body on fine-boned, comparatively short legs. Its plentiful torso is connected by a short, stevedore neck to a head that’s large and broad, but not round. The contrast between the Chartreux’s wide forehead and its narrow, though rounded, muzzle creates the impression that the cat is smiling. This meditation is enhanced by large, round, moderately wide-set eyes, separated by at least the width of an eye, that range in color from gold to copper. The Chartreux’s nose is straight, and short to medium in length. Small- to medium-size ears, rounded slightly at the tips, are set high and erect on the head.

The Chartreux’s coat, soft and dense in texture, is medium-short to medium in length and may be slightly wooly. It may not, however, be any color but blue-gray — in shades that range from slate to ash — with tips that are lightly brushed with silver.

The Chartreux cat is a massive, slow-maturing breed. Males may take as long as four to five years to reach their full-monty adult weight, 12 to 16 pounds. Females usually weigh what they’re going to weigh, seven to 10 pounds, by the age of 3. The Chartreux’s unique combination of stocky body and slim legs — described occasionally as resembling “a potato on toothpicks” — has been achieved at some risk of patellar luxation (displacement of the kneecap). Indeed, the Chartreux cat is only one of two breeds — the Cornish Rex is the other — for which lameness in the hindquarters is a disqualifying factor in the Cat Fanciers’ Association’s breed standards. This is not to say that only two cat breeds are prone to patellar luxation, but it is to note that the condition must be significant enough to have warranted the attention of breeders.

Patellar luxation, “when mild, does not usually cause any symptoms in the cat,” says one observer, “but if it is severe, it can cause lameness. Because this condition is hereditary, most reputable breeders screen their breeding animals for it and do not use questionable animals for breeding.”

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

The post Chartreux Cat – The Frensh Breed Cat appeared first on Funny Cute Cats.

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2F8WGPb via IFTTT

#funny cats #funny cute cats #cute cats #cats #cute kittens #kittens #pets #best stories animals

0 notes