In 3 days, I’m going to start to be a total jogging addict, I think
I’ve been beta testing it and I can confirm it’s actually the greatest app ever. Full iOS release date is as specified, Android release this Spring.
It’s so intense, at one point during the first mission when radio contact was lost, I could hear them trying to contact me “Can you hear us?!” and I literally grabbed the mic and shouted, “I CAN HEAR YOU WHAT DO I DO?” even though that’s not how it works.
I’m just glad nobody was near me.
Alright yall sit your asses down I’m telling you a story
I have this app and it is one of my best purchases I’ve ever had. It endorses your running and makes you work.
The only downside is that it is fucking terrifying. One time, I was running, and got surrounded by zombies. Groaning and shuffling from all angles. And I have never ran that fast in my entire life. I completed my course(which usually takes 15 mins) in 5. I was also screaming a bit. I got some really weird looks, too.
So, morale of the story: This is a fucking scary app and I recommend it 100%.
HEY SIT YO ASSES DOWN LET’S CHAT ABOUT WHAT A GREAT APP THIS IS.
I’ve had this app for, what, two years now? Yeah. Two years.
Literally the best investment of my life. Yes, better than SAT tutors, personal fitness training, college, and art class, though these are all things that are important and helped me take steps towards being awesome. But this app might be literally saving my ass.
So first I downloaded the Zombies, Run! app on the Android. What does this app have? And the above stories are true – you can set your app to a GPS chase (or accelerometer but that’s really annoying because phones aren’t built for that) and zombies will chase you. And they’re groaning over your music and everything.
But what changed my life for the better was the Zombies, Run! 5k training app, only $2.
THAT’S RIGHT, AN 8-WEEK COUCH-TO-5K TRAINING, THEMED IN THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, FOR ONLY TWO FUCKING DOLLARS.
You don’t even need the original app. But the original app’s storyline enhances this one, and vice versa.
Now, you might be like, what? That can’t be right. Pay $2 to train for a 5k in the course of only two months? HELL FUCKIN’ YEAH YOU HEARD ME RIGHT.
This is me being a massive lonely nerdass at the Color Me Rad a month ago. Granted, that race had more hills than I cared for (I trained on a flat boardwalk), but I still ran. And before that, only halfway through the program, I ran the Electric Run 5k with my also-nerdass boyfriend. Yeah, ran it. Hell yeah.
And I clocked in a 11:41 mile yesterday on the treadmill. A year ago I couldn’t even run for more than a minute without wanting to stop and roll over off the boardwalk onto the beach.
And what’s better: I’m seeing my blood sugar levels drop. Yeah, I’m diabetic, and this is actually helping my fat diabetic ass. So along with a better diet and a totally rad EDM playlist, this game is literally saving me. It’s helping me get up, get active, and finally start loving to run.
Okay, but enough about me.
What else does this game have that you should 100% get behind?
Indie developers!
…that actually respond to their players!
Canon queer representation!
Canon diversity!
Continued content!
An AWESOME community!
DID I ALREADY MENTION CANONQUEER AND RACIAL REPRESENTATION!?
Continuously updated content!
They’ve been recognized by all sorts of British media, and after this app got big, Six To Start was funded by the British government to help develop an app for walkers!
This is literally one of the best apps on the market.
Please support this app for awesome INDIE APPS, FUN FITNESS, AND REPRESENTATION!
welp guess i know what i’m downloading once wisconsin’s weather makeS UP ITS FREAKIN MIND-
Well, make yourself a cup of tea and prepare for a long read, because there are lots of myths about nutrition. I should start first and foremost by saying that I am not going to tell anyone what to feed their cat, or dog, unless that animal is a patient of mine. I’m only going to tell you what to consider.
The first one is that lots and lots of laypeople sites will say ‘meat should be the first ingredient’ often followed by ‘no nasty byproducts’ and this is not strictly the case. Cat food must have meat in it, but it doesn’t strictly have to be the first ingredient, especially if it uses multiple meat sources.
What I want to know about any given wet cat food is this:
Is it a ‘guaranteed analysis’ or a ‘typical analysis’. A guaranteed analysis is superior.
How much of it is water, indicated by ‘Moisture percentage’
How much is protein, and is that figure ‘as fed’ or ‘as dry matter’.
How much is fat, and is that figure ‘as fed’ or ‘as dry matter’.
Macro and micronutrients are also important, especially taurine and in growing cats, but that information is often unreasonably difficult to find outside of the premium diets.
This is a large part of the reason, incidentally, that vets and a profession often recommend a couple of brands over other. Getting all the information I require to confidently recommend a diet is easy for Hills, Royal Canin, Advance, etc but nearly impossible without phoning and begging any of the supermarket brands. Honestly, if a brand of food wants me to be able to honestly recommend it, it needs to provide its nutritional information in an easily accessible manner. Otherwise you have to go to the store to start getting any nutritional info, as I did.
Some brands have a guaranteed analysis, which is more reliable and suggests better quality than a typical analysis
Some packets will clearly state they are compliant with AAFCO (
The Association of American Feed Control) recommendations, even here in Australia.
Then others, like Smitten, will subtly say ‘Complementary food only’, which means you cannot guarantee or expect a cat fed that food alone to remain healthy for a year. It’s not well marked.
Only one of them offered any indication of the Moisture Content, which is what you need to make sure you’re comparing apples with apples.
The moisture content is important, because if you look at those labels as-is you will see all of these diets only offer 9% to 13% protein. For a species that requires a high protein diet, that doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but that’s because you’re not taking the water into account.
To simplify, it’s not unreasonable to consider food as being made up of only four things: protein, fat, carbohydrates or water.
All of these diets list their fat and protein, but only Fancy Feast Originals listed its moisture percentage, and once you know the percentage of three components, you can use simple maths to figure out the fourth. Fancy Feast isn’t the most expensive, nor is it the cheapest, it’s middle of the range.
But why are there always carbohydrates in my cat food? Because there’s always carbohydrates in meat. Glycogen is the most common, it’s the energy storage molecule in muscle and liver that makes it taste good, and incidentally the cat uses the same enzymes to digest it as they do starch. This is probably why they often like starchy things. Cats can and do digest carbohydrates, beware of any source that claims they do not.
So out of the canned foods at my supermarket, you’d think they all sound pretty similar with their protein ranging from 9-13% and their fat from 1.5-5.5%. But you have no way to compare them without knowing the moisture content.
If one diet is 9% protein, 2% fat and 80% moisture, then it’s 9% carbohydrate. If it’s 9% protein, 2% fat and 70% moisture, then it’s 19% carbohydrate.
Unfortunately, finding the moisture content of many of these diets is difficult. However, it’s not unreasonable to assume that cheap wet food contains a higher moisture content, as it’s usually the case. Water is cheap.
If you can get the moisture content, you can calculate the percentage of fat/protein or carbohydrate as a Dry Matter Percentage (what’s left after removing the water). It’s simply the nutrient % / (100- moisture %)
For a normal cat, we’re looking for a protein level that’s at least 25-35% of the dry matter, and fat that’s 10-30% of the dry matter, depending on its digestibility.
For reference, the Fancy Feast Originals can in this sample had 55% protein and 10% fat by dry matter, which is more than the minimum amount of protein, but that’s perfectly alright for a normal cat.
If you compare that to the ‘Gourmet Delight’ Natural Grain Free diet, you have to guess the moisture percentage. If you guess moisture at 80%, then by dry matter you have 45% protein 7.5% fat and more carbohydrates than the Fancy Feast had. If you guess only 70% moisture, and most canned foods are between 70-80%, then those numbers start to look even worse.
The fancy ‘Natural’ and ‘Grain free’ means absolutely nothing for the cats.
(The ‘natural, grain free’ dies even specifies ‘no nasty byproducts’ on the tin and the website is full of dumbed-down myths to sell you your food. Also check out the people listed as answering their FAQs, I can’t even tell whether they’re vets or not. No ‘Dr’ or qualification, and not easy to Google.)
You would think cheap cat food is going to be poorer quality than expensive cat food, but especially in the case of the Grain Free trend, it’s not always the case. This is because if something is more expensive, it is often perceived as better by consumers, even if it is really not, so the manufacturer can hike the price up a bit freely
So after you’ve decided whether the diet has enough protein, enough fat, and meets suitable nutritional guidelines like
AAFCO, then you look at what the ingredients actually are. Most meats are going to be around 90% digestible and usable by the cats, while vegetable proteins are only 40-50% useful at all. So if the diet has a lot of high protein vegetables, that protein percentage may be artificially elevated and not utilized well by the cat’s metabolism.
I’m not going to talk about grain free versus not, because the vast majority of the time it makes no difference to the cat and is simply a personal choice on the part of the human feeding it.
Lastly, look at how much you need to feed to maintain a body weight. If the food doesn’t tell you the moisture percentage, and doesn’t tell you the calorie content, it should at the very least have a feeding guide. If you need to feed twice as many packets of one food to maintain weight as another, then it’s probably either lower quality, higher fiber or higher moisture than another.
That said, you might want a lower calorie food or a higher moisture food to help a cat feel full while losing weight, or to improve stool quality. That’s ok, pick something that suits your purpose.
With me all the way to the end? Well done. Crack out a biscuit to have with your tea.
TL:DR:
You wont find all the nutritional info you need on the packet
Check the protein and fat levels
Check whether it’s a complete diet, (eg
AAFCO
standard) or a ‘Complementary food’
Make sure it’s got meat/fish
And this rather long post is the simplest I can make cat wet food for you.
(Oh, and if you have something to add to the conversation, please do so in a reply or reblog. Random anecdotes sent to the ask box will not be published to keep the topic all in one place)
Pride month is coming up, so here’s a reminder that the Stonewall riots (in which trans women of color fought for us to have rights) wasn’t about marriage equality, it was about police brutality.
and that the fight for marriage equality wasn’t about being heteronormative it was about lgbt couples being able to have the same legal rights as straight couples regarding their relationship especially during the aids epidemic. it was so that lgbt people could be with their partners while they died.
Browsing antique stores is always the most wild fucking time. I found an insanely cursed Sean Connery Barbie in my favorite antique store which is nothing new there are like 20 super cursed dolls in that store but they sell men’s flannels for $12 so
The antique store with like 50 pocket dimensions underneath it is playing “What A Feeling” from Flashdance. There’s a giant bloody wooden tooth hanging from chains. This is so surreal
FYI I was using bloody as in there is red splatters on the roots of the teeth not the expletive
Shaggy Rogers is here and he has a giant beard
There is a Greco Roman helmet in one of the the pocket dimensions on top of a typewriter
THERE IS SECRET LIBRARY ???????
People have definitely fucked up here. I can sense it.
This door doesn’t even wiggle there’s no way that lock is what’s keeping it closed
What the fuck
Y’all I’m gonna die going up this
This place is so terrifying im looking for bodies now
Trying to find exit. I’m actually starting to get anxious now.
Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Jules walked into silent hill
So I have absolutely been inside this specific antique store (unless this is a pocket dimension that exists in many places, the store I know of is in downtown tacoma, WA). It’s spooky as hell, you can’t ever find anyone working there (the one time I did find a clerk he looked like he hadn’t left this garbage mansion in years, his hair was ginger and way too long and way too crunchy), it’s always disturbingly quiet despite being on a main downtown street, and to leave you have to meditate on that desire to summon an exit less you be trapped forever. The floors are incredibly uneven with lots of ramps and rooms on a slope. The library is my favorite part. There’s chairs and shit hanging from the ceiling all over the place. There are several false doors and windows. The inside in undeniably larger than the outside. This place is filled with a miasthma of chaotic energy.
To heal your soul, I recommend going to Mad Hat Tea just around the corner which also has a very real Vibe but it is healing and calming to a magical degree. A classmate of mine said once she had a terrible cold and went to Mad Hat between classes and asked the woman to give her something good for colds, she drank it without question and immediately her cold was gone. Shit theres so many like, old-magic-aura areas in downtown Tacoma guys, it’s crazy.
My employer decided to convert all of a certain class of our records from paper based files to digital. There were three immediate problems. Our company was not going to buy a generic system, but develop our own unique, tailored system. It was to be done on the cheap, with net savings for record keeping from Year 1. The guy in charge (let’s call him Genius) always (and I mean ALWAYS) thought he was the smartest guy in room. Believe me, he wasn’t.
Anyway, one of the girls I worked with took on the project on the condition that she could have the next July off for her wedding and honeymoon. She worked hard, and the project was actually making progress. One of her duties was passwords, none of which could be written anywhere because Genius knew this was ‘bad’. She periodically reminded Genius about the July wedding and he told her it’d be fine, but never signed off the paperwork. Come mid May, the project is WAY behind, mainly because Genius told management it could all be done in house at negligible cost, and Genius kept changing the design every time he read a new magazine article on IT. My friend was then told 6 weeks out from the Wedding that her leave was cancelled. The project took priority and she’d just have to reschedule her wedding, honeymoon, the works. Genius just could not see that this might be a problem. So she did her job, updated the passwords as required, never recording them anywhere, as required,……and resigned without notice the last day of June.
On her honeymoon she gets a frantic call from Genius demanding all the passwords. “Sorry, I don’t work there anymore “ click.
That’s why a decade later our company still has a few hundred electronic case files we can’t access.
Wait, wait…. Is that seriously it? How their clothes go?
that genuinely is it
yeah hey whats up bout to put some fucking giant sheets on my body
lets bring back sheetwares
also chlamys:
and exomis:
trust the ancients to make a fashion statement out of straight cloth and nothing but pins
Wrap Yourself In Blankets, Call It a Day
Ok, yes, but guys, look
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, fabric was EXTREMELY time consuming to make, and as such, was extremely valuable. You have to grow your fiber, either in the ground or on an animal. You have to process the fiber. You have to spin the fiber. And spin, and spin, and spin. Spinning technology prior to the late Middle Ages consisted of a drop spindle. It takes forever and a day to spin enough thread to make fabric using a drop spindle – 10-30 times longer than to weave it, depending on how thick your yarn is and what weaving technology you are using. Then, once you are done with that endless task, you need to weave it. The examples in this post are all from Greece, where they used the warp-weighted loom, which is actually a rather efficient piece of weaving technology, but it’s still not as fast as the treadle loom (another late Middle Ages invention) and in no way comparable to a modern industrial loom (essentially the same machine as a treadle loom, but automated (except warping, which is still hell on earth even in 2018)). You know the saying “women’s work is never done”? That saying refers to the fact that unlike, say, field work, or mining, or smithing, spinning and weaving were started before dawn and carried on until after dusk, every day of the year, and there was always, always need for more.
After all of this, every piece of fabric that is made represents literally hundreds of hours of work. It is so valuable it was a standard form of currency before the invention of money. Egyptians piled linen high in their tombs as a show of wealth – and that linen was stolen by the grave robbers along with the gold and other precious artifacts. Textiles were one of the most valuable things you could steal when you pillaged a city. A primary reason for the warfare and raiding that was a consistent part of pre-modern Mediterranean/Near Eastern history was to acquire female slaves to produce textiles. Yes, cooking, cleaning, and sex were also reasons to acquire female slaves, but the economic reason was for textile manufacturing.
So if fabric is that valuable, you’re not going to waste it. You’re not going to make something tightly tailored, because as anyone who sews can tell you, cutting fabric to fit produces a lot of waste. In addition, the cloth of the ancient world was often much more loosely woven than cloth today, which is partly to do with weaving technology but most to do with the fact that the denser the cloth, the more threads there are in it, which means the more threads you have to spin for it, which means the time you have to spend making it has just gone up dramatically. Loosely woven cloth ravels like hell when you cut it, again as anyone who sews can tell you, and that makes it much more difficult to sew something nicely tailored. Needles and scissors are also items we take for granted, but are, in their modern form, relatively modern inventions and have, historically, been tricky items to make.
Thus, most of the clothing of the ancient Mediterranean/Near East was based on the rectangles of fabric that come directly off the loom. Much of China’s historical dress is similar, at least in the time frames we’re talking about. Throughout European/North African/Middle Eastern history, and in China until silk changed the game (at least for the rich), tailoring skill and technology has lagged behind cloth production skill and technology.
The famous painting from the early Renaissance where the woman is wearing a dress constructed using a truly obscene amount of fabric? That painting is often held up as an example of the sharp increase in the availability of material goods that is the hallmark of the European Renaissance (especially because it is of a merchant family and not nobles), and it is that. But it is also an example of a mode of dress that was difficult-to-impossible to achieve before the invention of the flyer wheel (for spinning) and treadle loom (for weaving), which made cloth take considerably less time to make and therefore considerably cheaper, and which also made cloth considerably more amenable to tailoring.
So yeah. You too would make fashion out of sheets if it took you most of a month of full-time work to produce one sheet.
I also want to point out that much of the historical dress of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas (in the places where cloth was used) is similar, it’s just based on narrow rectangles sewn together rather than large rectangles, because these are places where the backstrap loom and/or tubular loom remained the mainstay of weaving technology. Backstrap looms produce narrow lengths of cloth (15-18 inches is usually the limit), so with that weaving technology + some sewing, you get things like Central and South American ponchos and much of the traditional dress of Central and Western Africa.
so my campus is currently hosting an ENORMOUS conference of scholars who study medieval history. they’ve been completely flooding the tiny cafe where I work and drinking our coffee faster than we can make it, but the good news is that they provide some PRIME people watching, including:
the fact that all of their name tags include pronouns so that I won’t feel bad assuming anyone’s gender in this post
the woman RANTING about one of her colleagues on the following grounds: “he thinks he understands it from some class he took in 1996! FUCK OFF, TOM.”
the man who was loudly and earnestly discussing the “influence of the Harry Potter fandom on our modern political discourse” while he got a soda
before he was out the door he’d switched topics to his preferred methods for teaching students about elves
the two nice extremely polite young British lads who I could not tell apart to save my life. their name tags indicated that they were apparently not twins, but cloning does not seem impossible.
the sheer number of people graciously volunteering to buy lunch for people they’ve just met
an unexpected number of very handsome soft butch women involved in medieval studies. I am bisexual and weak.
the guy in the flannel shirt who had the coldest, softest, most feminine hands I’ve ever encountered. I fell in love with him for a good 60 seconds. I am bisexual and weak.
people who aren’t from America being cheerfully confused by our money, including my favorite, a Canadian woman who told me “I’m slow with American money because it’s all the same color.”
I’ve learned that people who aren’t going to be in the country for more than a few days don’t give a SHIT about their change and will toss all of it in the take a penny/leave a penny jar. I collected so many quarters, y’all.
also a nice British woman called it the penny pot, which is the cutest shit I’ve ever heard and absolutely its new name.
just in general the EXTREMELY good grace and patience with which everyone accepted that we only have 2 cashiers and that it takes about seven minutes to make more coffee.
SEVERAL times after I apologized for the coffee wait (because this is customer service and minor inconveniences mean we have to grovel) the response was ‘lmao no worries this just means I get a fresh pot’
a woman approached me to day with a fucking enamel pin of that old illustration of a nun gathering dicks from a tree (you know the one) and I said immediately “oh my god, is that a pin of the penis tree?” and she looked stoked and said “yes it is the penis tree! you’re only the second person to recognize it!” what kind of boring ass medieval scholars has she been hanging with???? she was probably so fucking excited to finally have company where she could wear that pin and nobody said anything??? rude.
you know, this one
I have more:
every single person who said “cheers” when I gave them their change.
the painfully hip young man who was dressed entirely in standard academic business casual EXCEPT FOR his shiny silver doc martens.
me: “you boots are amazing.”
him: “!!!! thank you!”
the man who walked in, spotted the selection of high octane energy drinks, and nearly cried with relief. when he came to the register to pay for what was probably enough caffeine to kill a horse he looked me dead in the eye and said cheerfully “thanks, I’m jet lagged as shit and I can’t be expected to function right now.”
the dude who overheard my friend Austin listening to Florence and the Machine, started chatting with him about it, and asked him out on a date
I sold a hot dog to An Actual Nun
I have a very important update for everyone who had questions regarding the penis tree pin (and there were many of you):
this post found it’s way to one Dr. Kara Maloney, who is in fact the proud wearer of the penis tree pin
as several people have suggested, it does in fact come from the Marginalia Paraphernalia kickstarter, so we can officially say we solved that mystery.
a friend of mine forgot the word “lamp” once and said “light faucet”
I’m shaking from laughter. Yes, this is the right way to start a Friday morning.
Listen guys, I have a BA in English and an MA in Professional Writing and I have:
Forgotten the word “gums” and called them “teeth cuticles” Forgotten the term “liquor store” and called it a “rum-o-rama” Forgotten the word “mohawk” and called it a “head mustache”
The list goes on and on. Wording is HARD.
You know that putty you put in holes before you paint a wall? I forgot the word “putty,” called it “hole-be-gone” instead, and now my whole family refers to it as hole-be-gone.
it’s hard to make the brain do the english, ok!?
I wish I had this skill. When I lose a word, my brain derails. I use the term ‘derail’ because it is the mental equivalent of a train derailment (just easier to clean up)
At the staff meeting, my boss referred to the clipboard as “that snappy board”
My 4-year-old nephew didn’t know the word “knuckle” so he told us his finger knee hurt.
I forgot the word “speech” once so I said “you wrote me an essay with your mouth”
Dad once temporarily had the term “auto body filler” leave his brain; the Canadian Tire worker had her whole day made when he cheerfully said, “I’m here to procure some…car-spackle!”
I once forgot the work barrel so I described it as a round wooden box and then something “pirates put rum in it” before my mate figured out what I meant.
Oh god. Here we go.
Once upon a time, I had a lot of trouble communicating with friends. It could be argued that I still do.
In my first year of high school, I was talking to this one girl who I’ll call Lullaby. We had literally every class together, so we started hanging out all the time.
During lunch, we had a conversation about our experiences dating girls vs. dating guys in a sexual manner. We get back and we go to the rest of our classes, and she starts out the door.
What I WANT to say is “Come back”
Of course my brain decides that there are synonyms to words that sound like that, since it won’t actually word.
I blurt out, in front of half of my class.
“Ejaculate back!”
I do this a lot.
Here are some good ones:
I stepped on something gross and it got between my toes, and in my distress I referred to my toes as “feet teeth.”
I was very proud to have finished the “plate laundry.”
I told my ex to go look in the garage, only I said “car pantry.”
But my VERY FAVORITE is when I couldn’t remember the word for brown, so I called it “boring purple.”
>
I once forgot the work barrel so I described it as a round wooden box and then something “pirates put rum in it” before my mate figured out what I meant.
“Something pirates put rum in” is usually “pirates” in my experience.
Look, I still maintain “food closet” is a perfectly acceptable term if you can’t remember “pantry”.
Conversely I once forgot the term “linen closet” and told my mum to get a sheet from the Blanket Pantry.
I’m an anglophone living in Europe, and I keep having this problem not because I forget a word, but because I forget which English dialect someone else speaks (or don’t know).
The past week featured ‘hot potato rectangles’ (because i was unsure what ‘chips’ would mean to my friend).
Don’t even get me started on the holes in the wall that make the electrikkity go.
Taking place in England the owners of the yard slowly kept adding sections to the contraption so when the squirrel learned one section and got the nuts, they’d add another section. It took over 2 weeks to get to the final product you see in the video.
I love how it pushed itself along in the red cart. FASTER FASTER!
Steel Phoenix Studios 