Walked by Husky

Jimai Hoth Gor , Prince Diamond , Dara Gueye by Jean Baptiste Mondino for Numéro Magazine Issue 241

You can get healthy, fit, and strong from home - with just your body and gravity!

Method: Train your exercises 2x a week for 2-3 Sets to near failure (as many as you safely can). Move on to harder exercises when you hit the goal standards.

We have a free fitness routine on our website. Our Hybrid Calisthenics app (beta) is also free to download.

Have a wonderful day!

You *can* get healthy fit and strong from home, but most of these exercises, even at the "basic" level are too difficult for your average beginner (never mind folks like me who are pretty solidly deconditioned or anyone with a disability) to manage. If these are too much for you, don't feel bad! There are lots of us who are right there with you.

There are much more heavily modified versions of all of these, or alternatives that build the same muscles, that are far more accessible to those of us who need less challenge. I don't have links to post right now, but have found that just a google search can bring back good results.

you can actually go browse @hybridcalisthenics page - they frequently post modified versions of exercises to help people who are new to working out or who are returning after a period of deconditioning.

Pushups are a great example - baseline "normal" pushups are actually a very advanced exercise! You're lifting about 65% of your weight, which is a LOT if you're not used to it. So don't start with a full push up, start by pushing up off of a wall or and gradually getting closer to the ground by moving on to a counter, and then the seat of a chair, and then a low step as you get stronger.

This particular video is about increasing the difficulty of exercises for people who have already mastered full pushups, pullups, and deep squats, but @hybridcalisthenics has lots of resources about *decreasing* the difficulty of these exercises.

My free Cloud Brush Pack is available now for Procreate, Photoshop, or Clip Studio Paint!

Link to download: CLICK Type "0" into the payment field to download for free (tips are welcome too!) Also includes free video tutorials: one, two, and three

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

I feel like the line between “fluffy uwu self care” and “get your shit together self care” is thinner than people seem to think. Like, sitting in a quiet space with a book and maybe some twinkly fairy lights gives me the spoons to go call my damn doctor like I’ve been meaning to. Bath bombs or shower steamers make me feel content and/or sparkly, which gives me confidence to go out in public. (Plus, I bathed.) I dye my hair funky colors so if I feel like people are staring at me I can say it’s at that instead of whatever my anxiety wants it to be. 

The two are not mutually exclusive, is what I’m getting at, and I never see that mentioned, just either “self care is being nice to yourself” or “self care is kicking yourself in the ass to function for a few hours”. Kick yourself in the ass with niceness.

My personal addition to this: sometimes you gotta do “get your shit together” self care to get to fluffy uwu self care. When I get in a bad mental health spot, I do nothing. I sit in bed with my thoughts being pulled every direction at once and lay there all day. Sometimes the self care I need is telling myself to get the fuck up, stop being intentionally miserable, and do something I know I’ll enjoy.

Sometimes maintaining a machine means gently cleaning it with a soft cloth and keeping it all nice and shiny and dust-free.

Sometimes it means disassembling it and replacing parts and otherwise really getting in there in a way that makes shit worse as a step to making it better.

The latter is, in fact, a lot easier if you also take the time to do the former. Sometimes, if you don’t, the dust will build up to a point where you CAN’T do deep maintenance without doing that superficial “beautifying” maintenance first.

Sometimes the machine is your life.

Tico & Seven ♥

I feel like Tumblr didn't show this post last time... 🤔

Fireworks Hair🎆

I do not recommend lighting your hair on fire lol

Touchscreens do not belong in cars

And gauges and dials should be gauges and dials, not screens

Door releases should have a direct mechanical link to a latch, not send an electronic signal to a servo

You should not have to have your phone alive to unlock your car

Most touchscreens have a temperature resistance of less than 40°C (104°F). They do not belong on cars, toasters, ovens and stoves, any kind of safety equipment, or any equipment that requires precision of operation to maintain safety. They do not belong anywhere near a working engine.

This is honestly better advice than “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”

By all means try again. But do that after you figure out WHY you failed!

Listen, I’m a control freak. I can only handle chaos if it’s contained within tightly confined boundaries. That’s why freehand selection is more than just a tool, it’s a lifestyle 😤

Full tutorial video on this workflow can be found here!

One of my highlights from last year was a beautiful hike that I did in the french alps. The view was incredible! So I had to make a drawing based on that moment✨

While I was out of town my boss pretty clearly got in a fight with one of my coworkers about overtime and billable hours and that has led to him being a petty little pissbaby about "complying with california law" by having us fill out time sheets because boss was utterly incapable of finding the middle ground between "you must track every second of your time in order to be paid for it" and "the technicians who make $60k a year are salaried and therefore are not entitled to overtime."

"Salaried employees can be non-exempt and therefore earn overtime if working for more than 8 hours a day but also are in a position where they can be trusted to take a few extra minutes at lunch or may stay after closing time occasionally without requiring overtime" doesn't seem like a very fine needle to thread but he is absolutely incapable of threading it.

For *years and years* now he has used himself as an example of the right way to be "on time." He's told us about going to his job as a kid and getting there five minutes early every day just to prove to his boss that he really wanted the work.

Anyway, I just got a lecture on how I'm not supposed to clock in even a minute before my start time, nor am I to cut my lunch short, nor am I to stay late to finish things up; he wants me in here for eight hours a day *exactly* and is now so hell-bent on micromanaging everyone's start and end times that he was late to a client meeting earlier because he was looking over time sheets.

Sir, you have played stupid games and you have won stupid prizes. You should have just paid the techs their fucking overtime.

He's being so petulant about this and it's so fucking funny. None of us feel bad for you bro. You are wage theft georg and the spiders have come home to roost. It is very much worth the potential few dollars of time I'll lose each week to see you tie yourself up in knots about whether I stayed two minutes late on wednesday to answer a customer's question.

Because we are in california and the "technicians" are working as desktop support *AND AS SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATORS* he is actually way, way more fucked than that:

I haven't carefully tracked how much overtime my coworkers were owed since my beloved friend left the company in 2019 (I love and miss you, nobody does it like you, you were so right to go, we should get coffee or something soon and you should sue that motherfucker i'm pretty sure I've still got the spreadsheet <3) - I used to track some of the disparity between the time she was logging and the time he accepted and at that time I think the threshold for tech workers to be exempt was 88K annually.

He really is wage theft georg. He has been leaning heavily on misapplication of exemption status and I've spent years telling my coworkers that they should be getting overtime, I think our operations manager just finally actually looked up the numbers I'd been telling him after a fight. (The operations manager also gets paid beneath the threshold for exemption, but he gets paid a lot more than the techs).

The Boss's deal is "the only overtime you get is overtime you bill" so if there's a problem after hours and a tech takes two hours to resolve it but spends an hour on research, boss won't pay the tech for the time spent on research only the time billed to the customer - the disparity is sometimes REALLY REALLY significant, especially if it's a problem that we *caused* and the customer doesn't get billed at all.

My title is technically "purchasing manager" and he tried to pull the "you're exempt" thing with me a few years ago. He wanted me to attend a series of webinars that started at like 6AM east coast time then do a full day's work after and I was like "are you planning on giving me six hours of overtime for five days, because then yes I'll do that" and he was like "no, you are salaried, you don't get overtime, plus you're a manager" so I looked up the laws in California (if you've seen me on reddit that's why my username is caemploymentqs - I made a throwaway that I ended up keeping) and I was earning under the threshold AND "managers" are supposed to have some kind of say-so in the way the business is run so I used the real-life example of "you made me get approval to order a five dollar box of pens this week, I am not a manager and I can prove it."

I did not have to go to the webinar, THAT fight led to an employee handbook and him being petulant about the fact that he has to give us breaks and made him aware that it is specifically illegal in california to add the breaks to a lunch.

I've texted like three of my coworkers "hey this contract is fucking you out of past overtime, don't sign it unless you get him to pay you back wages and here's how you would figure out what he owes you. Time to start a union haha lol jk. Unless..."

A two for one post today.

Dragon posts for Smaugust.

The Maple Leaf Drake is a small to medium sized woodland dragon that populates temperate forests across the globe. Their unique body morphology allows them to hide, almost seamlessly, amongst vast maple forests. This physiological adaptation also extends to seasonal color changes throughout the year. They will live their lives hidden amongst the leaves, using their long proboscis bill to pierce through the bark of Maple Trees to extract the sweet sap, which makes up the majority of it’s diet. 

Incredibly skittish, the Fearful Precious Red Coral Drake lives it’s life hidden amongst Red Coral. It’s long proboscis-like mouth snatching up small unsuspecting pray. 

Another selection of some of the better names I've come across in Regency era newspapers recently.

Achilles Deatherage is my great(5th) grandfather. Glad the name is still getting around.🤗 Here is the house he lived in @yeoldenews

That is amazing!

I'm very curious if your Achilles is the same one I posted as there were a truly shocking number of Achilles Death(e)rages running around in early 19th century America. The source of the clipping I used was from a legal summons from Stokes County, North Carolina printed in 1823 in the Western Carolinian newspaper (printed in Salisbury, NC) - however the summons states that Mr. Deathrage "does not reside within the limits of the state".

Either way, A+ naming choices @ryujin1066's great (6th) grandparents.

Yet another selection of some of the better names I've come across in Regency era newspapers recently.

A Guide to Historically Accurate Regency-Era Names

I recently received a message from a historical romance writer asking if I knew any good resources for finding historically accurate Regency-era names for their characters.

Not knowing any off the top of my head, I dug around online a bit and found there really isn’t much out there. The vast majority of search results were Buzzfeed-style listicles which range from accurate-adjacent to really, really, really bad.

I did find a few blog posts with fairly decent name lists, but noticed that even these have very little indication as to each name’s relative popularity as those statistical breakdowns really don't exist.

I began writing up a response with this information, but then I (being a research addict who was currently snowed in after a blizzard) thought hey - if there aren’t any good resources out there why not make one myself?

As I lacked any compiled data to work from, I had to do my own data wrangling on this project. Due to this fact, I limited the scope to what I thought would be the most useful for writers who focus on this era, namely - people of a marriageable age living in the wealthiest areas of London.

So with this in mind - I went through period records and compiled the names of 25,000 couples who were married in the City of Westminster (which includes Mayfair, St. James and Hyde Park) between 1804 to 1821.

So let’s see what all that data tells us…