That Post About 30 Year Old Coming Of Age Stories?

OK Tumblr Geriatric Ward, let’s talk about your posture-

there are things you should be doing now to prevent yourself from starting to look like 🥀

Why does it matter? Future you would like to avoid the pain, limited motion, and fall risk that goes along with worsening posture.

What’s the focus?

1. Keep the flexibility in your spine

2. Stretch the muscles in the front

3. Strengthen the muscle in the back

Here are some simple things you can do daily while sitting and when you get up to go into the bathroom or the kitchen

Keep the flexibility by doing these repeated movements: 10 repetitions several times a day

The goal is to give yourself a double or triple chin. Keep your nose pointing forward, don’t let it tip up or down

Thoracic extension- use a chair with a seat back that comes up to the level of your shoulder blades. Try to bend back over the top of the chair without arching away from the seat back and without extending your neck. If the pressure from the top of the chair is uncomfortable you can place a towel there

Stretch the muscles in the front by using a door frame. This one will feel good afterwards

If this isn’t enough of a stretch you can do one side at a time. If you have the right arm up step forward with the right foot and turn slightly to the left. Then do it on the other side.

Strengthen the muscles in the back by squeezing your shoulder blades together for a count of 10 and then repeating 10 times. You can do this several times a day Hint: Don’t lift your shoulder blades up

There are lots more exercises for strengthening your back muscles but this is a good starting point and easy to do. I like doing it while driving

Tips:

Do the best you can

If it hurts stop

Envision future you saying thank you each time you do one of the exercises

Last rays in a snowy forest

niiloi

jukkarisikko

The snow outside - Kaoru Yamada 

Japanese , b. 1975 -

You mentioned years ago that you once worked on a project restoring former coal mine land, trying to get plants to grow and break up the compacted soil and so on. Do you know how the site is doing now? I hope you don’t mind me asking, but it sounds like a very cool project and I would love to know if it worked!

Oh, extremely well! The trees are about a third of the height they should be for their age, but there's a little woodland there now. This year my uni is taking over the lease for the site, so investigations continue. We got a lot of papers out of it. Plus, we proved that if you get the trees to grow in, you increase other biodiversity, like birds and earthworms and small mammals and lizards (the place is alive with lizards every summer, actually. Sometimes they sit on your bag.)

The main project site is here, if you want a gander.

Happy Hanukkah, everyone, from these two jerks! I’m posting this a little early this year. Line art by the amazing Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, and colour art by @deecunniffe. 

I want to point out what a technical achievement this story is on the art side. There’s a real joy to creating a whole story in eight panels, but this? This is some magic. We introduce four new characters. In panel 5, SIX PEOPLE are talking. SIX. In the world of comics, that’s almost un-doable. 

Yet Ro and Ted arranged everything so the conversations flow and are sensibly grouped, all the “acting” is fantastic, and then Dee laid on top these beautiful, almost fairytale colours – look at the subtle work, the blush in Henry’s cheeks, Frank’s five o-clock shadow, the shine of the wine bottle’s glass surface, the light texturing in the backgrounds… and of course the snow! This is some first-class illustration work on an incredibly hard script. (I fear Ro and Ted always get me at my worst – my very formalist script for them in the 24 Panels anthology was no cakewalk either. (The problem is, they’re just so damn good at it… check out their work on the Image comic Crowded!)

As always, if you like what we do in Hells Kitchen Movie Club, consider donating a little to a veteran’s charity. 

(I also have a thriller novel I’m crowdfunding, please check it out, we are more than halfway there. The book is all written…)

Previously in Hell: cover image // 01 // 02 // 03 // Xmas // 04 // 05 // 06 // 07 // Hanukkah // That time the Punisher’s creator gave us a thumbs-up // twitter // insta

peaklass

Art Nouveau architecture of a house built in the 1880s in Brussels, Belgium

Nikitin Alexander