i’m older now

Imagine there’s a hierarchy of protection your body enacts for injury. The worst case scenario would be something akin to severing an artery. The best case scenario? A minor muscle tear. Somewhere in the middle, you get the knee pain, bad patellar tracking, or torn knee ligaments. If I were to make a list of them in order of best case to worst case scenarios it would look something like this:

Minor muscle tear

Broken Bone

Compound Fracture

Torn Connective tissue

Severed Artery

Think of this order as layers of protection for your body. Strong muscle tissue is, therefore, your first line of defense against a host of other fuckups that can happen to you. With that said, you must work them out often and well.

Knee Pain

Suffice it to say, women are more prone to torn ligaments than men. So be sure to pay close attention here. If you’ve never had a fucked up knee, you know someone who has. And while a regular squat is good for training knee extension, there are better ways to stress the joint itself to offer you more protection down the line.

Here are three such exercises:

1. Peterson Step-up

The very first exercise in the video, but it’s pretty brutal if you do them a lot. Take a look again for a few key points:

The working leg is on the cinder block pointing straight ahead.

You’re starting on the ball of your foot and pushing down.

Dorsiflex the nonworking foot (the top surface of your foot pointing up).

The stance is kind of staggered so that your nonworking foot is about half the distance ahead of your working foot.

Don’t use the nonworking leg for assistance.

Hold onto a rail if your balance sucks

If you do it right, you’ll feel this right in your vastus medialis obliquus (VMO). This is that sweet looking tear drop muscle in your quadriceps. If you are at a stage where your knee fucking hurts and you want to strengthen it, use a shorter step. You can get by with as low as five centimeters if you can’t handle too much knee stress. As you get stronger, increase the step height. Alternatively, increase the weight, but err on the side of caution.

2. Step-down

I don’t see a lot of people do these, but they’re pretty rad. As you can tell from the video, you are stepping down from an elevation. Like the Peterson Step-up, the elevation depends on the amount of stress you can handle, but a normal step from a flight of stairs is a good start. A few key points:

Don’t jam your nonworking leg into the ground; lower with control.

Knee and foot are in line pointing straight ahead.

Start your progressive overloading with elevation before adding weight.

Like the Peterson Step-up, you can scale the heights of your step depending on what you can handle and it also works the VMO. But don’t go bouncing up and down with reckless abandon. Take it nice and easy.

3. Sissy Squats

Despite the name, they are not for sissies. They’re allegedly named after Sisyphus, that guy who pushes that rock up the hill to have it roll down again. But aside from that, every rendering of sisyphus shows him as having ripped quads. Sweet, right?

This particular exercise is the easiest to scale, modify, and load. The variation I do has the torso upright for the whole movement. Keep the shoulders placed above the feet, squat down, and come up on the balls of your feet.

To scale it you have a few options:

Hold a weight goblet squat style, and keep your torso upright.

Hold a kettlebell behind your back and keep your torso upright.

Keep your torso inline with your thighs. This is the most intense variation and it’s all quads. Tread with care. Here is what it looks like:

To get to this level of quad use, you can also use bands to assist you so that you keep your balance. Tread with caution on this. If you become more bad ass, you can add weight to it.

Conclusion

These exercises aren’t the only things you can do for stronger knees, but they are a good start. In addition to helping your knees, they also help with your proprioception by way of working on your balance. And whether you play sports or not, better balance is something we can all live with, along with strong joints, and a lack of knee pain.

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“Femme Fatale” by Susan Kane

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Dandelion through a crack

Tiny unit

1. The music, obviously

My first time playing Pokemon was through my cousin’s old copy of Gold.

It wouldn’t save anymore, so every time we played we started over from Newbark. The farthest we ever got was Ecruteak in 3 days, until the console froze lol

look, i fully recognize that there are reasons to be skeptical of history and archaeology. i am very on board with criticizing academia as an oppressive institution, and the way that researchers take their bigotry and bias with them to their work. i also recognize that academia does a pretty bad job of communicating what it does to the public, and that’s a part of why people’s hostility to it is able to flourish.

but i am disturbed by the pervasive narrative in online leftist spaces that people who research the human past are ignorant and bigoted, and i think we need to do more to combat that narrative.

historians being homophobic has become a whole meme, and it feels like people are just using historians as a homophobia scapegoat, when in reality the humanities are overwhelmingly left-leaning. people also keep blaming historians for erasing the homoeroticism of fictional literary characters, which is just… not what historians do. homophobic biases and erasures in the interpretation of history over the past few hundred years are a very real thing that’s important to learn about, but scholars have radically shifted away from that approach in recent generations, and these memes are not helping people outside the field to understand history and reception. instead, a lot of people are coming away with the impression that…

(source… really? nobody?)

this thread gets bonus points for the comments claiming that modern historians argue about whether achilles was a top or a bottom using homophobic stereotypes, which i can only guess is a misunderstanding of the erastes/eromenos model (a relationship schema in classical greece; i think people have debated whether achilles and patroclus represent an early version of it). also a commenter claims that the movie troy invented the idea of achilles and patroclus being cousins when no, they were also cousins in lots of ancient sources.

there’s this post about roman dodecahedra (link includes explanation of why the original post is misleading).

there’s this thread about how some thin gold spirals from ancient denmark look exactly like materials used in gold embroidery to this day but archaeologists are stupid and don’t know that because they dont talk to embroiderers enough. in fact, the article says they were most likely used for decorating clothing, whether as a fringe, braided into hair, or embroidered. so the archaeologists in the article basically agree with the post, theyre just less certain about it, because an artifact looking similar to a modern device doesn’t necessarily mean they have identical uses.

this thread has a lot of people interpreting academic nuance as erasure. the museum label literally says that this kind of statue typically depicts a married couple, giving you the factual evidence so you can interpret it. it would be false to say “these two women are married” because there was no gay marriage in ancient egypt. (interpreting nuance as erasure or ignorance is a running theme here, and it points to a disconnect, a public ignorance of how history is studied, that we can very much remedy)

lots of other conspiracy theory-ish stuff about ancient egypt is common in social justice communities, which egyptologists on this site have done a good job of debunking

oh, and this kind of thing has been going around. the problem with it is that there are loads of marginalized academics who research things related to their own lives, and lived experience and rigorous research are different forms of expertise that are both valuable.

so why does this matter?

none of these are isolated incidents. for everything i’ve linked here, there are examples i havent linked. anti-intellectualism, especially against the humanities, is rampant lately across the political spectrum, and it’s very dangerous. it’s not the same as wanting to see and understand evidence for yourself, it’s not the same as criticizing institutions of academic research. it’s the assumption that scholars are out to get you and the perception that there is no knowledge to be gained from thorough study. that mindset is closely connected to the denial of (political, scientific, and yes historical) facts that we’ve been seeing all around us in recent years.

I was cleaning out my bookshelves and found this old (2001) zine focused on urban agriculture that includes this really excellent critique of native plant restoration and “non-native” plant removal.   Here’s an excerpt of the text since it’s tiny and old:

“And what about the Others (why must we always place the Others in a non-human category, as if they were negated by humans)? Many species of butterflies, for example, have adapted to the so-called non-native plants and there exists no firm scientific basis, as far as I can determine, that these butterflies will adapt back to plans once widely established in a terrain far more pristine than our present industrially-degraded landscape. Degraded terrain, similar to a raked garden, is fertile ground to “non-natives” (there’s that term again!).

I often wonder, when I read of dedicated restorationists taking students armed to the teeth with weed wrenches in restorations areas to eradicate weeds, how these young people respond to the usual pep talks of “natives vs. non-natives.” Many of these children come from immigrant families. I work with many similar young, impressionable minds in San Francisco, where the same question arises. Since they are not native to the United States, do these young people associate themselves with somehow being bad themselves?