It's 2008 in here baby!

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

A peach culture being a people who are outwardly friendly but secretly difficult to actually get to know and a coconut culture being a people that are difficult to even start a conversation with but once you get in they’re very easy to form lasting relationships with.

Obviously this analogy has its flaws but I think this explains to me a lot about cultural misunderstandings. Everybody guards their personal life. The question is just where they put that barrier.

This leads to people from “peach” cultures feeling like everyone from “coconut” cultures is mean and rude and the other way around people from “coconut” cultures feel like everyone from “peach” cultures is shallow or inauthentic.

Neither is true, really. We just put our social shells in different spots. Like an American for example will invite you into his house the day he meets you but forming an actual deep friendship with him will still take 2-12 business years whereas a German might think you’re creepy if you try to talk to him but once you figure out how to break that barrier you’re friends forever.

Yourspace, a modern "Myspace" page template

(Pictured above: the default layout, and my old customised page that I've used prior as an example)

I've been making pages for (formerly) Neocities and my personal site for going on 8 years now, and it turns out that I have a lot of old ass codes that I don't really like or use anymore. So, I've decided to start uploading some of them!

This is "Yourspace", a modern Myspace-based layout code that ditches the horrid table layouts, with bonus compatibility for mobile screens. It's not compatible with old Myspace themes as a result, but should be much easier to customise to make up for it. Intended for Neocities, Nekoweb, etc., it does require basic knowledge of HTML and CSS to use -- since it's older it's not my cleanest work, but should be readable enough that it's (hopefully) not difficult to work with.

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

Salem the black-coded bunny boy!!!!

"I know it's stupid," she said, "but I can't stop thinking about it."

"Call me if that happens, " I said, because we lived 15 minutes away from each other. "I'll run over and watch her until her grandparents get there."

1. Never tell anyone what you're planning to do until you do it (you will get a premature dopamine hit and sense of accomplishment from telling them and lose motivation to actually do it)

image for when your stomach ails you this morning