#i mean i think the price was a lil high for the product and quality bc while bigger than most it is still a prize figure

[kostektyw]

so i know a few month ago i promised myself i would not turn into an anime figure collector, but the fact i just bought my third anime figure ever Does Not break that promise, i swear (:°з」 ∠)

[the-bjd-community-confess]

Econ anon here again just wanted to reply to some of the comments https://at.tumblr.com/the-bjd-community-confess/not-quite/x59g10p6gbrq

Thank you for your input and healthy discussion, warms my nerdy lil heart!! 🥹

Regarding e-commerce sites, I’m speaking purely in terms of maximizing efficiency for buying and selling on the second hand market. Far easier to sort through items on eBay than the #bjdsales IG hashtag for example. Also that’s why so many (Western people at least) end up buying recasts entering the hobby as there aren’t very many luxury goods today that you can’t buy legit off of e-commerce sites. You aren’t wrong as to the “why” knowledgable legit BJD buyers don’t list/search those sites but the result is still an overall hindrance to legitimate secondhand market transactions. 

Regarding unknown buyers/sellers, this originally started back in the early 2000s when there were little to no recasts. The concern was overwhelmingly getting scammed and having someone run off with your money. Even now it’s rarely an issue an informed buyer is being sold a recast or being tricked into buying one. Most transaction issues with unknowns revolve around sale scams for legit dolls and items. I’d say recasts are part of the concern now, but that can usually be assuaged with a CoA verification . But overall even without recasts not selling/buying to/from unknowns would still be standard. 

Great comments regarding IP issues and price. Although I will say what you mean by “inflexible” actually means more flexible or more elastic in economic terms.  Lol it is a bit confusing but basically what’s considered “flexible” isn’t based on whether the price of an item ever increases or decreases or the frequency it does, its based on people’s willingness to buy when it does change. We are essentially saying the same thing though!  Companies that raise their prices will be generally unsuccessful.  

Taking this a step further this actually made me really consider if the BJD market is a competitive market as a whole. I would say the smaller companies and independent artists are price takers, meaning the above theory would apply to them as they cannot set a price in the market on their own. The market determines the price. Ex, heads are usually anywhere from $85-160 (depending on skin tone, size, etc). An artist charging $300+ for their head without any other extras, faceup, etc. would be looked at like they were insane lol. 

HOWEVER, companies like V0lks and Soom are more likely Monopolies. They can set that higher price themselves regardless of the market and consumers are willing to pay it because of their brand and products (superior goods).

Soom especially quality is rather mid in comparison to the prices they charge for a basic nude doll. Many people complain about QA issues of head cap magnets being weak, obvious seam lines, the resin skin tones are not consistent between batches, need to be wired/sueded to pose, jointed hands are DYI kits, etc. Yet they are still widely popular despite all these quality issues.  But it’s also a big trait of Monopolies in economics that they do not have to prioritize quality above all else as people will want them regardless. V0lks on the other hand has higher quality standards but they have their own unique way of selling and offering dolls (lotteries, one-offs, not being able to buy blank dolls, full sets coming with glued in eyes, etc) that people do complain about often yet there are still thriving in business.

Not to mention both V0lks and Soom come out with limiteds and full sets that can be 3x-5x times the price of an average BJD doll already costing hundreds. They don’t even have to offer heads because they know people will want the sculpt enough to buy the full doll. 

Going back to IP I don’t know much about IP law but I am not surprised at the costs to go through legal proceeds being ridiculously high, which you are right is likely the reason they don’t enforce. However, I don’t think it’s because the dolls are underpriced though. It’s likely even if they were able to charge say $300 a head, they still wouldn’t be able to generate enough to cover legal costs. Lawyers can be $300 & up an hour in addition to retainer fees. Only V0lks I would guess would have the resources to sue and even with them its likely the opportunity costs aren’t worth it to them. 

At that level it’s never really about the principle of fighting for your IP and all about the money. Now if a multi-billion dollar company like Matt3l started stealing V0lks IP, you bet it would be worth then to sue. Not to mention they could likely get attorneys who would work for a percentage of the amount won, rather than charge hourly saving on the up front costs of legal expenses. But that usually just happens in extremely high profile situations when lots of money are involved. That’s why you rarely hear of anyone suing anyone else over IP if they themselves or the person they are suing aren’t a big corporation with lots of money, the costs wouldn’t be worth the reward otherwise. 

Regarding Lou, I don’t think the argument about Lou its a bizarre at all. What you are suggesting would be a duopoly or a cartel (no not the drug kind lol!). Cartels in Econ are companies who each agree to make a certain amount of an item so they can split market profits on that item rather than compete (usually illegal to form in most industries due to anti-trust laws etc). Although I do think someone mentioned it in the comments too, the downside of cartels is one side (Lou in this case) is incentivized to cheat. Companies would be wary giving Lou molds as he could essentially then do what he wants, sell for lower prices, produce more than agreed upon, not give them their share of profits, etc, etc.  There is no promise he wouldn’t sell more than he is supposed to or even if they did give him an exclusive sculpt he could use it to copy and make his own (like he has before).

Regarding overhead costs of legit vs recast. This isn’t true at all that it would be more expensive for Lou to go legit or that he is saving lots of money by stealing at this stage. Although there are heavy fixed costs in the short run of starting a business, Lou is now a successful recaster. He has the materials and resources to sculpt his own if he wanted to. The start up costs of getting a warehouse, resin, casting materials, etc, for his recast business far out way the costs of spending a bit more time refining a doll with sculpting, sanding, etc. Time is the main cost in sculpting original creations rather than money. 

For proof of this look no further than some of the western artists presales on IG. They will get people excited with their sculpting process and get lots of preorders. But when it actually comes to paying a caster and getting other supplies to produce the doll that’s when they flop. They either take way longer to deliver or out right become a scammer and don’t deliver dolls because the overhead costs of producing the doll were way higher than sculpting one, even when they weren’t the ones doing the casting themselves (short run vs long run marginal costs). 

However, this is a pipe dream Lou going legit honestly. It’s far more lucrative and brings more economic profit for him to remain a recaster having a monopoly on it being the main recaster. If he were to go legit, another recaster seeing opportunity would take his spot. Thats why even if Lou’s recast factory blew up tomorrow and he left the businesses, it would only be a matter of time before another recaster took his spot.

~Anonymous

[therappundit]

Top 10 Rappers of 2020

The finish line of this long, surreal year is finally upon us...which means that it’s time for me to throw down the gauntlet in the ‘Best of 2020’ frivolous list race!  🙌

*Just to be clear*: this is a list of MCs who I believe turned in the best overall performances in 2020. ***This is NOT a list of the my top 10 favorite MCs***, or even who I believe to be the best MCs in the world at the moment...these are simply dope artists that put forth the strongest, most consistently interesting and important (to the genre) high-quality work in the perilous year that was 2020. 

If you think your favorite MC was slighted....well, Michael Jordan is the greatest to ever play the game of basketball but even he didn’t win MVP every year, right? I encourage you to write your own list - it’s a cool way to dap artists that are too often overlooked by industry websites, and share the music you enjoy with others that may not have given the record a spin otherwise.

Even if 2020 didn’t bring you the “instant classic” you had been hoping for, I think it’s hard to deny that this year really had impressive depth when it came to showcasing some of the most diverse music that the genre has to offer.  I can’t speak for music in general - sadly I’m just The Rap Pundit, not The Music Pundit - but I can say that it has been an impossible task to keep a playlist less than 500 songs deep at a time, because for every truly great release in 2020 there seemed to be 30 very good releases. 👌

So how did I come about these 10 MCs (and Honorable Mentions)? Before you get huffy about who I snubbed (and that is pointed directly at my jury of older head peers that consider themselves tastemakers, but also haven’t opened their minds up to any new takes on rap styles since the year 2000)...here are the five chief pieces of criteria that I put into finalizing my list:

- quality (whatever lane you’re in, how often did you ‘own it’?)

- quantity (at least 10 very good-to-great songs released, and 3-4 verses that stand out as a ‘must-hear’ for any rap music fan)

- consistency (not just 4-5 great features and a few forgettable solo tracks, will I want to keep at least 7 or 8 of your own new songs released in 2020 in my rotation for 2021?)

- impact (are you so vital to the type of rap music you make that if you stopped rapping tomorrow, there’s no one else in the game that could fill that void?)

- “it” factor (are you carried by a co-sign or an elite production team, or did you bring a style/talent to the table that could carry a record in and of itself?)

Got it? Then here we go...

1. Conway the Machine

I hope 2020 was the type of year that Conway the Machine had been hoping for since he first began his journey with rap music. After years of scraping and hustling towards music industry recognition (and not just cult figure status), at year’s end we see Griselda’s top Lieutenant holding down a rare balancing act: champion of underground hip-hop, and most requested feature by any mainstream rap star looking to add some tough-talking muscle to their album.

While much of Conway’s content has always been driven by surviving an attempt on his life in 2012, much like 50 Cent, Conway’s way with words and perspective manage to elevate the quality of his material to a higher tier than most. And where - at least in his heyday - 50 Cent benefited from an indestructible super-villain persona, Conway’s success can be greatly attributed to a larger-than-life heart.  With every braggadocious act of gunplay, there are moments of gratefulness to still being alive to share success with his brethren, as well as a painful longing to be with close allies that are no longer with him (at least not in the physical form).

Above all else, in 2020 Conway the Machine did what he has always done throughout his career: delivered well written, passionate bars about coming up in an impossibly challenging environment and coping with loss...only now his craftsmanship and understanding of how to channel all of those feelings into a more polished final product have yielded the most well-rounded solo project of his career in From King to a God. Progress is a slow process, but the long and winding road has finally taken Conway a step closer to that G.O.A.T. status he will hopefully continue to reach for...

Best Evidence: FKTG, and a countless number of scene-stealing verses alongside rap acts ranging from deep underground to household names

2. Freddie Gibbs

I don't use the word "sauce" all too often (this may actually be the first time), but if there was any MC guaranteed to bring sauce to any rap record right now, it's Freddie Gibbs. 

Forever existing somewhere between gritty gangsta and syrupy old soul, the flavor that Freddie brings to every verse is malleable enough to work on virtually any type of record, which was certainly proven in 2020. Anyone foresee a Gibbs & Alchemist Grammy nomination heading into 2020? It’s a testament to how high quality work, through consistent reliability and dues paid, can elevate a project from underground niche following to critical acclaim. While his work with Alchemist may not reach the lofty levels of his heralded collaborations with Madlib, Alfredo represents the best that “quarantine music” can offer...two talented friends saying one day, “hey we should finally drop a full tape together, why not?” - and then BOOM, it happens.

Too many fail to remember that Gibbs already has a long accomplished body of work behind him...so the fact that he may just be entering his prime now, is scary.

Best Evidence: Alfredo, Machinedrum’s “Kane Train”

3. Boldy James

Comeback MC of the year, and no it is not close (but big shout-out to Grafh, another dope MC who had an amazing year).

I'm old enough to remember when folks like Roc Marciano and Ka were seen as sleepy, monotone rappers with little hope of reaching permanent rap icon status (flash-forward to today, and they are widely consider geniuses). For some, the quieter, less hook-dependent approach to making rap songs, was....well, not great rap music. They were wrong then and they’re wrong now, but similar to how the coolest, smartest cat in the room is rarely the loudest, it can take some time and patience before everyone learns what’s what. Time is what is required to appreciate Detroit’s Boldy James, a veteran that has been through it - both in terms of the ups and downs of the music business, as well as the streets through which he draws his stories and inspiration.

Boldy makes it seem all too easy, rapping his verses with the cool, casual tone of telling old stories to a close friend over drinks. Dropping multiple projects (with one still to come) in one year can often lead to over-saturation. Even the most dedicated fans/stans can begin to feel less enthusiastic about new releases when they have already received a healthy portion of more of the same...but most rap fans are not necessarily Boldy James fans. Boldy fans (much like Roc Marciano and Ka fans) are already aware that knowing what type of material to expect from your favorite MC can be a blessing if that MC takes pride in the execution of the final product, rather than the noise leading up to it. 

The beauty of his collaboration with The Alchemist (big year for that guy, huh?), The Price of Tea in China, is that it celebrates the more subtle nuances of boom-bap, proving that great MC and producer chemistry can trump the “shock & awe” of more uptempo rap music. The shock in Boldy James’ lyrics sits within the detailed descriptions of the cold world he grew up in...so monotone or not, how can any music could be more gripping than that?

Best Evidence: TPOTIC, Manger On McNichols, a long list of consistently perfect feature verses

4. 42 Dugg

I would say this is more of a longterm investment rather than the celebration of a rapper already within rap’s inner circle, but 42 Dugg didn’t just steal the show on every feature this year, he also displayed maturity in his ability to craft well-rounded, high quality rap singles. I’m talking joints that work just as well on the street tape level as they would at the radio level. That is especially rare to see from a rapper that is still relatively new to national conversations. 

So much more than just a co-sign of Lil Baby and Yo Gotti, the Detroit eastsider has already proven that he can craft a full solo album with the swagger of a far more seasoned MC. 42 Dugg combines a Boosie-esque, "oh you think you’re better than me??” chip on his shoulder with the unpredictable bombast of Lil Wayne. What he may lack in punchlines he makes up for in musicianship, his voice bringing one of the most nimble touches to trap music that I have heard in a long time. 42 Dugg music is hard and soulful, with the natural hunger of a rapper that knows me might be one smash away from superstardom. By this time next year, I’m betting he will be. 

Best Evidence: Young & Turnt 2 (Deluxe), features on high profile records like Lil Baby’s “Grace” and “We Paid”, and a growing stream of attention grabbing solo loosies

5. Rome Streetz

In 2020 it was almost impossible to be an underground MC with a great project unless you landed a Rome Streetz verse. 

Rome has been bubbling for a while now, but in 2020 he unleashed an onslaught on the game. At times he seemed like the hardest working MC in underground circles, busting his ass to not only make as many appearances as possible, but also to own any song he guested on. He raps like every verse might be “the one” that gets him a huge contract, and that’s a level of hunger and consistency that will likely land him more than one huge contract someday. In spite of that laundry list of strong features, the young Brooklyn MC still managed to release multiple dope solo projects, all flashing a rap style that feels at once a throwback and the fresh voice NYC rap needs. 

Rome is clearly from the same school as many of the New York City greats, because he has the capacity to deliver dark, potent bars with the sharp intellect of a Harvard lecture (think AZ before “Sugar Hill”). While he sounds most at home when he’s rhyming over instrumentals that run more coldblooded than a horror flick, it’s easy to picture him popping up in more places in 2021...if that’s even possible.

Best Evidence: Noise Kandy 4, Kontraband, The Residue, and at least 50 incredible features with a who’s-who of the underground’s finest

6. Stove God Cook$

No one saw this coming....well, maybe Roc Marciano, Lord Jamar, Busta Rhymes and a few more NYC heads in the know - but I guarantee you, no one else saw the Stove God coming!

Bar for bar, no MC owned more rewind-worthy rap quotables in 2020 than Stove God Cook$. Dropping a solo debut with VERY little fanfare and zero features (apart from the steady, reliable guidance of Roc Marciano - low key one of hip-hop’s most reliable producers), a slow bubbling word of mouth campaign on social media eventually got Stove God verses exposed to more and more high profile ears. Such a grass roots campaign is rarely seen...I mean, a rap album slowly becoming a critical darling simply off the strength of more and more random folks discovering the music and Tweeting about it, as opposed to the buzz being calculated before the product??? It feels almost too good to be true these days, as early reviews of Reasonable Drought typically lead with something along the lines of, “hey, have you heard of this album? I have no idea who this is, but it is 🔥🔥🔥”

It has often been said that Roc Marciano has a lot of “sons” in the game, implying that Roc Marci gave birth to a style that a whole generation of underground MCs run with today. So it’s ironic (or perhaps highly appropriate?) that the next level of progression for Roc might be to have a protege, a young Jedi to carry on the tradition on Roc’s own terms, and become the next new star to be embraced by the old heads. But Stove God isn’t a clone of Roc, or anyone else, he’s simply one of the most exciting artists to hit the NYC underground in a generation. Everything from his word choice, to his fresh references and sense of humor, to his delivery and the way he structures his verses, feels like a collection of “firsts”, there’s simply no one sounding like him. And if his work in 2020 is any indication, he will continue to be in a league of his own for years to come.

Best Evidence: Reasonable Drought, spotlight snatching features alongside Roc Marciano and Griselda’s finest

7. Lil Baby

Once viewed by some as just another “Lil”, Lil Baby had been rollin’ coming into 2020, but by the end of 2020 it’s clear that he has arrived at the forefront of rap music’s most reliable hitmakers right now. 

A must-have feature on any rap album reaching for max exposure, Lil Baby’s dexterous flow, charisma, and pen that is significantly sharper than early reports indicated, made him one of the few shining stars in 2020 to consistently deliver good rap music to what in any other year would have been considered smash hits in any club.

What makes Lil Baby’s music standout is that he could easily be a “cookie cutter” MC, phoning in verse after verse just to get another check, but instead he continues to bring it - trying to squeeze in an extra catchy lyric, maybe flow in a way that breaks up a verse to make it stand out from the pack a little more - and even when he is featured over cookie cutter beats that sound like every other trap inspired beats that came before it, Baby seems eager to prove something. I think that’s what I like about him - he’s on a short list of mainstream-bred Young Thug disciples that seem to really want to put the work in to becoming one of the greats. 

Best Evidence: I mean...did any rap star have more songs in circulation this year? Dude was everywhere, but “The Bigger Picture” got his name officially into the lyricist conversation (even though personally I don’t even think it’s one of his more impressive records - at least not stylistically)

8. Westside Gunn

No one denies that the Griselda Records team had a banner year, yet somehow the vocal leader of the group managed to drop a handful of dope projects without receiving credit for being a great MC in his own right. Great artist, great album curator, great business man - sure, but great MC?? That credit is rarely given to the FLYGOD. He might not even understand how natural he is as a solo MC, waxing unpredictable flows and half-bars that stick in your mind in place of catchy hooks or predictable song structure. He might call himself an artist first, but I still call him one of the most prolific rappers today (regardless of whether he retires after the ball drops).

I can’t believe I have to tell rap fans this in the year 2020...but......you all know that message and punchlines are just part of the art of rapping, right...and not the only thing that defines who is a dope MC and who isn’t?? Play any solo cut from Westside Gunn and filter out the “doot-doot-doots” and stream of conscious hooks and what you are left with is one of the most distinctive voices in rap music, attempting off-kilter flows and phrases over some of the most impressive production in rap music today, and to me that sounds like my kind of rap music. What the Buffalo floor general lacks in diversity of subject matter he makes up for with a relentless imagination.

That’s why it’s not all that surprising to me that Westside Gunn enjoyed more mainstream attention in 2020 than he ever has before. All he needed was a window of exposure and he certainly capitalized on it, pitching his sound and his vision in all the right places, without compromising his style or vacating his lane. So strictly as a MC, I would consider him the Young Thug of the east coast underground scene, and if 2020 does turn out to be his final year of recording solo projects, I am thankful that he already has a long list of quality projects with high replay value to revisit again and again. But don’t wait - give this man his flowers now.

Best Evidence: “Euro Step”, “Rebirth”, “327″, “Shawn vs. Flair”, “Michael Irvin”, and YES he even had a more than worthy verse on “$500 Ounces” alongside Freddie Gibbs and Roc Marciano

9. Benny the Butcher

Who else is more reliable to deliver a dope feature verse than Benny?

By now you must be muttering at least a few things about me, so let me just make two points: YES, I am a big fan of Griselda records, but NO I do not consider that an unreasonable bias because even on paper according to a large variety of sources, it’s clear that Conway, Boldy James, Westside Gunn and Benny are true specialists when it comes to the quality of the work they distribute. Its not a fluke or a trend, they’re just that good at what they do...I have been saying this for almost 5 years now, but in 2020 the rest of you sleepy heads finally just stopped hitting snooze.

Benny the Butcher already possesses the writing capacity, attention to detail, and skills of observation/personal reflection to put himself within special company as one of the nicest pens in the business today. But in 2020, he dialed things up even higher...or perhaps word of mouth just finally caught up with the rest of his peers? The tribute to the classic Roc-A-Fella era that was his Burden of Proof project with Hit-Boy helped expose Benny to a much larger audience, and it has been beautiful to see so many more folks quoting and sharing his lyrics on Twitter, because I recall when he had about the same amount of Followers that I do, because it wasn’t all that long ago (I just hope they go back to experience all of his prior work - I’m still partial to his incredible verses on “Shower Shoe Lords” and “Pissy Work”)! 

In my not so humble opinion, I do think some of the more dramatic pomp and circumstance on the BOP album was more suited to a Rick Ross or Meek Mill than Benny, so I’m actually more excited to hear what Benny has in store for 2021. He truly sounds at his best over more minimalistic production that lets his lyrics fill the spotlight...but still, tracks like “Timeless” and “Legend” do remind me of some of my favorite moments from old JAY-Z albums...blasphemous, maybe, but true.

A shot to the leg last month seems to have done nothing to slow his momentum, so if you didn’t board the bandwagon by now, you are inexcusably late.

Best Evidence: Burden of Proof, mercilessly slaughtering every verse on every Griselda projects, and a ton of show-stealing features

10. Drakeo the Ruler

What a journey it's been for the L.A. rising star. 

Flexing a penchant for placing local slang into his music and delivering dark verses with a clear sense of humor, it's easy to see the appeal of Drakeo's style. If Thank You For Using GTL was an inspiring attempt to do anything possible to keep his buzz going (in that case, recording his verses over a prison phone), the quick release of We Know The Truth shortly after he regained his freedom seems to have given him a 50 Cent-esque teflon aura at the moment. 

But this is about more than just Drakeo himself, it’s about what he represented before incarceration, and what he represents now. As one of the more visible forces in a new generation of west coast hip-hop, Drakeo was a few key features away from exploding onto the national scene. Now after surviving his ordeal, likely with a great deal more to write about, his ceiling has only been raised - and along with his growth potential, so rises the potential for the current rap scene out in L.A. right now. Mark my words: by this time next year Drakeo’s flow will be one of the most flagrantly jacked flows in rap music coast to coast.

A sincere welcome home from the rap world, Drakeo the Ruler. Hopefully the worst is now behind you. 🙏

Best Evidence: We Know The Truth, Free Drakeo, Thank You For Using GTL

*Honorable Mentions*:

Che Noir, Ka, Ransom, Billy Woods, Royce Da 5′9″, Jay Electronica, Fly Anakin, Curren$y, Lil Uzi Vert, Roc Marciano, Skyzoo, Black Thought, Tee Grizzley, Your Old Droog, Flee Lord, Lil Wayne

[sally-mun]

OKAY BITCHES ON TO PART 2!

Also don’t forget to check out Part 1 if you haven’t yet!

British

Okay so maybe it’s in poor taste to start the British section with dolls I’m not actually sure are British, but fuck it. The one on the left is a doll I’m reasonably sure I got from a British seller, and the one on the right seems to just be a scaled-up version of it, SO. That’s what I’m going with.

No joke, the left doll is my favorite Sonic plushie EVER. It’s so incredibly fluffy and the proportions are just right and it’s really well-made and AUUGHH I LOVE HIM. Interestingly the doll on the right is made of the same uber-fuzzy material, but it doesn’t have as much of a fluffy effect because of the larger scale. Also the shoe stripes are ribbons for some reason, which makes them stand out from all the other dolls.

So this is from a line of dolls that, as far as I’ve ever seen, are simply known as “Europe prize” plushies. I don’t know if they were actual prizes for some sort of game or claw machine or whatnot, but that’s how I tend to see them listed. These dolls are REALLY nicely made and incredibly cute, like way more than usual. I also have the Knuckles from this set, but he doesn’t live in this net so he’s not pictured here.

I know this line also included Sonic (obviously), Amy, and Shadow, but I’m not sure who else. I’d REALLY like to get the others someday, but I don’t have much hope for that, since they’re long since out of production and prices just keep going up as everyone cashes in on nerd collector culture.

This doll is fine enough on its own (if a bit fearful in the eyes), but what’s really odd about it is that it’s like literally twice as tall as the other dolls in its line, for some reason. I have the Sonic and Tails from this set, and their sizes both match each other, but for some reason Knuckles is a tall boi?? Oh well.

I believe this set also includes an Eggman doll, but I’ve never seen it before.

I wish I’d thought to showcase it better in this photo, but the tag on the bottom of Sonic’s right foot here is the real spotlight of this doll. I don’t know much about the background of this doll, but i know that tag on his foot is what distinguishes him from other Sonic dolls, and collectors go NUTS for this guy. I remember missing out on one years ago because the shipping was too costly (it’s always been rough importing from Britain, but it used to be a lot harder), and for a while I thought I’d never get one. Oddly this one that I did eventually nab is the only one I’ve ever seen with suction cups. I’d like to hope that one day I could get the one that doesn’t have them, but I’m not holding my breath.

Following the last doll, I’m sure a lot of you are immediately noticing that this Tails also has the tag on his foot, albeit a very faded one. This doll is also super odd, because EVERY other time I’ve ever seen this doll before, it has NOT had the foot tag! This one is the only one I’ve encountered with the tag, and I didn’t even know it had it until it arrived in the mail. This doll is also about 50% bigger than the Sonic doll with the foot tag, maybe he goes with the non-suction cup’d Sonic plushie? I don’t know off the top of my head how big that Sonic is supposed to be, so it’s possible! Or maybe these dolls have nothing to do with each other, and I bought some weird anomaly. Definitely one of the weirder Tails plushies in my collection.

Australian

EASILY the ugliest doll I will ever own, short of maybe obtaining the Tails that matches this set. (Trust me, the Tails is REALLY FUCKING UGLY.) I have such mixed feelings on this lil guy because, as many of you already know, this is one of the elusive Sega World Sydney dolls, which means it’s EXTREMELY rare and thus meant to be treasured... and yet holy shit guys how did you fail so hard on this doll. I mean FOR FUCK’S SAKE HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE SOCKS! OR FINGERS!! There were plenty of Sonic plushies in the world by the time this doll was created, and they all socks and fingers, let alone better designed faces. I dunno man, I don’t know how to reconcile how ugly this doll is.

And then there were two.

Those of you that’ve been following me for years have probably already seen these before, but fuck it, here they are again. The Sega World Sydney plushies are the ONLY official Sally plushies to exist, and like the Sonic one, it’s really difficult to reconcile how incredibly ugly they are. I mean I can at least cut them some slack with the faces I guess, because the one on the left isn’t terrible I suppose. I think the fact that she doesn’t have hands is really stupid, but I mean, if Sonic didn’t get fingers I guess I’m not surprised Sally didn’t either. No, the thing that really gets me about these Sally dolls is the hair. It’s hard to tell from this angle but it’s.... bad. Oh my god it’s so fucking bad. It looks like she had a bad incident with a weedwacker. WHO THE FUCK DID THEY HIRE TO DESIGN THESE PLUSHIES?!

Whatever, I don’t turn away official Sally merch. Vests exist for these dolls, but as you can see I don’t own them for either of these two. I do have a third, smaller Sally that DOES have her vest, but she doesn’t live in this net. Maybe another time!

More bad Sally hair, this time without legs because she’s a hand puppet. She probably has the worst hair of all of the Sally dolls I personally own, it’s very clumpy and matted. The others’ hair is at least still fluffy.

I’ll let the fact that she doesn’t have hands slide here, being a puppet at all, but even then it’s only because I’m feeling generous. There’s no reason she shouldn’t have had them.

SOOOO not technically a plushie, but it was in the net and I’m doing Sally items right now anyway, so fuck it. This is a mini-backpack, but the fabric is so furry that it’s pretty much impossible to get a clear picture. I left the strap there sticking out just to help give some idea of what shape you’re even looking at.

I can’t remember what I paid for this, and honestly I don’t care, because it’s so unique and I’ve never seen another one since.

Bootlegs

A friend of mine sent me this as a surprise a few years ago because he thought it was cute, and I definitely have to say it’s one of the more fascinating items in my collection. Most of the time bootleg merch is trying to imitate something official to confuse the buyer, but so far as I know this is completely original! I love it because it’s what I imagine Sonic would look like if he were an Animal Crossing character. The most bizarre detail of all, though, is that the tush tag has the logo for Detective Conan instead of Sonic the Hedgehog. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

This is a fake version of the Fang/Nack doll from Sonic the Fighters, but honestly, I don’t mind at all that it’s a bootleg because holy shit this doll is higher quality than some of my official ones! (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, SEGA WORLD.) According to the pictures I’ve seen, I think he’s actually even better quality than the original he’s copying!

It’s hard to describe just how nice this doll is, because the picture seriously does not do him justice. The stitching is perfectly clean, the proportions are absolutely perfect, the fabric is soft and high-quality, and oh my god the HAT!! The hat is AMAZING, it’s actually solid and holds its shape VERY well! The same goes for his tail too, on that note. Plushies with long tails tend to have trouble maintaining their shape, but this doll’s tail is really well done. He also has a much longer muzzle than most dolls of this time were willing to use, which again helps his proportion and overall accuracy. I don’t give one single shit that this doll isn’t official, I love him so fucking much! <3 <3 <3

Other Dolls

What can I say, I fucking LOVE Nick Wilde from Zootopia, and this is one of the best dolls of him I’ve ever seen. It’s actually really nicely made (they put a LOT of work into his shirt), and he’s very soft and huggable. Also, bless that smarmy expression, they got it just right.

Jumbo Tom Nook! This is the only jumbo plushie of him I’ve ever seen, so I’m glad I was able to nab it. The fabric is oddly shiny though, and I have no idea why?? I have several Tom Nook plushies from different doll lines, and I’ve never seen another one that’s shiny like this.

Decided to picture these guys together because why the fuck not. I apologize for the lack of clarity, but I’ve never been willing to open their bags. I want them pristine~

One thing I think is cool about the Undertale dolls is that there’s so much uniqueness put into each one. They all have differently shaped tags to reflect their individual personalities, and the plastic bags they come in have different patterns as well. The fabric patterns all completely unique to each one as well, so they’re not all clones of each other (especially with Papyrus).

You can actually still buy all of these guys right now on the Fangamer website! They’re pricey, but you get a quality that makes the price worth it, and you get a discount if you buy them together!

Vault Boy from Fallout, and for some reason I’m just now realizing that I don’t know what vault number is on his back. I feel like a terrible fan, FORGIVE ME. He has also never come out of his bag, so sorry for viewing difficulties here as well.

Companion cube ‘fuzzy dice’ for the car. This is one instance in which I have actually not used the car-related plushie in my car, as at the time I got this it was VERY difficult to get companion cube merch of any kind (these dice were actually a compromise with myself because I still couldn’t afford a regular cube), and after the work I put in to find these I definitely wasn’t going to risk them in my car! Just as well anyway, because they’re awfully big and would’ve been pretty cumbersome to look past.

...I did, however, put these in my car for a while. These are fuzzy D20 dice, because come on, if you’re going to hang dice in your car and have the option to use these, how can you not?? It definitely got a lot of compliments, even from people that simply saw them through the window. I didn’t even play tabletop games yet at the time, I just really liked them~

AAAAND THAT’S IT~ At least, that’s it for this net! Maybe I’ll do this again with the other nets sometime, if you guys would like to see more. I do have another one that also very much needs a dusting, so we’ll see!

Thanks for tuning in!!

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 6, Number 8

Angel Olsen

Now half a year in the pandemic, we’re starting to see the emergence of quarantine records, whether in the trove of reissues hastily assembled to stand in for new product or home recorded projects made with extremely close friends and family or albums that are conceived and written around the concept of isolation. Music isn’t real life, exactly, but it lives nearby. And in any case, it’s still music and can be good or bad whether it’s been unearthed from a forgotten box of tapes, recorded at home without collaboration or side people or technologically gerry-rigged so that distanced partners can work together. So, as long as you all are making music, we will continue to listen and find records that move us, as the world burns all around. This edition’s contributors included Patrick Masterson, Andrew Forell, Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake and Ray Garraty. Enjoy.

+ — #playboy (Deluxe Edition) (self-released)

#playboy (deluxe edition) by +

One of the most genuinely confounding records I’ve heard this year comes courtesy SEO-unfriendly artist + aka Plus Sign fka Emanuel James Vinson, a Chicago rapper, city planner and all-around community activist who spends his time helping with the city’s Let’s Build Garden City initiative when he’s not making music (which is frequent, by the way — take a look at the breadth of that Bandcamp discography). The concept with #playboy, originally released in April but deluxed in late May, is simple: Two kids find a music machine called #playboy in their basement and start tinkering with it. Its childlike whimsy is conveyed in the song titles (“Getting the Hang of It,” “Wake Up Jam (Waking Up)”) every bit as much as it is in the music, with occasionally grating indulgences, the odd earworm and a brief appearance by borderless internet hip-hop hero Lil B that makes perfect sense in context; the kindred spirit of that community-building cult auteur is strong here. You may wind up loving this record or you may wind up hating it, but I can promise you this: You’ll be thinking about it and the artist behind it long after it’s over.

Patrick Masterson

 Actress — Mad Voyage Mixtape (self-released)

I once suggested Darren Cunningham mucks about with his music because he can’t help himself. That was about six years ago on the occasion of his purported “final” album Untitled; with the benefit of hindsight, we can see he was (like so many others, to greater or lesser consequence) just pulling our leg with that PR. Hell, he’s released two albums worth of music in July alone: The first was the mid-month surprise LP 88, which follows in the vein of his acclaimed high period as an often brilliant, occasionally frustrating patchwork of submersible beats best played at high volume with a low end. The second came at the end of the month in an m4a file shared the old fashioned way on a forum via Mediafire link, nearly an hour and a half long, and per the man himself, “All SP-303, sketchbook beats, recorded this past week [the first week of July] straight to recorder or cassette.” It feels very much like a homespun Actress mixtape and is probably best thought of as livelier accompaniment to 88 but, even still, there’s no noticeable drop in quality — once Actress, always Actress. If headier lo-fi beat tapes are your beat, this will slot comfortably in line.

Patrick Masterson

  bdrmm - Bedroom (Sonic Cathedral)

Hull five-piece bdrmm play a satisfyingly crepuscular version of shoegaze on their debut album Bedroom. Ryan Smith, his brother Jordan on bass, guitarist Joe Vickers, Danny Hull on synths and drummer Luke Irvin combine the widescreen sound of Ride with a cloak of gothic post-punk. Like the late, lamented Girls Names, bdrmm find a sweet spot where atmosphere and dynamics either build to euphoric crescendos or bask in bleak funereal splendor. Bedroom seems deliberately sequenced from celebration to lament. “A Reason To Celebrate” evokes Ride at their most anthemic, the tripping staccato driven “Happy” summons the spirit of The Cure of Seventeen Seconds before the pace drops for the second half, the songs become quieter and darker as the band finds a more personal voice. “(The Silence)” is an ambient whispered wraith of a thing, “Forget The Credits” impressively mopey slowcore. bdrmm don’t always transcend their influences, but this debut is an atmospheric treat if your taste runs to the darker end of the musical buffet.

Andrew Forell  

 Circulatory System — Circulatory System (Elephant 6 Recording Co.)

Circulatory System by Circulatory System

Nearly 20 years after its initial release, the excellent eponymous debut album by Will Cullen Hart’s psychedelic chamber-pop band Circulatory System gets a long overdue vinyl reissue. While his previous project, the undeniably great Olivia Tremor Control, tended to lean more towards classic psych-pop’s traditional tropes — hard-panned drums, loads of disorientating tape effects, wonky harmonized vocals — Circulatory System taps into something utterly uncanny. Both Signal Morning (2009) and Mosaics Within Mosaics (2014) have their moments, but this is front-to-back brilliant, conjuring a sublime atmosphere of reflective estrangement. The music is a thick, grainy soup of shimmering instrumentation, from the eerie (“Joy,” “Now,” “Should a Cloud Replace a Compass?”) to the joyful (“Yesterday’s World,” “The Lovely Universe,” “Waves of Bark and Light”), but part of the album’s magic is the way everything flows into a seamless whole. As is vinyl’s tendency, the rhythm section really comes alive here, the fuzz bass and tom-heavy drum parts booming out, with plenty of vivid details in the mix swimming into view. A worthy reissue of an essential album.

Tim Clarke

 Cloud Factory — #1 (Howlin’ Banana)

Cloud Factory #1 by Cloud Factory

Cloud Factory, from Toulouse, France, overlays the serrated edges of garage pop with a serene dream-pop drift. It’s an appealing mix of hard and soft, like being pummeled to death by pillows or threatened gunpoint by a teddy bear. “Amnesia,” for instance, erupts in a vicious, sawed off, trouble-making bass line, then soars from there in untroubled female vocals. Later, “No Data,” punches hard with raw percussion, then lays on a liquid, lucid guitar line that encourages middle-distance staring. None of these songs really up the ante with memorable melodies, sharp words or that intangible R’NR energy that distinguishes great punk rock from the so so. Not loud, not soft, not great, not bad. Cloud Factory resides in the indeterminant middle.

Jennifer Kelly

 Entry — Detriment (Southern Lord)

Detriment by Entry

Nuthin fancy here, folks. Just eight songs — plus a flexing, fuzzing intro — of American hardcore punk. Entry has been grinding away for a few years now, and Detriment doesn’t advance much past the musical terrain the band marked off on the No Relief 7-inch (2016). That’s OK. The essential formula is time tested: d-beat rhythms, overdriven amps and Sara G.’s ferocious vocals delivering the necessary affect. That would be: pissed off, just this side of hopeless. Detriment sounds like what might happen if Poison Idea (c. 1988) stumbled into a seminar on Riot Grrrl; after everyone got tired of beating the living shit out of one another, they’d make some songs. “Selective Empathy” is pretty representative. Big riffs, a breakdown, and more than enough throaty yelling to let you know that you’re in some trouble. You might recognize the sound of Clayton Stevens’ guitar from his work with Touché Amoré — but maybe it’s better if you don’t. This isn’t music for mopery. Watch out for the spit, snot and blood, and flip the record.

Jonathan Shaw  

 Equiknoxx — VF Live: Equiknoxx (The Vinyl Factory)

There’s nothing like a little roots music to get you through the sweltering summer heat, and this early July mix by Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair (half of forward-thinking Kingston dancehall unit Equiknoxx) was a personal favorite of the past month for hitting that spot. The group tends to throw curveballs at the genres it tinkers with, and Blair’s mix highlights why they’re so good at it: The crates run deep. Spanning everything from legendary producer and DJ Prince Jazzbo to in-house music fresh out the box (e.g., “Did Not Make This For Jah_9” was released in late May), Blair sets the mood and educates you along the way. Like everything else these cats do (and that includes the NTS show — support your independent radio station!), it’s hard not to give the highest recommendation.

Patrick Masterson  

 Ezra Feinberg — Recumbent Speech (Related States)

Recumbent Speech by Ezra Feinberg

Knowing that Ezra Feinberg is a practicing psychoanalyst, it’s tempting to read meaning into the name of his second solo album. But be careful to think twice about the meaning you perceive and ask yourself, is it the product of Feinberg on the couch or your own projection? His choice to name one of the record’s six instrumentals (there are voices, but no words) “Letter To My Mind” certainly suggests that there’s an internal dialogue at work, but the music feels most like a layered deployment of good ideas than an exchange of intrapsychic forces. The synthesizers shimmer and cycle like something from a mid-1970s Cluster record, resting upon a pillow of vibraphone and electric piano tones, which in turn billow under the influence of undulating layers of drums. Feinberg’s guitar leads are bright and pithy, like something Pat Metheny might come up with if he knew he was going to have to pay a steep price for every note he played. Ah, but there I go, projecting an implication of adversary process where there may be none. Might it be that Feinberg, having spent a full work week immersed in the psychic conflicts of others, wants to lay back on the couch and exhale? If so, this album is an apt companion.

Bill Meyer  

 Honey Radar — Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years (Chunklet)

Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years by Honey Radar

Jason Henn of Honey Radar has a solid claim at being his generation’s Bob Pollard, a prolific, absurdist songwriter, who tosses off hooky melodies as if channeling them from the spirit world. His least polished material glints with melody hidden beneath banks of fuzz, whispery and fragile on records, but surprisingly muscular in his rocking live shows. This 28-song compilation assembles the singles, splits, EPs and bonus tracks Henn recorded for Chunklet between 2015 and the present; it would be a daunting amount of material except that it goes down like cotton candy, sweet, airy, colorful and gone before you know it. Like the Kinks, Henn has a way of making strident rock and roll hooks sound wistful and dreamy. In “Lilac Pharmacy,” guitar lines rip and buck and roar, but from a distance, hardly disrupting Henn’s placid murmur. “Medium Mary Todd” ratchets up the tension a bit, with a tangled snarl of lick and swagger, but the vocals edge towards quiet whimsy a la Sic Alps; a second version runs a bit hotter, rougher and more electric, while a third, recorded at WFMU, gives an inkling of the Honey Radar concert experience. A couple of fine covers — of the Fall’s early rant “Middle Class Revolt” and of the Monkees rarity “Wind-Up Man”— suggest the fine, loamy soil that Henn’s art grows out of, while alternate versions of half a dozen tracks hint at the various forms his ideas can take. It’s a wonderful overview of Honey Radar so far, though let’s hope it’s not a career retrospective. Henn has a bunch of records left to make yet if he wants to edge out Pollard.

Jennifer Kelly

 Iron Wigs — Your Birthday’s Cancelled (Mello Music Group)

Your Birthday's Cancelled by IRON WIGS

As an adjective, “goofy” had gotten a bad rep in hip hop. Anything that is unusual, inventive and not in line with “keeping it real” is immediately stigmatized as goofy, weird, nerdy and bad. Iron Wigs is goofy but hold the pejorative connotations. Chicago representatives Vic Spencer and Verbal Kent team up here with Sonnyjim from the UK to do some wild rhyming. They collaborated before, but Your Birthday’s Cancelled is a complete, fully fleshed project, masterfully executed from start to finish. Instead of the usual gun busting you get a fist in the ribs. Instead of drug slinging, a blunt to activate your rhymes. Each member of the group has a distinctive delivery which makes you to listen carefully for every verse, no skipping. It’s a relief to listen to rap artists who don’t pretend they’re out in the streets while they’re at home enjoying a favorite TV series. The standout track here is “Bally Animals & Rugbys” with Roc Marciano dropping by for a verse.

Ray Garraty  

 Levinson / Mahlmeister — Shores (Trouble In Mind)

Shores by levinson / mahlmeister

Jamie Levinson and Donny Mahlmeister’s Bandcamp page indicates that they’re based in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. This goes further towards explaining their association with Trouble in Mind Records, which is located in the same county, than their music, which brings to mind something much further north. The duo’s music is mostly electronic, with modular synthesizers setting the pulse and sweeping the pitch spectrum while lap steel guitar adds flourishes and a shruti box thickens the textures. The album is split into two, with each track — one is named “Ascend,” the other “Release” — taking up one side of a 50-minute cassette. The first side trundles steadily onwards, and the second seems to bask in a glow to that never totally fades. Since there’s no “Descend,” it’s easy to imagine this music sound tracking a drive into the Canadian north, the journey unspooling under a sky that never darkens, its progress towards Hudson Bay unhindered by other traffic or turns in the road. Perhaps that’s just one listener’s fantasy of easy social distancing and escape from the present’s grim digital glare into a retro-futurist, analog dream. But in dreams we’re free to fly without being seated next to some knucklehead with his mask over his eyes instead of his mouth, so dream on, dreamers. This tape is volume one of the Explorers Series, Trouble in Mind’s projected program of limited edition cassette releases.

Bill Meyer

 Klara Lewis — Ingrid (Editions Mego)

Klara Lewis’s latest recording shows a narrowing of focus. Previously she seemed to be trying ideas and methods on for size, investigating ambient electronics or hinting at pop melody without completely committing. Given the approach to music modeled by her father, Graham Lewis of Wire and Dome, she probably does not feel the need to do just one thing, and that’s a healthy angle if one wants to stay interested and flexible. But there’s also something to be said for really digging into an idea, and that’s what she has done here. Ingrid is a one-track, one-sided 12.” Burrowing further into one-ness, it is made from one looped cello phrase, which gets filtered and distorted on each pass. The effect suggests decay, but not so much the gradual transformation of a William Basinski piece as the pitiless abrasion of a woodworker going over a plank with sander. The combination of repetition and coarsening hits a spot closer to one that Tony Conrad might reach, and that’s an itch worth scratching.

Bill Meyer

Luis Lopes Humanization 4tet — Believe, Believe (Clean Feed)

The cruel economics of contemporary creative music-making favor an ensemble like Humanization 4tet. At a minimum, the filial Texan rhythm section of Stefan and Aaron Gonzalez (drums and bass respectively) and Lisbon-based duo of Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone) and Luís Lopes can each count on having the other half of a band on the other side of the Atlantic. But any project that’s on its fourth record in a dozen years has more going for it than the chance to save on plane tickets. For the Portuguese musicians, it’s an opportunity to feel an unabashedly high-energy force at their backs, as well as a chance to drink from a deep well of harmolodic blues. And for the Gonzalez brothers, it’s the reward of being the absolute right guys for the job; it has to be a gas to know that the heft they put into their swing is so deeply appreciated. While Lopes’ name remains up front, everyone contributes compositions, and everyone gives their all on every tune.

Bill Meyer  

 Joanna Mattrey — Veiled (Relative Pitch)

Veiled by Joanna Mattrey

This solo CD, which closely follows a collaborative cassette on Astral Spirits, is only the second recording with Joanna Mattrey’s name on the spine. But Mattrey is no newcomer. The New England Conservatory-trained violist has been playing straight and pop gigs for a while. If you caught Chance the Rapper on Saturday Night Live, Cuddle Magic with strings or a host of classical gigs around New York City, you’ve seen her. But if black dress and heels gigs pay her bills, improvised music nourishes her heart. And if sounds raw enough to scrape the roof of the world nourish yours, this album is new food. The premise of Veiled is finding veins of concealed beauty concealed, and that search impels Mattrey to tune her viola to sound like a horse-haired Tuvan fiddle, clamp objects to the strings and blast her signal through some satisfyingly filthy amplification. And whether it’s a slender tune or a complex texture, the reward is always there.

Bill Meyer

  Angel Olsen — “Whole New Mess” single (Jagjaguwar)

Everyone processes a breakup differently (though, to be fair, that’s probably less true now than ever). For Angel Olsen in 2018, it meant retreating to The Unknown, a century-old church in Anacortes, Washington, that Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum and producer Nicholas Wilbur made into a recording studio. What ultimately came from those sessions was All Mirrors, but Whole New Mess is a chance to revisit that album (fully nine of these 11 songs are ones you’ve heard before; only the title-track and “Waving, Smiling” are new) in a more intimate framework — just Angel, a guitar, a mic and her reverberant heartache. The most cynical view to be taken here is that it’s a stopgap capitalizing on people’s vulnerability amid a pandemic quarantine, but it could also be a corrective for the bloat of All Mirrors, a record I listened to once and haven’t thought about since. Late Björkian excess doesn’t suit her nearly as well as the light touch delivered herein, and your interest will similarly hinge on how much Whole New Mess sounds like the old one.

Patrick Masterson   

 Ono — Red Summer (American Dreams)

Red Summer by ONO

Ono, the long-running noise-punk-poetry-protest project headed by P Michael Grego and travis, tackles the Red Summer of 1919, evoking the brutal race riots that erupted as soldiers returned from World War I. During that summer, conflicts raged from Chicago to the deep south, as white supremacists rioted against newly empowered returning Black veterans and an increased number of Black factory workers employed in America’s northern factories. Ono captures the violence—and its links to contemporary race-based conflicts—in an abstract and visionary style, with travis declaiming against an agitated froth of avant garde sound. “A Dream of Sodomy” lurches and rolls in funk-punk bravado, as travis declaims all the nightmarish scenarios that haunt his nocturnal hours, while “Coon” natters rhythmically across a fever-lit foundation of hand-drums, mosquito buzz and flute. “26 June 1919” wanders through a blasted, rioting landscape, sounds buzzing and pinging and roaring around travis’ fractured poetry. “White men, red men, Manchester town, send ‘em home, Oklahoma, send ‘em home, in a Black man house, send ‘em home, send ‘em home,” he chants, ominously, vertiginously. The center isn’t holding, for sure. The disc closes with the uneasy truce of “Sycamore Trees,” where steam blasts of synthesizer sound rush up and around travis’ vibrating, basso verses about meeting under the sycamore trees, a metaphor like the blues and gospel and nearly all Black music is full of metaphor about reuniting in a better place. Powerful.

Jennifer Kelly

 Julian Taylor — The Ridge (Howling Turtle, Inc.)

Singer-songwriter Julian Taylor does the little things well. That's not to say that he doesn't do the obvious things well, too, on his latest release The Ridge. His easy voice fits his songs, letting autobiography come with comfortable phrasing. As a writer, he tends toward the straightforward, avoiding extended metaphors or oblique references. The title track considers a particular form of life, and Taylor sticks to the tangible, singing about the stable, “Shovel manure, clean their beds, and prepare the feed for the day.” Taylor's songs make sense of the immediate world and relationships around him, but they avoid woolgathering. The album feels a bit removed from the current climate, but that's no complaint when Taylor's developed a welcoming place to visit. It isn't always easy here, but it's always companionable.

But back to those little things. Each song has carefully detailed orchestration and production. The record goes down easy whether tending toward James Taylor, Cat Stevens or something closer to country, and much of that easiness comes from the precise placement of every note. Burke Carroll's pedal steel, for instance, never exists for its own sake, but to serve the lyric that Taylor sings. The album contains enough space to feel like a rural Canadian ridge, with details drawn into to support Taylor's direct stories. The Ridge could easily go unnoticed (unobtrusiveness not being a highly rewarded trait), but its subtlety and care make it worth taking your boots off and sitting down for a minute.

Justin Cober-Lake  

 Various Artists — For a Better Tomorrow (Garden Portal)

For A Better Tomorrow by Various Artists

Compilation albums loom large in the American Primitive Guitar realm. Takoma, Tompkins Square and Locust all had larger ambitions than merely offering a sampling of wares, and to them, Garden Portal says, “hold my beer. I’ve got some collecting and playing to do.” For A Better Tomorrow started out as a Bernie Sanders fundraising endeavor. But when Bernie bailed and COVID-19 came on the scene, Garden Portal pivoted to support Athens Mutual Aid Network, an umbrella organization that coordinates aid to the underserved in this trying time. But in addition to good works, there’s some good work going on here. Not all of it is guitar-centric, but even the tracks that aren’t are close enough to the strings and heart template of the aforementioned parties to merit consideration under the same rubric. Joseph Allred’s been ultra-productive recently, so it’s actually helpful to be reminded of the spirit that infuses his playing by listening to it one track at a time. Rob Noyes’ “Diminished” takes the listener on a deep dive into the construction of sentiment and sound. And Will Csorba’s Pelt-like blast of fiddle drone, “Requiem for Ociel Guadalupe Martinez,” will put your hair up high enough to make that self-inflicted quarantine do a bit easier to execute.

Bill Meyer

  Various Artists — The Storehouse Presents (The Storehouse)

The Storehouse Presents by The Storehouse

The coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on many things. You doubtless have your own list of loss, but for the proprietors of The Storehouse, the catalog of things kissed goodbye directly corresponds to their endeavor’s inventory of reasons to be. Over the past few years, the Storehouse has invited audiences out to a West Michigan farmhouse to enjoy a potluck meal and a concert played by some musicians of note. If there had been no lockdown, listeners could have enjoyed the Sun Ra Arkestra last April. Instead, no one’s playing, and no one’s getting paid, so the Storehouse has compiled this set of live and exclusive studio tracks to sell on Bandcamp in order to benefit the musicians and the Music Maker Relief Foundation. The cause, is good, but so are the tunes. Want to hear Steve Gunn and William Tyler in sympathetic orbit? Or Joan Shelley pledging her love? Or the first hints of Mind Over Mirrors’ new direction? Step right this way, preferably on one of 2020’s first Fridays.

Bill Meyer

 Z-Ro — Rohammad Ali (1 Deep Entertainment / Empire)

On one of his previous tracks, Z-Ro admitted that he’s basically just writing the same song over and over again (that’s how meta he is now, writing songs on writing songs). While he exaggerated a bit, he was not that far from the truth. In the last half dozen years he’s been writing the same three or four songs in various combinations, reconfigurations and forms. Rohammad Ali follows the same template: haters hate him, but he’s OK and is counting his money. Multiply this by 17, and here is the album. Despite this self-cannibalizing (lots of poets did that), Z-Ro with every new album sounds fresh and far from tired. The self-repeats just fuel him. Rohammad Ali has only one rap guest, and it’s Shaquille O’Neal whose rap career didn’t jump off in the 1990s. A lack of guests only proves that Z-Ro can self-sustain without support from the outside. The only thing from the outside he needs is hate.

Ray Garraty

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them. The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

The metrics are fake.                        

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

The people are fake.                        

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as the Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views — 30 seconds of a video counts as a view — for as low as $15; oftentimes, customers are led to believe that the views they purchase come from real people. More likely, they come from bots. On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a “click farm”: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content — that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free — to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

The businesses are fake.                        

The money is usually real. Not always — ask someone who enthusiastically got into cryptocurrency this time last year — but often enough to be an engine of the Inversion. If the money is real, why does anything else need to be? Earlier this year, the writer and artist Jenny Odell began to look into an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices. Odell discovered an elaborate network of fake price-gouging and copyright-stealing businesses connected to the cultlike Evangelical church whose followers resurrected Newsweek in 2013 as a zombie search-engine-optimized spam farm. She visited a strange bookstore operated by the resellers in San Francisco and found a stunted concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts she’d encountered on Amazon, arranged haphazardly with best-selling books, plastic tchotchkes, and beauty products apparently bought from wholesalers. “At some point I began to feel like I was in a dream,” she wrote. “Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.”

                                       The content is fake.                        

The only site that gives me that dizzying sensation of unreality as often as Amazon does is YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next to anonymously produced videos that are ostensibly for children. An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number (dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Sure, why not?) of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up.

These, at least, are mostly bootleg videos of popular fictional characters, i.e., counterfeit unreality. Counterfeit reality is still more difficult to find—for now. In January 2018, an anonymous Redditor created a relatively easy-to-use desktop-app implementation of “deepfakes,” the now-infamous technology that uses artificial-intelligence image processing to replace one face in a video with another — putting, say, a politician’s over a porn star’s. A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Contrary to what you might expect, a world suffused with deepfakes and other artificially generated photographic images won’t be one in which “fake” images are routinely believed to be real, but one in which “real” images are routinely believed to be fake — simply because, in the wake of the Inversion, who’ll be able to tell the difference?

                                       Our politics are fake.                        

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity — a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

                                       We ourselves are fake.                        

Which, well. Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this house number? Can you select the images that contain a motorcycle? I found myself prostrate daily at the feet of robot bouncers, frantically showing off my highly developed pattern-matching skills — does a Vespa count as a motorcycle, even? — so I could get into nightclubs I’m not even sure I want to enter. Once inside, I was directed by dopamine-feedback loops to scroll well past any healthy point, manipulated by emotionally charged headlines and posts to click on things I didn’t care about, and harried and hectored and sweet-talked into arguments and purchases and relationships so algorithmically determined it was hard to describe them as real.

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity — to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

[jeanjauthor]

Clothes vs. Money: Status and Self Worth in the 18th Century

Writers, this is an EXCELLENT summation of how important the quality & appearance of clothing is in a pre-modern society.

Clothing today is incredibly cheap: a single day’s wages will get you pants or skirt, shirt, socks and underwear, all of it brand new, straight off the rack, in a vast variety of colors and patterns.  A week’s wages will get you shoes and coat and a couple changes of underwear, extra shirt, extra pants or skirt (or a dress).

Prior to the 20th century...it could take you more than a month to earn enough money for a new shirt, or underclothes, or trousers, or shoes.  Not and, but or. You’d be lucky to get two of those things at average to good wages for the vast majority of people...and since the vast majority still worked on farms prior to the industrial revolution, and with it, the agricultural revolution, you’d only see that kind of money during or shortly after harvest season.

Listen to John Townsend reading from these journals.  Take your inspiration from them.  Be realistic in what your characters would be wearing, how often they’d get a chance to do laundry, and make sure your characters are clothed appropriately for their situation.

In the movie Ever After, Danielle (Cinderella) borrows a fancy noblewoman’s dress left at the painter’s studio to go rescue her fellow servant.  The dress is only available to her because her best friend growing up is the painter’s apprentice, and because painting a portrait can take weeks of work, so it was often just easiest to leave the clothing on a mannekin form while the owner went off in their other clothes to do other things.  We might think the dress she normally wears isn’t too bad, but it’s only slightly above what the other servants wear, and it’s definitely not new.

In the modern era, this is also true, though the lines are a bit more blurred.  We have Casual Fridays, where you can come to work at some places in jeans and a teeshirt, or a Hawai’ian shirt...and we have formal suits and dresses and skirtsuits.  Some situations you can get away with a Casual Friday.  Others, you’d never get away with it.  Lawyers, for example, are expected to wear suits or the equivalent at all times, to project an air of professionalism & seriousness. 

We have a variety of uniforms that we have to wear for certain jobs or industries, too.  Not just UPS or Military or Post Office or Law Enforcement.  Have you noticed the variety of uniforms in the restaurant industry?  Some places (McDonalds, etc), issue you your uniform. It isn’t yours to keep, however; once you’re done working for them, you have to hand it back in.  You also have to keep it clean and neat at your own expense.  Housekeeping staff for hotels have to do this, too.

Other places simply say “wear black pants (or skirt, but no yoga pants or jeans) and white shirt, no teeshirts or logos (not even a lil alligator or polo pony)”...and that’s all you have to wear.  You have to supply your own “uniform.”  It could be almost any style of trousers or non-logo non-tee shirt.  Others allow you to wear a serious, sober, law-office-worthy tie...while some allow you to wear “an amusing tie of publicly acceptable subject material”...aka no naked-lady ties, or ties covered in swearwords...but you could wear Loony Tunes characters like Bugs Bunny, or a Transformers tie if you wanted.

However, clothing is incredibly cheap; if you’re used to having money in your pocket for clothes every few months in real life, you probably haven’t thought about having to repair your clothes.  Shirt gets ripped?  Go buy a new one!  No big deal!  ...Right?

You cannot take that attitude, that mindset, into a pre-20th-century tech-level world.

Just to give you an example, making the cloth to make clothes took HUGE amounts of effort before the advent of industrialization, from the farm machines to automatically pick the cotton through to the carding and spinning and weaving machines.  Prior to all of that (and yes, the mechanized industrialization of agriculture is PART of why clothes are so cheap...and why wool, which still has to be sheared by professional shearers working one sheep at a time, is so much more expensive!)...it took 12 full time spinners to keep 1 full time weaver working at the loom.

What does that mean?  It means that the 12 spinners listed above did nothing but spin all day long.  Aside from maybe making their meals, they didn’t plough (plow) the fields, they didn’t feed the livestock, they didn’t shepherd the sheep, they didn’t mend the fences, they didn’t craft the furniture or repair the roof thatching...  A lot of families grew flax specifically for turning it into linen thread, and spend every spare moment they had spinning thread, to either hopefully get them enough thread to set up a loom in the winter months when there was’t a lot of outdoor activity going on, or to sell to professional weavers, in hopefully good enough quality to fetch the best price for their balls of thread.

Ploughmen (whatever gender) would be outside all day long, plowing, weeding, harvesting, mending things around the farm and would only spin if there was time.  Housekeepers and child tenders would spin while food was cooking (which could take hours), or while laundry was drying...but it would still probably take roughly 30 part-time spinners to keep 1 weaver in constant production.

Also, consider the fact that it takes literal days to set up a loom...and god help you if you got it wrong and didn’t discover the mistake right away, because you’d spend hours more undoing and redoing it right.  Dependind on the width of the fabric, the tightness of the weave, the type of fabric and the kind of loom (Navajo vertical looms are different beasts from European treadle looms...and a lightweight linen suitable for handkerchiefs and veils isn’t going to be at all like a heavy canvas, never mind a rug weight material), the swiftness of making the cloth means that your progress might be measured in inches per day, feet per day, or if you’re very lucky, yards per day...and that’s assuming you have enough thread on hand for both warp and weft.

...Think that’s a lot?  I haven’t even gotten into all the effort required for finding and making dyes, madders (fixing agents to help keep the colors from fading too fast in sunlight) and getting the consistencies right.  (Contrary to popular belief you could get some bright colors out of natural dyes; black was the absolute most difficult to dye, not purple. The materials for making black dye were far cheaper to acquire than for purple, but still, difficult to dye and keep it actually black in sunlight.)

Nor have I gotten into sumptuary laws, which tried to dictate what a person of a certain social rank could wear, including furs and silks.  (Anyone could wear squirrel fur, for example, but to wear mink or ermine, you had to be waaay up high on the social ladder.) ...People still wanted to wear things “above their station” and sumptuary laws were difficult to enforce at times...but sometimes they were enforced ruthlessly.  So it was risky at times.

Danielle in Ever After would’ve been whipped & imprisoned/indentured for wearing that fancy dress, if people had realized she was a peasant, not a noblewoman.  But for her, the risk was worth it, to save a man from being sold off to the colonies for indentured servitude, to bring him back to his wife and his family & friends.

So John’s not kidding when he says that people in the late 1700s/early 1800s invested money in their clothes as a sign of their social status.  You want people to treat you with more respect, you have to look like you have the social status, and that preceived social status is often dependent on wealth.

Buying new is not the only option, either.  We have places like the Rack where they sell off for cheap the odds and ends, remnants of garments that just didn’t sell at listed price in the big department stores, or they might have a few flaws that the big stores reject (missing button, wonky stitching, etc), but otherwise the garment is in good shape and still basically brand new, so it’s sold for maybe $20 instead of $80

We also have the true thrift stores, such as Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul, Value Village, and those are just the local charity/donated goods shops in my area.  You can visit these places and get that same dress at $80 for just $4-$8, but it’ll have been worn by someone else, laundered (well, one hopes), and put up for sale.

The same sort of system existed in pre-industrial societies.  Mercedes Lackey has a beautiful scene in her first Bardic Voices, The Lark & the Wren novel, wherein the main character, the Wren, is taken to various used clothing sellers in the market places of the city she’s in, and given advice on what to buy, which includes torn and stained clothing, and how to hide the stains, using ribbon trim and embroidery and applique patches, or even just wearing a vest over a shirt that’s stained on the chest area.

Since Wren is trying to make a living as a bard/minstrel, it’s considered appropriate for her to have clothing that has fancy, eye-catching trim on it, as part of her entertainer persona.  When she’s busking in the street (performing for passers-by to hopefully get pennies...or pins...in payment), the more eye-catching, the better, since it goes with her ear-catching music.

And when she gets a job providing polite, soothing music in an upper-class bordello/brothel style establishment, she wears more subdued clothes.  Why?  To help her blend into the background, since the focus is to provide soothing, pleasant music while the rich patrons wait for their chosen paid companions to be available.  They’re not going to put up with someone wearing screaming shades of red and yellow and green with ribbon-strung bells dangling off their elbows...but neither will they put up with someone wearing the cheapest, crappiest woven fabrics visibly stained and ragged, badly patched or torn.

Since the adage “the clothes make (the social status) of the man” has been around for ages and ages...I can only imagine that clothing--and the kind of high-tech gear you can afford--far into the future will also still continue to be a mark of unspoken social status for humankind.

...I mention gear because aliens might or might not have any need for clothing, but they’ll certainly have a need for gear, and the higher the quality the gear, or the more functional it is, the more likely they’ll be considered higher quality in social status, too.

Also, functionality is a key factor, because social status isn’t just about kings and queens at the top and peasants and slaves at the bottom. It’s also about what kinds of society your characters move around in.  You wear clothes appropriate to being a sailor while on a ship, but you will want different outfits when you’re a blacksmith apprentice, versus a clockmaker’s helper, versus a farm laborer, versus a nobleman’s son.

A nobleman’s son wouldn’t want to wear the leather apron or smock that a blacksmith would, but if you walked into a smithy and asked for a job while wearing fine silks, you’d get turned down (and laughed at behind your back), but if you walked in wearing wool (which doesn’t catch on fire; it just scorches and smolders and goes out) and leather (ditto), you’ll be taken seriously.

Your gear is the same.  The Millenium Falcon was a rusted bucket of bolts and patch jobs compared to Queen Amidala’s personal, sleek, silvery interstellar transport, but it was still a fantastically swift, maneuverable ship.  The Queen’s personal yacht would get her respect from port authorities.  The Falcon’s capabilities would get it respect from other smugglers and crime bosses, because it looks like it can’t go very fast and should fall apart at any minute...but it won’t fall apart.  It’ll blast past everything else & keep going...provided you can keep it patched together.

Anyway, long speech short, watch this video, and think about how your stories and your characters protray their social status, their wealth, via their clothes & gear...and remember, pre-20th-century, clothing is expensive.  You and I have each probably have so many different outfits on our shelves and in our dresser drawers and wardrobe cupboards and closets that we’d be considered damn near royalty in terms of pure clothing-wealth, compared to just about anywhere in the 11th Century.

Clothing makes the character, and the story.

[dctuk]

Sticky stuff: What’s what?

A buyers guide to adhesive

A question we get asked often is - 'do I need glue?'. The honest answer here is that it really just depends. Firstly if you are talking about glue for your flooring and if so well then yes. We would recommend using some sort of adhesive as there is nothing worse than an unruly, out of place tile when you’ve finally perfected your interior masterpiece.

Although one of the main reasons that people opt for carpet tiles is the fact that they don’t require any toxic sticky substances and are easily interchangeable, we do recommend using just a small amount of adhesive, even if it's just to hold the corners in place. If nothing is holding your carpet tiles or LVT down other than good ol’ gravity, movement and pressure on the tiles could cause them to shift and potentially become a trip hazard (unless... that is your plan?).

Well, stick with DCTUK as we have a fantastic selection of the best carpet tile and vinyl adhesives in the biz and we want nothing more than to ensure your floor is fitted to perfection and stays that way. Sicking down carpet tiles and LVT has never been more fun with these ranges of adhesive we have on offer, let's take a look...

Adhesive for carpet tiles

Interface Tactiles

Hold your carpet tiles in place and stay on the safe side with these little squares of magic from Interface. They may a lil on the flimsy side but don't be fooled these babies are tough and are going to make your life a hell of a lot easier. Interface Tactiles are enough to set the interior geek inside of us all jumping for joy as this awesome invention is strong enough to hold tiles in place but forgiving enough to be easily removed or replaced without leaving behind any nasty residue. Boasting no drying or waiting time, resistant to moisture and temperature - these bad boys are your one-stop shop if you are living with an indecisive wife or are looking to protect what you’ve got lurking underneath them.

Sticky Stuff Spray Adhesive

New to DCTUK and already flying off the shelves, Sticky Stuff spray adhesive is a semi-permanent solution which makes the floor tacky but not sticky. Suitable for all residential projects and commercial projects on the smaller side, this tacky spray adhesive comes in a canister for a speedy and mess-free application meaning you can show off your floor in no time. Each can covers 28 tiles and won’t leave any permanent marks on the subfloor if you do decide to do a switcheroo with your flooring at a later date.

Bostik Spray Adhesive

Your number one, numero uno, choice if you are on the hunt for more of a permanent solution where longevity is needed. High in strength, this chlorogluorocarbons and halogen-free adhesive is suitable for use with a whole host of subfloors. Super easy to apply and boasting a rapid drying time of 1-3 minutes, all you need is a cuppa and a can of Bostik spray to keep your fitters happy chappies. Just... don't mistake it for hairspray.

DCTUK Double Sided Tape

This is not the same as the double sided tape you would pick up in ‘The Works’ for a bit of scrap-booking, think more supersonic sellotape. Constructed using a top-secret tearable, non-woven base, this durable double-sided tape is the perfect way to ensure your carpet tiles are stuck down quickly and efficiently to your subfloor. Minimal experience is required in the handling of this sellotape plus it's mess-free, cost-effective and easy to store. Each roll contains 50 meters worth of coverage, either tape just the corners or the full tiles. I’ll leave the mathematics down to you with that one.

Bostik Laybond Tackifier

From the brain boxes over at Bostik, their Laybond carpet tile tackifier is the perfect way to ensure your flooring is in it for the long run. Suitable for use with a whole host of subfloors, ranging from concrete and cement to sand and chip wood, this Tackifier suits pretty much everything you would want to stick your tile too (within reason sir). Featuring a barely there off-white colour for a professional and seamless finish, we love it, our fitters love it and soon you will love it. Available in two different sizes, you’ve either got the 5kg option or the 25kg option depending on how large your space is. For coverage between 40m2 - 50m2 we recommended opting for the 5kg tub whereas for a larger area size of 175m2 - 200m2, the hefty 25kg should do the job.

Adhesive for LVT

Styccobond F46 P.S adhesive

Full to the brim with innovative performance qualities, this pressure sensitive acrylic adhesive is your go to guy if you’ve opted for stick-down LVT. Free from solvents, this resilient acrylic adhesive forms a permanent tacky film between the product and subfloor to deliver a professional and polished finish. Available in both a 5L and 15L tub at jaw-dropping prices, you better pick your jaw up off the floor and get a wiggle on before they're gone.

Bostik Laybond HT adhesive

A super strong adhesive ideal for products that are kicking back relaxing and chillaxing in the sunshine. Laybond HT adhesive is designed specifically for use with LVT or sheet vinyl products that are being laid in places that are often subjected to higher temperature levels than the norm. This could include conservatories, rooms with large windows or underfloor heating - basically if the floor is too hot to tippy toe across bare footed, you’re going to need some of this.

As well as all these wonderful products, we also have a range of miscellaneous products that can assist with that sometimes-tricky carpet tiling process – from flexy fix pressure cans through to tape, we’ve got everything you need and more. Shop carpet tile adhesive from DCTUK today. 

[imissmymarcjacobs]

Olive & June The Studio Box Review

Olive & June’s “The Studio Box” Contents: What’s Inside the Box?

Screenshotted from the official Olive & June website, here is a list of everything included with your purchase of The Studio Box, which currently retails for $50 USD:

Since the screenshotted list above contains kind of a lot of additional, unnecessary “fluff,” I thought I’d make my own, simpler, cut-to-the-chase list in case that makes it easier for anyone:

More Simple List of What’s Included in the Olive & June - The Studio Box:

The actual box, which is only really worth mentioning because it’s supposed to be able to be used to assist with “nail selfies,” i.e. you’re able to put your phone in a lil slot at the top of the box and use the box itself as a nice, convenient lil backdrop for photos of your mani.

A cute lil mess-resistant pouch, which fits all of the remaining products inside it except for the nail polish remover. You can also, obviously, empty the products out of the pouch and use the pouch for anything else you feel like using it for, and I feel like it would be easy to find a use for this pouch since it’s made of a nice slick, mess-proof type of material.

A teeny-tiny nail brush that you can use to help easily clean up nail polish accidents or mess-ups without getting nail polish everywhere or messing up another nail, because that just always freaking seems to happen, right?!

Nail File, which is super cute and definitely embodies the whole Olive & June aesthetic, I mean as much as you can really expect from a nail file tbh. The actual, physical nail file has the Olive & June logo printed on one side, and “#OLIVEYOURMANI” printed on the other side. The whole file has a cute baby pink allover background color, and the printed logo and text are white.

Nail Buffer Block, which - like the nail file - is about as cute as you can really ask for in something like a nail buffer block. The actual buffer block is completely white except for a printed, baby pink Olive & June logo on one of the sides.

Flat-Edge Nail Clipper, which looks pretty much exactly like any other traditional pair of nail clippers except that it has a flat-edge instead of a curved one, and it also has “Olive & June” printed on the top in cute pink text.

Cuticle Serum that happens to be one of the things (iirc) that Olive & June have really become known for, and a quick look at the ingredients will tell you why! I’ll show a screenshot of the Cuticle Serum’s ingredient list as we delve a lil deeper into this review.

“The Top Coat” is, of course, a nail polish top coat. It’s clear, the bottle and cap are silver, and that’s about all there is to say at this point!

“7-Free” Nail Polish (color of your choice) - I chose the color CHM, which is described like so on the Olive & June official website: “A sheer tan that flatters everyone, can be worn anywhere, and looks good every single time.”

Acetone-Free Nail Polish Remover Pot - yes, the kind you actually stick your finger into, not the kind where you dump the liquid out onto a cotton ball or something like that. This nail polish remover appears to be quite small, and the amount of product included is 70mL or 2 fl oz.

“The Poppy” - Olive & June’s Universal Polish Bottle Handle that I was honestly very confused by at first, lol. Basically, it’s a big ol’ rubbery, kinda circular… handle, I guess is the best way to describe it haha, but it’s essentially, to my understanding, supposed to make painting your nails much more ergonomically-friendly, since holding this big soft rubbery thing is - I guess? - better than painting your nails the normal way where you just hold the not-so-uncomfortable-to-me-personally-at-least actual top of the nail polish bottle.

And that’s everything that comes in Olive & June’s “The Studio Box!” I know that was sort of a long-winded start, and we’ve only just gotten through the freaking “included products” list, lol, but I’ll try to keep the rest brief, concise, and to-the-point.

My Thoughts on the Actual Olive & June Nail Polish in the shade CHM, as well as Olive & June’s “The Top Coat”

As for the shade of the nail polish, and just the shade itself, I absolutely adore it and am so glad I chose it out of all the shades available, cause I admit it was quite overwhelming having to choose a shade off of the internet without being able to see anything in person, and with so many available options to choose from! The shade CHM is basically, for me, the epitome of a “My Nails But Better” shade. So, don’t opt for this color if you’re wanting something bold or basically something that’s even visible at all on the nails haha. I actually had someone ask me if I was just wearing a clear coat while I was wearing this! It was a clueless-to-all-things-beauty boy tho, so take that with a grain of salt haha, because you can definitely (imo) tell that it’s slightly more than just a clear coat; for example, you can’t really see the whites of your nails with this color on, but you can see through it a tiiiiiiny bit if you’re really looking closely, so it’s not quite opaque.

Now let’s talk about the actual formula of the Olive & June Nail Polish. During the first few seconds of trying this out for the first time, I remember thinking that I was so glad I had gotten the entire box of Olive & June stuff, because if I had just gotten this nail polish and it ended up being a fail, I’d have been so disappointed! However, as I applied the second coat, things started to come together and I was willing to abandon my negative first impression, lol. With one coat only, at least with this particular shade (CHM), it seems to go on extremely streaky and uneven, goopy in some spots and barely there in others. Two coats, though, works wonders to even everything out and makes it look like someone who actually knows what they’re doing was the person that did your nails hahaha. I painted one hand with two coats of CHM only, and left that to dry, and the other hand with two coats of CHM and then one layer of “The Top Coat” before letting that side dry.

Let me just say that, in the same way the second coat of CHM worked absolute wonders, so did the act of letting my nails completely dry! Both hands, so with and without the top coat, dried super fast compared to how fast I’ve experienced with other nail polishes. This is SUPER important to me because this is essentially the main reason I completely stopped painting my nails for a while: I’d carefully take my time painting them to be as perfect as I could muster, and then when it came time to let them dry, I’d stay as still as I possibly could for a could 45 mins - 1 hr, but every damn time I went to “check” on my nails after that amount of time, they seemingly hadn’t gotten one bit more dry than they were the second I stopped painting, and I’d end up completely ruining my labored-over nail polish work every time, without fail. This Olive & June stuff, though… it’s good, it’s different. It actually dries down quickly and dries down HARD. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had nail polish that feels like it’s completely dry, but as soon as I accidentally squish it on something in just the right way, which I always inevitably do, everything goes to shit and once again, my nails end up ruined. So, yeah, I will totally start painting my nails a lot more often now that I have some polish that is actually, you know, not shitty! Lollllll

Unfortunately, I can’t say too much about Olive & June’s “The Top Coat” yet because I’ve only tried it once and, like, it’s a top coat, so I can’t tell much on the first try. What I can tell you is that it definitely didn’t ruin anything or make anything worse or prolong dry time by any significant amount. So, things are looking promising when it comes to this top coat, but I’ll be sure to update you either here on the blog or on my Instagram when I have more concrete thoughts to share!

The Rest of the Items Included in “The Studio Box” by Olive & June

As I mentioned when talking about the top coat, I don’t have too much to say about the rest of the products in the box except that I really like and am enjoying everything so far and have not had a single problem with anything as of yet. The quality of literally everything (including the box itself lol, which I was honestly not expecting!) is SO good tbh, and I can see why this box is priced how it is. If you have any specific questions on any of the products that I mentioned in this post, or want to see a future post with updates on how I feel on these products in the future, please let me know!!! I will be sure to get back to everyone with any sort of question or comment! 😋

Overall, the price of the box (at the time of writing this post, $50 USD) does seem quite high for a lil assortment of nail care and nail polish-related items, but honestly, the quality of each and everything included with the purchase goes way above and beyond my expectations and I will absolutely be placing more Olive & June orders in the future to try out more of their colors since I adored the one I tried, CHM, so very much! In my opinion, The Studio Box by Olive & June is completely worth how much they are charging for it because the quality of everything is absolutely superb, not to mention how adorable and sooo freaking cute everything is! The lil details are always the most important, and Olive & June really did a great job on this. I can’t wait to try even more of their stuff!

Thank you so much for reading, and, like I said above, be sure to comment or msg me letting me know if you’d like to see any sort of follow-up post related to these products I talked about here! If you enjoyed this comprehensive review on The Studio Box by Olive & June, please please please leave a comment letting me know! It means so much to me when I know someone, somewhere is enjoying something I put time and effort into creating. I love you guys so very much!!!

[notatreeblog]

*post contains affiliate links which means NAT receives a small commission for each sale made

FabFitFun is a seasonal lifestyle subscription box. Each package includes full sized products valued at over $200 with the option of customizing the products in your box. FabFitFun also offers add-ons as well as member only sales as perks for their subscribers. Each package from FabFitFun is $49.99 with reduced prices for annual subscription terms. Shipping within the US is free. And with code ASHELI10 you’ll receive $10 off your first box. NAT received this package at no cost for review purposes.

Subscription Box Review

The first look inside the FabFitFun Box for winter 2019. This box is so cute!

Everything that came in my Winter 2019 FabFitFun subscription box. This is a great mix of different items to use in different areas of your everyday life!

  So what is all this stuff?

Our box insert came in the form of a mini magazine with Maria Shriver on the cover.

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Not only do they list each of the items that was included in this box but they also take it a step further and give us some interesting articles as well as recipes and horoscopes. I think that’s a fun way to bring the box full circle!

  Paper Source 12 Month Rose Floral Planner

$27.95

The first item in my Winter FabFitFun Box is this planner from Paper Source. I love their products and I love floral patterns so I am so happy to have received this! This item was customizable for Select members only and the other selections available were; a Beauty Bakerie palette, LXMI Pure Nilotica Melt, Vooray Sidekick Crossbody Bag and of course this planner.

I love the vintage style pages and the fact that I don’t have to worry about buying myself a planner for next year is boss!

  Drybar Prep Rally Prime + Prep Detangler

$23

This next item came in each Winter FabFitFun subscription box. I love the Drybar’s products and have never been disappointed with a single product that I’ve used from them. This one smells great and not only can I use it on myself but I can also use it on my three daughters!

This detangler is infused with Biotin and vitamins B and C to make hair soft and manageable! I think it looks really pretty in it’s bottle as well.

  Makeup Eraser in Original Pink

$20

The next item in our box was also included in each of the Winter FabFitFun boxes. I have a mini makeup eraser and when I first got it I wasn’t sure it was going to live up to the hype… after using it I was hooked so I am so glad that I now have a full sized one to add to my collection. You seriously need no makeup remover with this guy – it takes off everything on your face (which makes it a great option if you have sensitive skin like me).

The towel is bright pink and super soft. I was surprised with how large the full sized Makeup Eraser is.

  Erno Laszlo Pore Cleansing Clay Mask

$48

This Pore Cleansing Clay Mask uses Kaolin and Bentonite Clay to purge skin of impurities while also moisturizing and nourishing. This was an item that was customizable to all FabFitFun members. The other items members could choose from were; LashesMD Eyelash Conditioner, PJ Salvage Faux Trim Cable Slippers and a Ban.do Bluetooth Shower Speaker.

The packaging is pink and black and very cute.

And I personally love that it comes in a tube, this way I won’t have to dip my fingers in it and possibly get germs in there!

  Battington Lashes Monroe 3D Silk Lashes + Glue Kit

$32

Another item in our package that was customizable to all members in this package are these false lashes from Battington Lashes. The other items members could choose from were; Adore By Swarovski Orange Circle Bracelet in Rose Gold, Karuna Face for All Face and Eye Mask Set and Rodial Soft Focus Glow Drops.

I love that they include the glue with this set and the magnetic box is such a cute place to keep them all in!

The lashes themselves add drama and length and are super pretty. They are good for up to 25 uses too!

  Ahava Salt Bag

$16

Ahh… talk about relaxation! This dead sea salt from one of my faves Ahava will ease muscle tension – especially post workout! This item was customizable for Select members only. The other items they could have chosen from were; Frank Body Original Coffee Scrub and the Vera Mona Color Switch Solo.

I can tell you that this will not last long … I take baths almost daily!

  Cuccio Somatology Calm + Clean Epsom Salt Hand + Body Wash

$39.95

One of the more unique items in this season’s box is this hand and body wash from Cuccio Somatology. This lavender infused cleanser uses Pro Vitamin B5 as well as Shea Butter to nourish skin. I love the packaging as well. This item is one that FabFitFun selects for subscribers – the other item that could have come in subscribers boxes was INC.Redible Nailsinc Thirsty Hand Mask Duo.

I was really impressed with the ingredients list and since I love florals I am really excited to use this lavender scented product!

  Unhide Lil’ Marshmallow

$65

The final item in my box and one that was customizable for all FabFitFun members is this faux fur blanket from Unhide. This is absolutely gorgeous and the color is PERFECT! Among the other items that subscribers could select were; Kate Somerville Goat Milk Moisturzing Cream, R+Co Television Perfect Shampoo & Conditioner, Jonathan Adler Fleur de Sel Ceramic Candle and Rebecca Minkoff Marbled Beanie & Arm Warmer Set.

Once I opened this up I realized it was not only soft and lush it was also so cozy and warm and a great size! I’ll be using this all winter and it goes with my living room decor perfectly!

  So in summary

Presentation: Everything arrived to me perfectly and was packaged well in my winter box from FabFitFun.

Quality: Wowee! They do a great job of adding items from really high end and fantastic quality brands that we all know and love!

Curation: The fact that this box is so customizable is one of the biggest perks but even without this box is well rounded and gives you items for all aspects of your life. I loved my box and will be using each of these items!

Box Economy: For the price of this box $49.99 I received $272 in products which is a fantastic deal!

  Subscribe to FabFitFun

                        FabFitFun Winter 2019 Subscription Box Review + Unboxing + Coupon *post contains affiliate links which means NAT receives a small commission for each sale made FabFitFun…

[centralparkpawsblog]

The 12 Best Dog Foods for Senior Dogs

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Our Pick: Solid Gold Young at Heart

Out of the dozen dry dog foods on this list, Solid Gold’s Young at Heart is the best at keeping the widest array of senior pups active and healthy.

It has good ingredients, is easy to digest, low in allergens, and won’t drain your bank account!

However, your senior dog may have different dietary requirements than most, so keep reading to find a dog food that may be better for your dog.

Check Price

Senior Diet

I know everyone talks about the puppy life stage being the most challenging, with the chewing and the housetraining.

But I would have to disagree: I think the senior life stage is by far the most difficult.

Three of our four dogs are chronological seniors, and keeping them happy and healthy can be quite a challenge.

As our dog ages, we’ve been faced with some of the common health issues associated with age, such as arthritis, dementia, loss of muscle mass, and loss of appetite.

One of the components we control to help promote good health in our dogs is their diet. Nutrition is one of the most significant factors in a dog’s overall health. The food we give them we can positively impact their immune system, increase their energy level, foster better cognitive function, and strengthen muscles and bones.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a magical dog food for all seniors.

Some older dogs suffer from being overweight while others are underweight. Some have heart or kidney issues, arthritis, or show no signs of aging at all.

Saying age is just a number couldn’t be more accurate than when talking about dogs.

Sophie, my 13.5 y/o, maintains a perfect weight, is still high energy, doesn’t suffer from heart or kidney disease, and has no signs of arthritis. For her, we’ve made no changes from her hypoallergenic diet. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it!

Calvin, 11 y/o, and Daisy, 15 y/o, both suffer from being underweight and have become extremely picky eaters. Also, Daisy suffers from arthritis, Calvin suffers from irritable bowel disease, and they both suffer from muscle loss.

So, what does this mean for us?

That we couldn’t be more thankful for the wide variety of senior dog foods out there.

Dozens of senior dog foods went through our tests to bring you the best senior dog foods we can find. What you’ll find below is the dozen best-of-the-best, and each one is best at something!

When to Switch to Senior Dog Food

There are several factors to consider before switching your dog to a senior diet, and their chronological age is one of the least important on the list.

What it all really boils down to is the health of your dog.

Some of the signs it might be time to change your dog’s diet to a senior diet are:

The state of their coat and skin – Often times as a dog ages their coat and skin become drier, losing its luster and shine.

Their activity level decreases

Signs of stiffness or soreness when walking or standing

Changes in their weight – Either overweight or underweight

Changes in their eating habits

Cognitive changes

After discussing with your vet and ruling out any underlying health issues, they’ll likely suggest a senior diet.

Food specially formulated for seniors help ensure your dog is receiving the proper dietary requirements needed to live the healthiest life possible

Things to Take into Consideration When Choosing A Dog Food

Every dog is different and some have particular needs, so it’s important to know what you’re looking for before you hit the store.

Is your dog already on supplements?

If so, some foods already contain supplements.

Some supplements and vitamins are pretty benign at higher doses, whereas others can cause GI upset or, in cases like vitamin D, can be dangerous to your dog’s health.

So, it’s wise to double check doses before purchasing a supplement-rich food.

Does your dog have specific ailments or predispositions to certain diseases?

…such as heart disease. If so, you would likely want to consider a diet avoiding grain-free dog food.

Do you have a small or large breed dog?

Just like when they were puppies, there are unique formulas for dogs of different sizes.

There are even dog foods designed for specific dog breeds, such as German Shepherds.

Is your dog needing to gain weight?

If the answer is yes, you would want to look for a higher fat and protein diet.

Is your dog a picky eater?

Then you would want to talk to the folks at the store to find a food that is more robust in flavor or even make your own.

Want some handmade food for your picky dog but are too busy to make it yourself? NomNomNow has you covered!

How is Senior Dog Food Different?

As dogs age, their dietary needs changes as well.

Some of the senior dog foods have:

Lower calories due to the decrease in activity and obesity, one of the most significant contributors to poor health in seniors. Obesity increases risks for things like heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and high blood pressure.

An increase in protein to help maintain muscle. “Senior diets should have increased protein-to-calorie ratio, providing a minimum of 25 percent of calories from protein,” according to Caroline Coile, Ph.D.

An increase in fiber to help maintain a healthy GI system. Keep in mind that a diet too high in fiber can also cause issues. An excess can decrease “how much protein and other nutrients your pet can absorb from their food,” according to Lisa M. Freeman, DVM, PhD, DACVN.

An increase in much-needed antioxidants, DHA, & EPA, all of which can help boost the immune system, aid in mobility, and combat cognitive dysfunction.

What to Look for and What to Avoid in Senior Dog Foods

Although all dogs need different things, there are a few ingredients any quality senior dog food should have (or not!).

Proper Protein Quality and Quantity – Look For

The protein source, meaning chicken, beef, etc., isn’t as important as the quantity or the quality.

Also, look at the product name.

If the name contains the protein type (i.e. beef or chicken), then it has a higher content. If it lists it as a protein flavor (i.e. lamb flavor), the protein content will be much lower.

All Life Stages – Avoid

“All life stages” really means “most life stages”

Steer clear of this one.

If the dog food label states “all life stages,” it indicates that the food was formulated or tested for growth and is more geared toward younger dogs.

Super Foods and Antioxidants – Look For

Super foods like blueberries, kale, kelp, cranberries, and spinach are ingredients rich in antioxidants.

These foods help boost immune systems and can fight the free radicals that contribute to cognitive decline.

Fiber – Look For

Good fibers can hep your pet maintain a healthy gut.

The best sources for fiber in dog food come from fruits and vegetables, flaxseed, psyllium husk, oats, and barley.

Glucosamine and Chondroitin – Look For

Many of the senior dog formulas have added glucosamine and chondroitin to the food to promote good joint health.

Some dog food companies are adding these to the “Crude Analysis” section, but if it isn’t there, you can check the ingredients list.

Omega-3 & 6 Fatty Acids – Look For

Fatty acids are essential to a dog’s overall health, so be sure that the food contains Fatty acids.

Low Glycemic Foods – Maybe Look For

Depending on your dogs needs, looking for foods that contain low glycemic ingredients, like sweet potatoes or brown rice, will aid in preventing blood sugar spikes and also provide a steadier source of energy.

Best Dry Dog Foods for Older Dogs

ProductFirst IngredientGrain Free?RatingPrice Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural SeniorChickenNo4.4$$ Check Price Nutro Ultra SeniorChickenNo4.4$E$ Check Price Purina Pro Plan BRIGHT MIND Senior 7+ChickenNo4.4$$ Check Price Orijen SeniorChickenYes4.3$$$$ Check Price CANIDAE PURE SeniorChickenYes4.3$$$ Check Price Royal Canin Small Indoor SeniorBrewers RiceNo4.6$$$$$ Check Price Hill's Science Diet Healthy MobilityChicken MealNo4.3$$ Check Price Merrick Lil' Plates Grain-Free SeniorChickenYes4.2$$$$ Check Price Wellness Complete Health SeniorChickenNo3.8$$ Check Price Diamond Naturals Senior FormulaBrown RiceNo4.1$ Check Price Nulo Freestyle Grain-Free SeniorTroutYes4.4$$$ Check Price Solid Gold Young at HeartChickenYes4.5$$$ Check Price

Best Dog Food for Overweight Senior Dogs

Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior

Specs

Chicken is the first ingredient

No wheat, corn, soy, artificial flavors, or preservatives

Contains brown rice, barley, and oatmeal

Contains flaxseed which is an excellent source of Omega-3 and 6 fatty acids

See full ingredients

Overview

Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior contains LifeSource Bits®, an exclusive blend of antioxidant and vitamin-rich foods that have had minimal exposure to heat, which ensures the best retention of nutrients.

The Omega-3 & 6 Fatty Acids will aid in good heart health, lower blood pressure, and reduce chances of blood clots.

What You’ll Like

It has a strong focus on boosting a dog’s immune system and protecting the vitamins and nutrients in the food during the cooking process.

What You Won’t

It doesn’t have a particularly high content of chondroitin or glucosamine.

Recommendation

The lower protein level and higher fiber level in Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior is great for dogs looking to lose some weight.

Brown rice, barley, and oatmeal are excellent sources of energy and fiber.

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Best Dog Food for Active Small Breed Old Dogs

Nutro Ultra Senior

Specs

Contains 3 different protein sources (Chicken, Lamb, and Salmon)

Includes 15 different superfoods

High protein content

No wheat, corn, soy, artificial flavors, or preservatives

Made with non-GMO ingredients

The same great recipe is available for small breed dogs

See full ingredients

Overview

Nutro Ultra Senior food has the perfect balance of protein, fiber, and fat content, which makes it ideal for most senior dogs. The added chondroitin and glucosamine promote good joint and cartilage health.

What You’ll Like

The three proteins help provide a well-balanced protein profile with white meat (excellent lean protein), red meat (high in iron), and fish (great source of fatty acids).

What You Won’t

If you are looking for a grain-free food, this one won’t be the best match.

Recommendation

Nutro Ultra Senior is an excellent choice for a senior canine with an average or above average activity level. This food will also help to maintain a healthy weight and aid in the retention of muscle mass.

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Best Dog Food for Cognitive Health

Purina Pro Plan BRIGHT MIND Senior 7+

Specs

Formulated to promote mental clarity and cognitive health

Available in multiple formulas

Contains a significant amount of glucosamine

Provides a higher than average protein content

See full ingredients

Overview

Purina Pro Plan BRIGHT MIND Senior 7+ has two different recipes: chicken and brown rice, and turkey and brown rice. The turkey recipe is corn, soy, and wheat-free, providing an excellent alternative for dogs with food sensitivities. Also, the chicken formula comes in small and large breed varieties. You can get it as wet food, too.

What You’ll Like

The ingredients are focused on senior wellness to help maintain proper mental awareness, joint mobility, and help to maintain muscle mass.

What You Won’t

The low fiber content isn’t the best choice for overweight seniors.

Recommendation

Purina Pro Plan BRIGHT MIND Senior 7+ is a great choice for seniors that may be showing signs of cognitive issues. However, even if your dog isn’t experiencing cognitive issues, it is still an excellent choice for most seniors.

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Best Dog Food for Underweight Older Dogs

Orijen Senior

Specs

Multiple protein sources (chicken, turkey, flounder, herring, mackerel, and eggs)

High content of glucosamine and chondroitin

Variety of superfoods like kelp, kale, spinach, and greens

Grain-free

See full ingredients

Overview

It’s rich in nutrient-dense foods and contains freeze-dried ingredients. It’s a high protein diet yet still maintains the right amount of fiber.

What You’ll Like

It’s packed with superior-quality ingredients full of vitamins and nutrients. Also, the high glucosamine and chondroitin content is perfect for seniors with arthritis.

What You Won’t

The price is a bit higher than the average senior dog food, a 30-pound bag is about $3.76/lb.

Recommendation

This is a fantastic choice for active seniors especially those transitioning from high-performance foods, active seniors, or for seniors in need of gaining a few more pounds.

Check Price

Read Reviews

Best Dog Food for Arthritic Aged Dogs

CANIDAE PURE Senior

Specs

Grain-free

Contains sweet potatoes

Contains probiotics

High levels of glucosamine and chondroitin

See full ingredients

Overview

CANIDAE PURE Senior is a fantastic grain-free option. It includes sweet potatoes, which have a low glycemic index, providing a steady source of energy. It also has probiotics to promote a healthy GI system. Also, this is a limited ingredient recipe, so it works well for dogs with food sensitivities.

What You Will Like

The special attention made to ensure the food is easily digestible.

What You Won’t

The price. It is a bit more expensive than the average senior food, but it definitely won’t break the bank.

Recommendation

CANIDAE PURE Senior is an excellent choice for seniors who benefit from a limited ingredient diet. Even if your senior doesn’t have food sensitivities, it’s a terrific food to maintain proper digestion and it has chondroitin and glucosamine to aid in keeping joints healthy.

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Most Easily Digested Dog Food for Senior Dogs with Poop Problems

Royal Canin Small Indoor Senior

Specs

Easily digestible

Small kibble size

Balanced protein content

See full ingredients

Overview

Royal Canin Small Indoor Senior is right choice for dogs in need of easily digestible food. It contains higher levels of EPA and DHA which supports healthy heart function and aids in keeping their coat and skin in good condition.

What You’ll Like

It’s formulated explicitly for small indoor dogs.

What You Won’t

Being that it’s a uniquely formulated food it is a bit higher in cost than the average dog food.

Recommendation

Royal Canin Small Indoor Senior is a perfect choice for small, less active dogs who are looking to maintain a fit weight and who need easily-digested food.

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Best Dog Food for Retired Large Breeds

Hill’s Science Diet Healthy Mobility, Large Breed Adult

Specs

No Artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives

Made specifically for dogs over 55 pounds

High levels of Omega-3 fatty acids

A Specific blend of ingredients to boost the immune system

See full ingredients

Overview

Hill’s Science Diet Healthy Mobility, Large Breed Adult has extra attention to joint health and mobility, which can be seen in the high levels of chondroitin and glucosamine. Also, it’s the perfect balance between the protein, and fat content is ideal for helping seniors maintain a proper body weight.

What You’ll Like

Glucosamine, chondroitin, and fatty acids are derived from natural sources.

What You Won’t

It has lower fiber content and may not ideal for seniors who suffer from chronic constipation.

Recommendation

Hill’s Science Diet Healthy Mobility is the best formula for large dogs with joint and mobility issues.

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Best Dog Food for Small Breeds with Health Problems

Merrick Lil’ Plates Grain-Free Senior

Specs

Grain-free and gluten-free

Designed to help maintain an ideal body weight

Made in the USA

Same great recipe available for small dog breeds

See full ingredients

Overview

Merrick Lil’ Plates Grain-Free Senior is a great grain-free option. It contains sweet potatoes, which have a low glycemic index, and also has salmon, rich in Omega-3 Fatty Acids. Also, they enhanced the formula with probiotics to aid in better GI health.

What You’ll Like

High levels of glucosamine & chondroitin.

What You Won’t

If you are looking for a food with grains, this one won’t be a match.

Recommendation

For most seniors, Merrick Lil’ Plates Grain-Free Senior is a perfect dog food choice. Its high protein content aids in muscle retention, the added probiotics aid in digestive health, and the high levels of glucosamine and chondroitin aid in joint health and mobility.

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Best Dog Food for Older Dogs Lacking Energy

Wellness Complete Health Senior

Specs

Wheat, corn and soy-free

Contains superfoods like blueberries, spinach, and sweet potatoes

Helps to maintain an ideal body weight

Enhanced with Omega fatty acids

See full ingredients

Overview

Wellness Complete Health Senior is a highly digestible food. It has a right amount of protein to maintain muscle mass, it’s full of antioxidants to boost the immune system, and the barley and brown rice provide a great source of energy.

What You’ll Like

It’s a very well-balanced food that would work for almost any senior.

What You Won’t

It contains grains, so if your dog requires a grain-free diet, this wouldn’t be the best choice.

Recommendation

Wellness Complete Health Senior would be a fantastic food for most senior dogs. It has the added glucosamine and chondroitin for joint health and mobility, added antioxidants to boost the immune system, and probiotics for a healthy GI system.

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Best Dog Food for Senior Dogs with Owners on a Budget

Diamond Naturals Senior Formula

Specs

Cage-free chicken

Added chondroitin and glucosamine

No wheat, soy, or corn

Enriched with probiotics

See full ingredients

Overview

Diamond Naturals Senior Formula is an easily digestible food. It’s full of brown rice and oatmeal, both of which are good sources of fiber and energy. The food has been enhanced with probiotics, chondroitin, and glucosamine to meet the needs of aging dogs.

What You’ll Like

The price: It’s a bit less expensive than the average dog food.

What You Won’t

The first ingredient is brown rice, not meat.

Recommendation

Diamond Naturals Senior Formula would be good for seniors who need an easily digestible diet, especially if you are on a limited budget.

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Best Dog Food for Senior Dogs with Allergies

Nulo Freestyle Grain-Free Senior

Specs

Grain-free and gluten-free

Trout is the first ingredient

High protein content

Contains trout, salmon, turkey, and chicken

See full ingredients

Overview

The proteins in Nulo Freestyle Grain-Free Senior are all very heart-healthy proteins and provide an excellent source of fatty acids, which is great for overall health.

What You’ll Like

Slightly different formula from the standard senior dog food so it would be a good one to try with dogs who are a bit finicky or who have allergies.

What You Won’t

It’s grain-free, which may not work for some dogs.

Recommendation

Nulo Freestyle Grain-Free Senior is a protein rich food which aids in retaining muscle mass, also the added chondroitin and glucosamine are excellent supplements to promote good joint health and mobility.

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Best Dog Food for Aging Dogs with Sensitive Stomachs

Solid Gold Young at Heart

Specs

Grain-Free and Gluten-Free

Contains 20 Super Foods like Blueberries, Sweet Potatoes and Spinach

Lower fat content

Formulated to be easily digestible

See full ingredients

Overview

Solid Gold Young at Heart has a powerhouse of superfoods to help boost the immune system. It’s also been enhanced with probiotics to aid in digestion. Plus, being grain-free and gluten-free, it would work great for dogs with certain food allergies.

What You’ll Like

The lower fat content, but still maintaining a high protein level.

What You Won’t

It’s grain-free, which may not work for some dogs.

Recommendation

Solid Gold Young at Heart is the perfect food seniors who have sensitive digestive systems, are looking to lose some weight, or are looking to boost their immune system.

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Our Picks and Best Brands for Specific Needs

Best for Small Dog Breeds

It’s a tie between Royal Canin Small Indoor Senior and Nutro Ultra Senior.

You wouldn’t go wrong with either brand, but if you have a more active small senior dog, then the Nutro brand might be the better pick.

Best for Large Breed Dogs

Bonus Pick: IAMS Proactive Health Mature Adult didn’t make our list, but many pet parents have reported that this food relieves flatulence in old, gassy dogs!

Obviously I’m going with Hill’s Science Diet Healthy Mobility, Large Breed Adult since it’s the only formula for large senior dogs. But, even if it weren’t this one would be hard to compete with.

The nutritionists working on this formula really put a lot of effort into ensuring a strong focus on joint and mobility health, both of which can be issues for large breeds, especially as they age.

Best for Arthritic Dogs

This one was a more difficult pick.

I am a believer in grains in dog food, especially since Daisy has heart disease, but I still choose CANIDAE Grain-Free PURE Senior. It has the highest levels of chondroitin and glucosamine.

Also, it has good levels of fatty acids, which also aid in joint health and mobility.

Best for Underweight Dogs

Because of the high protein content and vitamin and nutrient dense ingredients, I would say the Orijen Senior dry dog food.

It’s packed with healthy proteins and fatty acids, both of which are great for dogs needing to put on a few extra pounds.

Best for Overweight Dogs

This one was also a tie, between Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior and Solid Gold Young at Heart.

Blue Buffalo has a lower fat content but still maintains a higher fiber content, which can help shed the pounds.

Solid Gold has a high protein level, lower fat content, and a higher fiber content, all of which are needed when trying to drop some weight.

Conclusion

I know there’s a ton of different dog food options and some may even seem very similar.

However, speaking from experience a dog’s sense of taste can be very particular and though they may not like one chicken recipe that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t like another variety.

All of our seniors are special and unique in their own way, and each of them deserves the perfect quality food that will aid in keeping them healthy happy dogs because really that’s all any of us really wants.

The post The 12 Best Dog Foods for Senior Dogs appeared first on Central Park Paws.

from https://www.centralparkpaws.net/dog-food/best-senior-dog-foods/

[thekushmiri-blog]

Beard Comb Or Brush For You Beard Grooming Equipment? We Say Picket Comb.

We Say Picket Comb. Proving your manhood and virility was once as simple as simply having a beard. Bad ass Flaming Skull beard comb made within the USA, cut from hardwood, sanded and completed.

However going with a coarse plastic comb only will get you half means because plastic is tough, forms sharp edges, and will likely nonetheless catch, strip, and pull out your beard hair. I purchased this as a birthday gift for my husband and he completely loves it and will not use any other of the combs or brushes that I've bought him. Trying on the picture it seems to be like there's a varnish or lacquer, however that is merely the results of high quality sanding work. http://hairtrimmerli.com/wooden-beard-comb/ This comb is made from natural horn and as we already mentioned, this is one of the top supplies you can use in manufacturing combs. Note the path of the grain: along the lengthy axis in the deal with and alongside the teeth within the inlay, this supplies offers most strength in the path of biggest stress. The appearance of a fuller beard begins together with your beard hairs aligning completely around your face. However let's run via the method of combing your 

The grain of the handle and enamel are regular to each other, which puts the grain in the same route to the maximum stress, making them much stronger (there are loads of beard combs laser etched out of a single piece of wood, which cannot compete on energy). What makes this stainless steel beard comb stands aside is the truth that it's a hand-finished product that has been created via dozen separate painstaking steps.Solving the uncomfortable problem that the plastic beard comb presents, this wood beard comb is completely non-static, so you may be in for no disagreeable surprises when using it. Let's check out the most versatile beard combs reviewed on this article. If this is a matter you should utilize brush with a wood comb for untangling a curly beard. Last, and maybe most significantly, is the scale of the Go-Comb. The present field seems match for the bearded kings of yore like Henry VIII and Charlemagne, which pushes it excessive, including the value of being an important gift to its already spectacular qualities. So, on this information, we overview some of the perfect beard combs in the marketplace for a nicely groomed beard. One other vital observe, Kent combs are made in U. OK. unlike some of the other combs listed right here that have been made in China. Ever marvel why you are getting extra ingrown beard hairs? The I Love My Beard - beard comb is an ideal present thought for any bearded or mustachioed buddy, household or cherished one, is comprised of pure wooden, so each could look just a bit different from the actual footage, and every beard comb measures just 2.15 inches lengthy x 1.eight inches huge.

The makers of the Beard Brush and Comb Set claim that their set can easily stand the check of time and will final ceaselessly. Handcrafted in Pennsylvania from sustainable sourced cherry timber, our handsome cherry wooden Beard Comb is designed to gently work in and evenly distribute your Badger Beard Oil and Beard Balm. Boars hairs: Pure fibers that soak up oils to evenly coat your hair along length of the beard follicle. On account of its tooth width, beard comb is used, ideally, proper after washing your beard for straightening and detangling it. They're additionally extremely really useful to be carried as pocket combs. First, maintain your comb with the teeth upward and start from the bottom of your beard. On a next part, we're going to analyse each one in every of them and talk about the standards to selecting the best beard comb out there. Plus, it is laborious to beat the flexibility of a 3-pack - you possibly can go away one beard again dwelling in your cabinet, maintain another in your pocket during the day, or pack another for travel. Constructed from high-high quality supplies similar to buffalo horn and sandalwood, which does a tremendous job of avoiding hair static, this pocket comb has teeth that are proportionately sized to give the comb stable motion for holding your face mane smooth with none snarling. Brawn beard balm and Boss beard oil can work wonders in your beard however you still cannot skip daily upkeep, which is the place our helpful little wooden beard comb — we wish to name him Lil' Peachy” — steps in. ✔ SATISFACTION ASSURED We stand behind the quality of our wooden beard comb fully. I wished a wood one, but went with a hand-lower plastic one as a result of pricing. Each tooth is reduce by specifically-designed round saws and hand-polished to ensure superior hair penetration without inflicting pores and skin irritation. The comb has lengthy fine tooth that work great for all types of beard. This beard comb overall is a good entry level beard comb that gives two distinct distances between the tooth of the comb. The Hair and Beard Comb by Huntsman Beard Co is made more in the vain of beard combs, but do not let its appearance deceive you; it makes for a superb beard comb. Therefore, maintain this in mind when you choose a superb beard comb that is product of wooden. Because it glides by means of your facial hair, it reduces the itches, kinks, and the occasional irritation that bounds off most black plastic combs. A handmade comb can be sturdier and less prone to break even when you carry it in your pocket or a corner of your overstuffed bag.

The development of comb is excellent and the size and form of the comb enamel helps distribute the beard oil, balm, and sometimes wax. If your rocking the Gandalf look, then conditioning your beard and the skin below it's incredibly important. My pick: Handmade wooden combs. Each comb is saw cut with a Cherry wood body with a Walnut deal with, then wonderful sanded/filed smooth, and eventually friction-polished with Carnuba wax to be able to be extremely easy in your face and beard. Especially for those who do not use a beard oil regularly. This things glides by means of my beard like a sizzling knife by way of butter and it really distributed the oils and balms that i really like. Now, relating to hand minimize combs, they are usually made of cellulose acetate, pure wooden or horn (unfortunately this is not vegan). If you're like most beards men, you need your beard to look its best always, which is why travel-capability is so essential. I think that the case is necessary for wood combs as they do not react very well with humidity. To begin with, beards typically aren't as dense as the hair in your head and moreover that, you need to have higher control over the comb for higher combing precision, especially whenever you add styling merchandise like beard wax. We typically suggest combing from the bottom up first, to unfold all of the hairs out and untangle issues from the underside. Lastly, we have metal combs. 

[theconservativebrief]

Pornhub has 80 million daily users and more pornographic videos than any other site in the history of the internet, and now it wants to be Playboy.

More specifically, what Playboy was in the ’90s. “A lifestyle brand, a fashion brand,” explains Alex Katz, co-founder of the Madrid-based creative agency Officer & Gentleman, which has been leading the brand strategy for Pornhub for the past four years.

Co-founder Javi Iñiguez jumps in: “The girls were wearing sweatshirts and purses with the Playboy bunny even though they might not have seen a Playboy magazine in their lives.”

Fair enough. Who doesn’t want the cultural clout of Hugh Hefner, literally everything else about Hugh Hefner aside?

It may be a small shock to discover that Pornhub even has a brand strategy, but it makes sense. The company has spent the past several years doing what anybody would do once they become superrich: buying their way to coolness. And, by extension, buying their way to women, whom the company has historically had a hard time appealing to.

I mean, who doesn’t see the connection between lifestyle brands and chicks?

Pornhub’s first website launched in 2007 and was acquired by the MindGeek conglomerate in 2010, at which time it merged with YouPorn, RedTube, and Xtube to become the Pornhub network. From there, it easily consolidated power to become the biggest porn distribution platform ever, but its new challenge was to become a brand that anyone would talk about out loud, and just maybe, someday, wear on a T-shirt.

Models from the ’90s-inspired Playboy fashion line launched last year by Joyrich. Joyrich

In 2014, the network held a contest asking advertising and creative professionals to submit concepts for safe-for-work, PG-13 Pornhub ads that could run in traditional media spots. The move was a reaction to a year of mainstream misses and only two hits: In 2013, Pornhub finagled a centerpiece montage (with clips handpicked by VP Corey Price) in the heart of the porn-focused Joseph Gordon-Levitt rom-com Don Jon. It also nabbed dozens of headlines in outlets from BuzzFeed to SBNation when CBS refused to air a 20-second, completely innocuous ad spot during the Super Bowl. By the time anyone bothered to point out that Super Bowl ads are only sold in 30-second increments, the scam had done its work.

Thanks to the contest, Pornhub buddied up with both Officer & Gentleman and Vendetta Studios, an LA-based viral video production house headed by Dave Lehre — an anxiety-inducing internet personality best known for one of the first viral YouTube clips, “MySpace: the movie,” and more recently for an elaborate stunt in which he fashioned himself into “the first white American K-pop star.”

For Pornhub, Lehre made a litany of viral videos, mostly ads for Pornhub’s new product releases: a VPN service, a “BaDoink” VR headset, a $1,000 robotic twerking butt, and so on.

“Make the brand accessible to the world” was the brief, Lehre says. Make it PG-13; make it live on YouTube; make it shareable. “When we came in, it was all potential. Nobody had tapped the power of Pornhub.” He pauses. “Damn, that sounds epic.”

Officer & Gentleman’s first projects were also tech-related: videos for a cryptocurrency called Titcoin and a (real) piece of wearable tech that would recharge your phone while you masturbated. It was called Wankband. At Christmastime last year, noting the success of gift cards for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, they started selling Pornhub Premium gift cards. “We thought it would be the perfect Secret Santa present at workplaces and stuff like that,” Iñiguez says.

(Please don’t give a Pornhub Premium gift card to anyone you work with.)

So, is Pornhub … a tech company? “Depends who you ask,” Katz says, though he seems uninterested in the proposition. “But I think the brand … it’s an entertainment company. You don’t see anyone wearing Facebook shirts because they’re cool.”

Right, right. Cool, we’re doing cool here.

“[In online porn], everyone has the same product, so the only way you can differentiate yourself is by building a brand,” Katz explains. “We only want to create advertising that can go viral.” That means safe-for-work content. “[Pornhub] has enough porn; they need content that’s shareable.”

“Everything has to go viral,” Iñiguez points out. So you throw a lot of shit at the wall to see what sticks. The list of what Pornhub has not been willing to try in the past four years would probably be more expedient, but here we are.

It launched its own lube brand, then the world’s largest lube slide. (One of Lehre’s projects, of which he says, “They didn’t come to set, they just said ‘Oh, we have these 5-gallon drums of lube we can send over.’ We got this huge slide. They sent all these porn stars to hang out and slide down it. That was a magic day.”)

“[In online porn], everyone has the same product, so the only way you can differentiate yourself is by building a brand”

At one point, the company started a record label and hosted music video premieres for California rapper Mykki Blanco and Michigan metal band King 810. It hosted a porn film festival in New York, featuring soft-core entries from Miley Cyrus and James Franco. It made an “adult adult coloring book” featuring X-rated sketches from Instagram and Tumblr artists, which it then sold exclusively at the Think Tank Gallery in LA, Verso Books in Milan, and the menswear boutique Off the Hook in Montreal. It launched a line of sex toys, then commissioned Spanish electro-pop band Perlita to create a song from sex toy noises.

The high-end Italian denim company Diesel became the first fashion brand to advertise on a porn site in January 2016, kicking off a much-covered official partnership with Pornhub. Creative director Nicola Formichetti told Dazed, “We all go on websites like Pornhub, you know? So before you start jerking off maybe you can stop and look at our new pants.” For New York Fashion Week in 2017, Hood by Air sent a Pornhub-inspired line down the runway (models wore their hair stylized as if it were coated in semen, and jackets reading “HUSTLER” and “NEVER TRUST A CHURCH GIRL”).

In September that year, the New York streetwear brand Richardson announced a capsule collection featuring Pornhub-branded hoodies, hats, swimsuits, jackets, and T-shirts — one featuring porn actress, poet, and Pornhub spokesperson Asa Akira, and another featuring the flags of countries in which Pornhub is banned. Two months later, the New York outerwear brand Moose Knuckles debuted a limited-edition Pornhub bomber jacket that was sold through the Rihanna-blessed SoHo streetwear staple VFILES.

VFILES is also beloved by Pornhub’s most important woman: Kim Kardashian.

Last summer, the team stopped by the De Re Gallery in Los Angeles for “Make Me Famous,” the first exhibition by “professionally provocative” Instagram-famous twins Allie and Lexi Kaplan — just to pick up a painting of the Kim Kardashian–Ray J sex tape, which is now prominently displayed in the company’s LA office.

Pornhub loves Kim. When she was robbed at gunpoint later that year, Pornhub offered $50,000 “in exchange for information leading to [the] arrest and conviction of criminals who robbed Kim Kardashian.” The press release said that everyone at Pornhub was “deeply saddened” by the “horrible incident,” and reminded the world that Kim Kardashian’s sex tape with Ray J “remains the most viewed video on Pornhub with 110,198,725 views and counting.”

“We consider her to be a member of the Pornhub family,” Pornhub VP Corey Price tells Vox. “As such, we wanted to extend a helping hand and do all that we could to help bring the wrongdoers to justice.” Ultimately, the police didn’t need Pornhub’s help, but it’s a nice gesture. The video now has more than 143 million views!

Pornhub hosted a sci-fi art installation in LA’s De Re Gallery last summer. Maggie West/Pornhub

This June, the company sponsored an elaborate sci-fi art installation at the LA nightclub Union — handing the reins over to LA photographer and activist Maggie West (best known for her “Fluid” series, containing abstract images of blood, saliva, and semen) and New York artist Ryder Ripps (best known for creating the branding for Soylent and using the Ace Hotel’s artist residency to hire two Craigslist sex workers for a widely-reviled project called “ART WHORE”).

Then it partnered with the editorial arm of luxury fashion seller SSENSE to produce an avant-garde photo shoot and literary companion essay called “The Data of Desire,” using Pornhub analytics to figure out which sneaker brands are most fetishized in porn. (Converse, Nike, Adidas, Vans, and Yeezy, in that order.)

Then last month, Kanye West told Jimmy Kimmel he “still looks at Pornhub” and the company reached out via Twitter to offer him a lifetime subscription to Pornhub Premium. Two weeks later, he was serving as creative director for the first annual Pornhub Awards in Los Angeles, which were reportedly a disaster but came off, anyway, as a major coup.

West debuted a new music video featuring the currently incarcerated Lil Pump at the awards and brought G.O.O.D. Music signee Teyana Taylor along to perform. He dressed porn stars in the latest Yeezy collection (when he bothered to dress them at all) and arranged them onstage to accept futuristic-dildo-shaped award statues he also supposedly designed. The next day, he announced a line of Yeezy sweatshirts featuring the night’s winners, including “Nicest Tits” honoree Kendra Sunderland and “Hottest Female Ass” honoree Mia Malkova.

“Where do these [partnership] decisions come from?” Katz parrots back to me. “Well, we can’t be in mainstream spaces, so we become this outsider brand that’s doing out-there things. That’s what attracts these other brands like Richardson and Yeezy. Pornhub has an outsider quality that draws people to them.”

Here’s the rub (sorry): Per Pornhub’s own data, as of December 2017, just 26 percent of the site’s users are women.

This is not really a problem, as what Iñiguez pointed out is true: Girls didn’t have to read Playboy to buy the clothes. But it is kind of a problem, mostly because women make up a large share of the people on earth, and Pornhub has basically nowhere to go within the demographic it already serves.

So far, Pornhub has tried selling Mother’s Day–specific cardboard VR headsets, publishing site traffic insights from the day of the 2017 Women’s March, and weighing in on International Women’s Day to announce that it would change the “female-friendly” tag on its site to “popular with women.” It also pointed out that searches for Amy Schumer rose 513 percent in tandem with her Instagram post about the holiday.

“More than ever before, women are coming forward to express their desires more openly,” Price says. “And we want to provide resources to support that.”

So, this January, Pornhub debuted “F*ck Your Period.”

“There are two types of women: women who have sex on their period and women who don’t,” Katz tells me. “It’s 49 [percent] to 51,” (based on an informal Pornhub survey of its female users). With that, uh, fact in mind, Pornhub launched a campaign with the goal of explaining the health benefits of having an orgasm during your period. It made its own period calendar app and encouraged women to fill it out so that each month, they would receive a free login code for Pornhub Premium for the duration of their period. “[The goal was] to get girls to experiment with Pornhub for the first time in case they hadn’t,” Katz says. “Pornhub is a sex-friendly, female-friendly company.”

Pornhub’s cryptocurrency launch in New York. Officer & Gentleman

Yet the campaigns aimed at women are rarely the ones that blow up. In March, the site started accepting cryptocurrency as payment and had models stroll through the Financial District in Pornhub-branded ski masks, tossing plastic coins and licking the Wall Street bull’s balls. This worked: It got press.

The following month, Pornhub launched a program called “The Visionaries Director’s Club” with the aim of “[diversifying] porn production” and gave rapper Young M.A. a budget to write and produce her own pornographic short film. The company described the film in a press release, writing that it would appeal to “our progressive generation,” and adding, “While high production level lesbian content is often clearly created with the male gaze in mind, M.A’s debut film is authentic and genuine to her taste profile.”

Last month, it gave a similar budget to pansexual singer and rapper Brooke Candy, who wrote of her film, “We had the most next level crew of fine artists from all over the world and the cast of actors that I chose really had an inner beauty which they unleashed on film. It’s queer, it’s sex-positive and it’s super-hot.” This didn’t work — it got no press. But the data says that female usership of Pornhub grows every year, Price points out. So it’s fine.

As a woman who menstruates, did I know that orgasms make period cramps less painful and bleeding cycles shorter? I mean, as a woman who drinks water, did I know it keeps my organs running?

Pornhub’s brand strategy is elaborate, multifaceted, funny, and cool. It’s also as simple as a bunch of straight boys chasing what straight boys so often chase: a projection of ease and edge that makes them appealing to other boys like them, and a veneer of caring that they hope will grant them an in with women.

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Original Source -> Pornhub wants to be a lifestyle brand

via The Conservative Brief

[lucentia]

After much experimenting and researching (and spending) I wanted to share my go-to beauty products that are vegan and cruelty free (and most of them relatively inexpensive). Whether you are vegan or not PLEASE PLEASE do not buy products from brands that test on animals. Do a little research (this blog post will get you started!) because no animal’s suffering and torture is worth a lipstick. The more we show we care about this issue through what we buy, the more inclined companies will be to change.

First thing’s first: don’t throw away all your non-vegan make up. As with clothes, it’s more wasteful to just chuck it than to use it up and get your money’s worth. As you start to replace things, just put red crosses over all these brands and products that test on animals. E.g. L’Oreal. They sell to China, thus they test on animals so see ya.

Here’s the lowdown of the current rules:

The use of animals to test cosmetics products or their ingredients is banned in the UK and all other member states of the European Union.

(However, millions of animals a year are still tested on for medicinal purposes and in universities).

This law is all well and good, but products are still tested on animals in the US and China. In fact, in China, it is a legal requirement for the products to be tested on animals before they are sold. So companies that sell to China will test on animals. You are still being faced with a choice to buy ethically almost all the time but you probably didn’t even realise (these big companies are very sneaky).

Some brands that are too big, like Unilever who own basically everything, ADMIT to testing on animals. Other brands will be vague and not give clear answers, probably because they too test on animals but try to find a loophole. But their vagueness is just suspicious. If that’s all you can see them saying avoid these brands too.

There are some brands, such as Lush, that not only avoid ingredients tested on animals but actively seek to end it.

The controversy for me lies in they having products that still include beeswax, carmine, and casein (a protein from cows milk). I’m waiting for the day Lush goes all vegan. Because I would argue a brand is not 100% cruelty free (even though they don’t test on animals) if they still use stuff like beeswax which to obtain involves the exploitation of bees. See the full list of animal derived ingredients here if you want to familiarise yourself with what to look out for. Carmine for example, has multiple names such as crimson lake, natural red 4 and E120 so is something I’ve found quite difficult to spot.

It’s okay to make mistakes.  As you’re probably a bit confused right now anyway- there’s so many aspects to think about, so many products and brands to avoid that it almost seems not worth bothering. But I promise it is! It seems overwhelming at first but what a thing to boast to yourself: I do not partake in supplying funds for companies to test on guinea-pigs.

so cute!! I love u

What is more, there are still loads of options! Just because you can’t buy that Estee Lauder foundation anymore, doesn’t mean there’s not a great cruelty free and vegan alternative. Same goes for toiletries and hair products (I’ll do a separate posts on shampoos and conditioners etc- this is long already and we haven’t even got to the make up yet haha). I still buy products from brands that are not completely vegan but still cruelty free (obvs) just because it’s cheap/ it suits my skin type/ variation etc. I’m currently in the process of finding my favourite vegan make up from vegan brands that I’ll probably use again and again during the rest of my life. More and more brands are jumping on the vegan bandwagon though so keep a lookout.

Cruelty Free Kitty is a great resource.

Just google a specific product and that usually gives you a straight forward answer.

Also PETA has several useful lists which are easy to navigate.

Bookmark these resources. Look for the leaping bunny which means it’s cruelty free on the back of products. Check if the brand itself tests on animals at all or sells to China. See if there’s a vegan alternative if it isn’t labelled as suitable for vegans.

Here’s a real life scenario for you. I’ve recently been wanting a new eye shadow palette for my birthday but when I was researching (to help my family so they don’t have to), all these brands that boast about their vegan range fell short at EYE SHADOW. Weirdly, even other blogs that listed for example the ABH palettes as vegan were not correct because when I looked at the ingredients it said it contained Carmine??? I love red eye shadow, it’s so autumnal and warm, but they all seem to have boiled down crushed beetles in??? UM WHO SANCTIONS THIS?? If companies stated more clearly **contains dead bugs btw** I don’t think people would be as convinced by their sales pitches, but look at that pigmentation! I’m not, for sure.

This research took a bit of work. And I’m happy to do so for my own benefit as well as sharing my findings to make it easier for readers of this blog! But it shouldn’t have been as complicated as it was. I’ve been looking for vegan products for almost two years now and the information is still not clear. It is a current and controversial issue but one we as the consumers can definitely put pressure on.

On a more positive note, a good place to start is Superdrug. Superdrug is the superior place to visit on the high-street for beauty products – and great for on a budget! I always end up scrolling on Beauty Bay and Feel Unique but never committing to the extortionate priced items in my basket. Maybe the quality is slightly better than drugstore brands, but not £15-difference-in-price better. Instead I spend lots at Superdrug (but gotta get them deals!).

Boycott Boots, here is why Superdrug is super super:

It has a selection of great drugstore brands; you can notice a difference between a Huda pallet and a Makeup Revolution but I still get compliments on my pink eye shadow from Makeup Revolution (unfortunately turns out this palette has carmine in sigh, I tried and some of their other palettes are vegan).

THEY HAVE A COMPLETELY VEGAN AND CRUELTY FREE MAKE UP RANGE and the products are actually very reliable and good value for money. No messing about here, thank you Superdrug you’re my hero x

Everything else i.e. not make up in their own brand range is cruelty free and almost all is vegan (I’ve found some foot cream with honey in it) and the great thing is that everything is labelled clearly (!!!)

STUDENT DISCOUNT- Unidays and NUS, get on it.

A BEAUTY CARD- gotta get them points because then you get free stuff.

Thursdays you get all these extra treats if you shop in store (see ya there).

And there’s always some deal or another like 3 for 2 or get this thing free and I’m like yes this gives me an excuse to stock up on everything because I’m saving money in the long run.

e.l.f.- another completely vegan and cruelty free brand exclusively sold in Superdrug stores. It is so liberating being able to buy everything and not have to check. And I really rate most Elf products.

Any more questions or comments feel free to share! Even if you still eat meat and/or dairy and don’t want to change that part of your life, using cosmetics and toiletries that contribute to suffering is completely unnecessary and switching will still make a difference! So (finally) here are some places to get you started! I hope I’ve convinced you to do the kind and ethical thing ❤

I’ve linked most of the products to Superdrug so if you fancy a make up haul you can just use Superdrug (note, student discount is not available online cry). All of these are products that come from cruelty free brands and are vegan, even if not all products from that particular brand are vegan.

Face

Primer

e.l.f. Mineral Face Primer

Let’s start with the basics. I rate the elf primers. Affordable and do the job well. There are plenty of variations to suit different skin types and for different occasions. The Mineral Face Primer is my favourite at the moment.

Foundation

Gosh Foundation Drops 30ml Ivory 002

Okay I’m still struggling to find THE love of my life (foundation-wise and real life lol) but this one comes pretty close. I love GOSH products, the quality is just above a lot of the other drugstore brands but not all of them are vegan 😦

This foundation buffs very nicely and is just the right amount of coverage! It is fairly long-wearing too when combined with a primer and setting spray/powder

Concealer

B. Flawless Concealer Duo N1/C2

This one is okay- it’s got a creamy texture an the ability to blend two shades and is fine if you put foundation over the top. But I have terrible dark circles under my eyes an I just need something a bit stronger.

So am still looking for a banging vegan concealer, hit me up if you got any suggestions.

Powder

GOSH Velvet Touch Primer & Setting Powder – Transparent

This is a versatile product- can be used as base and/or setting powder. It gives a nice finish though and keeps everything in place. The flaw with loose powder is that they are not the easiest to use.

Highlighter

e.l.f. Baked Highlighter Moonlight Pearls 704

Lovely lil highlighter! I feel like it’s quite subtle so I go a bit crazy on the layers but for a fiver, it adds great dimension and lasts forever.

Bronzer

I Heart Revolution Bronzer Love Hot Summer 5g

I loveee this bronzer! I use to adore the Hula bronzer from Benefit but alas, Benefit needs to go in the burn pile. I have gone through some bad bronzers since, but this is just perfect for my fair complexion!

Lips

(I do not suit lipstick so barely wear anything other than my Lush lip balm sorry this has one product, will let you know if I find any more gems)

e.l.f. Matte Lip Colour Tea Rose

This is like a pencil lipstick, it’s a sort of hybrid but I actually am quite a fan! Nice to add a bit of subtle colour and complete a look without being too in your face, or drying.

Eyes

Mascara

Too Faced BETTER THAN SEX MASCARA

The pink one, and top right shows the brush. Yes I should probably make a joke how this mascara is better than sex (but let’s be honest, it’s not) but it is my favourite mascara for sure! So dramatic, coal black, and actually makes my eyes look bigger! It does flake a bit towards the end of the day, but the mascara itself lasts so long! I buy roughly one a year.

The gold mascara is Gaya Cosmetics Vegan Mascara for Sensitive Eyes.

It was a present and I actually really like it! It’s the opposite to my Better Than Sex mascara, it lengthens lashes and is a bit less dramatic for everyday. It also doesn’t flake as much. The brush is in the top left photo. The two mascaras combined, create the ultimate dramatic eyelashes.

Palettes

Okay story time: so I was going to include my Urban Decay Naked 2 Pallet here. It’s a go-to for nights out and the best pigmentation palette I have. I got it for my birthday last year and I specifically remember asking for a vegan eye shadow palette. And I specifically remember my Mum saying she double checked with the lady who sold it to her in Debenhams or whatever that it was definitely vegan. And up to five minutes ago I thought it was! I had done light research a year a go, couldn’t find anything to convince me otherwise, it was cruelty free after all.  BUT IT’S NOT VEGAN! Urban Decay is a cruelty free brand but is owned by L’Oreal so its parent company isn’t even cruelty free so belittles its cruelty free status. On the UD website, it says all eye shadow in the palette MAY CONTAIN CARMINE. And now, I just feel like my life’s a lie, how does a brand get this far and so popular that almost every girl has one but people aren’t deterred by not only the dead beetles, but the brand’s laid-back attitude to using animal derived ingredients?

Also whilst partaking in this vigorous research for this post, I have reason to believe my other fave palette, Makeup Revolution Flawless 4, isn’t vegan. I bought this palette fairly recently and although the pigmentation isn’t great unless you add water or hairspray to your brush (though hairspray can dry the eye shadow out), I do remember looking up whether it is vegan. Superdrug again is extremely helpful because it has a vegan filter (as do an increasing amount of websites thank you). But I thought I would mention this here to admit I make mistakes. And sometimes my good intentions don’t get come to fruition.

Instead I shall include my Lily Lolo Laid Bare Eye PAlette. 

These are lovely quality creamy eye shadows for a shimmery every day. The downside is the individual eye shadows are kinda small (but portable!)

e.l.f. Matte Eyeshadow Palette Mad For Matte

Elf classic mattes good for a basic look and the base of a more complex one if you combine with another palette. A must-have!

Eyeliner

Supercat

The one time you’re allowed to go to Boots is for Soap and Glory. Yes, their products are pretty fab, and they are cruelty free. This eyeliner, the ultimate of all eyeliner pens. is also vegan (THANK GOODNESS). 10/10 feel like a super cat.

Lashes

Extreme caution here!!! Some of the most popular lashes are made from mink who are kept on fur farms. Elf do cruelty free lashes (but I’ve found them not to be so good).

I tend not to buy lashes because they are SO expensive and would rather invest in a good mascara.

Just be careful. Check.

Brows

No competition, brows is where I justly splash out a little and get the Dipbrow Pomade by Anastasia Beverly Hills. It is God-like and worth the hype. The only bad thing is that it dries out quite easily. Sometimes I have to add a little water or setting spray to my brush to get it going.

Setting Sprays

Can you tell I’m a fan of elf?

I’m not sure how well setting sprays actually work but I wanted to try one. I think I can notice a difference but I prefer a good powder to set my make up. Sometimes I double up. Also word to the wise, apply after eye makeup has completely dried.

Perfume

Eden Perfumes

I’ll do a proper post about this fab company but just buy from Eden Perfumes. Perfume can contain some nasty ingredients- Eden Perfumes are all vegan and not tested on animals. They make dupes of popular brands (who can afford the eye-watering £50 perfume of Marc Jacobs bottles anyway?) that smell almost exactly the same! I love No. 309 Daisy and No.470, a Tom Ford dupe. They have two stores, one in Brighton and one in London so worth a visit where you can try everything!

Even better, you can send your bottles back to get them refilled at a cheaper price whilst also saving on waste yay!

Brushes

Like most people, I have just collected a random assortment of brushes over the years. When buying brushes make sure the hairs are synthetic. I really like Eco Tools though.

Also Superdrug has an own brand brush cleaner for those who need a good, cheap brush cleaner!

    As always, please share any of your finds! As you can probably tell, I don’t venture outside of Superdrug much but I am most willing to do on a recommendation!

Katy x

Vegan and Cruelty Free Make Up Favourites After much experimenting and researching (and spending) I wanted to share my go-to beauty products that are vegan and cruelty free (and most of them relatively inexpensive).

[thesinglesjukebox]

THE 1975 - LOVE IT IF WE MADE IT [4.46] Get out your popcorn, it's time for another controversial One Nine Seven Five single...

Will Adams: What? It's just an ordinary The 1975 s- *reads lyrics* OH MY GOODNESS! [3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Matt Healy yelling Hot Takes™ in a wind tunnel as a warmed over INXS track plays is weirdly compelling, but not quite good. [5]

Claire Biddles: If anyone else tried this zeitgeist-quotes lyrical trick (it's barely a trick!) I would hate it, but a) I'm hugely predisposed to The 1975; and b) their inherent miraculousness somehow makes them the exception to every rule. The lyric tries to hold the enormity of the world and so does the music -- each electronic whoosh and whizz is a digital overspill from the heady whole, like even something this maximalist and ambitious isn't quite enough for them. [10]

Iain Mew: The sound is a great expansion of the omnivorous approach of the last album. Taking a beautiful twinkle and one shiny happy phrase and setting upon them with echo, reflections and a lot of noise, its sonic trip represents the overload of modernity in the compelling way that the lyrics resolutely don't. Maybe it's because I've been extremely online since way before The 1975 was a thing, but I'm already familiar with a great stream of context-free sourness and nonsense, and I'd rather not encounter any replications of it. If you're singing "poison me daddy" and "fuck your feelings" as slogans for satire, you're still singing "poison me daddy" and "fuck your feelings" as slogans. It's on a level with someone seeking out the most awful tweets to quote tweet them for clowning purposes, at best. [3]

Alfred Soto: Have these loudmouths gone and interpolated The Blue Nile? Sounds like it. "The Downtown Lights" relied on a steady pulse to put over its lovelorn message; "Love It If We Made It" relies on "The Downtown Lights" to pull a con job on fans born after 1985. I mean, why is this mix so crowded? [5]

Eleanor Graham: The 1975's music has this quality of dancing around your own mind in the stale air of Tory safe-seat mid-late teenhood in an endless cycle of UCAS and grey skies and girls and boys and club toilets with peeling paint. I don't expect anyone to be able to relate to that, but please don't equate my specificity with cosy familiarity. I'm talking about "Robbers" cutting straight to the core of everything that hurts about growing up within its first 30 seconds. Uncomfortable? Oh, god yeah! But when something so closely resembles the inside of your head, it is churlish to deny that you're a fan. All of this goes to say: I am incapable of being objective about "Love It If We Made It." Because it is essentially a dystopian "Robbers," with the same yearning indie thrum and a new urgency; because, well, you know, everything's decaying; because aren't we all thinking about the death of the republic on some level at all times, but don't we also need bangers? Of course, we should be cynical about pop songs that make half-hearted jabs at the administration and reference the deaths of children, which both 1975 singles have now done. In its defence, this one at least makes the statements "I moved on her like a bitch" and "thank you, Kanye, very cool" sound terrifying and surreal enough to remind me that "terrifying" and "surreal" should not have become platitudes. Is it toothless? Is it exploitative? Or will it be read in twenty years simply as addressing the elephant in the room? They've thrown the chorus in there -- raw, open, pleading, trailing off like a comet in the night sky -- to make all of those questions feel inconsequential. [8]

Juan F. Carruyo: A shocker in gloomtown, the song starts with a bang and it never lets up, swallowing everything in its path. The moody production suits the enveloping soundscape and it's worthy of mentioning how the bass plays against the keys in the refrain. By the time the song ends, it feels like this is the soundtrack for the rapture. [8]

Edward Okulicz: I'm massively fond of the 1975, but this is puddle-deep where it's trying to be ~meaningful~ and ~edgy~ and ~zeitgeisty~ and it's a hookless joy after the previous single's buzzy earworm. Big-name artists probably think they've earned the right to release indulgences, but we shouldn't pretend singles like this are anything more. [2]

Will Rivitz: Leave it to The 1975 to build off an earth-shatteringly good teaser single with a follow-up nearly as bad as the first was good. Look, I'm all for politically conscious songwriting, but these lyrics could have been written by any of the interchangeable and smugly ineffective liberal Facebook pages my high school friends repost material from. I can overlook the awful lyricism of "Give Yourself A Try" ("Like context in a modern debate, I just took it out," eurgh) because a) it's only occasional and b) is utterly drowned out by an ecstasy of electric guitars, but here Matty Healy's slacktivist garbage piles are given main billing. One point for the Lil Peep shoutout, one point for the glorious jangles after the second chorus reined in too soon in favor of a bridge that is somehow worse than the verses, and absolutely nothing else. [2]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I have to give credit where credit is due: this is an evil song that utilizes its structure as a means to elevate and justify its conceptual gambit. Matt Healy reads off a list of provocative phrases that act as a simulacrum of the discouraging news headlines, ironic shitposts and self-impressed hot takes that crowd numerous corners of the internet. The pulsating beat and claustrophobic mix amplify that particular dread, and the swirling harp is the only sound that feels unstuck from it all. It hints at a hope that is later projected in the chorus, but it turns out to be nothing more than a red herring. I don't expect Healy to provide answers -- I'd argue that he took the more effective route in providing a moment of release over anything concrete -- but I don't believe him at all when he says he'd "love it if we made it." This is the sort of dude who finds joy in crassly exploiting the tragedy of others for the sake of art, and it finds its roots in how he decided on the band's name. When the chorus finally breaks free from the monotony, his voice has a smugly arrogant tone that snaps everything into place: Healy is eager to be the source of relief for the trigger warning-necessary lyrics that he doled out in the first place. He can only be a savior for the bullshit he pushes on you, and he'll cover it up by touting we instead of I. As a political statement, this has virtually no worth. As a piece of music, the bridge makes exceedingly clear that this is just an edgy "We Didn't Start The Fire." As a depiction of narcissistic manipulation, this is excellent -- perhaps the best of the year. [0]

Vikram Joseph: Even without the viral billboard advertising campaign, "Love It If We Made It" is much larger than life, but offsets its pretensions with self-aware hyperbole and a streak of pitch-black humour. The genuine venom towards a society that permits Donald Trump and "a beach of drowning three year olds" is undercut by an awareness that we're all tied up in this mess -- they can get away with railing against modern existence without sounding aloof or curmudgeonly, because they're so self-evidently part of it, and, to some extent, in love with it too. The chorus is equal parts earnest optimism and grim humour, which just about epitomises their brand. There have been a lot of "We Didn't Start The Fire" comparisons, but it actually makes me think more of a half-speed, tongue-in-cheek "Ignoreland"; The 1975 feel better having screamed, don't you? [8]

Lauren Gilbert: See, I wrote an entire blurb about how this is "New Americana" v. 2018, and then promptly deleted it to write about what it means for modernity to have failed us. Spoiler alert: Modernity has not failed us, but the specific iteration of modernity of which Healy writes is certainly Not Great. Capital M Modernity is more (and less) than drugs and borders and Trump. At the risk of sounding like the pedantic graduate student I am, modernity is characterized by industrialization, market economies, nation states, individuality, and secularism (surely not the "Jesus save us!" Healy mentions). Healy's Modernity-as-characterized-by-this-song is not that. He's writing about the dissatisfactions of a left-leaning person in the Trump/May/dear-god-why-is-Boris-Johnson-still-around era, a modernity grounded in the specific sociocultural norms and events that shaped how certain rich English-speaking countries experienced in 2018. And if we consider that particular experience of modernity as the only possibility we have, it's pretty easy to conclude "modernity has failed us" and write a "We Didn't Start The Fire" of terrible things. And I'll give Healy some credit; "Love It If We Made It" does sound and feel like living in twenty-fucking-eighteen. But modernity the concept does not imply that we must live in our specific instance of modernity; we do not have to accept Trump and income inequality and in-the-future-everyone-will-be-famous-for-fifteen-minutes Modernity. And more than that, that specific (miserable) modernity is not even the only modernity happening right now. Around the world, people are living longer, healthier lives; fewer people live in extreme poverty; there are fewer wars. Healy's Modernity may feel like a prison, where we are trapped forever in endless cars on endless roads to places we don't want to go, but it is not the only game in town. I (and many others) am alive today because of modern(ity) medicine & honestly, I'll take Donald Trump and Brexit and "thank you, Kanye, very cool" as the price of being alive. Perhaps it's too much to ask for a band known for its cynicism to consider a fuller context, and the very real positives in the world we live in, but hey, why give themselves a try? [4]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

[meganambers]

  Creating a streetwear line can be both taxing and rewarding, especially when it is a family business. However, the Iphi brothers, make running a company as a family appear easy by giving each other the space to be their own creative selves. Hailing from Toronto, Canada, Ariel and Isac created ‘Cold Attitude‘, a brand that gives the customers a taste of the fashion and culture behind the capital of Ontario.

I recently caught up with the team of brothers and we discussed the making of ‘Cold Attitude‘, how they gained their experience of music by running events and parties to creating their now successful brand and who they hope to work with, in the near future.

  Megan Ambers: Who are the designers behind ‘Cold Attitude’? 

Cold Attitude: We are brothers, founders, and designers of the brand. I myself, Ariel Iphi (age 23), run the operational side of things along with finding the inspiration to curate a lot of our designs. My brother, Isac Iphi (age 21), handles marketing and public relations. There’s a lot that goes into what we do, but in hindsight, we’re a jack of all trades here. Together we use both of our individual tastes and unique fashion senses to create our clothing. We influence each other heavily. It gets tough at times, and disagreements do arise, but that’s probably due to our focus to deliver the best product we can.

MA: How did growing up in Toronto inspire the message behind “Cold Attitude”?

Cold Attitude: When you think of one of the greatest cities in the world, you almost immediately think of New York. We had the benefit of having so much family there, that we visit a couple times here and there per year. We always get the same questions, “What do you do up there?”, “How cold is it?”, I’ll be like, the same weather as here to be honest. New York showed us a lot, it showed us a lot of potentials that Toronto has. New York birthed Biggie Smalls, Jay Z, and Diddy, but Toronto brought Drake, The Weeknd and Tory Lanez to the world. We have a culture and it’s time for the world to see it. Toronto is everything to us, and we wanna show everyone why. We felt that our voice hasn’t been heard and that we may as well give it a shot. The idea of Cold Attitude essentially holds a double entendre. The phrase derives from the idea of aggressive and hungry behavior. Being Cold blooded, or having a Cold Attitude. It also breaks through the idea that Toronto, Canada is more than just being the “Cold” city of all the great cities in the world. And we as Torontonians have an Attitude to show what we got. We’re more than just the cold city above the border.

  MA: On your “About” page of your website, you said that your clothing line “has emerged from an entertainment collective.” Can you further explain what do you mean by entertainment collective and how did you incorporate that to your line?

Cold Attitude: My Brother and I, at a young age, ran events and concerts. Isac was 17 at the time and I was 19. It was hard to have an underage DJ perform at venues. So we bought out a club for a night, sold tickets, and even brought out Robin Banks, a Toronto rapper. We did so well that the owner of the club offered a residency position. That’s how we started. We later did it again and brought out Ramriddlz, and at this point, we’ve been in the presence of many artists, one of them being A Boogie Wit A Hoodie. In earlier days, we understood that we needed to make an entertainment group. We were shooting music videos with the help of @avi.vsl, we were booking shows, club appearances and even getting involved in studio time. We thought the perfect thing to top it off was to have some hats to represent us and it essentially took off from there.

   MA: How does “Cold Attitude” separates itself from other streetwear lines in Toronto?

Cold Attitude: Our goal is for the brand to be the push of peoples comfort and confidence. It stands for people that have something to prove. All styles, all cultures, and anyone that feels some resonance with the product. It may be hard to see all of that now, but as time goes and we develop, we will have the power and ability to artistically broadcast what we mean. Through pop-ups, collaborations and networking to whom we feel would appreciate the product once they see it on hand. We create fashion but we do not compromise on the quality of the products. We want people to love wearing it and how they feel in it. We want people to be impressed by the quality being better than expected, so much that the price is justifiable.  

MA:  You mentioned before that it was your cousins (from Brooklyn) that played a role in the notoriety of your brand, particularly by word of mouth. How important is it for a designer or a creative in general to use word of mouth as a technique to gain more customers?

Cold Attitude: Word of mouth is everything of course. It’s like being the drug dealer on the block. You get success when everyone knows who has the good shit. We try to be as close to the customers as possible. My brother and I handle all the emails, DMs, complaints, and positive feedback. Social Media is the new high school cafeteria. A lot of customers, sales, and inquiries come from our DMs. It’s interesting to see how the word of mouth moves around. When we receive purchase orders, at the end of the month we like to take the time to try to spot out our customers. Who they are, their demographic and what they’re into. We’ll almost always see some mutual relations. We learned this method from our cousins out in Brooklyn, I can’t really speak on what the products were, but we’ll leave it at that I guess.

 MA:  Define what fashion means to you?

Cold Attitude: Fashion means wearing your personality. They say the eyes are the windows to your soul. I feel like fashion is the book cover of your character. In many ways we find that fashion correlates with music. We often listen to artists that resonate a story within us. We buy albums and listen to singles that express how we feel. Clothing has the same effect on us. We buy things based on how we feel towards the product. What’s the story behind the brand name, what’s the process on how it’s made, to what organizations do they contribute and get involved in. Fashion hits uniquely to peoples tastes and cultures. That’s the fun of it to me. I love learning and exploring different personalities, cultures, and emotions and think of how we can create something to offer them.

  MA: What skills do you feel are a necessity in order to be a successful designer?

Cold Attitude: Not being afraid to challenge comfort zones. It’s probably one of the toughest parts of the fashion industry. Nobody cares about your product if it follows a trend 2 years later. Often times a product can take up to 6 months to create from conception to retail. The pressure of timing, and actually knowing whether or not you have the next trend on your hands is often challenging. One of the first products we had mocked up was an all black corduroy crewneck. There weren’t much corduroy products available in the market. And so we were extremely nervous to launch the product. About a year later, corduroy was the trend. We would’ve been very successful with the product had we stepped out of our comfort zone. And so, for every design we mock up, we try our best to challenge ourselves and our comfort.

MA: How do you stay in touch with the current trends regarding fashion?

 Cold Attitude: A lot of our inspiration comes from what creatives of underground artists are into. We see what people are wearing to the club, and what catches peoples interests. Working in the clubbing and events industry makes it really helpful of course. Our eyes are open. We see everything from the streets to the internet. Instagram is a huge platform where people display their favorite fits. We always keep ourselves updated, however, we don’t really care to align our brand with those trends. We also like to experiment with new fabrics, some that aren’t as traditional as many brands might explore for retail outlets. That really helps us to create unique pieces and integrate higher-end fashion goods with artistic designs for better pricing and delivery. 

 MA: Isac, as a DJ, you know and understand how to follow trends when it comes down to what songs are and aren’t popular in the clubs. How did you and your brother Ariel incorporate that into your line? 

Cold Attitude: We see the potential in something that may not be hyped at the moment but has the potential to be in the future. Bringing back old tracks like Yeah! By Usher, or If I Can’t by 50 Cent. Those songs still bump, and the club loves it. I like offering nostalgia mixed with some “SoundCloud” songs that are on a current wave. My favorite is when I see people shazaming a track. My brother and I really see the same protocol follow suit in clothing. Sometimes bringing back the old becomes the new. Added with a twist to which has not been mainstream yet. 

MA: Are there any brands or celebrities you see yourself collaborating with?

Cold Attitude: Yes. We had the pleasure of working with Jake Paul. The relationship was helped through a friend, Jaay Da Barber. Jake saw the product, loved the quality and asked if he can have a set. We were excited because it assured us that we’re on the right path. It was an organic reach. We didn’t reach out or pay for an endorsement. There was an appreciation for the product. Our segmented target is however revolved around music. We want to inspire sound to have some physical aesthetics. Not specific to Hip Hop music, but if there was one artist that I could pick to wear our brand it would be either Lil Uzi or Jay Z. 

MA: where do you see yourself in the ten years?

Cold Attitude: Our only goal coming up is to open a retail store in Toronto. We have dreams and ambitions to open up shop in New York, LA, London, etc… But we don’t really focus so far ahead. We try to focus on what’s next in the near future and things that can gradually take us to the next step. Wherever that may be.

 MA: What advice do you have for designers that want to step into the designer aspect of streetwear?

Cold Attitude: To understand within yourself what is your inspiration and create a story. But really, The best advice is to probably tell you that you don’t need any advice. Creativity comes uniquely from within each person. No one can tell you how you feel, you just gotta work on what you would love. I’ve done sales all my life since a young age. One thing I can tell you is that it’s near impossible to sell a product you wouldn’t buy yourself. So do whatever you feel is best for you, someone out there will resonate with it.

IAmMeganAmbers Exclusive: Founders of Streetwear, Cold Attitude Talks Working With Jake Paul, Being from Toronto, and Splitting Responsibilities as Brothers Creating a streetwear line can be both taxing and rewarding, especially when it is a family business.