The Secret To Perfect Hair

Unless you have spent your life living pre-4000 BC, before the mirror was invented, you may have noticed that you have hair growing out of your head. Life in the Boomer Lane has noticed this since she was a toddler and her mother tried to comb her demented hair. Even bracing her foot against LBL’s tiny shoulder and yanking as hard as she could, Beloved Mom was unable to get LBL’s hair to look like anything other than Rasputin’s beard.

The years since have been filled with as many hair procedures as follicles on her head, in a series of unsuccessful attempts to make her hair more humanlike. Each procedure and each stylist was eventually abandoned.

One day, LBL was in a large, crowded department store, when two of her former hair stylists (who had each owned their own salons and had recently joined forces in one salon), stopped her and loudly announced that her hair looked like shit. They did this while one stood behind her and the other stood in front of her, each pulling her hair in even more directions than it had ever discovered on its own. A crowd formed around them and gawked, assuming this was a reality show about hair, in which people with bad hair were ambushed in public places, taken to New York, and transformed. But when the salon owners eventually moved on, the disappointed crowd disbursed.

Fairly recently, LBL was on the usual hunt for the perfect hair stylist when she saw one online that bleated “Voted the #1 Salon in (LBL’s hometown)!” What followed were glowing endorsements about the prowess of the salon’s owner. She dialed the number as fast as she could and made an appointment with the owner. When the Big Day arrived, LBL strolled into the salon, mentally prepared to have her life finally make sense. Said owner looked up from the women whose head he was slathering with a blue substance, and said, “Renee! I haven’t seen you in a while! Glad you are back!” This was not the best way to start. LBL may not be the sharpest tack in the tool box, but she realized two things immediately:

1. She must have been to this salon before.
2. If she hadn’t returned, it was, most likely, for a good reason.

An hour and a half later, she knew exactly why.

Disasters occur even when she has hairdressers she likes. She referred one hair stylist to a friend, and when her friend went there and loved the cut and color he did, said hairdresser promptly learned that his mom was quite ill, took a long leave of absence and eventually quit the salon altogether.

She referred her current hair stylist to another friend, who went with the highest hopes. They discussed at length how my friend wanted to look and the stylist said, “So you want funky, right?” LBL’s friend enthusiastically agreed. The snipping started and went on for some time. When finished, the stylist beamed and announced “Farah Fawcett!” As Farah Fawcett was, at the time, still dead, LBL’s friend thought it unlikely that the stylist was announcing that Ms Fawcett had just entered the salon. The stylist handed LBL’s friend a mirror and confirmed her worst nightmare. While hoping she would look like the cover of a magazine, she hadn’t anticipated that it would be a magazine from the 1980s.

LBL will no longer refer friends to hair stylists.

LBL has now figured out what the secret is to perfect hair every day, and it is neither wigs, large hats, nor burkas. She now wears her workout clothes at all times, and when she sees people she knows, she says, “Oh please excuse my hair. I spend most of my day in the gym and don’t wash my hair until I get home.” People are so stunned that they can only process the “most of my day at the gym” part. For more formal occasions, she does dress up, but quickly says, “Please excuse my hair. As I spend most of my day at the gym, I only had time for a shower, before getting dressed to go out.” Same reaction from people.

This technique is pretty flawless, unless, as the months have gone by, people are starting to wonder why, hair aside, the rest of LBL doesn’t look like she has seen the inside of a gym in a long time. She is working on this pesky issue now, and will share her thoughts with readers in a subsequent post.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

Mobile Gaming Is About To Overtake Consoles

When Hironobu Sakaguchi created “Final Fantasy” for the original Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987, he helped kickstart a trend in role-playing console games: epic stories, sprawling worlds for players to explore, and varied casts of interesting characters. Now he makes smartphone games.

It’s a move that makes good financial sense. In 2015, mobile gaming is projected to overtake console gaming in revenue, according to recently released data from Newzoo, an Amsterdam-based games research firm.

Mobile games are expected to bring in $25 billion in revenue globally this year, and more than $30 billion in 2015, according to Newzoo. Console gaming is moving the other way, with revenue expected to fall to $26.4 billion in 2015 from $26.9 billion in 2014, Newzoo data suggests.

Mobile games will “replace the traditional console market as the largest game segment” in 2015, Newzoo said in its report.

hironobu sakaguchi

Japanese video game creator Hironobu Sakaguchi

A spokesperson for Newzoo told The Huffington Post in an email that the decline in console game revenue overall can be attributed more specifically to a decline in revenue from handheld systems like the Nintendo 3DS and Playstation Vita. Revenue from games for TV consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One is expected to rise by 2017, though at a much slower rate than mobile gaming.

Sakaguchi’s first two mobile games haven’t exactly been smash hits. According to Google Play data, 2012’s “Party Wave” received only a few hundred downloads at most on the Android platform, while this year’s “Terra Battle” fared significantly better, with between 500,000 and 1 million downloads on Android. For reference, “Candy Crush Saga,” very much the gaming app to beat, has been downloaded up to 500 million times on Android since its release in 2012. (Statistics from Google Play were used because Android holds 83.6 percent of the global smartphone marketshare, and these games are international releases.)

It should be noted that Sakaguchi is not finished with console games, as he explained in a recent interview with Polygon. But fellow Japanese game developer Yoshiki Okamoto recently told Wired about his decision to abandon console gaming in favor of mobile.

Okamoto is the creator of “Street Fighter II,” a game that, like Sakaguchi’s “Final Fantasy” series, proved incredibly influential on the console gaming scene. Before it, the best head-to-head fighting experience you could get at home was (apart from actually fighting your siblings) Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.

“The business and content creation of anything for the console platform became just kind of overwhelming. It wasn’t at a level anymore where I could gather my friends and create something,” Okamoto told Wired.

He created a new mobile game called “Monster Strike” that’s available on both iOS and Android. It’s kind of a hybrid of billiards, Pokemon and Angry Birds, and like many popular games, it runs on a “freemium” model: You download the game without paying a penny, but it’s loaded with potential in-app purchases that can help you advance.

“Monster Strike,” a smartphone game from the creator of “Street Fighter II”

It’s no secret that “freemium” games are big money makers. “Candy Crush Saga” runs on the same model and generated $264 million last quarter. Such games can also be created with considerably less work than full console games: Kouki Kimura, development director of “Monster Strike,” reportedly told Japanese game magazine Famitsu that Okamoto made a functional mock-up of the game in just two weeks.

For a sense of what that means, compare those two weeks to the development process for “Final Fantasy XV.” The game was first announced in 2006 and is still in development, with a budget estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, if previous games are any indication.

Baking Substitutes For Dummies: How Alternative Ingredients Stack Up To Conventional Ones

When most people think about baking, they think butter, flour and sugar. But those traditional days are far behind. With alternative ways of eating — such as veganism and the gluten-free diet — gaining popularity, subbing in new ingredients has become the new “traditional.”

Carob powder in place of chocolate, flaxseeds to replace eggs, coconut oil instead of butter, and bean flours in place of all-purpose are just a few ways people are baking these days. But how do those ingredients stack up to the older, more traditional ones? The infographic below created by Simply Worktops broke it down for all of us, in terms of proteins, sugars, fibers and more. Plus, they also give insight on all the baking substitutes appropriate for each diet. Check it out and bake smarter.



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