US surfer Carissa Moore Photo: BRIAN BIELMANN / AFP (Getty Images)

The Tokyo Olympics will feature many of our favorite sports like gymnastics, track and field, and swimming – but there will also be six new (or almost new) sports in the mix. Here’s what you need to know to see the newcomers to the “2020 Olympics,” as they are called. (Yeah, we know it’s 2021.)

Baseball and softball

Baseball and softball are among the six, but they’re not entirely new to the games. Baseball (an all-male event) first appeared in the Olympics in 1992, and softball (for women) was added in 1996. Both were dropped in 2008 and are returning this year, though only six teams participate in each. For baseball, these are the United States, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Israel, and the Dominican Republic. For softball, these are the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Italy.

Skateboarding

Skateboarding is going to be a fully Olympic sport for the first time, though it made an appearance at the 2014 Youth Olympic Games. There will be two events: Park and Street.

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The course for Street is designed to mimic an urban street. There are stairs, ramps, railings, curbs, and benches available, and it is up to the competitor to put together a series of moves that take advantage of the features available.

Park skateboarding is done in a bowl, with steep sides that allow for spins and other tricks in the air. Both events have men’s and women’s competitions.

How is it rated? The jury evaluates the movements of the participants according to speed, height, originality and execution.

Who can be seen: Street favorites include Nyjah Huston from the US, Yuto Horigome from Japan and Leticia Bufoni from Brazil. Sky Brown from Great Britain, Heimana Reynolds from the USA and the American-Finnish skateboarder Lizzie Armanto (skating for Finland) can be seen in the park.

surfing

Shortboard surfing (with boards less than eight feet) will be in the Olympics for the first time this year. Men and women compete separately. Four people will run together, but only one surfer can ride a wave at a time.

How is it rated? The jury evaluates the surfers’ movements based on factors such as the difficulty of the wave and the movement they choose, the variety of movements, the originality, the ability to combine movements and the “speed, power and flow” of the movements.

Who can be seen: The USA, Australia and Brazil are the strongest countries here. John John Florence and Carissa Moore are favorites from the US; Also look out for Stephanie Gilmore from Australia and Gabriel Medina from Brazil.

Sport climbing

Three climbing disciplines will be held at the Olympic Games in Tokyo: speed, bouldering and lead. Men and women compete against each other in all three, their placements in each being considered together to determine who will receive a medal.

How is it rated? Speed ​​climbing takes place in head-to-head runs, with the winner of each advance advancing. Times are expected about six seconds per run for men and eight for women.

Bouldering, which is done without a rope because it doesn’t stray too far from the ground, allows participants to make multiple attempts to climb to the top of a specific problem. Climbers have four minutes to climb as many problems as possible; The goal of everyone is to get both hands on the last grip with as few attempts as possible. Getting to a designated zone near the summit isn’t as good as climbing the boulder, but it will still hit someone who didn’t even make it that far.

Lead climbing allows only one attempt per participant, and climbers climb a 15-meter wall one after the other. The further up the wall you can climb within the six-minute limit, the better your score. If there is a tie, the fastest promotion wins.

Who can be seen: The top climbers include Adam Ondra from the Czech Republic, Janja Garnbret from Slovenia and Miho Nonaka from Japan. The Americans to watch out for are Nathaniel Coleman, Colin Duffy, Kyra Condie, and Brooke Raboutou.

karate

Judo has been an Olympic sport for decades, but karate is new to the games. There are two events: kata and kumite. The events are suitable for both men and women, each with three weight classes.

Kata is a demonstration of karate moves against an imaginary opponent, and participants can choose one of 102 pre-arranged sequences to perform. Kumite is a sparring event in which participants compete against each other in pairs.

How is it rated? Judges rate kata based on factors such as strength, speed and technique of movements. Kumite is scored through the individual blows and kicks the competitor takes on the body of his opponent, with each blow earning one to three points. The first person to have an eight point lead over their opponent is the winner of the game.

Who can be seen: In Kata, Sandra Sánchez and Damián Quintero from Spain as well as Kiyou Shimizu and Ryo Kiyuna from Japan are among the front runners. Kumite favorites include Ugur Aktas from Turkey, Anzhelika Terliuga from Ukraine and Irina Zaretska from Azerbaijan.

Photo: Afanasiev Andrii (Shutterstock)

Vacuum cleaners can get clogged if objects get stuck in the hose or if the container is too full, but most clogs can be easily cleared simply by emptying your vacuum cleaner regularly. However, hair and string tend to wrap around the vacuum cleaner brush and can limit its movement, causing slow death until it stops spinning and your vacuum cleaner becomes unusable. At first glance, it might look complicated to get in and unravel the mess, but depending on the vacuum, it’s probably easier than you think.

How to remove a vacuum cleaner brush

The best way to clean a suction brush is to remove it. Unfortunately there is no universal vacuum cleaner, so remove the brush depends on the vacuum mark. Some require removing the lower grille that surrounds the brush; others have a convenient pull-out lever or button that opens a compartment on the side to remove the brush for cleaning. Most modern vacuum cleaners have this capability.

How to clean a tangled vacuum cleaner

Once you remove the brush, cleaning it up is pretty easy, like TikTok users @ vaneamaro91 Highlights. Take good scissors and cut along the length of the brush, being careful with the bristles so you don’t accidentally cut pieces off. Once the hair and tangled particles are loosened, pull the pieces apart with your hands and remove dirt from the brush. (Can wear gloves if you’re gross.)

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To the deeper cleansing, you can take a cleaning brush, detergent, and some white vinegar. After removing as much hair and dirt as possible, soak the brush in warm water with dish soap and use a cleaning brush to get into the small areas to loosen stubborn dirt. When you’re done, wipe it down with diluted white vinegar to disinfect the brush and remove any debris that’s still clinging to the bristles. Wipe it dry with a microfiber cloth and make sure the brush is completely dry before you reattach it. Congratulations, your vacuum cleaner will spin like new.

Photo: vangelis aragiannis (Shutterstock)

Socrates did not fear death. Although he suffered a gruesome death (he was executed by the state for the alleged crime of corruption of the Athenian youth), Socrates did not flee or plead with his executioner. If we take to heart his beliefs and teachings – that death is an inevitability that might actually be good – we can find greater acceptance in the unknown as well.

How did Socrates see death?

Socrates lived in a time of immeasurable barbarism, when death, war, and disease determined the experiences of the living. But his familiarity with death was strong, even by the brutal standards of the time. He was a soldier – and even something of a war hero; he saved the future Athenian leader Alcibiades during a siege of the city of Potidaea in 432 BC. Chr.– So he was much more used to the inevitability of mortality than most people in the 21st century.

Ancient Greek society thought of death as a spiritual transition into an underworld of spirits, crystallized by the spirit leaving the body in the form of a culminating exhalation. Socrates was less mystical in his interpretation of death and was clearly realistic if not skeptical about it. When the philosopher was 399 BC In court in Athens, Socrates spoke to a jury of 500 male citizens and delivered a speech that captured his thoughts on death on the most appropriate stage imaginable.

He said after the Cambridge University:

Also, remember in the following way that there is much hope that there is a good thing in being dead. Because being dead is one of two things: either it is like being nothing and the dead person has no perception of anything, or it is, as they say, a kind of change, namely the shifting of the soul from here to another place. And if it is indeed a complete absence of perception, like the sleep of someone who does not dream at all, death would be a remarkable gain.

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Socrates had a devoted follower in a young Plato who attended the trial that day. Regarding the behavior of his mentor prior to his execution, Plato noted that Socrates “appeared happy both in his manner and in his words when he died nobly and without fear”. It is an attitude that drove Socrates’ spirits as he drank from the hangman’s cup filled with poisonous hemlock.

How Socrates Can Teach You To Tame Your Fear Of Death

Socrates was in many ways a forerunner of the stoic school of ancient Greek philosophytrying to avoid negative emotions and replace them with an unwavering inner determination. Denying your feelings about death is not necessarily good, but accepting its eventuality can go a long way in taming your fear of the unknown.

It’s a scary concept to be sure but science hasn’t really figured out what it feels like to die beyond the experience of people pronounced dead and later resuscitated. As far as research has established, there are harrowing moments of mental and physical decline, but also hallucinatory reunions with loved ones who have passed away, cinematic moments of your life that flash before your eyes, a state of raptured contentment, and other blissful sensations.

The insight from Socrates’ meditations is that there is nothing to fear in the unknown. In addition, the opportunity to lead a virtuous life combined with the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom should open the doors to fulfillment while you are living. Before the jury, before his execution, Socrates made his most forward-looking and lasting statement: “Untested life is not worth living for man.” What one should do to combat any fear of death is to put oneself in the Investigate the present, suggested the philosopher.

Using the philosopher’s point of view as a guide – that people should seek beauty, strength, and health, tempered with the pursuit of knowledge – will help you ground in the present. Hopefully it fills you with a state of contentment so that death is not so much a morbid ghost haunting you as it is an insignificant aspect of your life.

Adobe recently announced that Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw, two great free drawing apps available on the iPad, will be removed from the Apple App Store (and Google Play) on July 19th. Fortunately, the apps get a free replacement in Adobe frescothat combines the features of Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw in a single app – but there could be a better choice for you, and now is the perfect time to find out.

You don’t need to make any changes as existing users can continue to use Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw as long as the programs are installed on their devices by July 19, but the apps will have limited support until they are fully retired January 10, 2022.

However, Adobe Fresco is honestly a much better app than Photoshop Sketch or Illustrator Draw ever were. (Adobe also offers iPad versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, but they’re locked behind a Creative Cloud subscription and lack many of the features of the desktop versions.)

The best other drawing apps for iPad Pro artists

And if you don’t like Adobe’s iPad apps and want to change something, there are plenty of other great drawing programs out there for the iPad Pro – maybe too many. To help you find one that suits your artistic needs, we’ve put together a shortlist of the best drawing apps for iPad Pro artists of every level. There are free and paid apps on this list (although the former are affordable options, we promise), but each has its own unique set of features and capabilities – whether it’s precise vector graphics, bold lines, or digital painting.

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Screenshot: Brendan Hesse

Procreate is a powerful app specially designed for iPad and Apple Pencil. The user interface is streamlined and easy to navigate, and it’s packed with professional features like custom brushes, layer blending modes, perspective grids, gradient maps, and more.

Procreate lacks some of the bells and whistles you’ll find in full-fledged desktop programs (I really wish it had Photoshop’s layer effects like “inner glow” and “outline”), and it’s one of the few apps on this list that isn’t available on other devices, but it’s linked to iCloud and Google Drive and supports PSD, PDF, PNG, TIFF, JPEG and its own .procreate file types, among others, so you can easily export Procreate images to other programs.

In fact, Procreate has been my favorite drawing and painting app for years – I use it more than any other app on this list, and it quickly replaced Photoshop when I discovered it a few years ago. It’s a paid app, but dropping $ 10 on a one-time purchase gives you lifetime access and all future feature updates, which is a much better deal than paying a monthly fee for a subscription-based app.

Screenshot: Autodesk

Sketchbook used to be a paid app, but Autodesk now offers the full version for free on the Apple App Store. It doesn’t quite have the same depth of functionality as Procreate or Clip Studio Pro, but it does include key features like custom brushes, layers, and gradient maps, and Sketchbook’s myriad perspective grids and drawing guides are great for creating engineering drawings and design work. It also converts pictures of hand-drawn sketches to pictures using your iPad’s camera. There are free Mac and Windows versions of Sketchbook available This is also useful for those who want to use a single program with a consistent user interface and functionality across multiple devices.

Screenshot: Brendan Hesse

Clip Studio Paint is popular with comic and manga artists who work digitally. It has robust brush customization settings and comes with built-in comic book page layout templates, animation tools, and even a library of 3D reference models – a great addition for anyone learning anatomy (and no, using them isn’t “cheating”).

Clip Studio Paint is available on iPad, Android, and desktop and comes in two versions: Clip Studio Paint Pro for $ 50, which includes all of the above, and Clip Studio Pro EX for $ 219, the advanced manga and Offers animation functions. Fortunately there is a Three month free trial available for all platforms so you can try it out before you buy, and monthly usage plans if you don’t want to pay full price at once.

Screenshot: affinity

Affinity’s digital art apps on iPad are more like professional desktop programs than streamlined mobile apps.

Affinity Designer is a vector graphics program, making it a solid alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator apps. It includes popular vector graphics tools like curves and precise shape creation, and is a good match for the well-known pen and pencil tools from Adobe Illustrator. Affinity Photo, on the other hand, is more similar to Photoshop and focuses on digital painting and photo editing tools. Both programs are known for their smooth, fast performance on iPad (although their exact performance depends on your iPad model) and their support for Apple Pencil.

Both apps cost $ 50, making them two of the most expensive options on this list, but you only have to pay for them once – which is still better than paying for a monthly subscription to Adobe’s software. You can buy too Mac and Windows versions every app.

Screenshot: Apple App Store

Our final highlighted selection is Linea Sketch, another completely free app. Compared to our other free selection, Sketchbook, Linea Sketch isn’t as sturdy, but its simplicity is part of its appeal.

Linea Sketch is a straightforward drawing and painting app that, unlike many of the cross-platform apps mentioned above, is designed specifically for the iPad and Apple Pencil. It’s a great beginner program too, thanks to its helpful color picking tips that offer a choice of complementary colors.

Other standard digital graphics features like line support, transform tools, perspective grids, built-in page layouts, and multi-layer support are also included (although I should note that the app only has five layers per drawing). If you want to edit your Linea Sketch drawings in other programs, you can export them as PSD, PNG or JPEG.

And much more

As I said earlier, this list only covers a fraction of the really useful drawing apps available on the iPad. I’ve mainly focused on apps that I use (or have used), so it’s likely missing some that other digital creators swear by. If your favorite isn’t on the list, leave a suggestion in the comments. If they turn out to be hugely popular, I’ll add them to the list in a future update.

[Channel News]