It’s actually legit advice for beginning joggers/runners that if you can’t carry on a conversation you should slow down because you’re going too hard for optimal cardio training..
You shouldn’t be going at a pace that keeps you too busy trying not to die. Start with walking, build up little intervals of brisker walking and graduate to slow jogging…
I think campus life has a lot to do with it. always racing around for classes keeps you surprisingly in shape
I did not learn this myself until I went back to alma mater a year later to visit and nearly died on the stairs, like how the heck did I dash up and down them a mere year prior???
What makes leather so expensive anyway? We slaughter cows like nobody’s business and leather lasts a long time, so I doubt it is an issue of the hides being rare or the product requiring rapid replacement and thus creating scarcity. Is the bulk of the cost coming from the chemicals required for the tanning process? Are we paying for the over head created by disposal of toxic byproducts? Are specialized laborers or machinery involved still all that valuable in the modern age? Is there a secret leather cartel driving up prices with monopolization? What is going on here?
Different qualities of leather. (Full grain is thickest, most durable, best, most expensive, it’s like the whole skin. Top grain is still real good but not so crazy-expensive, the highest layers of the skin. Split grain is much less expensive, the lower layers. Bonded leather is the MDF particleboard of the mammalian world, it’s basically glue and dust.)
Hides are irregular shapes and may have undesirable variations, so even though a cow is pretty big, it’s not like a bolt of fabric, and you can’t get that many usably-large great pieces from each animal. Skilled people in factories probably have to cut each hide individually into all different grades of leather, and then sell/transport the types of grain they aren’t using, and that’s a lot of skilled work and extra middle-people.
I don’t know much about tanning.
Many other different skills involved, too. It’s definitely hard to make leather jackets well.
Markups for name brands — and maybe some brands invest in doing things more sustainably, or have higher pay for their skilled workers, or have factories that use only top-quality leather and fixings, or not.
Good leather will last for generations if cared for, so if can be an investment garment. An in-vestment, if you will (but you don’t have to and probably shouldn’t).
Digression: real leather is much more sustainable than plastic/vegan/faux leather, which are very poisonous to the environment to make, plus they soon leach into the ground in a landfill. Wool is very warm and can definitely be done sustainably. 🙂
Big factories very far away, such as in Turkey, Pakistan, and India, with various laws for chemical disposal, labour laws/costs, transportation, levels of middle-people who all need to take a cut, etc.
If you’re ever in India, Pakistan, or the Middle East, you can get leather way more cheaply there. (Similar to ceramics in Portugal and silver in Mexico.) It’s funny to see it sold there cheaply, because it’s usually way too hot to wear it until you get someplace else.
There! Now you know a bunch about leather.
Kimi
A town near where I grew up had a leather factory that closed due to bankruptcy. It turns out, while a hundred years ago the United States may have been the leather-making capital of the world, now there are only a few tanneries left. Part of this is due to shoe manufacturers moving abroad for cheaper labor, which causes most American tanneries to go out of business or followed them. Environmental regulations also moght play a factor, as the tanning process can be pretty rough on the environment, especially the water if it is dumped without doing quite a bit of treatment. You couldn’t fish or swim in rivers contaminated from the tanning process and smog was a big issue.
The cost of tanning also probably has difficulty due to how it can’t be automated or standardized. Each hide is different, so the process is more of an art that requires skilled workers to do it right than a formula where you always do a set amount of each ingredient. Leather is also used for a wide variety of things, including shoes, handbags, purses, upholstered furniture, and other items. It is probably more profitable for a company to pump out a lot of small items (that doesn’t have to worry about imperfections or getting a big piece of nice leather), than doing the more specialized and complicated work that requires leather without any imperfections (which might also be more profitable doing work for an expensive car or furniture, and not require the “softness” a jacket would). Also, cows are kept outside in an open environment, so it can be easy for them to get wounds or scars from things like parasitic flies (eg bot flies). Another factor might be that the US military uses a lot of leather.
Veronica
This was a good and educational comment
Big Z
I did an IT internship in the office of a leather tannery in the US back in college, and I can confirm that a LOT of the best sheets of fully-sized leather do in fact go mostly to car seats and not to clothing.
The environmental regs were WILD — it’s a nasty business literally filled with open vats of chemicals like a Batman villain origin story.
That said, you CAN automate a fair bit of it, depending on the specific tanning process, right up until the final sorting and grading of hides.
Kimi
Since they ended up shutting down, I have no idea how much they could have automated rather than having skilled workers for, how much technology has changed since then or how much was just flowery language on their part and not the actual truth. I would imagine that with the progress in automation in cameras and sensing in the past decade or so, you could probably micro-adjust a lot better now than back in the 60s (like using drones for crop health monitoring). That doesn’t bring quite the ring to it as saying your workers are artisans though. The idea that each cow can be a little bit different does make sense from one point a view (different genetics, life experiences, etc), but I have no idea how much that actually factors into the process other than what I was told and have read.
As such, I appreciate the correction Big Z, it is interesting to know.
Leather is just more labor-intensive to manufacture than many other fabrics. The time it takes for the tanning and processing of leather is where most of the cost comes from, I think. Pretty much all animal-based fabrics, like leather, silk, and wool, cost more because they require more effort just to raise/breed the animals.
Its mostly the long and complex process of turning skin into leather.
The skin needs to be cleaned of meat and fat tissues.
Dehaired. Cut into usable even pieces. Often split apart in layers.
Soaked and churned in one type of solution for hours, even days, dependent on thickness, chosen process and material.
Then washed and soaked in another one to get the tanning solution out since that is usually toxic.
At that point it gets physically treated, flattend, kneaded, rolled.
Then usually coloured, washed from colouring, then soaked in a fixiative.
Finally often surface treatment, steamrolling powders into the surface to preempt rot. Many modern leathers are finally coated with some kind of plastics film.
And all that before fasioning clothes out of it, which is also more complex than with normal, industrially even fabrics.
And many of those steps can not be fully automated since every skin is slightly different.
Its a whole lot of time, water, energy and chemicals, with many steps needing experienced handlers to oversee and steer the mechanized processes.
Not to mention the expensive wastewater treatment – in regions that care about such stuff.
But also: luxury product.
Buy in india or china where the largest producers are located today (again, enviromental impacts) and the prices we westerners pay appear kinda ridiculous.
Thrift stores are wonderful things. I’ve found several very reasonably priced leather jackets there. They’re not my style, but I have bought them for my motorcycle-riding friends and family on occasion.
2nd hand store or specifically the salvation army store, a stinky piece-leather beauty. Good jackets look like a single piece of material, this patch-leather jacket looked like frankenstein made it out of rat-hides, but only if you were close enough to see the 1950 individual stitches.
It mostly smelled like motor oil and 50-years of cheap tobacco, which I suppose is a lot of leather jackets, even if they aren’t bonded jigsaw puzzles.
I was confused at first reading this strip because they’re just dressed like they’re going to class, but I think they’re meant to be running for exercise.
Joyce’s pants have a vertical stripe down the side so I think they’re doing what I more or less did when I jogged in the winter in Colorado, which was jacket and hat and gloves over my exercise clothes.
Depending on how cold it is, you also wanna add like leg warmers, or thicker socks.
(I’m in a warmer state now, so instead I just add a UV neck muffler and an extra non-jacket layer on top.)
When I did, and what I do now that I bike, I’ve got two things, one you can do one you can’t.
1. I was born with the Full Winter Package, which is to say, I’m one of those freaks shovelling snow in shorts and it feels GREAT because FINALLY it’s not hot. BUT!
2. Even I start out wearing more, which gets to the thing you can do, which is layering. More layers equals more insulation, and most of all, more flexibility. I used to put on oversized sweatpants over regular trousers, just for example. Outer jacket plus inner jacket (or a liner) plus regular clothes underneath works is another example. The outer layer should be a wind blocking layer.
3. okay I lied there’s three: gloves and heavy socks. You lose so much heat out of your hands it’s not funny (or at least I do), and keeping those warm keeps your whole arm warm. Thick/warm socks are similar but also have to deal with water and ground contact so that’s why they matter a lot too.
Not really a winter tip, but I learned you can wear shorts quite early in the year. As long as your upper body is warm, bare legs don’t matter as much.
Personally, I have a set of insulated tights and shirt that I wear under my usual exercise gear and a balaclava, but I live in the Great White North and have to take it somewhat more seriously than the average USian.
I live somewhere that doesn’t typically get below freezing, but when I did run a lot, I’d intentionally dress less warm than the temperature needed because Id get very warm very fast, and my body sucks at regulating that shit. Like, if I know I’m going to need a sweater and a jacket for class, then I need a light jacket for running. Any more and I overheat and have a panic attack
I always feel loved when my spouse gets me clothes. They have a pretty good read on my tastes.
It does feel odd to do it with a fresh romance as a college freshman. I don’t have any logic or rhetoric to back that position up, but I can sum up my feelings as “Whoa, Dorothy, chill out”
No yeah I like playing dress-up with my partners, but she just jumps into it with an immediacy that gives me pause.
Pocky
I mean, we established Joyce is totally into it. So depends on the relationship really. I know some couples who pretty much default to the others fashion tastes because it makes their lives easier lol
315 thoughts on “Brisk”
NGPZ
we get it Dorothy, ya think she looks hot in leather XD
QueenofSodor
i mean, she DOES
jeffepp
Split the difference, and go with leather lingerie.
Dara
p. sure that’s for Dina
hope so anyway xD
Decidedly Orthogonal
I was thinking leather jacket over lingerie. But yours is good too! ?
Tan
…. Well that just awakened something in me. Okay. So now I know that.
Erik
Kate McKinnon rocked that look in the Celesbian interview with Dani Campbell…
Yet_One_More_Idiot
A babydoll nightie and leather jacket… excuse me, one cold shower required… xD
QueenofSodor
i think dorothy should wear something leather to try and match the vibe of joyce’s leather jacket. maybe a collar?
Pocky
if they both get leather jackets, they can start a dorky biker gang.
eskimolos
Really getting Harry/Kim vibes from Disco Elysium, maybe they could fleece the jackets from some delinquents while pretending to be the fuzz.
Jon
Better than getting Harry Kim vibes – they’d be freshmen forever!
Casi
and they’d have to die at least twice, and have one of them replaced by a duplicate and have it never be talked about again.
Morrison
GOOD IDEA QueenofSodor
Anna Grant
Sub Dorothy truthers rise up
QueenofSodor
i’m always saying this
girls rule basically
rise up? like to the top? you’re not making sense
Kazuma Shouri
okay but like do you get puppygirl or kittygirl vibes? cuz honestly I think she could go either way, but I do feel she leans slightly kittygirl
QueenofSodor
i mean, canonically she is considered a puppygirl!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/arf
Byron Orpheus
I’d just like to assure everyone that the above link to http://www.dumbingofage.com/arf is SFW.
Cattleprod
A jacket that looks cool, yet noticeably less cool than Sal’s.
Jon
Of course it’s less cool than Sal’s – Sal isn’t wearing it.
Rowen Morland
What if Sal wears Joyce’s jacket?
ZombieKyrik
Then it becomes cooler by being in contact with Sal; now whether it absorbs any of her coolness, and becomes permanently cooler is up for debate.
Spacie
Sal will always be 20 percent cooler.
Freezer
And now my brain is racing down a “Which DoA character is which FIM character” rabbit hole.
Sal = Rainbow Dash
Joyce = Twilight Sparkle
Dorothy = Starlight Glimmer
Nono
How do people have conversations while they’re jogging, I’m too busy trying not to die
cbwroses
You have enough stamina and motivation to actually jog?
Glad somebody does.
Aquila
Some call it “jogging”, some call it “failing to catch up to the ice cream truck.”
not someone else
Being 19 is a whole hell of a lot of it in my experience, lol.
sickolesbian
i think you have to do it slowly but for some of us this would simply be a brisk walk
Big Z
It’s actually legit advice for beginning joggers/runners that if you can’t carry on a conversation you should slow down because you’re going too hard for optimal cardio training..
Li
Yes this exactly!
You shouldn’t be going at a pace that keeps you too busy trying not to die. Start with walking, build up little intervals of brisker walking and graduate to slow jogging…
Andy
If you’re jogging you can talk. If you’re running you can’t.
Kazuma Shouri
I think campus life has a lot to do with it. always racing around for classes keeps you surprisingly in shape
I did not learn this myself until I went back to alma mater a year later to visit and nearly died on the stairs, like how the heck did I dash up and down them a mere year prior???
Pocky
leather jackets unlocked something in her
Nono
College kids can afford leather jackets?
Maybe at a second-hand store or something?
Foolissa
This was my thought *exactly*, like, I was NOT gonna buy anyone a leather jacket at 19 due to the 19-year-old amount of money in the bank account
Dara
YEP
Not in MY budget
Big Z
Right? I got my first leather coat as a graduation present from college!
True Survivor
What makes leather so expensive anyway? We slaughter cows like nobody’s business and leather lasts a long time, so I doubt it is an issue of the hides being rare or the product requiring rapid replacement and thus creating scarcity. Is the bulk of the cost coming from the chemicals required for the tanning process? Are we paying for the over head created by disposal of toxic byproducts? Are specialized laborers or machinery involved still all that valuable in the modern age? Is there a secret leather cartel driving up prices with monopolization? What is going on here?
Leorale
I’ll take an educated guess at it.
Different qualities of leather. (Full grain is thickest, most durable, best, most expensive, it’s like the whole skin. Top grain is still real good but not so crazy-expensive, the highest layers of the skin. Split grain is much less expensive, the lower layers. Bonded leather is the MDF particleboard of the mammalian world, it’s basically glue and dust.)
Hides are irregular shapes and may have undesirable variations, so even though a cow is pretty big, it’s not like a bolt of fabric, and you can’t get that many usably-large great pieces from each animal. Skilled people in factories probably have to cut each hide individually into all different grades of leather, and then sell/transport the types of grain they aren’t using, and that’s a lot of skilled work and extra middle-people.
I don’t know much about tanning.
Many other different skills involved, too. It’s definitely hard to make leather jackets well.
Markups for name brands — and maybe some brands invest in doing things more sustainably, or have higher pay for their skilled workers, or have factories that use only top-quality leather and fixings, or not.
Good leather will last for generations if cared for, so if can be an investment garment. An in-vestment, if you will (but you don’t have to and probably shouldn’t).
Digression: real leather is much more sustainable than plastic/vegan/faux leather, which are very poisonous to the environment to make, plus they soon leach into the ground in a landfill. Wool is very warm and can definitely be done sustainably. 🙂
Big factories very far away, such as in Turkey, Pakistan, and India, with various laws for chemical disposal, labour laws/costs, transportation, levels of middle-people who all need to take a cut, etc.
If you’re ever in India, Pakistan, or the Middle East, you can get leather way more cheaply there. (Similar to ceramics in Portugal and silver in Mexico.) It’s funny to see it sold there cheaply, because it’s usually way too hot to wear it until you get someplace else.
There! Now you know a bunch about leather.
Kimi
A town near where I grew up had a leather factory that closed due to bankruptcy. It turns out, while a hundred years ago the United States may have been the leather-making capital of the world, now there are only a few tanneries left. Part of this is due to shoe manufacturers moving abroad for cheaper labor, which causes most American tanneries to go out of business or followed them. Environmental regulations also moght play a factor, as the tanning process can be pretty rough on the environment, especially the water if it is dumped without doing quite a bit of treatment. You couldn’t fish or swim in rivers contaminated from the tanning process and smog was a big issue.
The cost of tanning also probably has difficulty due to how it can’t be automated or standardized. Each hide is different, so the process is more of an art that requires skilled workers to do it right than a formula where you always do a set amount of each ingredient. Leather is also used for a wide variety of things, including shoes, handbags, purses, upholstered furniture, and other items. It is probably more profitable for a company to pump out a lot of small items (that doesn’t have to worry about imperfections or getting a big piece of nice leather), than doing the more specialized and complicated work that requires leather without any imperfections (which might also be more profitable doing work for an expensive car or furniture, and not require the “softness” a jacket would). Also, cows are kept outside in an open environment, so it can be easy for them to get wounds or scars from things like parasitic flies (eg bot flies). Another factor might be that the US military uses a lot of leather.
Veronica
This was a good and educational comment
Big Z
I did an IT internship in the office of a leather tannery in the US back in college, and I can confirm that a LOT of the best sheets of fully-sized leather do in fact go mostly to car seats and not to clothing.
The environmental regs were WILD — it’s a nasty business literally filled with open vats of chemicals like a Batman villain origin story.
That said, you CAN automate a fair bit of it, depending on the specific tanning process, right up until the final sorting and grading of hides.
Kimi
Since they ended up shutting down, I have no idea how much they could have automated rather than having skilled workers for, how much technology has changed since then or how much was just flowery language on their part and not the actual truth. I would imagine that with the progress in automation in cameras and sensing in the past decade or so, you could probably micro-adjust a lot better now than back in the 60s (like using drones for crop health monitoring). That doesn’t bring quite the ring to it as saying your workers are artisans though. The idea that each cow can be a little bit different does make sense from one point a view (different genetics, life experiences, etc), but I have no idea how much that actually factors into the process other than what I was told and have read.
As such, I appreciate the correction Big Z, it is interesting to know.
Envy
Leather is just more labor-intensive to manufacture than many other fabrics. The time it takes for the tanning and processing of leather is where most of the cost comes from, I think. Pretty much all animal-based fabrics, like leather, silk, and wool, cost more because they require more effort just to raise/breed the animals.
ResRam
Its mostly the long and complex process of turning skin into leather.
The skin needs to be cleaned of meat and fat tissues.
Dehaired. Cut into usable even pieces. Often split apart in layers.
Soaked and churned in one type of solution for hours, even days, dependent on thickness, chosen process and material.
Then washed and soaked in another one to get the tanning solution out since that is usually toxic.
At that point it gets physically treated, flattend, kneaded, rolled.
Then usually coloured, washed from colouring, then soaked in a fixiative.
Finally often surface treatment, steamrolling powders into the surface to preempt rot. Many modern leathers are finally coated with some kind of plastics film.
And all that before fasioning clothes out of it, which is also more complex than with normal, industrially even fabrics.
And many of those steps can not be fully automated since every skin is slightly different.
Its a whole lot of time, water, energy and chemicals, with many steps needing experienced handlers to oversee and steer the mechanized processes.
Not to mention the expensive wastewater treatment – in regions that care about such stuff.
But also: luxury product.
Buy in india or china where the largest producers are located today (again, enviromental impacts) and the prices we westerners pay appear kinda ridiculous.
DinaJoyce
Thrift stores are wonderful things. I’ve found several very reasonably priced leather jackets there. They’re not my style, but I have bought them for my motorcycle-riding friends and family on occasion.
sickolesbian
its affordable at a thrift store if they can find one
Needfuldoer
Always check secondhand stores and Marketplace first. I got a CE-rated, armored motorcycle jacket for 50 bucks this past spring.
Risky
2nd hand store or specifically the salvation army store, a stinky piece-leather beauty. Good jackets look like a single piece of material, this patch-leather jacket looked like frankenstein made it out of rat-hides, but only if you were close enough to see the 1950 individual stitches.
It mostly smelled like motor oil and 50-years of cheap tobacco, which I suppose is a lot of leather jackets, even if they aren’t bonded jigsaw puzzles.
Spacie
I found a leather winter coat for 25 dollars at Charlotte Russe once. It was during summer in Central FL so it was on clearance.
Brasca1
It’s the jackeeeet!!
DocHarleen
What’s up, Richie Aprile?
IntangibleMatter
Oh god, jogging in the cold. That always would make my lungs burn when I had to do it in high school. Good on them for pulling it off
Jon
Question for folks who run in the winter.
Do you just wear your regular winter outerwear?
I was confused at first reading this strip because they’re just dressed like they’re going to class, but I think they’re meant to be running for exercise.
Jon
Even though just yesterday they both said “why go running when we could stay in bed and cuddle”, and I just accepted that as the correct answer lol
I hate running so bad
Li
Joyce’s pants have a vertical stripe down the side so I think they’re doing what I more or less did when I jogged in the winter in Colorado, which was jacket and hat and gloves over my exercise clothes.
Depending on how cold it is, you also wanna add like leg warmers, or thicker socks.
(I’m in a warmer state now, so instead I just add a UV neck muffler and an extra non-jacket layer on top.)
Dara
When I did, and what I do now that I bike, I’ve got two things, one you can do one you can’t.
1. I was born with the Full Winter Package, which is to say, I’m one of those freaks shovelling snow in shorts and it feels GREAT because FINALLY it’s not hot. BUT!
2. Even I start out wearing more, which gets to the thing you can do, which is layering. More layers equals more insulation, and most of all, more flexibility. I used to put on oversized sweatpants over regular trousers, just for example. Outer jacket plus inner jacket (or a liner) plus regular clothes underneath works is another example. The outer layer should be a wind blocking layer.
3. okay I lied there’s three: gloves and heavy socks. You lose so much heat out of your hands it’s not funny (or at least I do), and keeping those warm keeps your whole arm warm. Thick/warm socks are similar but also have to deal with water and ground contact so that’s why they matter a lot too.
Thomas
Not really a winter tip, but I learned you can wear shorts quite early in the year. As long as your upper body is warm, bare legs don’t matter as much.
Big Z
Personally, I have a set of insulated tights and shirt that I wear under my usual exercise gear and a balaclava, but I live in the Great White North and have to take it somewhat more seriously than the average USian.
Bogeywoman
I live somewhere that doesn’t typically get below freezing, but when I did run a lot, I’d intentionally dress less warm than the temperature needed because Id get very warm very fast, and my body sucks at regulating that shit. Like, if I know I’m going to need a sweater and a jacket for class, then I need a light jacket for running. Any more and I overheat and have a panic attack
Dot
Dorothy really likes to dress her partners like dolls, huh
QueenofSodor
she’s so real for it, her next move should be to forcefem walky
Stormtide Leviathan
“I’ll show you a doll”
Dara
You have my attention.
ElderlyMarxist
1000% agree
Freemage
Well, that’ll confuse Danny to no end….
Jon
I always feel loved when my spouse gets me clothes. They have a pretty good read on my tastes.
It does feel odd to do it with a fresh romance as a college freshman. I don’t have any logic or rhetoric to back that position up, but I can sum up my feelings as “Whoa, Dorothy, chill out”
Dot
No yeah I like playing dress-up with my partners, but she just jumps into it with an immediacy that gives me pause.
Pocky
I mean, we established Joyce is totally into it. So depends on the relationship really. I know some couples who pretty much default to the others fashion tastes because it makes their lives easier lol