"Cause When The Lights Are Down, There's No More To Say, Love Is The Real Pain, An Internal Revolution

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

The Huffington Post

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong

For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public percepti

"For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people."

A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.

Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.

And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.

encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.

All throughout childhood, while my peers were socializing and making friends, I studied the blade read so many books that I am now almost legally blind, which left me with vast and deeply instinctual understanding of English grammar - and next to no ability to explain how it actually works. Friends will often ask me to proofread their writing and then get very mad when I say things like, "You need to completely reverse this sentence and cut this clause entirely; no, I'm sorry, i don't know why, I just know that the way it is now ITCHES 😭"

Now, what I want to see is a fantasy story where this plays out with MAGICAL grammar. Someone from a backwater town deeply steeped in folk magic arrives at Wizard Uni where all their fellow students are like "What do you mean, we should add another '𝞯∘⋇𝞿' to the incancation because it 'sounds better'? What do you mean, 'it could just be a regional thing'?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'THIS SPELL JUST FEELS LIKE IT NEEDS A LIVE RAT'????"

in b4 95% of all websites in june 2024 announce that "for security" they will only work with browsers that use manifest v3

What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?

An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:

I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.

Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.

A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)

So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.

Just a local update

For those who'll be wanting to know how I'm doing: I think right now the line from The Right Stuff is probably apropos. I'm "maintaining an even strain."

I sort of have no choice, because there's a lot of bureaucratic stuff surrounding Peter's loss that has to be dealt with, and there's not really anyone else to fall back on: in terms of local legalities; this burden falls on me. (shrug) So, I'm keepin' on keepin' on. It's not easy, when half your world has ended: but there's nothing else to do.

Just repeating the news that I just edited into the original post about all this: the "funeral expenses" issue is now handled.

And I want to thank EVERYBODY who so incredibly generously has stepped up to assist. You are all, every one of you, in my heart right now... not least due to the many, many kind things you've had to say about Peter. Current events mean I'm going to be backed up on the thank-yous for some days yet. Please bear with me.

For those who feel inclined, the Ko-Fi account here is open as usual for those who might simply want to drop something into the pot tagged "GNU Peter Morwood."* I'm looking into his notes about his preferred charities so that I can split all such donations in those directions. (For example, P. lost a beloved cousin to childhood leukemia, so I'm looking around for appropriate cancer charities. ...But more of that later.)

In local issues: I'm still waiting for word from the coroner as to when Peter's post-mortem will be happening. (I had hoped it might be today, but there's no news yet.) Not much to be said about this except that the sooner that's all handled and resolved, the happier I'll be. Then other adjacent issues can start being dealt with.

At the physical end: I haven't been sleeping terribly well, but that's probably no surprise. My appetite has been almost nonexistent, but that at least is very slowly starting to recover (to the point where at least food is no longer a source of "no interest whatsoever" or of active distaste). Right now it seems I get better results from eating out instead of cooking in: so that's the way things will go in the very short term.

But for now, pretty much all I can do is sit tight, try to keep household business from getting out of hand (why does it suddenly take so much energy just to do the dishes? ...like I don't know perfectly well why), and wait for Forces Beyond My Control to get moving.

Meanwhile, let me take a moment here to thank everybody who's expressed concern about the state of my wellbeing (and that at a time when I care a whole lot less about it than usual). It's heartening, and I very much appreciate it. I promise to do my best to do right by myself, on all of your behalf. (Behalfs? Behalves? Pfft.)

Thanks again, everybody. —D.

*People are also reminding me that the financial health of the household's still-living member in the immediate future is also an issue here. 😏 Heaven forbid I should argue the point. If you want, tag such donations as "DD" and I'll note that. ...And thanks again, all. I can always count on y'all to look after me. ❤️

HEY!

Back up your computer!

Go get the external drive you bought specifically for this purpose and then left in a drawer somewhere and RUN A FULL BACKUP.

There are lots of posts that make the rounds reminding us to sit up straight, stretch, drink water, refocus our eyes, take our meds, etc. But while this may not be about your health, it's still super-important.

Back up your whole-ass computer. If you can afford a second backup drive, buy one so that you have one SSD and one HDD, and back up to both of them (you can back up just the current important stuff to the SSD and let the HDD do the heavy-duty lifting).

Do not rely on 'the cloud' or the internet to keep jack shit.

AND BACK UP YOUR GMAIL AS WELL HOLY SHIT. The last thing you want is a catastrophic issue where literally every single thing you have in gmail is gone. It's happened. It happened to a friend of mine and basically her entire life was in there and now it's all gone. 20 years of it.

Reblog to save a life.

Not the most relevant but what's funny is how "Swype" is what some of us use as the word for swipe typing on mobile despite the actual Swype keyboard having been defunct/dead for years now (it is actually literally incompatible/does not work on Android 14 now 😩)

this can't be true can it

We’re extending the Ebooks Direct “Get Our Whole Store For $44″ Sale by 5 hours

…Because we can. (And because it looks like some extra people will be wandering in due to an unexpected crossposting on Twitter…)

This means it’ll be closing down at 23:59 Irish time / 12:59 Hawai’ian time, today, 1 September 2022.

For those of you who haven’t seen them before, the details are below:

Just for Tumblr users – for the next 5 hours or so (until 12:59 Hawai’ian time on 1 September 2022), get 20% off the price of the already-discounted package containing the entire contents of our Ebooks Direct store. With the extra discount, that’s $44 for the whole thing!

I had some murmurs in my ask box over the last ten days or so from folks who were sad that they’d missed out on earlier iterations of this sale, for one reason or another. And when I mentioned this to @petermorwood, in his usual direct way he shrugged and said, “Well, why not just do it again?”

…And frankly, that made perfect sense. Some people are getting ready to start one version or another of the New School Year, and might possibly enjoy having some extra reading to distract them. And other people might just want to top up their electronic TBR piles on the relatively-cheap. And who knows how many other reasons people might have. So why not?

Therefore: if you’d like to avail yourself of this genuinely around-the-bend bargain price* on the whole-store 35-book package, just go to this URL, put  one of the “I Want Everything You’ve Got” packages in your shopping  basket (make sure to tell the page which ebook format you want/need:  Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks/Apple or generic .epub), and then proceed to the checkout. (The fully discounted price won’t show until you get there: this is just the way the store behaves when we’ve already got an across-the-board discount running.)

In the checkout page you’ll find the store has applied your extra discount  automatically, like this:

…Then you just make the payment by whatever method you prefer (we do credit cards via Stripe, as well as PayPal), and the store emails you the download links for the files. (If you need assistance with getting the files into your e-reader or app, we’ve got a page at the store with useful advice on that.) And  from over here I will applaud you for your general wonderfulness, and get back to work.

(BTW, in  case anybody accidentally just goes straight to the main product link  [which doesn’t auto-attach the discount], the added-discount code is EVERY24. That way  if it’s missing from the field in the checkout page, you can put it in  yourself.)

Anyway: Enjoy, all! And if this offer’s of no  interest to you, would you kindly consider reblogging it for the attention of others  who might like to know about this? Those reblogs really help.** Please & Thank You! :)

(Oh, by the way—! UK people, one [sad] thing:  we can’t include you in this offer… please forgive us. Due to Brexit  we can no longer sell direct into the UK. Details on that are here. …My apologies for that.)  :(

*Because seriously, $44 for 35 ebooks isn’t too bad…

**Especially since I don’t really care to Blaze posts like this. Properly speaking, Blaze is for shitposts. (Like the Duckie of Light.)  :)