Ummm Wtf. Is There Like....even Anything To Do About This? Aside From Growing Literally All Your Own

Ok, but now how about they codify this into law so it's not so easy to flip back and forth just based on who is currently appointed to the FCC :/

electoral-vote.com

FCC Reinstates Net Neutrality

Click on the map for the article

Legendary U Washington bookseller Duane Wilkins is drowning in medical debt

Nearly every sf writer who's ever toured the west coast knows Duane - he's the encyclopedically knowledgeable sf buyer for the U Washington Bookseller, who has organized some of the best sf signings in Seattle history. He's a force of nature.

He's also broke. A two-week hospital stay left him drowning in medical debt - despite being insured! - and now he's being threatened by a collection agency.

Now, Duane is forced into participating in one of the most barbaric of contemporary American rituals, fundraising to cover his medical debt. He's raised $6k of the $10k he needs (I just pitched in $100).

If you can afford to help out someone who's done so much for our community, please kick Duane whatever you can spare.

Northern light cats ₊⊹✨｡⋆

Ebooks Direct

Young Wizards "All The Wizardry" Bundle

This bundle contains all the Young Wizards material in the Ebooks Direct inventory. That's nineteen ebooks, containing:: The nine New Mille

The newest bundle at Ebooks Direct.

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.

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.

Get Our Whole Store For $44, Black Friday (-7) Edition

Seriously, I resent the whole Black Friday thing. Yet if you don’t do it, people think maybe you’re not serious about selling your stuff. (heavy sigh) …Fine. But can we maybe get it over with a week early? Because I hate interrupting people’s holidays.

Many of our Tumblr friends know what this particular discount offer is about: they’ve seen it before. (Last time it was about replacing a dying computer. Which has indeed happened, and we’re waiting for its replacement to arrive: thanks to all who assisted!) …But sort of fifteen hundred or two thousand more people are following this account than were last week about this time (and y’all are very welcome!), and I can’t help but wonder if maybe some of them would like some of this action: a lot of books for CHEAP. (…I mean, thirty-five novels and short works for $44? Looks bargain-ish to me.)

The list of the books on offer is on the product page linked to below. The New Millennium Editions of the Young Wizards novels are there, and all the current Middle Kingdoms works, and a lot more.

…So! For the next twenty-four hours, you can get our entire ebook store’s inventory for USD $44. Just go to this URL and 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. You’ll find (when you’re in the checkout: it won’t do this until then) that the store applies your discount automatically, like this:

…Then you just make the payment by whatever method you prefer, and the store emails you the download links for the files.

(BTW, in case anybody accidentally just goes straight to the main product link  [which doesn’t auto-attach the discount], the 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! Thanks for taking the time to check this out. And if this offer’s of no interest to you, would you please consider reblogging it for the attention of others who may? Please & Thank You. :)

(And one last note: UK folks—to our great annoyance, we can’t include you in this offer… so please forgive us. Due to Brexit  we can no longer sell direct into the UK. Details on that are here. …Our apologies again.)  :(

Ha a lélek vándorlásában hiszünk, el kell fogadnunk hogy ha zenészek voltunk, zenészek maradunk akkor is, ha négy lábbal újraszületünk..