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Also, if your dietary habits are having a significant negative effect on your interactions with others - either intimates or strangers on the internet - then that is a Bad Thing. Just think: you could still be a vegan (or keto/paleo/whatever) without alienating anyone. If you make the opposite choice, that's a bit of a red flag.

An old addition of mine on a post about veganism recently crossed my dash organically, and coincidentally just after I encountered a really sad and unfortunate example of exactly what that addition was about. It occurs to me that it's probably worth recirculating just that addition, without the long conversational back-and-forth that lead up to it, because it's still as relevant as it was when I made it. So, here goes:

As many people have pointed out, some stripes of militant veganism look suspiciously like eating disorders.

This because they are eating disorders.

The term for this specific type of eating disorder is orthorexia nerviosa, and while it is not limited to vegans, it can absolutely manifest in and be camouflaged through a vegan lifestyle.

If you:

compulsively follow rules relating to your veganism, and harshly punish yourself, either physically or mentally, for ever accidentally deviating from them?

have extreme anxiety over the possibility of compromising your veganism, either on purpose or accidentally?

bury yourself in research about the benefits of veganism and the detriments of other diets (eg. obsessively watch incendiary animal welfare videos, despite knowing that they trigger you; obsessively research and collect vegan recipes and read vegan lifestyle blogs in a way that goes beyond being enthusiastic about cooking as a hobby; etc.)?

have rules relating to veganism which get harsher and harsher over time (eg. only eating backyard eggs -> never eating any eggs; only eating ethically sourced honey -> never eating any honey; reducing your processed sugar consumption -> obsessively cutting all processed foods out of fear of accidentally consuming sugar with bone fragments; promoting veganism as a positive lifestyle choice -> feeling like you’re not doing enough unless you actively attack all diets which are less restrictive than your own, etc.)?

are losing weight to a noticeable and continuing degree, even after your body should have adjusted to your new diet?

have problems in your social relationships due to your diet to a degree which is impacting your mental well-being?

are convinced that your self-worth and value as a person is intrinsically tied to your diet, and that any deviations from your specific vegan diet will make you worthless as a person?

Please talk to your doctor about orthorexia, and consider seeing a specialist. Eating disorders are serious, and can be deadly, and orthorexia is one of the most under-diagnosed eating disorders because people often do not notice that it has developed until they are extremely malnourished and have done permanent damage to their physical and mental health. 

Veganism isn’t the problem per se. Lots of vegans can live perfectly healthy lifestyles. But the danger with orthorexia is specifically the fact that none of the justifications for it are inherently bad. You can have a perfectly good rationale for what you’re doing when you start, and then your mental illness will slowly boil the frog, cutting food after food and creating new rationalization after new rationalization, until where you end up is literally killing you. And that’s the same no matter how you get there.

Gym bunnies who develop orthorexia by dramatically cutting carbs and worrying over their macros in a way that just happens to result in them eating half the calories that they should be getting? Well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with body building! Health food obsessives who cut category after category of food over fear of GMOs and pesticides and contamination? Well, there’s nothing inherently wrong with leaning organic! People who want to avoid food produced through human exploitation, who start by buying fair trade coffee and chocolate, and then eventually expand what human exploitation they’re worried about until they can’t shop at any normal grocery store, and can’t eat at any restaurant or any friend’s house under any circumstances? Refusing to support exploitation is a good thing! But pull the curtain back on these explanations and what you actually have is a disordered brain doing everything it possibly can to starve itself, without ever consciously admitting that that’s the goal.

If your veganism is starting to cause severe disruptions in your life, either physically, mentally, or socially, see a doctor.

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As I recently announced elsewhere, I've decided that today is a good day to start a vacation from engaging with the news - especially the political news. I've been doing that pretty continuously since 2016, sporadically since 2001. I'm tired of being "in the same room" with both demons and dilettantes.

Before I "go" one last thought. Even in humanity's worst times, life went on. People still loved and laughed during the Third Reich - not just the perpetrators but their (still-alive) victims as well. People still made art and music and good food even during the Black Plague. That stuff's important. The bleaker the times, the more important it becomes that we strengthen the bonds of community and friendship, however we do it or whatever else we're doing concurrently.

That's why I'll still be here (and elsewhere) for funny stuff, uplifting stuff, science/tech stuff, and so on. Anything that gives us hope. That gives us a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. We all need those things now more than ever.

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👏

scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon

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OMG that's lovely, @iris-collects. Thank you!

I found god in a hopeless place

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Sorry, I'm the only one allowed to hide in my bathroom. Get the fuck out.

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Practice beats performance. Every time. Thank you, State Department (and USPS) workers.

So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.

I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?

They're my fucking hero.

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"I screamed so much making this that the neighbors called 911, but you're worth it."

Honestly, with all the tradwife cooking trash circulating, it only makes me love B Dylan Hollis more for baking vintage recipes while being openly gay, making sexual jokes, and screaming at the ingredients. He's the antithesis of every soft-spoken cishet woman cooking for her husband and children. You don't have to be an idyllic cottagecore housewife to cook.

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"Not my goats, not my rodeo."

That's something I say to myself several times a day. (You might be more familiar with "not my circus, not my monkeys" but I use this version because "goat rodeo" is another favorite phrase.) I ask myself whether there's any possible way my involvement in something could improve the outcome. Does the situation allow it for anyone? Am I personally in a position to make it happen? Do I have the skills, or energy, to follow it through? If the answer is no, I commit to disengaging. No second-guessing myself. Done and dusted; move on to the next thing. My characteristic personality flaw is taking on too much responsibility, so learning to just drop stuff on the floor (and not even let myself feel bad about it) has done wonders for my mental health.

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an ornithologist pointed a microphone at a bird sitting alone on a wire and caught the sound of the bird singing a song at a decibel so low that it would be impossible for another bird to hear it, meaning the bird was singing quietly to itself I love life

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Nobody expects the Roomba Interruption.

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hmmm

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As any reader of fantasy knows, being dead and being a follower are not mutually exclusive conditions.

Having "a lot" of followers on tumblr is funny because probably 80% of them are ghost blogs who haven't been on here in like a decade.

It's like, no no, those aren't my followers, that's a graveyard! I'm the caretaker of a thousands of tombs. I love them, but they've been dead for seven years.

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Also, the distinction between "settled" and "nomadic" is murky at best. As @uunaksiivik points out, it was/is pretty common for nomadic groups to act as stewards of the "wild" land along their travel routes. Many groups were/are nomadic for part of the year and settled - often in larger aggregations of multiple family/tribe/clan groups - for part.

If people don't need to create permanent structures to live life and sustain/advance their culture, why would they? There's nothing less civilized about that. It's just different. <looks around> Maybe that's even the smarter way to be. Every moment spent building or maintaining a physical built environment is a moment not spent creating art or music or deep religious/philosophical structures, or just enjoying life with friends and family. Many indigenous folks in America looked at how the newcomers live and they laughed at how little room it left for the things that make us human.

I have a lot of feelings on how indigenous groups who didn’t build permanent structures like cities aren’t seen as being as sophisticated as ones who built large cities, without accounting for the fact that maybe it’s in our values systems to leave as light of a footprint as possible and it’s important that our structures are easily taken down or fade with the passage of time because it’s easier on the landscape, but ya know.

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The oompa loompas went on strike.

You're passing through Wonka's factory and through a doorway you see what is distinctly the body of Christ being fed into a big wacky machine

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A lot of these look like games I'd really like to play. Such creativity!

I’ve been mesmerized by this. I love all the details each artist put in. I highly recommend watching the full video. It really inspires me to write.