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[piss3dm3nk3n]

how’d this mf put out THREE within in WEEK

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.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

General Mills and cheaply bought "dietitians" co-opted the anti-diet movement

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Steve Bannon isn't wrong: for his brand of nihilistic politics to win, all he has to do is "flood the zone with shit," demoralizing people to the point where they no longer even try to learn the truth.

This is really just a more refined, more potent version of the tactical doubt sown by Big Tobacco about whether smoking caused cancer, a playbook later adopted by the fossil fuel industry to sell climate denial. You know Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How To Lie With Statistics? Huff was a Big Tobacco shill (his next book, which wasn't ever published, was How To Lie With Cancer Statistics). His mission wasn't to help you spot statistical malpractice – an actual thing that is an actual problem that you should actually learn to spot. It was to turn you into a nihilist who didn't believe anything could be known:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

Corporations don't need you to believe that their products are beneficial or even non-harmful. They just need you to believe nothing. If you don't know what's true, then why not just do whatever feels good, man? #YOLO!

These bannonfloods of shit are a favored tactic of strongmen and dictators. Their grip on power doesn't depend on their citizens trusting them – it's enough that they trust no one:

http://jonathanstray.com/networked-propaganda-and-counter-propaganda

Bannonflooding is especially beloved of the food industry. Food is essential, monopolized, and incredibly complicated, and many of the most profitable strategies for growing, processing and preparing food are very bad for the people who eat that food. Rather than sacrificing profits, the food industry floods the zone with shit, making it impossible to know what's true, in hopes that we will just eat whatever they're serving:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460

Now, the "nothing can be known" gambit only works if it's really hard to get at the truth. So it helps that nutrition and diet are very complex subjects, but it helps even more that the nutrition and diet industry are a cesspool of quacks and junk science. This is a "scientific discipline" whose prestigious annual meetings are sponsored (and catered) by McDonald's:

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/my-trip-mcdonalds-sponsored-nutritionist-convention/

It's a "science" whose most prominent pitchmen peddle quack nostrums and sue the critics who point out (correctly) that eating foods high in chlorophyll will not "oxygenate your blood" (hint, chlorophyll only makes oxygen in the presence of light, which is notably lacking in your colon):

https://www.badscience.net/2007/02/ms-gillian-mckeith-banned-from-calling-herself-a-doctor/

When the quack-heavy world of nutrition combines with the socially stigmatized world of weight-loss, you get a zone ripe for shitflooding. The majority of Americans are "overweight" (according to a definition that relies on the unscientific idea of BMI) and nearly half of Americans are "obese." These numbers have been climbing steadily since the 1970s, and every diet turns out to be basically bullshit:

https://headgum.com/factually-with-adam-conover/what-does-ozepmic-actually-do-with-dr-dhruv-khullar

Notwithstanding the new blockbuster post-Ozempic drugs, we're been through an unbroken 50-year run of more and more of us being fatter and fatter, even as fat stigma increased. Fat people are treated as weak-willed and fundamentally unhealthy, while the most prominent health-risks of being fat are roundly neglected: the mental health effects of being shamed, and the physical risks of having doctors ignore your health complaints, no matter how serious they sound, and blame them on your weight:

https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/11968083-glorifying-obesity-and-other-myths-about-fat-people

Fat people and their allies have banded together to address these real, urgent harms. The "body acceptance" movement isn't merely about feeling good in your own skin: it's also about fighting discrimination, demanding medical care (beyond "lose some weight") and warning people away from getting on the diet treadmill, which can lead to dangerous eating disorders and permanent weight gain:

https://www.beacon.org/You-Just-Need-to-Lose-Weight-P1853.aspx

Fat stigma is real. The mental health risks of fat-shaming are real. Eating disorders are real. Discrimination against fat people is real. The fact that these things are real doesn't mean that the food industry can't flood the zone with shit, though. On the contrary: the urgency of these issues, combined with the poor regulation of dietitians, makes the "what should you eat" zone perfect for flooding with endless quantities of highly profitable shit.

Perhaps you've gotten some of this shit on you. Have you found yourself watching a video from a dietitian influencer like Cara Harbstreet, Colleen Christensen or Lauren Smith, promoting "health at any size" with hashtags like #DerailTheShame and #AntiDiet? These were paid campaigns sponsored by General Mills, Pepsi, and other multinational, multibillion-dollar corporations.

Writing for The Examination, Sasha Chavkin, Anjali Tsui, Caitlin Gilbert and Anahad O'Connor describe the way that some of the world's largest and most profitable corporations have hijacked a movement where fat people and their allies fight stigma and shame and used it to peddle the lie that their heavily processed, high-calorie food is good for you:

https://www.theexamination.org/articles/as-obesity-rises-big-food-and-dietitians-push-anti-diet-advice

It's a surreal tale. They describe a speech by Amy Cohn, General Mills’ senior manager for nutrition, to an audience at a dietitian's conference, where Cohn "denounced the media for 'pointing the finger at processed foods' and making consumers feel ashamed of their choices." This is some next-level nihilism: rather than railing against the harmful stigma against fat people, Cohn wants us to fight the stigma against Cocoa Puffs.

This message isn't confined to industry conferences. Dietitians with large Tiktok followings like Cara Harbstreet then carry the message out to the public. In Harbstreet's video promoting Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cocoa Puffs and Trix, she says, "I will always advocate for fearlessly nourishing meals, including cereal…Because everyone deserves to enjoy food without judgment, especially kids":

https://www.tiktok.com/@streetsmart.rd/video/7298403730989436206

Dietitians, nutritionists and the food industry have always had an uncomfortably close relationship, but the industry's shitflooding kicked into high gear when the FDA proposed rules limiting which foods the industry can promote as "healthy." General Mills, Kelloggs and Post have threatened a First Amendment suit against such a regulation, arguing that they have a free speech right to describe manifestly unhealthy food as "healthy."

The anti-diet movement – again, a legitimate movement aimed at fighting the dangerous junk science behind dieting – has been co-opted by the food industry, who are paying dietitian influencers to say things like "all foods have value" while brandishing packages of Twix and Reese's. In their Examination article, the authors profile people who struggled with their weight, then, after encountering the food industry's paid disinformation, believed that "healthy at any size" meant that it would be unhealthy to avoid highly processed, high calorie food. These people gained large amounts of weight, and found their lives constrained and their health severely compromised.

I've been overweight all my life. I went to my first Weight Watchers meeting when I was 12. I come from a family of overweight people with the chronic illnesses often associated with being fat. This is a subject that's always on my mind. I even wrote a whole novel about the promise and peril of a weight-loss miracle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781429969284/makers

I think the anti-diet movement, and its associated ideas like body acceptance and healthy at every size, are enormously positive developments and hugely important. It's because I value these ideas that I'm so disgusted with Big Food and its cynical decision to flood the zone with shit. It's also why I'm so furious with dietitians and nutritionists for failing to self-regulate and become a real profession, the kind that censures and denounces quacks and shills.

I have complicated feelings about Ozempic and its successors, but even if these prove to be effective and safe in the long term, and even if we rein in the rapacious pharma companies so that they no longer sell a $5 product for $1000, I would still want dietary science to clean up its act:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2816824

I'm not a nihilist. I think we can use science to discover truths – about ourselves and our world. I want to know those truths, and I think they can be known. The only people who benefit from convincing you that the truth is unknowable are the people who want to lie to you.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/05/corrupt-for-cocoa-puffs/#flood-the-zone-with-shit

[fatliberation]

One exhausting thing about being fat is the endless understanding and forgiveness you have to have to maintain any personal relationships. I overhear my mother saying how disgusted she is by fat Autistics. I’m a fat autistic. I can’t say anything about how deeply hurtful this is without being sensitive. My friend says only fat people will die of covid, so it’s not such a big deal. So I don’t deserve to live? Or the classic:“Ew I’m getting fat”. If you start a fight each time someone around you implies you don’t deserve life or your body is vile, you’ll spend your whole existence arguing.

I empathize with this so much, anon. My family (and some friends) are SO deeply invested in diet culture and fatphobia. I have a parent who is a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company that sells ozempic and wegovy, and no amount of education or asking for human empathy will change their mind or make them treat me better. It's a hard reality to accept that you can't change everyone's minds. and it is so, so tiring and emotionally exhausting to have to advocate for your existence 24/7. I get burned out doing it too often. The thing is, you don't have to offer endless forgiveness. I'm currently working with my therapist on what to do about this, and the unfortunate solution is to set harsh boundaries (yes, even if they will never understand it or think I am too sensitive, or crazy... it is VERY uncomfortable but I am working on being okay with being misunderstood!) and distance myself from people who refuse to respect said boundaries. Next time my parent berates my food choices, tells me I'm going to die young, or compares me to an anti-vaxxer for not losing weight, I'm removing myself from their presence and tell them these types of comments are driving me away. If they want me in their life, they'll learn to respect me. It hurts, and it's so fucking hard when it's immediate family.

As for non-familial relationships, I've curated my social circle to (mostly) friends who are fat positive and it's one of the best things I could have done for my wellbeing. If I meet a potential friend who starts spitting some fatphobic bull, I avoid hanging out with them from the get-go. I've met most of my fat positive friends in social groups made for fat people, check out facebook groups to see if there's any fat community in your area!

Tbh I have always had this idea of carrying around little pamphlets or cards that are like fat liberation 101 for strangers, I would keep them in my pocket to hand out to someone who says something fatphobic to me so I can avoid confrontation (and exhaustion)... if I made those would you guys want them? 👀

[scientia-rex]

Because my most popular post is about weight loss and how it's a crock, I get a lot of questions about various things, including bariatric surgery--just posted the link to the post I did about that--but also Ozempic/Wegovy, the once-weekly injectable semaglutide medication that was developed for diabetes but was found to have independent benefits on weight loss.

I always said that weight loss was like Viagra: when a medication came along that actually worked, it would explode. We'd all hear about it. Fen-phen in the 90s worked, but it was bad for your heart. Stimulants, like meth, may cause weight loss, but they do it at the cost of heart health, and raise your likelihood of dying young. Over the counter weight loss supplements often contain illegal and unlisted thyroid hormone, which is also dangerous for the heart if taken in the absence of a real deficiency. Orlistat, or "Alli," works the same way as the Olestra chips Lays made in the 1990s--it shuts off your ability to digest fats, and the problem with that is that fats irritate the gut, so then you end up with fatty diarrhea and probably sharts. Plus Alli only leads to 8-10lbs of weight loss in the best case scenario, and most people are not willing to endure sharts for the sake of 8lbs.

And then came the GLP-1 agonists. GLP stands for glucagon-like peptide. Your body uses insulin to make cells uptake sugar. You can't just have free-floating sugar and use it, it has to go into the cells to be used. So if your body sucks at moving sugar into the cells, you end up with a bunch of glucose hanging out in places where it shouldn't be, depositing on small vessels, damaging nerves and your retinas and kidneys and everywhere else that has a whole lot of sensitive small blood vessels, like your brain.

Glucagon makes your liver break down stored sugars and release them. You can think of it as part of insulin's supporting cast. If your body needs sugar and you aren't eating it, you aren't going to die of hypoglycemia, unless you've got some rare genetic conditions--your liver is going to go, whoops, here you go! and cough it up.

But glucagon-like peptide doesn't act quite the same way. What glucagon-like peptide does is actually stimulating your body to release insulin. It inhibits glucagon secretion. It says, we're okay, we're full, we just ate, we don't need more glucagon right now.

This has been enough for many people to both improve blood sugar and cause weight loss. Some patients find they think about food less, which can be a blessing if you have an abnormally active hunger drive, or if you have or had an eating disorder.

However, every patient I've started on semaglutide in any form (Ozempic, Wegovy, or Rybelsus) has had nausea to start with, probably because it slows the rate of stomach emptying. And that nausea sometimes improves, and sometimes it doesn't. There's some reports out now of possible gastroparesis associated with it, which is where the stomach just stops contracting in a way that lets it empty normally into the small intestine. That may not sound like a big deal, but it's a lifelong ticket to abdominal pain and nausea and vomiting, and we are not good at treating it. We're talking Reglan, a sedating anti-nausea but pro-motility agent, which makes many of my patients too sleepy to function, or a gastric pacemaker, which is a relatively new surgery. You can also try a macrolide antibiotic, like erythromycin, but I have had almost no success in getting insurance to cover those and also they have their own significant side effects.

Rapid weight loss from any cause, whether illness, medication, or surgery, comes with problems. Your skin is not able to contract quickly. It probably will, over long periods of time, but "Ozempic face" and "Ozempic butt" are not what people who want to lose weight are looking for. Your vision of your ideal body does not include loose, excess skin.

The data are also pretty clear that you can't "kick start" weight loss with Ozempic and then maintain it with behavioral mechanisms. If you want to maintain the weight loss, you need to stay on the medication. A dose that is high enough to cause weight loss is significantly higher than the minimum dose where we see improvements in blood sugar, and with a higher dose comes higher risk of side effects.

I would wait on semaglutide. I would wait because it's been out for a couple of years now but with the current explosion in popularity we're going to see more nuanced data on side effects emerging. When you go from Phase III human trials to actual use in the world, you get thousands or millions more data points, and rare side effects that weren't seen in the small human trials become apparent. It's why I always say my favorite things for a drug to be are old, safe, and cheap.

I also suspect the oral form, Rybelsus, is going to get more popular and be refined in some way. It's currently prohibitively expensive--all of these are; we're talking 1200 or so bucks a month before insurance, and insurance coverage varies widely. I have patients who pay anything from zero to thirty to three hundred bucks a month for injectable semaglutide. I don't think I currently have anyone whose insurance covers Rybelsus who could also tolerate the nausea. My panel right now is about a thousand patients.

There are also other GLP-1 agonists. Victoza, a twice-daily injection, and Trulicity, and anything else that ends in "-aglutide". But those aren't as popular, despite being cheaper, and they aren't specifically approved for weight loss.

Mounjaro is a newer one, tirzepatide, that acts on two receptors rather than one. In addition to stimulating GLP-1 receptors, it also stimulates glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) receptors. It may work better; I'm not sure whether that's going to come with a concomitantly increased risk of side effects. It's still only approved for diabetes treatment, but I suspect that will change soon and I suspect we'll see a lot of cross-over in terms of using it to treat obesity.

I don't think these medications are going away. I also don't think they're right for everyone. They can reactivate medullary thyroid carcinoma; they can fuck up digestion; they may lead to decreased quality of life. So while there may be people who do well with them, it is okay if those people are not you. You do not owe being thin to anyone. You most certainly do not owe being thin to the extent that you should risk your health for it. Being thin makes navigating a deeply fat-hating world easier, in many ways, so I never blame anyone for wanting to be thin; I just want to emphasize that it is okay if you stay fat forever.

[cannabiscomrade]

It's Gastroparesis Awareness Month

Hi! I have gastroparesis and I'm an insufferable know-it-all so let's talk about it!

Gastroparesis, or a paralyzed stomach, is a condition that causes delayed gastric emptying.

This can cause a range of symptoms and complications:

nausea

vomiting

early satiety/fullness

upper gastric pain

heartburn

malabsorption

dehydration

malnutrition

Gastroparesis can be treated by a gastroenterologist, but often needs to be managed by a motility specialist due to a lot of misconceptions about the condition. Providers, especially in the emergency department, will commonly misdiagnose gastroparesis as cannabis-hyperemesis syndome, cyclic vomiting syndrome, gastritis, food poisoning, etc.

There are several commonly known causes of gastroparesis like vagus nerve damage from diabetes, injury to the stomach, and stomach surgery like hernia repair or bariatric surgery. There are also idiopathic cases with no known cause. Other causes of gastroparesis are:

Connective tissue disorders like HSD and EDS (commonly hEDS and cEDS)

Post-viral (like COVID, viral gastritis, mononucleosis/Epstein-Barr)

Restrictive eating disorders

Autoimmune diseases like Systemic sclerosis (scleroderma), Lupus, Hashimoto's

Central nervous system disorders

Gastroparesis also has common comorbidities with conditions like:

POTS and other forms of dysautonomia (POTS, EDS, and gastroparesis are a common triad of diagnoses)

MCAS

SMAS (which can also present with similar symptoms to GP)

Intestinal dysmotility and esophageal dysmotility disorders (known as global dysmotility)

PCOS with insulin resistance

Endometriosis

SIBO/SIFO

Chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction

Migraines

Certain medications like Ozempic and other drugs in that class act on the digestive system to delay gastric emptying, which has caused people to be diagnosed with gastroparesis. Some people report that their cases have not gone away since stopping the medication, others report feeling better after stopping. Other drugs like opiates and narcotics can cause delayed gastric and intestinal motility as well, but these are commonly known side effects of those painkiller classes.

Gastroparesis is classed based on severity and graded based on how you respond to treatment.

Severity of delay ranges from mild to very severe, and this is based on your actual stomach retention calculated at 4 hours into a gastric emptying study.

The grading scale ranges from one to three, one being mild and three being gastric failure.

There is no consistent single treatment that is proven to work for gastroparesis, and there is no cure. Treatments can consist of:

Diet changes (3 Step Gastroparesis Diet, liquid diet, oral sole source nutrition)

Prokinetic (motility stimulating) drugs

Anti-nausea medications

Proton-pump inhibitors

Gastric stimulator/gastric pacemaker

Pyloric botox and dilation

G-POEM/pyloroplasty

Post-pyloric tube feeding

Gastric venting/draining

Parenteral nutrition

IV fluids

Other surgical interventions like gastrectomy or rarely, transplant

Gastroparesis is a terrible disease and I hope that if any of these symptoms resonate with you that you can get checked out. I was misdiagnosed for a long time before getting a proper gastroparesis diagnosis, and all it took was a gastric emptying study. This is ESPECIALLY true if you're having post-COVID gastrointestinal problems that are not improving. I almost died from starvation ketoacidosis because of how serious my GP got in a short period of time post-COVID (I had GP before COVID), and now I'm tube reliant for all my nutrition and hydration.

Stay safe friends!

[blatantlynotokay]

Toxic @na Work Environment

My job for my entire life has pretty much been to be a model. I started off as a runway model when I was a teenager. Then I went onto commercial and print for a while, which I still do. I was an atmosphere model for quite a bit and now I am a model bottle server in a high profile city. It would be a lie to say that my various professions and pressure to be thin and beautiful, has not affected my @na throughout my life. If anything I feel like it fuels it every day.

At my job pretty much everybody has a 3d. Well, none of us really talk about it blatantly other than a lot of the girls are on Ozempic even though they are 18-22 bmi who mostly just rave every day about how much weight they’re losing. It’s always so interesting. How fellow Anna‘s interact with each other when we know that we both have a 3d but never really talk about it.

One of my coworkers, we’ll call her Audrey, is always talking about how full she is and how much she ate in the day and how hungry she is and how she wants to order food but never actually orders food and none of us have ever seen her eat. Audrey is 5’8” and weighs 112 pounds. I know this because she’s told me before and I know she doesn’t eat and she knows that I don’t eat, but still every time we work together we talk about how much we’re craving certain foods or how we just ate certain foods. (Lie) I know it and she knows it but we never really talk about it. That’s all we talk about all shift is food. It’s nice to food fantasize with someone and I sure she feels it too.

In fact, I’ve worked at this job for almost 4 years and I honestly don’t think I’ve seen any of my coworkers eat. Not the model ones at least, the men always and my boss always eats, but she’s quite heavy. In fact, anytime that I ever go out with my coworkers, if we ever do go out for food. They never finish their food or if we go to a bar they’ll get a side of fries, but really only eat two or three and continue chain-smoking or chain vaping. It’s such an interesting thing to be in that environment, where everybody knows, but no one talks about it. I wish we could talk about it. I wish I could tell them how hungry I was. How little I ate that day I wish they would feel comfortable enough to tell me how they are. But we just talk about how much we love to Pad Thai and are definitely gonna order chicken wings as soon as we get home.

I am pro recovery. Block don’t report

[the5thcellar]

The only reason why people are against the perspective of Luke and Nicola having it, it's the internal fat phobia for me. Same thing for the group 'no chemistry' in the series. Anons wouldn't say all that shit about one sided crush from her, if she was indeed a woman with a skinny body, not a mid size one. The thing is she doesn't need it, cause she is ethereal and perfect in her way. She is a beautiful woman. She is gorgeous, while people project much of their own insecurities on her. Luke, though, is just the other typical male celebrity. If they'll ever jump on the train, it will certainly be him asking her out, not her following him. I don't see this woman in her golden retriever stage for anyone. She knows her worth and is sure to be aware of impulsive decisions of his.

OH CLOCK IT OMGGGGGGG. 193829293912% !!!!!!!!!!

I would like this post a hundred times if I could. I've been pretty much silent about the issue of fatphobia in the fandom because the arguments I've witnessed / been involved in on twitter ALWAYS get the same dead end responses - "not everything is fatphobia they just have no chemistry" / "you have to admit that Nicola isn't that attractive it has nothing to do with her weight".

It's LITERALLY fatphobia. Most of the times it's not even internalised - people are literally saying the quiet part out loud by insisting Nicola doesn't look good enough to warrant attraction from a "hot guy" like Luke.

LIKE BE SO FUCKING FR RN OMG ??? I've had to sit through people shipping SO many weird ass pairings that I personally felt were completely absurd - pairings that the mainstream audience ate up just because it was a skinny girl with a hot guy.

(Truth be told - and on a more relevant note - I literally felt like Phoebe and Regé had no chemistry. both of them were so absolutely compelling and gorgeous as individual characters but they didn't work together for me)

Isn't it strange how no one really said much about the previous two Bridgerton pairings where aesthetics were concerned... and were lauding the couples for all having such GREAT chemistry with one another ... but when it came to Luke and Nicola they were all suddenly so insistent that there was no chemistry at all and that their views are completely objective? Nah. Pack it the fuck up. All these people are fatphobic as hell.

What's made it worse is the bloody ozempic obsession that has swept over Hollywood in the past year. Suddenly celebs who used to advocate for body positivity are all skinny - doing a hypocritical 180 on the self love ethos they were preaching.

But anyway that's diving more into social commentary and I don't want to veer too far from the original content on this post.

So 100% yes - a HEFTY MAJORITY of polin antis and lukola antis are blatantly fatphobic. If you cannot imagine Luke Newton can EVER have feelings for Nicola but think him and A are obviously a great fit - you're fatphobic. You can pretend you're objective all you want ... but think about why you're so FUCKING QUICK to defend Antonia and say she'll be together with Luke forever / she's totally his type when 1) she's barely been in the spotlight - she's done no interviews or anything for y'all to even get enough of an idea of her personality to stan her or bat for her 2) y'all don't fucking KNOW his type you just assume it's skinny women because his celeb crush is dua lipa and everyone loves hot and skinny women right? newsflash guys my celeb crushes are Zac Efron and Mads Mikkelsen and HELL YEAH I'd fall over myself to date either of them... but in a fuck marry kill contest I'd still choose to marry Jack Black.

What you think is attractive as a fantasy is not always what you find attractive in a long term partner.

You're here on my page defending Antonia and insisting she's a better fit for Luke not because you know her, or like her, or even because you respect Luke. You're here on my page because you're using her as an excuse to come for Lukola. You're here on my page because you cannot imagine that a fat girl can be together with a "hot man."

Now check that.

[buyozempiconlinecanada]

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[uluthrek]

asoiaf characters rated based on how likely they are to own a thermomix.

ned: 2/10 has no idea what that is and is, upon introduction, mildly terrified of it

catelyn -10000/10: ideologically opposed to the thermomix, those things are NEVER even getting CLOSE to her precious kitchen, hates the thermomix and its users with frankly demonic fervor

lysa: 1000/10 self explanatory

tyrion: 7/10 has one and secretly regrets the purchase but still uses it to make pretentious ass hipster shit he himself doesn’t even like but he is desperate to get some use out of it

brienne: 0/10 lives off protein bars, brussel sprouts and tap water and is scared of her own kitchen

cersei: 10/10 collects expensive kitchen gadgets like one might do with lego sets; rarely ever uses it, though, because actual meals don’t agree with her ozempic intake

jaime: 5/10 secretly yearns for it but will tell anyone who asks (or doesn’t) that owning a thermomix is emasculating

edmure: 9/10 has bought one but got electrocuted so hard he had to go to the er when he tried to hook it up

olenna: 3/10 is intrigued but completely and utterly unable to order anything from the internet

rhaenyra: 10/10 can’t be bothered to actually work it herself and has a servant do it for her

alicent: -1000000000000000/10 HATES the thermomix and HATES its users and will shame you on facebook if you own one

helaena: 20/10 the first thing she’s buying once she moves out

alysanne: 0/10 also a part of the extreme anti thermomix movement

rohanne: 20/10 where do you think those handmade poisons are from?

stannis: 0/10 those things are a waste of money and he eats but for sustenance, food intake is not supposed to be fun or enjoyable because life is meaningless

selyse: 20/10 ooooh flashy gadget oooooh

davos: 1/10 he can admit that it is neat but finds that it takes the joy out of the process of cooking

[apricitystudies]

what i read in mar. 2023:

(previous editions) bold = favourite

class, race, & labour

crime of the centuries

from a massacre in apartheid south africa to 'feel good' multiculturalism: the dark history of harmony day (australia)

the prison industry corporate database (usa)

how australia wrote the 'stop the boats' playbook

the crisis of the intellectuals

gender, sexuality, & intersectionality

‘i know where the bodies are buried’ (uk)

is it too late for male friendship?

all true at once

of an age: a tender portrait of young queer love in 90s suburban melbourne

inside the secret working group that helped push anti-trans laws across the country (usa)

politics & current affairs

‘what was the point?’: freed after 9 years, refugees learn to live again (australia)

on the trail of the fentanyl king

the mercy workers

emboldened by israel’s far right, jewish settlers fan the flames of chaos

sas unit repeatedly killed afghan detainees (uk)

in australia, slot machines are everywhere. so is gambling addiction

history, culture, & media

the disabled villain

the lesser known history of the maralinga nuclear tests (australia)

a murder in berlin

baghdad memories: what the first few months of the us occupation felt like to an iraqi

will the ozempic era change how we think about being fat and being thin?

violent delights

at the kremlin in 1943

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brinklump Linkdump

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

Life comes at you fast, links come at you faster. Once again, I've arrived at Saturday with a giant backlog of links I didn't fit in this week, so it's time for a linkdump, the 14th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

It's the Year of Our Gourd twenty and twenty-four and holy shit, is rampant corporate power rampant. On January 1, the inbred droolers of Big Pharma shat out their annual price increases, as cataloged in 46Brooklyn's latest Brand Drug List Price Change Box Score:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/branddrug-boxscore

Here's the deal: drugs that have already been developed, brought to market, and paid off are now getting more expensive. Why? Because the pharma companies have "pricing power," the most reliable indicator of monopoly. Ed Cara rounds up the highlights for Gizmodo:

https://gizmodo.com/ozempic-wegovy-wellbutrin-oxycontin-drug-price-increase-1851179427

What's going up? Well, Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists. These drugs have made untold billions for their manufacturers, so naturally, they're raising the price. That's how markets work, right? When firms increase the volume of a product, the price goes up? Right? Other drugs that are going up include Wellbutrin (an antidepressant that's also widely used in smoking cessation) and the blood thinner Plavix. I mean, why the hell not? These companies get billions in research subsidies, invaluable government patent privileges, and near-total freedom to abuse the patent system with evergreening:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/23/everorangeing/#taste-the-rainbow

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It's like these guys can't even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that's how you get guillotines.

Take Apple. They just got their asses handed to them in court by Epic, who successfully argued that Apple's rule requiring everyone who sells through the App Store to use Apple's payment processor and pay Apple 30% out of every dollar they bring in was an antitrust violation. Epic won, then won the appeal, then SCOTUS told Apple they wouldn't hear the case, so that's that.

Right? Wrong. Apple's pulled a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran. Apple has announced that app companies that process transactions using their own payment processors on the web must still pay Apple a 27% fee for every dollar their process:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apples-app-store-rule-changes-draw-sharp-rebuke-from-critics-150047160.html

In addition, Apple will throw a terrifying FUD-screen up every time a user clicks a payment link that goes to the web:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

This is obviously not what the court had in mind, and there's no way this will survive the next court challenge. It's just Apple making sure that everyone knows it hates us all and wants us to die. Thanks, Tim Apple, and right back atcha.

Not to be outdone in the monopolistic mustache-twirling department, Ubisoft just announced that it is going to shut down its driving simulator game The Crew, which it sold to users with a "perpetual license":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

This is some real Darth Vader MBA shit. "Yeah, we sold you a 'perpetual license' to this game, but we're terminating it. I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Ubisoft sure are innovators. They've managed the seemingly impossible feat of hybridizing Darth Vader and Immortan Joe. Ubisoft's head of subscriptions, the guillotine-ready Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers need to get "comfortable" with "not owning their games":

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games

Or, as Immortan Joe put it: "Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!"

Capitalism without constraint is enshittification's handmaiden, and the latest victim is Ello, the "indie" social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users. When Ello took VC and Andy Baio questioned how this could be squared with this promise, the founders mocked him and others for raising the question. Their response boiled down to "we are super-chill dudes and you can totally trust us."

They raised more capital, and used that to create a nice place for independent artists, who piled into the platform and provided millions of unpaid hours of creative labor to help the founders increase its value. The founders and their investors turned the company into a Public Benefit Corporation, which meant they had an obligation to serve the public benefit.

But then they took more investment money and simply (and silently) sold their assets to a for-profit. Struggling to raise capital, the founders opted to secretly sell the business to a sleazy branding company called Talenthouse. Its users didn't know about the change, though the site sure had a lot of Talenthouse design competitions all of a sudden.

Finally, the company announced the change as the last founders left. Rather than announcing that the new owners were untrustworthy scum, warning their users to get their data and get out, the founders posted oblique, ominous statements to Instagram. The company started stiffing the winners of those design competitions. Then, one day, poof, Ello disappeared, taking all its users' data with it. Poof:

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/

I'm sure the founders' decisions each seemed reasonable at the moment. That's every terrible situation arises: you rationalize that a single compromise isn't that big of a deal, and then you do the same for the next compromise, and the next, and the next. Pretty soon, you're betraying everyone who believed in you.

One answer to this is "Ulysses pacts": making binding commitments to do right before you are tempted. Throw away all your Oreos when you go on a diet and you can't be tempted to eat a whole sleeve of them at 2AM. License your software under the GPL and your investors can't force you to make it proprietary. Set up a warrant canary and the feds can't force you to keep their spying secret:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

If the founders were determined to build a trustworthy, open, independent company, they could have published their quarterly books, livestreamed their staff meetings, built data-export tools that emailed users every week with a link to download everything they'd posted since the last week. Merely halting any of these practices would have been a signal that things were wrong. Anyone who says they won't be tempted in the moment to make a "reasonable" compromise in the hopes of recovering whatever they're trading away by living to fight another day is bullshitting you, and possibly themself.

The inability to project the consequences of your bad decisions in the future is the source of endless mischief and heartbreak. Take movie projectors. A couple decades ago, the studio cartel established a standard for digital movie distribution to cinematic exhibitors called the Digital Cinema Initiative. Because studio executives are more worried about stopping piracy than they are about making sure that people who pay for movies get to see them, they build digital rights management into this standard.

Movie theaters had to spend fortunes to upgrade to "secure" projectors. A single vendor, Deluxe Technicolor, monopolized the packaging of movies into "Digital Cinema Prints" for distribution to these projectors, and they used all kinds of dirty tricks to force distributors to use their services, like arbitrarily flunking third-party DCPs over picky shit like not starting and ending on a black frame.

Over time, the ability to use unencrypted files was stripped away, meaning every DCP needed to be encrypted, and every projector needed to have up-to-date decryption keys. This system broke down on Jan 1, 2024, and cinemas all over the world found they couldn't play Wonka. Many just shut down for the day and refunded their customers:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/1/24021915/alamo-drafthouse-outage-sony-projector

The problem? Something that every PKI system has to wrangle: an expired certificate from Deluxe Technicolor. The failure has been dubbed the Y2K24 debacle by projectionists and film-techs, who are furious:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/main-forum/34652-the-y2k24-bug-major-digital-outage-today

Making everything worse is that Sony mothballed the division that maintains its projectors, so there's no one who can update them to accommodate Technicolor's workaround. Struggling mom-and-pop theaters are having to junk their systems and replace them. There's plenty of blame to go around, but Sony is definitely the most negligent link in the chain. Shame on them.

Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious. This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot. The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

There once was a chatbot named DPD, Who was useless at providing help. It could not track parcels, Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time, And a customer's worst nightmare. It was so bad, That people would rather call the depot directly, Than deal with the useless chatbot.

One day, DPD was finally shut down, And everyone rejoiced. Finally, they could get the help they needed, From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is…the opposite of an AI hallucination? It's AI clarity.

As with all botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean damn quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag. Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the Internet Archive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another. Think of steampunk, a subculture that wove together artists, makers, costumers, fiction writers, and tinkerers in endlessly creative ways. My old pal Roger Wood was the world's most improbable steampunk: he was a gay ex-navy gunner who grew up in a small town in the maritimes but moved to Toronto where he became the world's most accomplished steampunk clockmaker.

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just skewered on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his wonderful workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about Don Bolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak. Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

As Doug Muir writes on Crooked Timber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi – the coolest of the kingdoms! – can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of work is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

As Muir writes: "Animals have no evolutionary history of photosynthesis and aren’t designed for it, but the same is true for yeast. So… no reason this shouldn’t be possible. A photosynthesizing cat? Sure, why not."

Why not indeed?!

OK, that's this week's linkdump done and dusted. It only remains for me to share the news with you that the trolley problem has been finally and comprehensively solved, by Sidereal@kolektiva.social, of the IWW IU 520 (railroad workers):

Slip the switch by flipping it while the trolley's front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment bringing the trolley to a safe halt.

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/111779015415697244

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/20/melange/#i-have-heard-the-mermaids-singing

[fatliberation]

Did u have a post abt how ozempic doesnt work somewhere on here? Tryna find it rn.

I don't post a whole lot about o/zempic or w/egovy in depth because it's a (somewhat) triggering topic for me. my dad is a lobbyist for n/ovo n/ordisk and he has continued to try to get me to take his drug because I have a "disease" that needs to be "treated." we've gotten into countless fights over it. I'm not in a place where I have the emotional energy to post about it, but here are some podcasts on the subject I have listened to and trust:

but yes, in short: it doesn't work, not for weight loss at least. it's prescribed with a diet and exercise (when their marketing relies on the fact that diets don't work. funny.) it doesn't make fat people thin, but it does make you lose a small percentage of your body weight (about 5 percent) because it's an appetite supressant. supposedly you would have to be on the drug for the rest of your life to keep that 5% off, and it's only been tested for a few years so we really have no clue of the long-term effects, and capitalism loves dependance! the side effects are horrible and are often too unbearable for folks to continue the drug. complete loss of interest and joy in eating, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, stomach pain, headache, dizziness, fatigue, even gallbladder and pancreas problems, gastroparesis, and blocked intestines. and there could be a risk of thyroid cancer.

[10001gecs]

im gonna be honest i dont even understand how ozempic works. like it makes you feel fuller longer but surely it doesnt make you feel good? like surely if ur losing weight ur like tired and stuff like you would be normally. so whats the point? if you wanted to lose weight while feeling bad as a celebrity you could just get an eating disorder like why do we need medication for that

[bradpittwh0re]

faceclaim: ariana grande

pairings: brad pitt x singer!reader

warnings:fluff

wicked2024

liked by bradpitt, yourusername , y/nstan04 and 347,086 others

wicked2024 We are so excited to announce that Y/N L/N will be joining the cast of Wicked 2024 as Glinda

view all 263,907 comments

y/nfan01 we are so proud of you y/n

y/nfan02 wait she's getting back into her acting roots , mother!!!

pittfan24 brad would have to give her acting lessons cause she can’t act , love her voice tho

y/nfan03 y you such a hater she literally acted before she was a singer

y/nfan04 we don't want this we want the next album

y/nfan29 can yall stop bullying y/n to make another album

y/nfan72 she literally made 3 album in 3 years relax

hater09 stop letting singers act they always horrible

y/nstan11 she literally started off on broadway before she became an artist weirdo

bradpitt been keeping this secret for so long your going to kill it

yourusername aww thx my biggest cheerleader

bradpitt 🥰🥰

yourusername

liked by bradpitt, zendaya and 1.5m others

yourusername I can finally reveal my new hair color for the glinda

view all 732,115 comments

y/nfan62 her hair colour suits her so much

bradfan4 why she look like a skeleton

zendaya your so amazingg

y/nfan65 love her to bits but is she okay

bradfan3 probably doing ozempic

y/nfan72 she needs to eat more

bradfan18 brad should be with a real woman not a wannabe child

bradfan55 why does brad think she’s attractive , soo confused

y/nfan87 all these comments are disgusting , stop judging her body

(yourusername disabled her comments)

TMZ

iked by y/nfan14, y/nfan46 and 45,188 others

TMZ Y/n L/N has been getting backlash over new look she posted via instagram.Do you guys thinks she is on ozempic???

view all 30,274 comments

y/nstan04 i miss the old y/n

bradfan13 y/n deserves better

hater92 💀💀💀💀

bradfan22 sided eye , so obvious she is using compare her pics to early

bradpitt

liked by yourinstagram, tchalamet and 35.m others

bradpitt I dislike sharing my private life with the world. Still, when people in my personal life are getting bullied, attacked, and trashy news outlets and fans are saying untrue things, I can't just stay silent.Y/N is the kindest person ever (and the best girlfriend) and doesn't deserve any of this hatred.

But I just also wanted to say, one: There are many different kinds of beautiful. There are many different ways to look healthy and beautiful. When I looked the way you consider my healthy but that in fact wasn’t my healthy. But that’s the first thing: Healthy can look different.

The second thing is you never know what someone is going through. So even if you are coming from a loving place and a caring place, that person is probably working on it or has a support system that they are working on it with, and you never know. So be gentle with each other and with yourselves.

And thirdly, the third one’s unrelated I guess. I just wanted to extend some love your way and tell you that you’re beautiful no matter what phase you’re in. But yeah, sending you guys a lot of love, and I think you’re beautiful, no matter what you’re going through, no matter what weight, no matter how you like to do your makeup these days, no matter what cosmetic procedures you’ve had or not or anything. I just think you’re beautiful and wanted to share some feelings. Have a very beautiful day, and I’m sending you a lot of love.

(bradpitt has disabled comments)

author note - thanks for reading this was something I had done awhile a go and decide to just release something for you guys, also I'm currently editing my Sza and Rihanna works so they can be more up-to-date and relevant