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Po-Motri-Cia, Astrophysical Cat Wizard

@aesmael / aesmael.tumblr.com

“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”

no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it

The idea that young people are getting used to not being able to speak in public about sex, queerness etc without talking around censors, and see this as normal and not a problem, scares me tbh.

The fact that people are so comfortable with being censored that they Voluntarily censor themselves on words and topics that aren’t even being limited is a terrifying sign

realizing I could technically say “yeah my mother wanted a girl so she dressed me like a little girl” to explain my childhood photos and it would technically be correct and win me much more sympathy than just saying I’m trans

“you’re right it IS weird to force children to live as a gender they know they are not”

I gave my soapbox speech about how weight loss is mostly bullshit to two different patients in a row yesterday and so help me I’m pretty sure one of these days someone is going to say “but SURELY you agree I’d be HEALTHIER if I lost weight!” bc you can see the disbelief in their eyes. And like. Sure, maybe! You might see some improvement in biomarkers like LDL and A1c, and your knees would probably feel better. But you would be amazed at how much more good you can do for yourself by focusing on things you can actually meaningfully change without resorting to making yourself miserable. Eat more fresh fruits and vegetables—it’s hard bc they’re more difficult to prepare and more expensive per calorie and go bad faster than other foods, but they’re what we evolved eating the most of so they’re what our bodies need the most of. And walk around more; sure, cardio is great for you, but if it sucks so bad you don’t do it, it isn’t doing shit for you. And we evolved to walk very very long distances, a little bit at a time, so our bodies respond actually very well to adding walks into our schedules, which is vastly easier than adding workouts that are frankly designed to be punishing when the definition of punishing is “makes you less likely to do it again in the future.”

You get one life. It is shorter than you can begin to imagine. Don’t waste it hating yourself because somebody is going to make money off that self-hatred. You deserve better than to be a cash cow for billionaires who pay aestheticians and dermatologists to make them (or at least their trophy wives) look thin and beautiful no matter what they actually do.

And ONE MORE THING—listen. We are NOT evolved to lose weight, we are evolved to hoard it. We came about in a world of famines. Not only does your brain have MULTIPLE failsafes built in SPECIFICALLY TO PREVENT WEIGHT LOSS, but there are epigenetic factors—factors that are not DNA but travel with it and affect how it is expressed. So if your parents or grandparents lived through a famine, like, oh, say, the Great Depression, YOU are more likely to gain weight and more likely to have difficulty losing it. AND! We live in a world highly affected by industrial pollution—there is no corner of the world free from it, micro plastics and industrial chemical pollution have been found literally everywhere ever studied—and many of those pollutants affect our endocrine systems. Looking at records of lab animals going back to the 1960s, where we have excellent records of what genetically essentially identical animals ate, we know that LAB ANIMALS FED THE SAME AMOUNT OF THE SAME CHOW WEIGH MORE NOW THAN THEY DID THE IN SIXTIES. So no. You’re not fat because your willpower is somehow busted. (Willpower, fun fact, can be depleted! By DEPLETING BLOOD SUGAR! Baumeister’s work in the 2000s demonstrated that.) You’re fat because your body wants you to live, and because the ultra rich have knowingly poured poison into the world because they don’t care if you die.

So YOU need to care if you live. And how you live. Please love yourself, because the billionaires will never give a shit about you. Weight Watchers has a 96-99% failure rate. Weight loss is a scam that makes billions of dollars every year. Love yourself too much to fall for that. Don’t wait until you’re thin to love yourself or to start living, because a) that day may never come and b) it’s okay if that day never comes. You are worthwhile and enough right now. I promise you that.

Did I mention that all studies on the subject are very clear--like, we do not need more studies on this, which is a bananas thing for a scientist to say--exercise does not lead to weight loss. It just doesn't. Anyone who tells you it does is wrong. It's good for you because it's good for you, not because it makes you thin. It improves your blood vessel health; it improves your heart health; it improves your body's ability to manage blood sugar; it improves your muscular health. It does not make you thin.

Reducing calories can reduce weight, but your body, as previously mentioned, is trying REAL HARD not to lose weight. I see a lot of recommendations for 1200 calorie a day diets. Google "starvation study" and look at how much the men in that study were given. It was over 1500 calories a day, and they were miserable. They became skeletal. They felt awful, depressed, foggy--because your brain is the single biggest user of calories in your body. It is so metabolically active that your brain uses around 30% of all the calories your body uses. Guess what happens when you starve your brain? You feel like shit. You feel stupid and depressed. Don't starve yourself. It doesn't work and it makes you feel awful and you will get rebound weight gain above whatever you lost, guaranteed, and then you'll blame yourself for "letting yourself go" because our society is built on lies.

We also cannot and should not ever suggest that anyone can lose more than 5-10% of their body weight and keep that off. It's just not possible. Bariatric surgery is a WHOLE other can of worms, I don't have the energy to explain why I almost never recommend it to my patients, but just know that if anyone has ever suggested you lose more than 10% of your body weight through behavioral changes, they are bullshitting you.

Low key pretty sure we are all going to be horrified that bariatric surgery was ever a thing, just like we can’t imagine why people used mercury injections for syphilis.

Will you feel better with exercise, vegetables & fruit, drinking enough water, and going to bed on time and getting a reasonable amount of sleep? Yeah, you probably will. It’s annoying how well those things tend to work. Will you lose weight doing those things? Maybe not. I literally do not give a shit as long as you feel better and can do what you’d like to be able to do on a daily basis.

saw this massive onion bigger than my entire hand in the produce aisle and immediately snatched it up solely to weigh it and a guy across the aisle asked how much it weighed because he was curious as well and when i told him it was two pounds he excitedly was like “it’s like the biggest one i’ve ever seen..” humanity rocks moment. bonding with strangers over giant onion

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

There is actually a whole series of these cars and I love them

The sonic one is a personal favorite, so much so that I made a scale model of it:

….the entire concept of model trains also having boxcar graffiti is somehow blowing my mind. it’s like you’ve opened my eyes to an entire fresh dimension of beauty.

The concept of "spyware" has disappeared from the common internet lingo after it became the case that the word could now be used to describe nearly every major website and a huge percentage of the most commonly-used software.

non-it/its users need to get their shit together fr

ok time to elaborate.

earlier today i was talking to someone and i mentioned one of my friends, and said 'yeah it was saying-' and before i could finish my sentence she interrupted me and went "it?" as if i'd misspoken. when i said "yeah, it said-" she looked at me as if i'd like insulted her or something and went "why are you calling your friends its? don't you mean they?"

i pretty much just went "nevermind" because that's not worth it (and no i'm not misgendering a friend for someone else's "comfort" like wtf) but the issue is

this. happens. every. time.

you tell someone else you use it/its? they look at you like you're fucking insane. 99% of the time they will refuse to use your pronouns because it's "offensive" to them (yknow what else is offensive? purposely misgendering me when i literally just told you my pronouns). when you talk about a friend who uses it/its pronouns, 99% of the time the other person will try to like. correct you or stop you even though they don't even know who you're talking about.

"well they/them is gender neutral too so just use th-" no. my pronouns are it/its. they/them is not it/its. they/them is misgendering.

"but it's gender neutra-" okay and? if dude said he uses he/him and you used they/them that's misgendering. why is it okay when it's it pronouns?

"but it's offensive to refer to people as-" bitch i am literally referring to myself as it/its. i am telling you directly in plain words that these are the pronouns that make me comfortable. i don't give a fuck what you think of them they are my pronouns

at this point i settle with they/them because i'm just done having people look at me like i said a slur when i tell them what pronouns i'm comfortable with.

for real once you realize that you can actually wear whatever you want and call yourself whatever name and pronouns you want and have whatever interests you want and be whatever gender you want your life gets so much better and more fun

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