#Or junk science in general

[ihazyourkitty]

Just a friendly reminder that David Kirby, the journalist who authored Death At SeaWorld, essentially a companion book for Blackfish, an allegedly deep, dark, gripping expose of SeaWorld and the broader “captivity” industry…

….also published this in 2005:

If I have to explain to any of you why promoting junk science linking autism to vaccines is irresponsible, exploitative and offensive, then don’t even bother commenting. There is no link between vaccines and autism. This was known in 2005, but that didn’t stop Kirby from profiting off of the controversy. He did distance himself from this stance later in life…. and by distance, I mean he admitted that other genetic and environmental factors were more likely at play, but that we still shouldn’t rule out vaccines. Basically, he just moved the goalposts like many anti-vaccine quacks are wont to do. To date, I have yet to find any formal retraction of his position on vaccines and autism.

This isn’t an ad hominem. I have serious concerns about anyone’s ability to properly interpret science or facts when they also peddle in anti-vaccine nonsense. Frankly, the snippets I have read from Death At SeaWorld show frightening parallels with anti-vaccine rhetoric. -Oh no, the whales are being loaded with antibiotics!

-They’re living in water full of chemicals!

-Let’s take mortalities, injuries, and medical issues out of context for shock value!

-Providing incomplete, or misleading statistics, also without context

-Their lives are not natural! (And a general reliance on the naturalism fallacy)

-The whistleblower underdogs vs the big mean establishment trope

-Featuring so-called “experts” who make a living off of pushing this controversy

-Insinuating some great big conspiracy

I’m not saying that the anti-vaccine and anti-captivity movements are altogether synonymous in a literal, 1-to-1 sense. Obviously there is additional nuance here. I don’t know what correlation, if any, there is between someone being anti-captivity and anti-vaccine. I would certainly hope that most anti-cap people are not also anti-vaccine.

What I am saying, however, is that at least one key player in promoting Blackfish drew from the same rhetorical playbook, and that deserves some serious scrutiny. Pseudoscience and misinformation are prevalent online. Don’t fall victim to more of it.

In David Kirby’s case at least, it doesn’t demonstrate that he was good at uncovering truth and speaking truth to power— it demonstrated that he was good at telling a compelling story via misrepresenting facts.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in NEXT THURSDAY (Apr 11) in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroehttps://cockeyed.com/lessons/viagra/viagra.html, then PROVIDENCE, RI (Apr 12), and beyond!

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

[frangipani-wanderlust]

Adding, be extremely skeptical and suspicious of any scientific article in which the conclusion isn't summarized in the abstract and/or the introduction. The point of a journal article is not to keep you in suspense and what the results were should be clearly and unambiguously stated somewhere in those two sections. If it isn't that is a red flag that the authors are trying to bury the lede, hide bad methodology, or both and that you should be reading the rest of the article with an eye to figuring out what it is they are trying to hide.

How to Really Comprehend a Scientific Paper

**credit to my research advisor, she’s an amazing mentor and I aspire to be just like her someday :)

Read the abstract. Write down what the paper says it is going to be about.

Read the introduction. Write down what the paper says it is looking to accomplish and how.

Read the conclusion. Write down what the paper actually did accomplish.

Go through and find all the pictures, graphs, or diagrams. Write notes explaining these images to yourself.

Read the whole paper start to finish. Write a summary of the paper as though you are explaining it to a layperson, and then another summary as though you are explaining it to a colleague.

Throughout all of the above steps:

If there are words you don’t know google them and write down the definitions

If the paper defines a formula, law, variable, etc in a certain way write that down

If there are references to or recommendations of other literature write those down. After the last step if there’s anything you’re uncertain about or would like more information on look to that list for further reading

[ms-demeanor]

Hi, I share your strong pro-medicine, pro-vaccines, anti-woo beliefs. I also have chronic digestive issues and insurance that won’t cover the useful specialists. The gastroenterologists I’ve encountered are helpful for making sure my insides look okay but they don’t seem to have much training around nutrition and food science. Nutritionists are unlicensed and I find them about as trustworthy as chiropractors, and I can’t get insurance to cover a registered dietician. The internet is saturated with pseudoscience junk and “miracle cures”, and in moments of desperation I’ve fallen for some of them. Luckily I haven’t been harmed by anything so far, but I don’t think they helped much either.

I was wondering if you or your followers have any resources on IBS and/or GERD that are scientifically sound and written for a general audience? Or advice for identifying when pop-sci-style “food science” articles are a scam?

I deeply regret to inform you that I was so annoyed by this exact problem that I literally went back to school to start working on getting a degree in nutrition and got two and a half years into a second bachelor's degree before realizing I wouldn't be able to get into any programs in my area that I could afford because the local state schools aren't accepting second bachelor's applicants. (Cal State Chico, I love you and you are too far away, it's not meant to be)

Nutrition information online is completely infested with woo and I am hesitant to point people toward one of the good resources I used to reference because it is politically batshit.

If you are looking at a food science article on the internet and are trying to figure out if it's a scam the big red flags to look out for are:

anything claiming to be a silver bullet; there are no silver bullets, no magical treatments, no one weird food that will fix the problem or one weird supplement that will make everything better.

Over-emphasis on a specific type of diet (diet as in "all the food that a person consumes" not as in "weight loss tool") for a general population. It's irresponsible to recommend a rigorous, restricted diet to a wide variety of people because people are so different that one diet that works for one person (say a vegan diet) might be unhealthy or difficult to manage for another person who would thrive on a different diet (low fat, low carb).

Anyone who tells you to cut out an entire food group or macronutrient is a liar who is trying to get your money. Unless it is your personal medical doctor who is saying "you need to stop eating grains" you do not need to stop eating grains and should not stop eating grains. You also do not need to stop eating fat, or eat only protein, or cut all fruit out of your diet. (caveat: there are some conditions that require a very low fiber diet, but even on that diet there are some fruits you can eat)

Beyond that, what you can do to make sure you're getting the best information possible is:

look up the author of any article you're looking at and see what else they've written; check what their qualifications are. See the people they interact with or have collaborated with. If they work heavily with people who are, say, antivax or proponents of raw milk, you should not trust their work.

If you see something that claims to treat your condition or help with nutrition, search "[subject] research study" or "[subject] scholarly research" and see what comes up. Read at least a few papers on the subject and see if there's a consensus or if there are broad disagreements. Get into the habit of looking up the impact scores of journals and researching the history of the journals.

Learn to recognize the woo keywords with your particular illness. For celiac that's "leaky gut," and any article I come across that discusses "leaky gut" gets extra scrutiny because sometimes there are legitimate reasons to describe a "leaky gut" but more often there are woo nonsense reasons. One really good way to figure out what the woo keywords for your illness are is to search "[your illness] + [woo huckster]", so "celiac + joseph mercola" or "celiac + the food babe." (those are good starting places to see what woo is popular around anything nutrition based, really; nothing those two say is trustworthy) you can also try "[your condition] + [specific type of medical woo]" with, like, "chiropractic" and "homeopathic" and "holistic" in the second box.

Be wary of positive assertions without evidence. If someone is making an affirmative statement and they aren't providing a citation, be suspicious.

Anyway. Good luck. It sucks out there.

[deminetly]

𓏵 YOUTUBE VIDEO IDEAS

──────────────────

┆ FASHION RELATED

thrift flipping random items my friend chose me

styling clothes I no longer like

closet cleanout

personalising something (your purse, bike, car, etc)

recreating pinterest outfits

how to find your style/finding my style

clothes Id buy if l was rich

current favourite fashion trends

wearing clothes wrong (scarf as shirt for example

recreating met gala outfits

letting my followers/friends style me

styling my followers

my favourite clothing items

how to spice up a boring outfit

making outfits based on random theme suggestions

upcycling my old clothes

jewellery collection

thrift haul + try on + styling

predicting fashion trends

how to dress more whimsical

weird fashion trends that actually existed

the science hehind why certain colors look good on you (explaining undertones, color theory and how to find your best shades)

only wearing old trends

my favourite trends

letting strangers pick my outfits from a thrift store 

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─

┆ ART RELATED

guessing the prices of modern art

playing roblox speed draw until I win

drawing in weird conditions (in the dark/underwater/with your non doninant hand)

recreating famous paintings

trying out different art styles

guessing/making up the meanings behind famous pieces

turning random scribbles into masterpieces

can I spot the Al generated piece

trying to create a masterpiece with the cheapest materials

attempting to find my art style

drawing the same thing in ten minutes vs an hour

redesigning companies logos

redesigning cartoon characters (in my art style)

drawing how I think book characters/places look

painting scnenes from my dreams while telling you about them

making a piece of art only using materials from nature

turning my followers’ pinterest boards into characters/stories/pieces of art

reviewing my followers’ art

trying to draw random characters completely from memory

drawing a self portrait from memory

drawing a self portrait in different styles

rating my fanart

doing random art exercises

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─

┆ …EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK CHALLANGES

trying a new hobby...

getting of my comfort zone (doing something uncomfortable...)

going on side quests alone...

trying out new styles...

dressing like 90s movie characters...

doing something nice...

watching a different movie...

letting followers/friends control my life...

listening to a new genre of music...

turning into my favourite characters...

letting my followers/friends style me…

interviewing strangers about their weirdest dream (or any other topic)…

testing out a new morning/night/writing/etc routine…

only wearing old trends…

reading/writing a short story…

watching a horror film…

helping out a stranger…

doing 3 crafts a day…

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─

┆ JUST VIBES / RANDOM

trinket collection/favourite trinkets

trinket hunting at the thrift store

whats in my bag

whats in my junk drawer

movie/book/music recs

character customizing (dyeng hair, getting nails done, etc)

reading my old journals

redesigning famous album covers/movie posters

going randonauticaing

turning into my favourite character for a day (dressing and acting like your favourite character)

rating media Ive consumed lately (movies, books)

room/car tour

being productive for a week

reading my followers confessions

doing public dares (with your friend/alone with dares that your followers submitted)

my wishlist

things I want in my future home/things I love in houses

my (month) favourites

weird facebook marketplace finds (+buying them?)

decorating my purse

hobby ideas

weird girl hobby ideas

trying new hairstyles and makeup looks

reading reddit confessions/AITA stories

career ideas if you like…

24h without my phone

replacing my screentime with isolation

putting the same writing prompt in story writing generators and ranking them

opening mystery jewellery bags

short film / short film ideas

stop motion film

the history of literally anything (journaling for example)

what Id buy if I was rich / wishlist

how to take good pictures / picture and pose ideas for photoshoots

rating my old pinterest boards and playlists

playing cozy games

making my room more whimsical / how to make your room more whimsical

attempting to follow a reciepe in another language

random dreams Ive had (+why you think you had them, their meaning, did it predict something?)

guessing how magic tricks work + learning them

revisiting childhood (trying your old hobbies, watching old favourite movies, etc)

trying to write a poem with random words that a random word generator gives me

interviewing strangers about their weirdest dream (or any other topic)

creating my own religion

creating my own holiday and celebrating it

reacting to beauty standars from different countries (and trying to look like that)

trying to do my followers homework

analysing a movie/book

asmr

how to add whimsy into your life

what your … says about you

answering strange questions

journaling prompts/questions for deep thinkers

my thoughts on …

creating a soundtrack for my life

reacting to embarrasing stories

reacting to mandala effects

taking uquizzes

asking strangers “whats the most interesting thing about you?”

letting a yes or no wheel decide my fate for a day 

going out and collecting things for my junk journal 

inventing my own country and language

letting strangers write a story sentence by sentence 

testing creativity techniques for a day

designing my dream life

conspiracy theories that I believe in 

reacting to random conspiracy theories

romanticising life 

choosing 5 things from all of the bucketlists ive ever made and completeing them

taking random personality tests

journal tour

yapping about (specific topic) while coloring/drawing

trying to be more creative

─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─

┆ RATING MY FOLLOWERS…

…letterboxd top 4

…style

…music taste

…instagram profiles

…rooms

…pictures as kids

…dreams

…deepest secrets

…crushes

…wishlists

…favourite (movies, songs,etc)

…journals

[hussyknee]

You understand "generational distrust" is different from "generational cohort" do you not? That the monikers of "Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, Boomer" are meaningless to anyone who isn't in proximity to the white US-centric Anglosphere and the attempt to homogenise all of society this way is profoundly colonial, imperialistic and erasing of other generational legacies?

Strauss and Howe laid the groundwork for their theory in their book Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (1991), which discusses the history of the United States as a series of generational biographies going back to 1584¹. In their book The Fourth Turning (1997), the authors expanded the theory to focus on a fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras² to describe the history of the United States, including the Thirteen Colonies and their British antecedents. However, the authors have also examined generational trends elsewhere in the world and described similar cycles in several developed countries.³

Academic response to the theory has been mixed, with some applauding Strauss and Howe for their "bold and imaginative thesis", while others have criticized the theory as being overly deterministic, unfalsifiable, and unsupported by rigorous evidence.⁴’⁵’⁶’⁷’⁸ Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who graduated from Harvard University with Strauss, called Generations the most stimulating book on American history he'd ever read, and even sent a copy to each member of Congress.⁸ The theory has been influential in the fields of generational studies, marketing, and business management literature.⁶ However, the theory has also been described by some historians and journalists as pseudoscientific,⁶’⁹’¹⁰ "kooky",¹¹ and "an elaborate historical horoscope that will never withstand scholarly scrutiny".¹²’¹³’¹⁴ Academic criticism has focused on the lack of rigorous empirical evidence for their claims,¹⁵ as well as the authors' view that generational groupings are more powerful than other social groupings, such as economic class, race, sex, religion, and political parties.¹

(Source)

The "10–15 years" thing was an off-the-cuff remark because the very first I heard of generational cohorts was in business school in 2011. I was in Canada at the time and talked about it with a bunch of middle-aged white professionals at a dinner party my landlady hosted. They hadn't heard about it either and it became a long conversational piece. I'm sure it would have been in Western cultural consciousness before then, and it's possible that I missed it because I live in South Asia, but I pretty much lived in internet fandoms and burgeoning social media since 2002 and only saw it had become a sudden, pervasive topic once I joined Tumblr in 2013 (apart from a dim memory of maybe having seen "Boomers" referenced in Reader's Digest when I was a preteen). So from a personal perspective, it seems like one of those cultural phenomenons that took off along with social media monopolies. I tried to trace how long Generational Marketing has been a thing with a cursory Google search, and the work cited furthest back is Rocking the Ages: The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing (HarperBusiness, 1997), reviewed by the New York Times the same year.

So yeah, like MBTI, this is just something corporate America fished out of the sociology trash bin, repackaged, and have now turned into yet another pop science cultural paradigm on par with Star Signs and twice as harmful.

[liberalsarecool]

You can't beat science with junk science.

RFK Jr will forever be known as the nepo baby who killed generations of vulnerable children, teens, and adults.

America will suffer during the next epidemic.

There is no good that comes from ignorance.

Gutting prevention has never improved anything. 'Doing less with more' is a sadistic gaslight.

This is a destabilization of society. This is giving conspiracy precedent over science.

Dark days are coming for America. Putin won.

[elicathebunny]

HEALTH SHOULD ALWAYS COME FIRST! PRIORITISING HEALTH BEFORE EVERYTHING ELSE TO LOOK GOOD + FEEL GOOD.

People always leave out the basics when it comes to trying to improve their looks. Prioritising health is so important before going in and tempering with your body. Your base is what you work with and you can definitely level up with what you've got naturally.

DIET

Your diet also depends on what your goals are. Someone who wants to build muscle will obviously eat differently from someone who just eats relatively healthy. So identify what your goals are and work your meals around that.

Here are some videos to give you a better insight: HOW I LOSE FAT AND KEEP IT OFF MEANS, WORKOUTS + EVERYTHING ELSE PROTEIN EXPLAINED, STRENGTH, MUSCLES, FAT LOSS & ENDURANCE HOW METABOLISM WORKS

Diet not only makes you feel better from the inside, but it also reflects on your outside. Your skin is a huge display of how you eat.

When you consume junk food, it can show up on your skin as breakouts or dullness. Your skin is one massive organ which soaks up everything put onto it and reflects everything you put inside your body. Fix the problem from the inside before getting confused about why your skincare routine isn't working.

FITNESS

Again, your fitness will differentiate from your goals. So work out your goals and make a plan around that. There are so many forms of fitness, some more intense than others and with different results. Working out in general is good for you, our bodies are meant to move. So even if you don't have a goal, staying active is always recommended.

HOW TO CREATE THE PERFECT WORKOUT PLAN

THE BEST WAY TO GAIN MUSCLE, SCIENCE EXPLAINED SIMPLY

Low-intensity workouts:

Yoga: Focuses on flexibility, strength, and relaxation through various poses and breathing techniques.

Pilates: A low-impact exercise method that strengthens muscles, improves flexibility, and enhances posture.

Walking: Simple yet effective, walking is a great way to improve cardiovascular health and boost mood without high impact.

Swimming: Provides a full-body workout with minimal stress on joints, making it ideal for people with joint issues or injuries.

High-intensity workouts:

HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training): Alternates between short bursts of intense exercise and brief recovery periods to maximize calorie burn and improve cardiovascular fitness.

CrossFit: Combines elements of weightlifting, interval training, gymnastics, and other exercises to build strength, endurance, and overall fitness.

Sprinting: Short, explosive bursts of running at maximum effort, often performed in intervals for cardiovascular conditioning and leg muscle strength.

Circuit Training: Involves moving through a series of exercises targeting different muscle groups with minimal rest in between, combining strength training and cardiovascular exercise.

These are just a few examples, but there are plenty of other workout styles out there to explore depending on your preferences and fitness goals. Walking every day is just a simple way to stay toned.

SLEEP

Sleeping is important for rest and recovery after workouts and energy-consuming activities. Sleep is needed for the brain to function, mood regulation and performance + productivity. Lack of sleep deprives you of all of these things, so getting your beauty sleep is absolutely needed.

School-age children (6-13 years): 9-11 hours per day.

Teenagers (14-17 years): 8-10 hours per day.

Young adults (18-25 years): 7-9 hours per day.

Adults (26-64 years): 7-9 hours per day.

HYGIENE

Upkeeping good hygiene is always needed anyway. Making sure you are clean (smelling good is a plus). Make sure you always wash your hands and take daily showers to remove any dirt on your body (clean those feet and your back well, don't forget them!). Taking care of your oral health must not be forgotten. Oil pulling and brushing your tongue for a healthy mouth. Make sure your hair is also getting the attention to keep it as healthy as you possibly can make it (this also depends on diet). Doing the extra things like spending time on your nails (making sure there isn't that stuff underneath them), making them pretty.

BODY CARE ROUTINE | FOR SMOOTH & GLOWING SKIN, TREATING KERATOSIS PILARIS, SHOWER ROUTINE

ENVIRONMENT

Having a stress-free environment is obviously the best to thrive in. But clearly not even being lucky enough to live like that constantly. So make sure you have that space to be on your own and have some alone time to really recharge. Keeping your space clean for a clear mind. Surround yourself with like-minded people and really set boundaries for those who prey on your mental clarity (energy vampires). Spending time in nature is one of the best ways to detach, rest time should not equal spending time on your devices. Let go and truly let yourself decompress. Mental health will improve how you carry yourself.

EMBODY YOUR POTENTIAL.

[cececat]

STH FanStory Recommendations:

As well as writing, I have found myself also reading an awful amount of Sonic-related fanfiction and comics recently… So, I thought I’d share a few of my favourites in case anyone else has found themselves hyper-fixating over this fandom like I have recently 🦔

I’ll try to put them in sections but please note that quite a few of the topics tend to overlap. Oh and also, there happens to be an awful lot of Sonadow shipping too, because even if it’s not always the key focus in the story, it always seems to make its way into the things I consume now apparently 😅 So I’ll be sure to tag with 💙🖤���️ if that’s relevant.

I hope you like this list (it took quite a while to put together) and be sure to show all of these stories and creators some love! 👇👇 👇

And obviously I had to start this list by plugging my own fanfiction stories, because I've been putting so much work into them and they will be updated regularly, while also making lots of other stuff as well... So please follow and/or subscribe for that... 😉 archiveofourown.org/users/cececatcreates

Live Action Universe:

Concord by EvieNyx (@evienyx) - [Complete] 💙🖤❤️ Focuses on Shadow after the third SCU movie. It’s really cute, and I feel like it accurately portrays movie-Shadow’s thoughts and memories, mixing together elements of the films with fan theories and other STH media canon.

Project Guardian by AealZX @aealzx - [Ongoing] Again, after the third SCU movie (there’s quite a few of them 😅) but Shadow is taken in as a fourth Wachowski sibling, who has to recover from severe injuries. Some art is included, and it’s just really sweet all-in-all.

Secrets In Our Quills by @nebrasska-alasska - [Ongoing] 💙🖤❤️ I’m sure many of you are already aware of their amazing stories, but this one is the longest so far, and also the closest to being completed. But if you like Sonadow slowburn and plenty of gay fluff, you should definitely read all of their incredible fanfics.

A Junk Yard Of Possibilities by CrazyForClones (@crazyforclones) - [Complete] This story looks at what happened to Agent Stone after Dr Robotnik’s death and focuses on the potentially adorable friendship that could blossom between him and Tails.

Family Loading… Please Wait by Humanities_Handbag ( @humanityinahandbag) & Invader_Sam (@smerfols) - [Ongoing] This quickly became a favourite, as it did with many others. 💕 It starts all the way back with the Wachowski’s adopting Sonic and then Tails and Knuckles and eventually Stone and Shadow, and it’s just the biggest, cutest family dynamic.

What Makes Us Who We Are by EmmaSmoke ( @emmasmoke8) - This is about the Mobians doing certain things their Earth animal counterparts would naturally do. My favourite parts are definitely Tails doing adorable fox things and Tom and Maddie trying to figure out what the heck all their anthropomorphic alien children are doing. 😅

Suspended by CheetahBoy (@90sfr3sh) - This looks at what could have happened if Sonic and Tails didn't get rescued by Maddie and Rachel during the second film. It's such a cool concept, I'm very excited to see what happens next! 😁

General / Alternate Universes:

Sonic Wave by Sharp_Silver (@sharp-silver-fanfic) - [Ongoing] I really love this story! 💕 It’s basically a full retelling of the STH universe lore, taking elements from all different bits of media. It’s been crazy good so far, so please give them your support!

Weird Science by satan_official - [Ongoing] 💙🖤❤️ This one is really interesting and it sort of makes me think of Equestria Girls (for any MLP fans out there!) but instead it’s Sonic and Shadow who are stuck in human bodies on the human world. It’s a bit different but really great so far 😁

Fixing Fractured Worlds We Briefly Broke by TheLittleStar_tm - [Ongoing] 💙🖤❤️ This is a fellow Prime fanstory, focusing on the trauma of all the Green Hills characters we already all know and love in the aftermath of season 3. 💔

Boom To Another Dimension by Gamerblade - [Ongoing] Explores what could happen if the SCU Live Action film characters were sent to the Sonic Boom universe, with pretty regular updates being uploaded so far. 😊

Into The Tailsverse by TheCatCacoon - [Ongoing] This one has a bunch of my favourite little two-tailed foxes, and, as someone who is also exploring bringing different Miles Prowers together, it’s intriguing to see how someone else writes these characters 🦊

Culture Shock by foggystarrs (@foggystarrs) - [Ongoing] 💙🖤❤️ Purely a Sonadow fanfiction, but it looks at hedgehog / Mobian courting behaviour and is just really cute 🥰 If you are a fan of oblivious gay and alien hedgehogs, you’ll probably love this one.

Others / Comics:

Sonic Desolation by Wren Rivers (@sonicdesolation by TrenchCoatGecko) - [Ongoing] This is a crazy detailed comic set around the events of the Sonic Forces game where Sonic is struggling with PTSD from what Infinite did to him during his imprisonment.

Heart Of A Monster by SuperEmeralds (@the-heart-of-a-monster by @superemerarts) - [Ongoing] Another insanely detailed comic, which is a retelling of Sonic Unleashed. Its so well done, plus there's a gentle sprinkling of platonic Sonadow.

Team Dark Supernova Odyssey by @sharpedgedfool (@teamdarksupernovaodyssey) - [Ongoing] This is a space opera comic revolving around found family and adventure themes, set as a hypothetical spin-off to the Shadow the Hedgehog video game.

Sonic Boom Revisited by @multiisketch , @mama-qwerty. & @star-stages (@sonicboomrevisited) - [Ongoing] This comic is amazing. A bit darker than the original series, but has just been so gripping so far. Regular updates too! Definitely recommended! 👍

Second Chance by @sumju - 💙🖤❤️ - Who doesn’t love a Sonadow comic?? Plus Tails is adorable as usual (and reminding Shadow of Maria 😭) so that’s an added bonus 🧡

Infested by @flightyalrighty - [Ongoing] Viewer discretion advised for this one, it seems pretty dark...

Ask the Sonic Verse by @verizzafai (@asksonicverse) 💙🖤❤️ - [Ongoing] This is a fun, silly ongoing series which focuses on different versions of Sonadow all being stuck in the same room and getting sent questions from the audience.

Low Light by @verizzafai (@soniclowlightau) 💙🖤❤️ - Only a few pages so far, but looks very promising!

Broken Future by @teamchillidogs 💙🖤❤️ - [Ongoing] A tragic re-telling of an alternate ending of Sonic Adventure 2.

Silver's Parent Trap by @evilgenius-prower 💙🖤❤️ - A silly AU where Silver is actually the adopted future child of Sonadow and goes back in time to try and save his dads lives.

Eggsperiments by @prince-less - This is a new concept so there's not much content about it yet, but I really hope it becomes either a proper comic or fanfic or something similar, because I'm such a sucker for alternate stories of Sonic and Tails being the best brothers, and this a really cool idea 🥺

Sonadow Future by @torusonicpilled 💙🖤❤️- [Ongoing] Another newer one, with a few fanfic chapters and a few comic pages, but they've already got me interested from the idea that Tails can be resurrected, so I'm excited to see where it goes next ☺️

Sonic & The Olympus Heroes by @miitarion - Not sure if this will be continued as it was only shared quite recently, so might just be a one-off, but the art is incredible; Definitely worth a read! ✨

@mercurio-shadowz - They've not been following a particular storyline, but their art and short comics (especially about Shadow being a closeted gay disaster) are awesome. 🤩

Incomplete / Unfinished:

These are a bunch of stories that I really grew to love but they either stopped too long ago and so are presumably forgotten about, or may have been abandoned entirely and will likely never receive any conclusions. I’ve included when they were last updated, but only read these at your own discretion! ⚠️

• Can’t Defeat A Genius Without Taking His Brain by xenoon [4 months] • Deepest Desire by Tirainy [5 years] 💙🖤❤️ • Mad About You by Cherivide [1 year] 💙🖤❤️ • Sonic The Second Speedster by ItsZaira [1 year] • Sonic the Vagabond Hedgehog by @trekkerac (@tatck) [1 year] - This quickly became a favourite; Sonic and Tails' relationship is so adorable 😭 But you might only want to read the first issue and think of it as complete, since the second issue isn't complete and hasn't been touched for a year or so... 😔

I've tagged as many people as I can and might come back to this list later if I find more that I enjoy, but for now I think (hope!) it's mostly up to date 💖

[growth-opportunities]

You found a sound that makes a girl’s boobs grow…and then you left it on all night!

Ever since she left for Europe, my girlfriend had been having trouble sleeping. She blamed it on jet lag at first but, after six weeks, that seemed less likely. Sleeping pills hadn't really helped and while meditation podcasts put her to sleep, they had a tendency to give her very strange dreams. The lack of sleep was starting to unravel her and it broke my heart that I couldn't be there to comfort her, which is ultimately where we came up with the idea that I'd record one of those meditation tracks for her. She always found my voice relaxing and it'd seem like I was there in the room with her and that might help her fall asleep. I, of course, immediately agreed to the plan and did my research, listening to the tracks that she liked most, picking out some good background music, and making my voice as smooth and soothing as possible. In my defense, I generally thought of hypnosis as junk science, and a hypnotic track promising to grow a woman's tits overnight especially so. So I didn't think there was any harm in taking a sample of it, turning it way, way down, and mixing it into the track.

Thanks to the time difference, it was midday for me when I sent her the track just before her bedtime. She was so excited to listen to it, just being really sweet, one of those moments where I was reminded of exactly why I fell in love with her in the first place. I told her to listen to it in good health and, genuinely, I completely forgot about that little Easter egg I had hidden under the low vibrations behind my voice. The rest of my day was quiet, finishing up work, making dinner, spending a few hours playing video games. As had become our ritual, I settled into bed and waited for her to text me good night so I could text her good morning. I wasn't expecting a picture but, when I opened it, I suddenly remembered what I had done. There was more tit bulging out of her dress than she'd had in both tits put together the day before. Her wide hips had left her bottom heavy for most of her life, but now she was well on her way to an hourglass figure.

I made a hasty apology, saying that I didn't expect it to work and had completely forgotten the expansion track was in the mix, but she quickly silenced me. "I don't blame you, baby. Hell, I'm not even that mad. I suppose it's a bit typical, but, I gotta be honest... I'm kinda loving it... And I slept like a fucking rock. Best sleep I've had since I got here. So, basically, what I'm saying is... I wonder how big I'm gonna be by the time I'm back stateside."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too)

You can get into a lot of trouble by assuming that rich people know what they're doing. For example, might assume that ad-tech works – bypassing peoples' critical faculties, reaching inside their minds and brainwashing them with Big Data insights, because if that's not what's happening, then why would rich people pour billions into those ads?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

You might assume that private equity looters make their investors rich, because otherwise, why would rich people hand over trillions for them to play with?

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/private-equity-vampire-capital/

The truth is, rich people are suckers like the rest of us. If anything, succeeding once or twice makes you an even bigger mark, with a sense of your own infallibility that inflates to fill the bubble your yes-men seal you inside of.

Rich people fall for scams just like you and me. Anyone can be a mark. I was:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

But though rich people can fall for scams the same way you and I do, the way those scams play out is very different when the marks are wealthy. As Keynes had it, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." When the marks are rich (or worse, super-rich), they can be played for much longer before they go bust, creating the appearance of solidity.

Noted Keynesian John Kenneth Galbraith had his own thoughts on this. Galbraith coined the term "bezzle" to describe "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In that magic interval, everyone feels better off: the mark thinks he's up, and the con artist knows he's up.

Rich marks have looong bezzles. Empirically incorrect ideas grounded in the most outrageous superstition and junk science can take over whole sections of your life, simply because a rich person – or rich people – are convinced that they're good for you.

Take "scientific management." In the early 20th century, the con artist Frederick Taylor convinced rich industrialists that he could increase their workers' productivity through a kind of caliper-and-stopwatch driven choreographry:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Taylor and his army of labcoated sadists perched at the elbows of factory workers (whom Taylor referred to as "stupid," "mentally sluggish," and as "an ox") and scripted their motions to a fare-the-well, transforming their work into a kind of kabuki of obedience. They weren't more efficient, but they looked smart, like obedient robots, and this made their bosses happy. The bosses shelled out fortunes for Taylor's services, even though the workers who followed his prescriptions were less efficient and generated fewer profits. Bosses were so dazzled by the spectacle of a factory floor of crisply moving people interfacing with crisply working machines that they failed to understand that they were losing money on the whole business.

To the extent they noticed that their revenues were declining after implementing Taylorism, they assumed that this was because they needed more scientific management. Taylor had a sweet con: the worse his advice performed, the more reasons their were to pay him for more advice.

Taylorism is a perfect con to run on the wealthy and powerful. It feeds into their prejudice and mistrust of their workers, and into their misplaced confidence in their own ability to understand their workers' jobs better than their workers do. There's always a long dollar to be made playing the "scientific management" con.

Today, there's an app for that. "Bossware" is a class of technology that monitors and disciplines workers, and it was supercharged by the pandemic and the rise of work-from-home. Combine bossware with work-from-home and your boss gets to control your life even when in your own place – "work from home" becomes "live at work":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Gig workers are at the white-hot center of bossware. Gig work promises "be your own boss," but bossware puts a Taylorist caliper wielder into your phone, monitoring and disciplining you as you drive your wn car around delivering parcels or picking up passengers.

In automation terms, a worker hitched to an app this way is a "reverse centaur." Automation theorists call a human augmented by a machine a "centaur" – a human head supported by a machine's tireless and strong body. A "reverse centaur" is a machine augmented by a human – like the Amazon delivery driver whose app goads them to make inhuman delivery quotas while punishing them for looking in the "wrong" direction or even singing along with the radio:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

Bossware pre-dates the current AI bubble, but AI mania has supercharged it. AI pumpers insist that AI can do things it positively cannot do – rolling out an "autonomous robot" that turns out to be a guy in a robot suit, say – and rich people are groomed to buy the services of "AI-powered" bossware:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

For an AI scammer like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, the fact that an AI can't do your job is irrelevant. From a business perspective, the only thing that matters is whether a salesperson can convince your boss that an AI can do your job – whether or not that's true:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

The fact that AI can't do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can't do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market. AI has created a world of "algorithmic management" where humans are demoted to reverse centaurs, monitored and bossed about by an app.

The techbro's overwhelming conceit is that nothing is a crime, so long as you do it with an app. Just as fintech is designed to be a bank that's exempt from banking regulations, the gig economy is meant to be a workplace that's exempt from labor law. But this wheeze is transparent, and easily pierced by enforcers, so long as those enforcers want to do their jobs. One such enforcer is Alvaro Bedoya, an FTC commissioner with a keen interest in antitrust's relationship to labor protection.

Bedoya understands that antitrust has a checkered history when it comes to labor. As he's written, the history of antitrust is a series of incidents in which Congress revised the law to make it clear that forming a union was not the same thing as forming a cartel, only to be ignored by boss-friendly judges:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Bedoya is no mere historian. He's an FTC Commissioner, one of the most powerful regulators in the world, and he's profoundly interested in using that power to help workers, especially gig workers, whose misery starts with systemic, wide-scale misclassification as contractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/

In a new speech to NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, Bedoya argues that the FTC's existing authority allows it to crack down on algorithmic management – that is, algorithmic management is illegal, even if you break the law with an app:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-remarks-unfairness-in-workplace-surveillance-and-automated-management.pdf

Bedoya starts with a delightful analogy to The Hawtch-Hawtch, a mythical town from a Dr Seuss poem. The Hawtch-Hawtch economy is based on beekeeping, and the Hawtchers develop an overwhelming obsession with their bee's laziness, and determine to wring more work (and more honey) out of him. So they appoint a "bee-watcher." But the bee doesn't produce any more honey, which leads the Hawtchers to suspect their bee-watcher might be sleeping on the job, so they hire a bee-watcher-watcher. When that doesn't work, they hire a bee-watcher-watcher-watcher, and so on and on.

For gig workers, it's bee-watchers all the way down. Call center workers are subjected to "AI" video monitoring, and "AI" voice monitoring that purports to measure their empathy. Another AI times their calls. Two more AIs analyze the "sentiment" of the calls and the success of workers in meeting arbitrary metrics. On average, a call-center worker is subjected to five forms of bossware, which stand at their shoulders, marking them down and brooking no debate.

For example, when an experienced call center operator fielded a call from a customer with a flooded house who wanted to know why no one from her boss's repair plan system had come out to address the flooding, the operator was punished by the AI for failing to try to sell the customer a repair plan. There was no way for the operator to protest that the customer had a repair plan already, and had called to complain about it.

Workers report being sickened by this kind of surveillance, literally – stressed to the point of nausea and insomnia. Ironically, one of the most pervasive sources of automation-driven sickness are the "AI wellness" apps that bosses are sold by AI hucksters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

The FTC has broad authority to block "unfair trade practices," and Bedoya builds the case that this is an unfair trade practice. Proving an unfair trade practice is a three-part test: a practice is unfair if it causes "substantial injury," can't be "reasonably avoided," and isn't outweighed by a "countervailing benefit." In his speech, Bedoya makes the case that algorithmic management satisfies all three steps and is thus illegal.

On the question of "substantial injury," Bedoya describes the workday of warehouse workers working for ecommerce sites. He describes one worker who is monitored by an AI that requires him to pick and drop an object off a moving belt every 10 seconds, for ten hours per day. The worker's performance is tracked by a leaderboard, and supervisors punish and scold workers who don't make quota, and the algorithm auto-fires if you fail to meet it.

Under those conditions, it was only a matter of time until the worker experienced injuries to two of his discs and was permanently disabled, with the company being found 100% responsible for this injury. OSHA found a "direct connection" between the algorithm and the injury. No wonder warehouses sport vending machines that sell painkillers rather than sodas. It's clear that algorithmic management leads to "substantial injury."

What about "reasonably avoidable?" Can workers avoid the harms of algorithmic management? Bedoya describes the experience of NYC rideshare drivers who attended a round-table with him. The drivers describe logging tens of thousands of successful rides for the apps they work for, on promise of "being their own boss." But then the apps start randomly suspending them, telling them they aren't eligible to book a ride for hours at a time, sending them across town to serve an underserved area and still suspending them. Drivers who stop for coffee or a pee are locked out of the apps for hours as punishment, and so drive 12-hour shifts without a single break, in hopes of pleasing the inscrutable, high-handed app.

All this, as drivers' pay is falling and their credit card debts are mounting. No one will explain to drivers how their pay is determined, though the legal scholar Veena Dubal's work on "algorithmic wage discrimination" reveals that rideshare apps temporarily increase the pay of drivers who refuse rides, only to lower it again once they're back behind the wheel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is like the pit boss who gives a losing gambler some freebies to lure them back to the table, over and over, until they're broke. No wonder they call this a "casino mechanic." There's only two major rideshare apps, and they both use the same high-handed tactics. For Bedoya, this satisfies the second test for an "unfair practice" – it can't be reasonably avoided. If you drive rideshare, you're trapped by the harmful conduct.

The final prong of the "unfair practice" test is whether the conduct has "countervailing value" that makes up for this harm.

To address this, Bedoya goes back to the call center, where operators' performance is assessed by "Speech Emotion Recognition" algorithms, a psuedoscientific hoax that purports to be able to determine your emotions from your voice. These SERs don't work – for example, they might interpret a customer's laughter as anger. But they fail differently for different kinds of workers: workers with accents – from the American south, or the Philippines – attract more disapprobation from the AI. Half of all call center workers are monitored by SERs, and a quarter of workers have SERs scoring them "constantly."

Bossware AIs also produce transcripts of these workers' calls, but workers with accents find them "riddled with errors." These are consequential errors, since their bosses assess their performance based on the transcripts, and yet another AI produces automated work scores based on them.

In other words, algorithmic management is a procession of bee-watchers, bee-watcher-watchers, and bee-watcher-watcher-watchers, stretching to infinity. It's junk science. It's not producing better call center workers. It's producing arbitrary punishments, often against the best workers in the call center.

There is no "countervailing benefit" to offset the unavoidable substantial injury of life under algorithmic management. In other words, algorithmic management fails all three prongs of the "unfair practice" test, and it's illegal.

What should we do about it? Bedoya builds the case for the FTC acting on workers' behalf under its "unfair practice" authority, but he also points out that the lack of worker privacy is at the root of this hellscape of algorithmic management.

He's right. The last major update Congress made to US privacy law was in 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented. The US is long overdue for a new privacy regime, and workers under algorithmic management are part of a broad coalition that's closer than ever to making that happen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Workers should have the right to know which of their data is being collected, who it's being shared by, and how it's being used. We all should have that right. That's what the actors' strike was partly motivated by: actors who were being ordered to wear mocap suits to produce data that could be used to produce a digital double of them, "training their replacement," but the replacement was a deepfake.

With a Trump administration on the horizon, the future of the FTC is in doubt. But the coalition for a new privacy law includes many of Trumpland's most powerful blocs – like Jan 6 rioters whose location was swept up by Google and handed over to the FBI. A strong privacy law would protect their Fourth Amendment rights – but also the rights of BLM protesters who experienced this far more often, and with far worse consequences, than the insurrectionists.

The "we do it with an app, so it's not illegal" ruse is wearing thinner by the day. When you have a boss for an app, your real boss gets an accountability sink, a convenient scapegoat that can be blamed for your misery.

The fact that this makes you worse at your job, that it loses your boss money, is no guarantee that you will be spared. Rich people make great marks, and they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Markets won't solve this one – but worker power can.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[piglemousse]

Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation Executive Order

Signed January 28, 2025

This executive order does the following:

Falsely claims that medical professionals are "maiming" children.

Claims, without citation, that "countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding."

Refers to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) as "junk science."

Instructs all federal agencies to repeal all children-related policies that rely on the WPATH's guidance.

Directs all agencies that fund medical schools and hospitals for research or education to force these schools and hospitals to stop providing gender-affirming care for children.

Gives permission to the Department of Health and Human Services to make changes to Medicaid and Medicare to stop gender-affirming care.

Cancels the “HHS Notice and Guidance on Gender Affirming Care, Civil Rights and Patient Privacy” policy signed in March of 2022.

Allows the Attorney General to revoke custody from parents who seek gender-affirming care for their children.

Ensures that federal employee health plans stop covering transgender-related surgeries and hormone treatments for children starting in 2026.

Directs the Department of Defense to change their insurance details to no longer cover surgeries or medications that alter a child's body, surgically or medically.

[lunasanguismusic]

I know this report is going to hurt a lot of people. Probably going to be used to try and ban trans health care in general. Also likely to add fuel to Trump's dumbass and vile parental abuse shit. I would like to say this for anyone who needs to hear it. Hormones or no hormones. You are and always will be who you are inside. Lack of estrogen doesn't make you any less a beautiful woman and lack of testosterone doesn't make you a less handsome guy.

This will be fought tooth and nail.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

I remember in the game, like during Riddle's flashback, Mama Roseheart says that a food was full of something that would make him smarter. But that kinda sounds like something from a factoid. Do we know if she's actually a qualified doctor?

Mrs. Rosehearts is a licensed medical mage. We have no reason to believe she isn’t, especially not when Riddle cites her occupation as a reason for her being well-respected in their community. Why would Riddle and their entire hometown perpetuate a lie and revere a woman if she’s not in such a powerful position?

I don’t think the scene you brought up is as much of a “gotcha” as it may seem to be. It might give the impression that Mrs. Rosehearts is one of those pseudoscience peddlers, but only if you take her dialogue at face-value and consider no other context.

Firstly, it’s important to note that Mrs. Rosehearts claiming the birthday cake has lecithin-rich ingredients, which will “make [you] smarter” occurs in the Japanese text.

The localization is more specific and has Mrs. Rosehearts instead claiming that the lecithin will “improve cerebral function”. Between JP and EN, EN actually provides the more nuanced wording this time.

The reason she says this is because lecithin DOES play an important role in cognitive function. It is necessary to make choline, an essential nutrient to then make acetylcholine. Acetylcholine, as it happens, is a neurotransmitter that conveys messages between the neurons and all cells in the body. In the simplest terms, lecithin is vital in brain function and memory development. If Riddle doesn’t get enough lecithin, it could legitimately impede with his studies, since the brain wouldn’t have what it needs to support optimal learning.

It isn’t pseudoscience, it’s real science and you will find numerous studies that back this up. The only reason it comes off as “fake” is because Mrs. Rosehearts grossly oversimplifies the explanation in her dialogue. This most likely happened because 1) adults tend to talk to children this way, especially to make less desirable food sound more appealing (which is the case for Riddle’s mom) and 2) the Twst writers know that most of their general audience don’t want to sit through a long lecture about how lecithin is converted to other substances to support the brain.

Mrs Rosehearts doesn’t actually mean that she believes Riddle will magically become smarter if he eats food with lots of lecithin in it. She most likely means she wants him to eat ultra healthy in general because the alternative, junk food, won’t give him the nutrients he needs for the high amount of studying he does.

[danzinora-switch]

Bit of an odd question for you, but I can see you have more knowledge of RotTMNT than I do. Do you think Donnie lets people help him/be with him in the lab? I've seen it claimed in a few fics but I don't know how validated it is by "canon".

Oooh, it depends.

The best canon argument #1 is Mikey. In 'Bullhop', while they're talking to Bullhop while standing in Donnie's lab, there's a lot of orange cloth/clothes/fabric lying about, suggesting that it might be Mikey's stuff.

Mikey also assisted Donnie in building Todd's entire Puppy Sanctuary in 'Repo Mantis' - technically outside the lab, but still a large engineering project.

There's a dozen little details that imply how close those two are, working on various projects, schemes, etc. throughout the show. One of the most on-the-nose scenes that Mikey is the Igor to Donnie's Dr. Frankenstein actually comes from a script page shared by Ron Corcillo on Twitter for 'Gourd Almighty' (one of the axed-by-Nickelodeon episodes).

Mikey was totally in on whatever Donnie was working on.

So Mikey: definitely allowed to hang out and help out.

The second person would seem to be April, due to a lot of their shared projects. In 'Donnie vs Witch-Town' they scroll through a history of science projects they've worked on together. In 'The Purple Jacket' not only does Donnie help her out with her coding project at school, but he actively encourages her to use his tech. When she's flying the jetpack asking how it works, he replies "everyone's got their own style, just do what feels natural." I bank a LOT on this line: if everyone's got their own style, that implies that more people than just Donnie have at least used the jetpack. In fact, in 'Endgame' we see Leo riding one like a surfboard.

This segues into the general crux of Donnie's work: the VAST majority of his tech is not just for himself, but for others. The Turtle Tank features a chair specifically to Raph's lumbar settings, and motorcycles for Leo and Mikey. 'Donnie's Gifts' as an episode features presents backfiring spectacularly, but still shows him making tech for his bros. Shelldon is first presented as a gift for all of them, to help around the lair. Donnie is proud to present his tech and for people to use it. (What he doesn't like is for people to MISuse it; such as his brothers altering Shelldon, Splinter stealing the Turtle Tank, and Bullhop making a ruckus throughout his lab).

That, in my opinion, is the core distinction of Donnie allowing someone to help him out in the lab: that they are there to actually help, and not just be annoying.

In 'Mind Meld', when Donnie makes his brothers just like him, he is ecstatic at first, declaring it the greatest day of his life. And he's pretty surprised and impressed with what they come up with in his lab.

So yeah, Mikey seems to be there a lot because he genuinely wants to help out, and Donnie's good with that. But how often does Leo want to help out in the lab with the work? Less often, and so we don't really see him outside of being annoying (Leo tends to pan Donnie's work a lot, from talking about his pattern of failures in 'Smart Lair' to actually clarifying he's not being sarcastic when he says he things the Shellhogs are amazing in 'Stuck on You'. This implies he doesn't care as much about the nerdy things Donnie gets up to, and we also know Leo to value the lazy way of doing things, per 'One Man's Junk'). What about Raph? In 'Stuck on You', while we don't exactly know how they all ended up in a giant glue ball, to some degree it was planned by Raph as a teambuilding exercise. Not his brightest idea as no one was really happy about that. And in 'Cloak and Swaggart' it is further implied that Donnie's aware of a bad trend between Raph and shiny red buttons.

And yet, given how much Donnie makes tech with them each individually in mind, if ever Leo and Raph wanted to help Donnie out in the lab with a project I can't see why he would refuse them. He would probably be delighted that they're taking an interest in his work (as he shines EVERY TIME someone does), and would find something for them to do that matches their skill level and accounts for their accident-prone tendencies.

Really, the only people we see thrown out of the lab are the ones posing a risk or problem to the projects inside: Bullhop, indelicately breaking everything. Splinter, high on Rat Fever in Ninja mode, loose inside. Even Mikey triggers an automatic defense when he speaks while Donnie is accessing their mint-condition Jupiter Jim comic in 'Jupiter Jim Ahoy!' - something Donnie built to protect a thing beloved by all of them.

Tl;dr: whether or not someone would be allowed to stay and/or help Donnie in the lab depends on what they're there for. Here to help? Awesome, welcome! Here to break things or just be annoying? Get out.

[angeliquexoxo]

"What are they like?" - General Resident Headcanons

PART 2

More hcs of how the residents would act around the mansion!💕

All characters are written according to my au, I don't own any of the characters written here and they all belong to their rightful owners (⁠＾⁠∇⁠＾⁠)⁠ﾉ⁠♪

This post may contain mature content such as swearing, talks about trauma, and other stuff you may not too read!

BEN_Drowned

I imagine him having the body of a 15 year old, and the mind of a 21 college drop out who's actually really good in technology and social media. Basically someone who's a genius but decided to drop out because it's just not working out for him.

BEN is really annoying to deal with in the mansion. Not because of his ability to manipulate technology (can manifest in tvs and such), but him as a being. Like you would see on the internet, the boy is a troll. He enjoys witnessing the angry reactions he would get from others- which is why he likes to use Jeff as his go to target.

Since he's a spirit, he could phase through walls and such but since he's a techno-poltergeist, he prefers using electronics and gadgets.

BEN would spend his free time in his room or at the recreation room, either playing video games or watching some kind of anime. But if he's working, he would be stationed at the security office- BEN is the only one in the mansion who can keep track of what's happening in most of the cameras placed all around the mansion.

One of the messiest residents in the mansion. The security office is filled with tangled wires and a bunch of junk food wrappers (chips, sodas, candy, etc) His room is also very unkept. For some reason, he has a bunch of used tissues all along his desk which I won't be elaborating any further.

BEN is really easy-going, really playful too- but again, he's a smart spirit. He doesn't trust too many people in the mansion except for jeff because he knows what kind of fucked up shit they all did. He likes to perceive himself as a friendly guy but also shows to others that you shouldn't fuck with him.

Since he's at cyber security, a lot of people look at him when they need something ordered off online (whether it's on Amazon or on the Dark web) of course he'll do it, but in return you'll have to do something for him in return. It can be as harmless as pulling pranks but sometimes his favors are fucked up like killing of a victim he trolled because he told them to pull up to an address he gave them.

BEN is quite expressive, he's the one who reacts to things the most besides Nina I envision him to show off lot of emotions too. He doesn't know how to hide them well, you can easily tell just by looking at him (I think it's also because BEN is always seen so carefree and positive so it's a no brainer if you notice the shift in his emotions easily)

He acts like a moody teenager. Like I said, BEN is pretty laid back, uses vulgar and extensive vocabulary (would use slang words the most) when something upsets him, he will make it known. Honestly, he'll start to act like a petty and salty bitch when there's a minor inconvenience.

Eyeless Jack

Ej is the mansion's official doctor. He got the position and the proper title after the number of times he would give his housemates medical help after or even between missions. He's also the one apart of cleaning up after fights between residents.

He's knowledgeable to almost all things about medicine, especially info on anatomy and things relating to surgery. I could say he's one of the smarter residents when it comes to academics (he liked science, particularly the biology)

He keeps mostly to himself. He doesn't involve himself in any drama happening in the mansion, not because he's not into socializing with the other members of the mansion but rather because he's worried about harming those around him. Because Ej is a half-demon from a failed cult sacrifice, he now has to live with his craving of human organs and it's said for him to deal with because all he wanted to do is help those in need.

With his cannibalistic tendencies, he prefers having meal time ny himself. The only time he'll eat is when he's out hunting or alone and somewhere private in the mansion- like his room or a closed area in the infirmary.

He doesn't get stressed easily. He knows how to act when there's a crisis. He's used to working under pressure, with him being the most medical knowledge in the mansion and stuff. The only time he'll start acting out is when he's hungry. He can control his anger well when things start to piss him off, but if he's starving- that's a whole 'nother level of danger.

Ej likes to be clean and tidy. The practice of keeping things sterile grew on him and because of that he prefers keeping things neat and organised. However, with him needing to consume human insides- it's difficult for him to keep his stuff clean. You'll need to find a victim, get the good stuff, dispose of the body, etc. yeah it's not a fun process for him.

A really respectful resident. He doesn't use vulgar language except the occasional swear words he thinks there's no need to swear so there's that He gives respect to anyone as long as they're respectful to him in return.

Ej is on good terms with residents in the mansion, not because he's the one healing but because he's not as fucked as they are. Has good bonds with Jane and Hoodie, thinks Nina is a sweet for helping him out in the infirmary while the other residents are just okay for him.

Would spend his free time reading books don't ask me how it just fits him if not then he'll organize the infirmary.

Jeff the Killer

Surprising enough, not as foul mouth as you think he'd be Clockwork took number 1 Jeff still swears and such, but he's not bold enough to say what's on his mind- it really depends if he drank enough beer or not.

Also really gross, his room reeks of alcohol and rot. He has a bunch of dirty laundry and empty beer cans that he has yet to throw away. Jeff doesn't have the best hygiene either. He has a hard time brushing his teeth due to the cut on his cheeks. He would also wear the same white hoodie- never washes it unless he feels like a decent human being and decided to do his laundry.

Honestly, he's a bit of a pussy. It really depends on who he's dealing with. If he's with Cody or some resident who is really introverted, then he'll start acting like he's a tough guy a bully basically. But if Jeff is with people like Jane or even with Liu- he'll start shutting his mouth more. Though that doesn't mean he'll start throw some nasty comment at them.

He's pretty awkward around certain residents cough cough Nina cough cough only because he's not good in emotions, especially if it's something really touchy. He hates the proxies, mainly because he doesn't like being bossed around still follows their orders though. He's on good terms with BEN- sure you'll hear Jeff cursing BEN off but rest assured, all of them are said with love. Thinks Jane and Clockwork are bitches, but really Jeff is just a pussy when they're near him.

His relationship with Liu is interesting. They weren't really close when they were kids- Liu was more favored by their parents while Jeff was the problem child growing up. When they reunited, Jeff avoided Liu a lot, him seeing the stitches he had on his face struck a chord on his heart. He almost felt sorry for him that his until he cut his smile up again.

You might think he's an idiot, I mean, he is, but he has a brain, and he uses it for the most part. Since he's a senior resident, he knows the ropes of going on missions and the kind of stuff happening in the mansion. He may not be the smartest, but he's a pretty good fighter. Has an okay amount of strength and can fun pretty fast. He's trying to learn how to use firearms, a shotgun preferably, so there's that.

Has the strongest gut out of all of the residents. He can watch the most vile thing to ever exist and still have his lunch in his stomach. Jeff also doesn't hold a lot of sympathy, just because he's running this killer game since he was 13. He's often stationed for torturing victims when they need info because of this.

X-virus

He is also an intelligent resident. Very gifted to all things related to science, specially biochemistry and microbiology- since he's centered around diseases and different types of viruses. Cody has some good knowledge in medicine too. Because of this, he's known to be the 2nd unofficial doctor of the mansion.

Unfortunately, Cody gets very distracted easily. Has a hard time staying still, which is why he often fidgets with his goggles. Would end up getting carried away with whatever he's talking about, especially when it's about things he's really interested in.

A lot of people in the mansion found him annoying. Many residents see Cody as a very clumsy kid who's constantly trapped in his own little world.

Cody is in fact the newest resident in the mansion. He came in after Nina after about 5 years? Some members of the mansion still see him as fresh meat though.

Could be one of the most sadistic residents in the mansion. He's known to use whatever deadly sickness he made on his victims. He enjoys seeing how his test subjects victims react to his viruses. Sometimes, he will even snap photos of said victims and name the photo after the virus he used on them. Has at least 1 binder container said photos.

He doesn't have the best living(?) schedule. The boy just wakes up from his desk, conduct experiments on his viruses, studies the results and passes out. He would often forget to eat too, because of this he has a skinny build.

He gets really excited when he's involved in certain missions especially the ones where they go in groups mainly because he wants to show off his creations.

He's only close with members like Toby and Nina, the only reason why is because they are the only ones who can tolerate him and his interest in viruses. Jane, Helen, and Liu have neutral feelings towards him while Clockwork, Jeff, and Ben simply find him irritating.

Kagekao

Kage is an asshole. Because he's the only supernatural being who's not a big wuss, he simply thinks he's better than everyone. He likes to make the other residents stupid a lot. He doesn't think he's better than everyone though, he's very much aware of the flaws he has but in certain if not most situations- Kage has the upper hand.

Knows some secrets about the other residents. He's a very sneaky demon- he knows how to hide himself very well. Because of this, there are times where he would come across residents doing something they shouldn't or overheard private conversations.

Surprisingly a very easy guy to talk too. He doesn't go against most of the rules in the mansion and listens to the proxies. However, every time someone asks him to do something- whether it's a small favor or not, he wants something in return.

Very chill but because of his attitude a lot of people don't like hanging out with him. If you do hang out with him though, most of the time you guys are just gonna end up drunk.

Not a light weight, he's able to consume a lot of red wine in one sitting. He doesn't enjoy other drinks, wine is the only drink he'll only enjoy. If there's no wine then he'll simply leave.

He likes hanging out with Sully a lot. For him, Sully can match his energy very well. Kage enjoys hanging with Liu too. He doesn't interact with his other housemates but he enjoys making Jeff feel like an idiot.

He has the ability to shape shift and climb on walls and ceilings. He enjoys staying in high places like roof tops or beams of high ceilings. He doesn't shape shift too much mainly because he hates the feelings of turning himself into something that's not his usual body.

He prefers killing his victims off quickly than taking his time. He will slow his pace when his victim is attractive. Many times he would hold conversations with many women, sometimes having wine with them before offing them.

I'd think Kage would have good charisma levels. He knows how to make women blush and stutter which is why he chooses them as his go to victims. Despite making girls fall into their knees with simple words, he doesn't have the interest in dating anyone and no there hasn't been a time where he hooked up with any of the girls he had killed

Took some time to finish this post. Many things are happening in school, I have exams next week and we also have a school event where we need to make a costume for our representative :'>>>

But we'll have an academic break after this week so I'll probs post more?

Thank you all for the hearts and reposts on my last post 😭 hopefully y'all enjoyed this one too! 💕😘✨