one voice for many

He’s going to steal everyone’s left shoe

BD-1: *touches Cal’s hand with his tiny foot*

Cal: *tearing up* thank you

In the future, children will think our ways are strange. "Why do old people always grow so much milkweed in their gardens?" they'll say. "Why do old people always write down when the first bees and butterflies show up? Why do old people hate lawn grass so much? Why do old people like to sit outside and watch bees?"

We will try to explain to them that when we were young, most people's yards were almost entirely short grass with barely any flowers at all, and it was so commonplace to spray poisons to kill insects and weeds that it was feared monarch butterflies and American bumblebees would soon go extinct. We will show them pictures of sidewalks, shops, and houses surrounded by empty grass without any flowers or vegetables and they will stare at them like we stared at pictures of grimy children working in coal mines

Treadwell Pridely says that trans rights are human rights!

18 shades of gay ~ claude cormier + associés | photos © as noted

For those who were wondering WHERE is this, it’s the “Quartier Gay” at Montréal (province of Québec, in Canada)

🤎❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

It’s a really cool city and I love living there ngl

I think adults need summer vacation. Like let's just close down all our jobs for three months and play outside. Please. I'm so tired.

Firefly is one of a very few shows I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a reboot of, if it was done with the right intentions by the right people. because the bones and aesthetic and premise of the show are incredible but I think maybe it was just kind of. created too early to actually fulfill the potential it had. like idk what if Firefly, but it was less weird about its female characters and half the cast was actually chinese. I just think that would be cool and interesting to see. and I want more space cowboys and frankly am not terribly picky as to how that happens and reboots are in. get all unknown actors to do it because I’m tired of looking at the same five people.

plus if it gets released on a streaming service we can even get the truly authentic Firefly experience of watching it be cancelled for no reason after season one.

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.

Black fire

This is so wild.

There's an art installment in Columbus, OH that we visited called Otherworld and one of the rooms used lighting like this and it was absolutely WILD. (I have no idea what they used to do it but this reminded me of it.) Everything in the room including every person was in those sepia tones and walking out of the room was a trip.

So huajiao (sichuan pepper) is almost a citrus fruit. It's in the same family but, tragically, doesn't appear to be close enough to hybridise with them (naturally at least, could you futz this will some easy biotech? If so, you should. I want the Worst Orange).

Anyway, the bit of the plant we actually use, then, is more-or-less a citrus peel. Can we do any of the same things with it? Can it be candied? Can I make mar麻lade?

The lack of juice is an issue, but probably not insurmountable.

I deviated from the original idea for a few reasons. You can't get fresh Sichuan peppercorns in the US. Also, I would like to be able to taste flavors other than "TV static" and "9v battery" in the near future. So this is mostly made up of blood oranges and sugar, but it also incorporates Tianjin chiles for heat, and Sichuan peppercorns for, uh, the bit.

The eating experience is pretty bizarre. First it tastes like normal marmalade. After you swallow, the heat hits you. And then after a couple bites, you realize something is wrong with your tongue.

10/10 will not make again

Shocking! This Beautiful Man Fucked His Way into the Alderaanian Royal Family After His Smuggling Career Failed!

Like, that's not even wrong, though. Yeah, the way it's written like a tabloid headline is hilarious, but it's not wrong. That's basically literally exactly what happened.

No, it’s so true and that’s the funny part. Leia could have had any man or women or alien in the galaxy if she so pleased and she chose a guy 13 years older than her who lived in a sewer for the first two decades of his life and spent most of his adulthood running drugs for a slug. A man who’s greatest skills are giving head and running from the cops. And you know what? I would have picked him too.

OMG!  I thought it was going to be a message about perseverance or it never being too late to follow your dreams, but nooooooo.  This is excellent storytelling.

Something that gets lost in the contemporary pressure to have an iron-clad identity is the subversive power of saying "it's none of your business."

Leeweek 2017 Day 6: Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing

On Whimsical Bullshit Interior Design: I fucking love those ceiling lamp sections of stores where they have all the possible sorts of lamps just hanging from the ceiling in clusters. If nobody stopped me, I would have that in my house. Just a whole fucking jungle of all sorts of lamps of various styles but vaguely matching aesthetics hanging on the ceiling, like this: