Nobody ever talks about the fact that heavy metal basically only exists because of a disability
For context: the reason metal sounds the way it does is because Tony Iommi, guitarist of Black Sabbath, lost his fingertips in a factory accident. Doctors told him he would never be able to play again, so he spent months burning down plastic and covering it with leather to essentially create new fingertips. Of course, he still couldn’t play in the same way, so he downtuned his guitars and found new ways to play parts that made them sound even bigger and heavier than before, and that’s how the sound of heavy metal was created!
Not to use him as inspiration porn but it really is incredible that an entire huge genre exists not in spite of but specifically BECAUSE of a disability
Also worth mentioning he was inspired by Django Reinhardt!
ALT
“My friend said, "Listen to this guy play”, and I went, “No way! Listening to someone play the guitar is the very last thing I want to do right now!” But he kept insisting and he ended up playing the record for me. I told him I thought it was really good and then he said, “You know, the guy’s only playing with two fingers on his fretboard hand because of an injury he sustained in a terrible fire.” I was totally knocked back by this revelation and was so impressed by what I had just heard that I suddenly became inspired to start trying to play again.“
honestly the impact of frustration is seriously underestimated. like as an emotion i think it’s not seen as intense as anger or despair or even joy or excitement. and yet being frustrated is the quickest route to meltdown. for me at least. there’s something about how it’s just got nowhere to go that makes it so overwhelming and unpleasant. and it gives you just contradictory responses to the situation can do you keep trying, do you get angry, do you cry and get upset do you throw up like what
One of the many things that Leverage does really well is the principle of Giving It A Face. It’s a bit of storytelling advice I’ve heard before that if you want the same emotional impact across of saying “six million people lost their homes and families” you’re more effective writing a scene where a lost kid stands in a ruined house crying for their parents, because then it has A Face. Almost every episode of Leverage does this; takes a systematic act of horror like for example the way the US military chews up vulnerable people, traumatise and permanently injures them, then throws them back into an even worse situation than they started from, and they focus on just one person. Give the issue a face, a family, loved ones and the kind of stakes you can hold in your hands. And once you understand it on a visceral level they pull back into act 3 and show you that this same exact horror is repeated a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times over. And then they get their fucking vengeance. It’s so effective and very, very well done and never loses its impact. My favourite is in the boiler room job with the final reveal but honestly it’s a feature of basically every episode to some extent and its SO good
“if being hard on yourself was going to work it would have worked by now” okay well being soft on myself isn’t working either so what the fuck is left. medium? I gotta be medium with myself? I gotta ask the fucking ghosts for help? is that it?
Here’s the thing: imagine if we fixed the housing market, so that the price of housing only increased to match inflation. That would be great, right? Except, homeowners typically spend $2000-$10000 per year on maintenance. So homeownership would go from an investment to an endless money pit, just like renting. The idea of a house as an investment, a house as a way to build wealth, requires that housing prices increase faster than inflation forever, which means that the burden of housing costs on working people must keep increasing forever, and the number of homeless people must keep increasing forever.
The housing crisis isn’t just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It’s an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up.
Conversely, if we want to end homelessness for good, we need to accept that housing is someone we’ll all have to continuously pour resources into, because buildings are complex physical objects that break a lot.
The reason I say this is because every time I read an article about the housing crisis, they always say something along the lines of “The housing crisis has robbed people of the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership!” without acknowledging that the housing crisis is what created the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership
What gets me is that “this is not an asset, it will not increase in value, do not expect it to or base any plans on that happening” is what we already say to people who are buying cars (or bikes or other personal transport). We already have a model for “owning something that has ongoing costs and doesn’t increase in value, but it’s worth it for its uses”. There’s no reason we can’t view housing like that as well.
the idea that masculinity and femininity together in one person is like, unexpected because of the incongruence between the two is an idea fundamentally based on oppositional sexism. if you find it funny that someone with a masculine body is performing feminine aesthetics you do on some level believe that the genders are opposite and features of both together on one person is like, funny, and you hold oppisitionally sexist beliefs. grenda from gravity falls send tweet
guillermo del toro said so many insightful and funny things last night at the frankenstein q&a that i started taking notes. these are all direct quotes. i love this man.
There was a massive shift in how our culture understood morality when, after World War II, the general public realized “just following orders” was not an excuse for crimes against humanity. Now we need another moral shift in which we decide, as a culture, that “for the benefit of the stockholders” is not an excuse for anything.
We kind of need to relearn the “just following orders” part again
Me: Exercise does not cause weight loss. This is a fact that has been demonstrated so robustly in research that even doctors, who hate and fear evidence, are grudgingly starting to admit this.
Someone reading that post: Cool, but have you considered that exercise leads to weight loss?
does it? not for people exercising for their non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
Interactive computer-based reminders to diet and exercise are useless.
I mean, I literally went to Cochrane Reviews, one of the best-respected sources for massive meta-analyses, and I just input the keywords “weight loss” and “exercise,” and I’m tooling through the results. Every one of the damn things shows that we do not have high-quality research indicating that exercise leads to weight loss. So no. I’m right, and you need to adjust your worldview–ask yourself, if not for weight loss, then why? Re-read those sources: exercise improved muscle density, insulin sensitivity, and cholesterol. It’s good for your blood vessels, it’s good for your strength, it’s good for your brain.
But it won’t make you thin. Maybe two pounds, maybe five, but that’s about it. If you’re looking at short-term, like a year, sure, you can lose weight–but the effort will almost always result in your body going “oh shit, we’re living in a famine” and you will regain it, and now, with your body at a new set-point, losing it will be harder. Regaining will be easier. Welcome to the life-destroying yo-yo.
#then what the fuck are we supposed to do?
Exercise and eat lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains because those things will keep you healthier longer, regardless of how much you weigh, and pick up your pick-axe in the ongoing horribly slow and frustrating fight of chipping away at the idea that being fat is a bad thing that means you’re a bad person. I recommend the book Fat Talk for a good place to start.
Regular exercise helps your general health. Builds muscle. Reduces your heart rate. Keeps your body generally fit and flexible. Often, reduces stress because it gives you time to focus on something other than whatever was stressing you.
Eating good veggies helps digestion, your skin health, emotional balance, and has plenty of other benefits.
Exercise and eating green leafy vegetables have very minimal effects on weight. The biggest effects are on people who gained weight because of a debilitating condition - exercise and diet can help them get back to the shape that’s their body’s natural condition with their normal metabolism. Usually not quite to where they were before - bodies try very hard to hold on to mass after illness or injuries - but bodies also want to find their normal equilibrium.
Exercise will not turn a fat person into a skinny person. It has plenty of health benefits; “being skinny” is not a health benefit.
Repeat: “Being skinny” is not an indicator of health.