Gronkulus

Pral*innen

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

every fat person you know for the most part probably has a story like this, of medical neglect. many of the stories i've heard personally are when the complaint or the doctor wasn't related at all, like being told to lose weight at the ear nose and throat doctor or at the dentist. it's straight up just bias. it's such a thing that in the show Shrill it's portrayed, when Aidy Bryant goes to the gynecologist and her doctor suggests she get gastric bypass.

the studies on health and fatness are simply not that black and white and there is basically no research that shows that more than an incredibly tiny minority of people can lose weight and keep it off for more than like 2 years. bodies have set points that they gravitate towards, it's not a personal failure. this also is how the weight loss industry succeeds so well - repeat customers.

some of the harm associated with fatness is also due to weight cycling, which is very hard on your body and is even worse if you get off a GLP1, which according to a recent study causes weight to be regained at a rate that is 4x faster than without taking a GLP1.

you don't have to hate yourself. you don't have to hate other people for their body type either. it makes me so sad to see the thinspo tag going around again in 2026 a lot like it was back in the day.

some resources to learn more here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/feeling-fat-may-be-worse-for-you-than-being-fat-idUSTON079061/

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

and like what I believe is a major source of the problem is that many people stop reading instructions as soon as they think they know what's expected of them. and I'm not actually sure a video would help very much!

would someone in the 45% "oh we're making a bell curve okay I can skip the short paragraph directly above the poll then that surely won't contain any relevant information" demographic watch an entire video just so they know what format I expect for a survey question, or would they watch enough of the video to get to the point where they think they know what's expected of them and then fill out the survey incorrectly?

how do I convey how extremely important it is to actually read and follow the instructions without coming across as condescending or scaring people away with how many paragraphs they have to read?

I want to eventually make a survey where people tell me directly in an open answer question what games they think the mainline super mario series consists of. to get useful data out of that, I need the answers to be well formatted.

specifically, I need it to be obvious and unignorable that:

I expect the items of the list to be separated by line breaks, not commas (some video game titles have commas in them so I can't automate the process of turning their list into data if they use commas)

the participant should not write anything in their response that is not part of their list

neither of these are things that are impossible to fix if someone doesn't follow the instructions, but they can't be fixed automatically. I'd need to manually clean up the responses or pay someone else to do it or (worst option!) cross my fingers and hope google gemini isn't hallucinating if I give it my data to clean up.

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

Astrologers helped design the study

No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance

They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!

After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it

Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance