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being fat is good and ok even if you're "obese".

being fat doesn't necessarily mean you're unhealthy, but being fat is good and ok if you ARE unhealthy!!!! health does not equal worth.

being fat (including "obese") SHOULD be glorified. ALL bodies are good bodies and worthy of being uplifted.

being fat doesn't need any justification. it's just as good and ok to be fat from a medical condition as it is to be fat from eating what you want.

no one has any say over or gets to make decisions about your body but you. no exceptions. not friends & family, CERTAINLY not some rando on the internet, not even a doctor.

being fat is good and ok even if you eat like shit and never exercise. it's literally no one else's business.

often, people will say, with no evidence, that being fat exacerbates or causes all kinds of medical conditions. many times, this is completely false and they're talking out their ass. but guess what! it's good and ok to be fat even if being fat exacerbates or causes your medical condition.

so often, fat people find ourselves assuring thin people of our justifications for being fat. you can be fat and healthy, some people are fat because of a medical condition, being fat isn't a choice, etc. i have found myself caught in that trap may times throughout my life. it's like the "born this way" mentality that was popular in lgbt spaces for a long time and just recently started to be criticized.

you don't have to justify your fatness with "i can't help it, it's not my choice, it's not my fault, i'm the GOOD kind of fat person", acting like being fat is some curse that's been thrust upon you, throwing other fat people under the bus. it's okay to just exist, healthy or unhealthy, as skinny people do. it's okay to love your body without justification. if i were offered a choice to magically become thin i would decline. i choose my fat body. it's allowed.

I started following that road looking for her, occasionally calling her with my special I Come Bearing Muesli whistle (and it was a lie), and as soon as I got mobile reception I received a text from a neighbour telling me “Ton affreuse est là” (“your horrible one is here”). I turned around to go pick her up, and discovered that he had locked her in the Horny Bull Pen, aka his most securised enclosure. When Pampe escapes to his farm just to be a pest she usually hangs out with his cows until I arrive and he doesn’t mind, so it was a little joke, and it was so funny finding Pampe languishing in a high-security prison. She looked very put out and I told her she absolutely deserved her sentence. Then I opened the gate and I didn’t even need my rope, she was happy to be pardoned and to see Pandolf, and followed us readily, on the road and then through the woods to my farm, it felt so companionable, the three of us walking home together.

the original “turing test” paper is so beautiful.  more beautiful, i imagine, than most expect going in—he’s got this underlying warm humanism and gentle humor throughout.  (it’s present even in his more technical papers, but it shines here)

and the section that slays me each time is this:

“It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it […]”

like.  this is the original “turing test” paper.  this is the first dude to formally conceptualize the whole “~*~what if computers learn to think, how could we tell~*~” thing.  which, in subsequent SF invocations, is used mostly in spooky or paranoid contexts: the Voigt-Kampff test of Blade Runner, the preemptive rushes to constrain that budding will in I, Robot and others, and in modern worries over AGI.  and i like those stories!  they’re interesting and cool and eerie!

but

but

the original guy was not scared or unsettled or spooked by the prospect of new minds.  this dude’s primary concern, when facing the dawn of artificial intelligence, was instead: “what if we teach computers to think and then the other kids on the playground bully the computer, that would be so mean :(((”

Luckily mama came to save

So I just discovered that there's a kind of salamander that takes entire genomes from males of different species and mixes them up however it pleases. I can't even say it's a "species" because a single individual can have the entire genomes from four different species knocking around in it, so scientists just refer to the "unisexual" members of the genus (because they're all female).

We don't even know what salamander they're originally descended from, because at some point they threw that genome out. Only the mitochondrial DNA are the same in this fucking ship of Theseus of an amphibian. Please keep in mind that it's commonly accepted that the whole purpose of an organism is to propagate its DNA. This salamander said NOPE.