In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
WOW.
I deeply, deeply regret my time counting calories and points.
flvffs asked: hello, have you ever read the farseer trilogy by robin hobb?
I have not! Is it good? Do you recommend it? Is there magic? Details, mon ami, I am curious. A cursory Google search reveals assassins, assassins are good.
Assorted headcanons about Tolkien characters driving, because I’m on a roadtrip and well we do what we can to pass the time
Bilbo: owns a sensible car that he drives at twice the speed limit through residentials, while Thorin braces himself with a hand on the ceiling, a hand on the dash, and a foot propped up next to it. Lobelia puts up a sign in her neighborhood that says “DRIVE LIKE YOUR KIDS LIVE HERE THAT MEANS YOU BILBO BAGGINS” and Bilbo texts her at a red light a reminder that he doesn’t have any children, thank you. When he adopts Frodo, he slows down a tad to just a quarter over the speed limit, unless Bilbo gets caught up telling one of his stories. He’s been clocked going over one hundred on the road back from Bree; his only defense was that, “The part with the trolls always does get me riled up.”
Thorin: drives ten miles below the speed consistently and obliviously while Bilbo slowly dies from the agony of it in the passenger seat, except when someone cuts him off at which point Thorin tailgates them for miles. His radio presets all lead to static because he’s owned his car for about two decades, and set up the radio stations in his old hometown. He never changes them: he knows that sooner or later he is going back.
Thranduil: owns a fancy sports car that in theory has a backseat and in reality comfortably fits exactly him and maybe one passenger who is still badly hunched over in shotgun (really discourages Legolas from bringing friends home from school). Speeds all the time. Has received multiple speeding tickets for the exact same stretch of road, which he pays and then continues to speed. The local traffic cops all know him and hate him and realize that he funds like a quarter of their operating budget.
Bard: owns a truck. Helps people move with his truck. Is too nice to say no even though he hates helping people move with his truck. When his kids are in the car, he drives exactly the speed limit. When he’s alone, he zips down the road at 14 mph above the speed limit because 15 is the point at which it’s reckless endangerment. He hasn’t gotten a ticket in years though. Most cops like him except the ones that don’t, and the ones that don’t always have the most obvious speed traps. Bard likes to roll through them at exactly the right speed. He nods at Alfrid as he does.
Samwise Gamgee: drives his grandfather’s old motorcycle which is older than Sam himself. It does not pass any emissions tests. It has extremely difficulty going up hills. But it always gets to the top, as Sam cheerfully reminds Mr Frodo, who rides in the little sidecar that Sam’s Gaffer used to transport his bulldog around. Frodo wears a helmet and googles. Sam keeps shouting over the roar of the engine if Frodo is doing alright , which is a nice sentiment that Frodo absolutely cannot hear.
Merry and Pippin: are not allowed to drive anymore. Not after The Incident. But it’s fine because they have plenty of friends who are happy to give them rides, or at least willing to give them rides, or are going to give them rides regardless of their feelings on the matter. Merry and Pippin are masters of the aux cord though. You never drive to better jams than when they are riding with you. It even makes up for all the times they say they just need a ride to a friend’s house and they make you take them to their weed man.
Elrond: arranges the neighborhood carpools. Is not sure how this became his job.
Eowyn: drives a big goddamn truck with a hitch for horses in the back. When men try to tell her how to park it (and men are always trying to tell her how to park it) she stares them down until they slink away. She’s got a lot of old country CDs on constant rotation; she likes hauling the truck up hills to the sounds of the great women of the Grand Ole Opry. She ends up stealing her uncle’s motorcycle from his garage and roaring out of town on it without a helmet is one of those stupid things she’s sorry she waited so long to do.
Boromir: drives an SUV his dad bought for him. Ends up ferrying a lot of hobbits in it. Will never start driving until he’s sure they are all buckled up.
Faramir: owns a smart car because it’s fuel efficient, compact, and easy to park in the city. His father refuses to let him park it in front of his house. Eowyn thinks it’s sweet, even if it is a pain in the ass to try to makeout in the back seat.
Galadriel: is chauffeured. Does not believe in making small talk with the chauffeur but somehow knows everything about him. Once she looks at him with a mischievous glint in her eyes and says, “why don’t I drive today?” And then proceeds to go roaring down a road recorded on no map or GPS while the chauffeur holds on for dear life. They arrive unscathed and ahead of schedule. Galadriel smiles knowing at the chauffeur until he can collect himself enough to go around and open her door.
Aragorn: owns my grandfather’s station wagon, which means it’s a partially rusted behemoth full of tarps, propane, fishing gear, and an odd smell identifiable only as “woodsy old man”. Everything in his car seems to be covered in a strange powder. It’s either dirt or the physical manifestation of age. He has a glovebox full of maps to towns you aren’t sure exist anymore along country roads you’re pretty sure are overrun. In his garage, there’s another car covered by a tarp. Rumor has it that it’s a big old fancy car that would make aficionados weep at the sight of it, but you peeked under there once and it looked nice and all but you can’t help but think Aragorn looks better in his old reliable rust bucket.
Gandalf: owns an ancient Volkswagen van. Never uses turn signals. Is offended that you would imply he needs to.
It’s been literal years and I’m still not over Snape’s cloak-shrouded ass for asking an eleven year old muggle-raised kid the difference between monkshood and wolfsbane in front of the everyone on the first day. You want to know the difference? There is no fucking difference. They’re colloquial terms for the same fucking plant. He just wanted the intellectual upper hand over a goddamn little kid. “Haha, trick question”, so clever. you oily bag of tits
I want to write an alternative version of Romeo and Juliet where instead of being a little ponce and trying to work things out for himself, Romeo asks his smarter friends what to do about the whole thing and Benvolio and Mercutio come up with the world’s greatest plan:
Marriage of convenience between Juliet and Mercutio.
Think about it.
Juliet’s parents want her to marry into the Prince’s family. Mercutio is a good compromise between no marriage and Paris.
Mercutio probably won’t get his inheritance if he keeps being HELLA FUCKING GAY ALL OVER THE PLACE so a beard is only a benefit to him.
They would probably get along great rolling their eyes at how adorably stupid Romeo is.
Romeo and Benvolio could get a “bachelor pad” right next to Juliet and Mercutio’s house. Every night, Romeo and Mercutio high five as they hop the fence to go bang their one true love.
The second half of the play is just all of them trying to keep up the charade and being “THIS CLOSE” to getting caught all the time. But everything ends nicely because true love conquers all.
Everybody wins. Nobody dies.
THE SHAKESPERE AU I NEVER KNEW I NEEDED
DUDE DID YOU JUST FIX ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC PLAYS EVER CREATED?!
ONCE AGAIN EVERYTHING IS SOLVED BY THE QUEER LENS.
Anonymous asked: Ok i have read Sansukh but you have a better way with words and my campaign to get my friend to read it has stalled so PLEASE GIVE ME THE MOST IMPASSIONED FIC REC IN THE HISTORY OF FIC RECS I THROW MYSELF ON YOUR MERCY
O K A Y
SO
Let me take you back, my dear, to approximately one year ago, shortly after my ass finally sat down for a plane ride and read all three Lord of the RIngs books in twelve hours. Naturally, having finished them and being in need of more, I went out to AO3 within days and started sifting through the Legolas/Gimli fic, because that ship sails itself to Valinor and I’m not a moron. And the VERY FIRST FIC when you sort by kudos (one does not simply enter a new fandom sorting by Date Updated, after all, sorting by kudos is the wise soul’s path) is Sansukh, with some rather peculiar tags (’dead dwarf peanut gallery’ among them) and 400K words and the ships Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield and Gimli/Legolas Greenleaf in pride of place.
“Well,” I said to myself, “I’ve never even READ the Hobbit and from what I know, I don’t ship Thorin and Bilbo at all, doesn’t Thorin try to kill him?” (Not that that’s ever stopped me before, but forgive me my naivete.)
“I’m sure there are more Legolas/Gimli fics that include ships I ship,” I decided, and kept right on scrolling.
So I skipped it. And methodically worked my way through the nine hundred odd Gimli/Legolas fics available on AO3. The quality of these fics declined, both in terms of characterization and of grammar, as these things do, until I broke down and admitted to myself that I couldn’t stand to drag myself through an unbroken block of text, and went to glance over FF.Net because that’s my usual move. Now, self-insert fics are some people’s cup of tea, and that’s great, but I was on a mission, I had a quest, and Girl-Of-The-Week/Legolas was getting in the way of my need for Gimli/Legolas, so I didn’t last long in the FF.Net archive, needless to say.
“Come on,” I groaned, “there’s got to be more good shit, where is the rest of it? Where’s my novel-length mess of mutual pining and tragic adoration and banter, with Eternal Third-Wheel Aragorn and beautiful world-building and rampant use and abuse of Sindarin and Khuzdul?”
And then I recalled something that had almost slipped my mind.
There was that one fic. The one I’d taken to skimming past because why do people ship Thorin/Bilbo, anyway? It was long, it was popular, and hey, I could always just…stop, if I didn’t like it, right?
I was desperate. It was worth a try.
And, oh, darlings, was it ever worth a try.
I was a chapter in.
I had been dropped headfirst into a pool of characters I didn’t know–Thorin? He was a king of something, I thought. Thorin’s nephews, Fili and Kili? Never met them. I was pretty sure one of them was blond. Mahal? Had to Google him. Dead members of the Company? Had to look up a list. Thorin’s father and mother and brother and grandparents? Spent a few VERY confused minutes doing research before I realized half of them had been created wholecloth by @determamfidd. It didn’t matter. By the end of the first full chapter I was ready to take a throwing axe to the chest for these dwarrows (and Mahal).
Watching Thorin come to terms with his death was agonizingly wonderful.
By the time Thorin’s spirit visited a sixty-something red-haired dwarf with a temper and an axe, I was addicted.
By the time Thorin had a sudden and terrible revelation about Bilbo Baggins, I was beyond sold, I was in love.
The culture of the dwarves of Erebor, the return after the diaspora in the Iron Hills and their stony determination to survive, Dain Ironfoot’s abrupt promotion to king over the bodies of Thorin and Fili and Kili, Lady Dis’ grief, the anguish of the Moria colonists, the dwarves in the Halls of Mahal grieving their living and dead loved ones, Gimli’s reckless love for his family and his people–it was like falling, or flying, or drowning. It was perfect, I thought to myself, feeling a great tremendous weight in my chest like the breathless moment after getting the wind knocked out of you, right before it hurts, when you just think oh, wow. It couldn’t get better, never mind that this person had apparently written however many thousands of words of just…dwarves being dwarves.
And then.
Bilbo left. The Ring was on the field of play.
“There is no way this woman is crazy enough to rewrite the entire trilogy,” I said to myself. “And if she maintains this level of talent all the way through, I may have to scream.”
Well.
The fic is almost done. Dets is that crazy. I have had to scream.
This is the epic-length Tolkien fic of your dreams. It has women (and dwarrowdams, and lady elves) being badass. It has nonbinary and trans characters. It has world-building beyond the dreams of mortal man. It has desperate pining and steady love and families torn apart and reunited and heroes to save Middle Earth.
It has songs that will break your heart and make you smile and wriggle their way into your mind (The Iron Hills For Me fucking BROKE ME, I read that section in bed and I had to put my phone down so I didn’t get tears on it, I love it so much). It has moments of brilliant, shining joy where all you can do is laugh and heartwrenching world-weary tragedy where crying just doesn’t seem like enough, somehow. It has Aragorn, the perpetual third wheel, who just wants his friends to be happy and would consider saving Middle Earth a definite bonus to that. It has all the mid-battle and post-battle and just-because banter you could want, between dead dwarves and living dwarves and elves and Men and even the occasional Vala. It has Legolas and Gimli cobbling together a friendship from shared experiences and shared grief and falling in love and miring themselves down in misunderstandings and pining and coming together in the most perfect ways. It has Khuzdul and Sindarin and writing that honestly could put Tolkien to absolute shame in places.
It’s beautiful.
It’s elegant.
It’s sprawling.
It’s everything I could have hoped for in a Tolkien fic, and so much more.
It’s fanfiction of Lord of the Rings, but only in the way that Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are fanfiction of the Bible.
And THAT is pretty much what I have to say about that.
someone:
you were pretty good at that thing, why'd you stop doing it?
me internally:
I get extremely anxious when I think about doing something I might possibly succeed at because I base my self-worth on my achievements and other people's approval, I am afraid because I know I will never be able to live up to my own unrealistic expectations, I hate making mistakes because they make me feel worthless, I take negative feedback too personally, I feel immense guilt over not doing things that I've been avoiding which just makes me avoid them more, I feel ashamed and inadequate due to how difficult it is for me to stay committed to anything, I'm worried that I'll just end up disappointing myself and the entire world, and I am convinced that if I failed I would literally die.
me externally:
idk i guess i've just been kinda busy lol
