maybe y'all didn't notice but fat people who don't hate ourselves sure did notice that people were obsessed with shitting on fat people in the late 90s and early 2000s (conservative political time) and now are again (fascist political time), coincidentally while the market for weight loss has become a 90 billion dollar industry due to glp1s.
you are not immune to propaganda. it makes some people a whole hell of a lot of money for you to hate fat people and fear becoming (or staying, I think like 70% or something of the US is fat) one of us.
a lot of the fearmongering over fatness comes from studies directly funded by the weight loss industry...i think people don't really realize or think about the fact that research can absolutely be influenced and skewed by its funding. there is also research that shows that an amount of the negative health outcomes for fat people come from anti-fat bias. if you go to the doctor with concerns and the doctor simply tells you to lose weight, your problem is neglected and you may not even bother going to the doctor with the next problem.
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.
A study spanning almost four decades and involving more than 100,000 adults in Denmark found that those with an 'overweight' body mass index
there's so much crazy shit once you go down the rabbit hole. for example, BMI was not invented by anyone with a medical background. it was never meant to measure individual health.
researching the history of education in japan and learning that, pre–Meiji Restoration, peasants/commoners formed their own schools to become educated because it was the best way of fighting tax fraud.
That is, when an official told you, a rice farmer, that you owed more taxes than you really did, it was very useful if you were good enough at math to know he was lying (and could prove it) and if you were good enough at writing to write a letter to your government defending your case.
all of which is to say it's crazy that mega-corporations are now pushing education to be "what if you paid us whatever we tell you to for the rest of your life and never do math or write anything ever again"
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.
OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.
And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.
“It's not fair.” The little ghost kicks impotently at the chalk lines around her feet. “I ain't done nothing.”
I nod, setting down my chalk and spellbook. “It does sound like there might have been a bit of a misunderstanding.”
“She took against me, that's what happened,” the dead girl says with a scowl. She looks about fourteen, round faced and spotty, with whisps of brown hair peaking out from under her mob-cap. Her face and her crossed arms have a tell-tale bluish tinge to them. A cholera death.
“I been here for don't know how long and never gave any trouble. Nobody ever complained about me 'till her.”
…well, that's not strictly true.
Number 12, Barclay Street has been attracting rumours of haunting since the mid nineteenth century.
Sounds of faint singing and crying in the corridors at night. Cold spots. Doors that open and close by themselves. Animals acting strangely. Harmless, mid to low-level stuff, typical for a bored teenage poltergeist.
Still, pointing that out isn't likely to achieve much, and certainly the most recent complaints of blood running down the walls, screams in the dark and paralysing night terrors seem distinctly out of character.
The ghost toes the chalk again, more tentatively this time. It stays resolutely unbroken.
She could get out if she wanted to. I'm not one of those assholes who brings out their full arsenal of wards and sigils for a first meeting with a level 2 spectre. The summoning circle will keep her in one place for as long as I need her to talk, but it wouldn't hold for a moment if she really fought against it.
I take it as a good sign that she's still here. Pouting or not, she's clearly willing to work with me.
“None of the others could do this,” she says. “None of 'em even saw me.” She looks up. “Are you here to exise me?”
“Exorcise,” I say instinctively, and curse myself when she flinches. “Sorry, no, no! I don't exorcise people from their homes without good reason, not if they're happy where they are.”
“I was happy. Till she started calling in all them ghost hunters.”
Mrs Delaney had been quite persistent in her attempts to 'fix' her haunted house. Most of the people she found were charlatans, of course, but I'd still arranged an appointment as fast as I could once word reached me. It wouldn't have been long before she happened upon somebody with Talent, and unfortunately not everybody in this field knows how to behave like a professional.
“I think we might be able to help each other,” I say, careful to keep my voice calm and level.
“Don't see how. Not unless you can exorcise Her.”
“Not quite what I had in mind.” I pull out my phone and scroll through my photos. “You say that you're not the cause of the most recent incidents of paranormal activity?”
A pause. The ghost gnaws on her lip. I wait, patiently, keeping my body language open and nonthreatening. “I… I knocked her coffee cup over,” she admits at last. “She was being mean and talking on her telephone, saying I done all these things when I never did! So I decided to show her what I could do if I wanted.”
“Hmm.” The ghost eyes me nervously, as if expecting me to pull out a book, bell and candle and banish her on the spot.
“I only tipped it,” she adds. “I didn't break it or nothing!”
“You shouldn't have touched it at all,” I say sternly. “But… I can appreciate that you were frustrated, so let's say no more about it.”
The ghost looks relieved.
“My point is,” I continue, “if you weren't the one making blood rain from the ceiling or tormenting people in their sleep, then what was? There's no other ghosts on the property.” I find the picture I was looking for. “You can get anywhere around the house, right? Including behind the furniture and in the backs of cupboards?”
“Yes'm.”
I hold the phone up so that she can see the picture on the screen. “I'm going to let you go free in a moment, and I need you to see if you can find anything that looks like this.”
The ghost wrinkles her forehead. “What's that when it's at home?”
“Black mould,” I say, reaching out a foot to break the binding circle. “And I'm pretty sure it's the cause of this haunting.”
[Video Description: An ad with piano music over it all, showing an elderly woman in her home, knitting, when two younger men walk by her window, which catches her attention. She stares out her window at them as they kiss each other while walking, the old lady staring in disbelief. Cut to the old woman approaching a residence with a broom in hand, staring up at the second floor window where a small rainbow Pride flag is hanging. The old woman stares up at it and mutters "Ridiculo", before getting up on a ladder with her broom to remove the flag. Focus on the flag fluttering to the ground as church bells chime. The scene then cuts to the couple from before, approaching their home with grocery bags in hand before one stops and stares at the second floor, stopping his partner who then drops the groceries as he too stares up. It's then revealed that the small pride flag had been replaced with a gigantic, hand-knit pride flag. It then cuts back to the old woman's home, where a tin of rainbow-colored yarn sits on her table. The hands of the old woman are holding and fondly touching an old black and white photo of two young smiling women, leaning against each other. Cut to the old woman's face as she stares out with a look of happy pride on her face. At the end of the video, the name "Idealista" appears on screen, followed by "buon pride" along with a rainbow. End VD.]
The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".
In this case, thankfully, the Strong Opinion™️ is that those two men are ridiculous with their teeny tiny flag for ants.
stop letting miserable people on the internet convince you that you must have a concrete, well-constructed opinion on everything that has ever existed.
When you meet Edward Elric he gives off the impression that he's the short-tempered hot-headed "violence is the answer to all life's questions" kind of protagonist, and it's in fact incredible character craft that he's actually the character who ends the series with a negative-3 kill count.
God's worst soldier Edward Elric. Showed up as the youngest member of the Amestrian army, took millions of dollars from them, never followed a single order, helped dismantle their fascist regime, left with a lower kill count than he arrived with, and fucked off to go be a house-husband. Character of all time.
when I was in high school I had a literature teacher who had a policy of unlimited extra credit. All you had to do was read a book by a notable author (his discretion) and have a little chat with him after school to prove that you read it. No limits, no need for variety (one month I decided I really loved Kurt Vonnegut and just read everything of his I could get my hands on).
Yes, I was tearing through books constantly, and talking to this teacher at least weekly. Because even though I always loved reading as a kid, literature was always a very weak subject for me in terms of a teaching-to-standardized-test school setting (I just do awful on "what color were the curtains" type multiple choice questions. Those details don't stick in my memory THEY JUST DON'T). But that didn't matter for this class. I could just read my way out of any bad test score. I have always had fond memories of how I "fudged" my way through that class and "abused' the extra credit policy.
I was thinking about it again today, and only just now realized that he absolutely tricked me into being well-read, while my teenage self thought I was totally getting away with something. THAT MOTHERFUCKER. I hope he's doing well.
I saw this on Facebook and had to look it up. It really happened, albeit the details are different. From Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story:
"On the evening of MD-46, I finally played the trick that had been in work for over two month," said Garriott. "It even had the flight controllers puzzled for twenty-five years! My objective was to pretend that my wife, Helen, had come up to Skylab to bring us a hot meal, even though this was an obvious impossibility. Here is how the scheme worked. I recorded her voice on my small hand-held tape recorder before flight, pretending to have a brief conversation with a Capcom, with time gaps for his replies. The Capcom would be my only accomplice, but his role would be carefully disguised.
It was also necessary to have some recent event mentioned to validate the currency of the dialogue, so it would seem it could not have been recorded before fight. The short dialogue is printed below in its entirety. I knew that both Bob Crippen and Karl Henize were going to be Capcoms for Skylab, so they were brought into the planning, given the script and rehearsed on their timing. They kept the short script on a piece of paper in their billfolds, awaiting the right moment.
"For our flight in August-September, there would be many occasions of natural disasters involving forest fires or hurricanes, which would be widely known throughout the United States. So a few comments about one or the other were made on the tape. This led to four different scripts being recorded, one for each of the two Capcoms and one each for the two natural events. I would play the tape on the normal air-to-ground voice link with my wife's recorded voice and the Capcom would respond as if totally surprised by the female interloper."
Near the end of one period of voice contact Garriott said to the ground, "I'll have something for you on the next pass, Bob." Crippen replied, "Roger that, Owen." Then quietly and surreptitiously, he reviewed the brief script that had been in his pocket for all these weeks. Soon after coming into voice range, the ground heard this voice on the standard air-to-ground link:
Skylab (a female voice): "Gad, I don't see how the boys manage to get rid of the feedback berween these speakers.... Hello Houston, how are you reading me down there? (s sec. pause) Hello Houston, are you reading Skylab?"
Capcom: "Skylab, this is Houston. We heard you alright, but had difficulty recognizing your voice. Who do we have on the line up there?"
Skylab: "Hello Houston. Roger. Well I haven't talked with you for a while. Isn't that you down there, Bob? This is Helen, here in Skylab. The boys hadn't had a good home cooked meal in so long, I thought I'd bring one up. Over"
Capcom: "Roger, Skylab. Someone's gotta be pulling my leg, Helen. Where are you?"
Skylab: "Right here in Skylab, Bob. Just a few orbits ago we were looking down on those forest fires in California. The smoke sure covers a lot of territory, and, oh boy, the sunrises are just beautiful! Oh oh..... See you later, Bob. I hear the boys coming up here and I'm not supposed to be on the radio."
"Then quiet returned to the voice link, but we were told later, Bob Crippen had lots of questions coming his way in the Control Center," Garriott said. "What was going on? Where was this voice coming from? Bob must have been a very good actor, because he claimed complete ignorance and innocence of how it happened. Everyone heard it coming down on the air-to-ground loop. The whole two-way conversation sounded like a perfectly normal dialogue. No breaks or gaps, and they all heard Bob respond in real time. Could I have recorded Helen's voice on a 'family conversation' from our home? Yes, but there was no recent one. How would she have known about the fires, or who was to be on Capcom duty and how could she respond to Bob's comments in real time, as everyone could hear?
"No one ever worked out how this was accomplished. Finally, at our twenty-fifth reunion celebration in Houston in 1998, and with many of the flight directors and controllers present and still with no clue as to how it was done, I described it all as above. My prejudiced opinion is that this was the best 'gotcha' ever perpetrated on our friendly flight controllers!"
Crippen recalled: "That was kind of a fun trick. There was head rubbing.
Everybody in the MOCR, or the control room, was looking like, What the hell is going on?' We did a good job. It was fun. Working those missions got to be tough. We did all kinds of things to try to come up with levity. That was a nice one that the crew got that the ground control didn't know about."
andulkaphoto
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
theartofmadeline
