thom

Frontend Engineer who enjoys music, miniature painting, video games, films. Previously a musician, bass player.

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

Has anyone got contact details for Alanis Morissette?

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"But meat has no antioxidants, you need plants for those." A lovely idea, built on a misunderstanding of what those plant compounds are even doing.

The polyphenols in plants, the famous antioxidants, are mostly the plant's own defence chemicals. Bitter, mildly toxic compounds it makes to stop insects and fungi from eating it. When they appear to benefit you, it is often because they mildly stress your cells and your body mounts a clean up response. That is the hormesis idea. The plant is poking you, and the recovery does you a bit of good. It works, in a backhanded sort of way. But it is hardly the gift basket it is sold as.

Meanwhile, animal foods quietly carry their own:
- Carnosine, concentrated in red meat, which mops up the compounds behind glycation and ageing
- Taurine, abundant in meat and shellfish, supporting heart and brain
- Glutathione, the body's master antioxidant, ready made in fresh meat
- Vitamins A, E and K2 in animal fat and organs, the fat soluble defenders
- CoQ10, packed into heart and other organ meats

And the headline act: your body manufactures its own antioxidant defence system, and it builds it largely from the amino acids you get from protein.

So the real picture is simpler than the slogan. You can borrow a plant's stress chemicals, or you can supply the raw materials for your own defences. The animal quietly does both jobs, and skips the bitterness.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Everything in moderation, they say, as if that settled it.

Moderation of what, exactly. A moderate amount of arsenic is still arsenic. A moderate amount of a thing that was industrial waste in 1910 is still a strange material to build a body out of.

Nobody in human history ever needed to be told to eat steak in moderation. Your body manages that one without a slogan. It fills you up and sends you on your way.

Everything in moderation is the sort of thing an industry says when it would very much like you to keep buying the product, but would rather you didn't ask too many questions about it.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The wellness industry wants you to believe reclaiming your health is expensive. It is one of the great lies, and it keeps the working man out on purpose.

The magazines all sell the same picture. A grass-fed ribeye from a named cow. A powder that costs more than the meat. A plunge pool, a sleep tracker, a fridge full of things ending in a vowel. The message underneath is always the same: if you cannot afford the boutique version, the door is shut.

It is the oldest trick going. Make the basic and abundant look exclusive, so the people who need it most assume it was never meant for them.

Here is what actually rebuilds a body, on next to nothing:

Eggs and fatty mince. Among the most complete food on earth, and still the cheapest things in the shop.

Tinned sardines. Complete protein and the good fats, pennies a tin.

Sunlight. A vitamin factory running on your own skin, switched on free every time you step outside.

Walking. The most underrated training there is, available the second you lace your shoes.

Sleep. The most powerful recovery known to man, and nobody has yet worked out how to charge you for it.

No subscription. No named ranch. A frying pan, a pair of shoes, and the nerve to ignore the people selling the deluxe edition.

Good health was never the preserve of the rich.

They would just prefer you believed it was.

[Ziggy_Sobotka @Ziggys_Duck]

Remembering the great Lance Reddick, born 64 years ago today in Baltimore.

Gone but not forgotten.
June 7, 1962 – March 17, 2023

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

What the Netflix documentary needs you to believe a cow is:

- A methane factory with a vendetta
- Personally melting a glacier right now
- Sinking water like a frat lad
- Bulldozing the Amazon between mouthfuls
- Mugging children for their grain
- A coronary wrapped in leather
- A mastermind that can't open a gate
- Smug, and unforgivably so

What a cow is actually up to out there:

- Chewing grass you physically cannot
- Drinking rain, handing most straight back
- Farming a hillside no tractor survives
- Muck-spreading the field for free
- Breathing out last August's carbon
- Six months of food off one animal
- Leaving the soil richer than it found it
- Unaware it's been cast as the villain

The cow has been framed.

The bloke who made the documentary flew there to do it.

[thom @thomblweed]

holy piss

https://t.co/oPlJfXq1Dr

[thom @thomblweed]

A reminder of the best band around 19 years ago. I got to see three of their shows from 2006 to 2007.

https://t.co/B6tBso4dAe

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Vegans: "Drinking cow's milk is unnatural!"

Great point.

So instead of pulling on some teats for thirty seconds, we've developed a twelve-step industrial alternative.

Step one: grow almonds in California, a drought-afflicted state currently depleting an aquifer that took twenty thousand years to fill.

Step two: ship them to a processing facility.

Step three: soak them in water. California water, specifically, because almonds need 15 gallons per ounce and California is already rationing.

Step four: pulverise them into a slurry.

Step five: filter the slurry through fine mesh, discarding most of the actual almond in the process. That was the bit with the nutrition in it. Gone now.

Step six: add more water, because the resulting liquid isn't watery enough.

Step seven: add sweeteners, because it tastes of nothing.

Step eight: add emulsifiers, because it separates in six minutes otherwise.

Step nine: add synthetic vitamins, because all the natural ones left in step five.

Step ten: add seed oils, because we apparently learned nothing.

Step eleven: homogenise, degas, pasteurise, and sterilise the mixture until it resembles no food that has ever existed in nature.

Step twelve: put it in a carton with a picture of a field on it.

The cow: stands in a field. Makes milk. Has done this for ten thousand years. No factory. No steps. No aquifer.

Unnatural, though. Very unnatural.

[thom @thomblweed]

@Ziggys_Duck If the man coming, be ready for the man.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Most of you will hate me saying this, but I will say it anyway.

The Democrats are in complete disarray and have no coherent message.

No real solutions. Just anti-Trump rhetoric on a loop.

And listen — I understand the anti-Trump sentiment. I share a lot of it.

But that is not a governing platform. That is not a vision for the country.

And it is not going to win elections.

Talk to your constituents about affordability.

About raising living standards. About the wealth gap that is tearing this country apart at the seams.

Here’s the hard truth: If we don’t fix the wealth gap through traditional American capitalism, we will have a populist leader on the left or a populist leader on the right in perpetuity.

And that is genuinely dangerous for the country.

Trump looks imperious right now. Looks invincible. I understand why people are scared.

But he’s got 36 months.

He can do a lot of damage in 36 months. I won’t minimize that.

But it is 36 months.

The question is whether the opposition uses that time to build something real or spends it screaming into the void.

[William Shatner @WilliamShatner]

At 95, I'm still smokin'! 😝

I’ve learned two things:

Never waste a good cigar.
Never trust anyone who says you should ‘act your age.’ 😉👍🏻

[thom @thomblweed]

@typecraft_dev “We can’t stop here, this is bat country!”

[Bo Loudon @BoLoudon]

🚨BREAKING: This AI video of President Trump announcing he’s “making Venezuela grande again” has gone viral.

This is absolutely hilarious.🤣😂

[CONSEQUENCE @consequence]

Sir Anthony Hopkins is celebrating 50 years of sobriety today

[Ziggy_Sobotka @Ziggys_Duck]

Awful news. RIP James Ransone, Ziggy Sobotka on The Wire.

June 2, 1979 - December 19, 2025

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

'He has a point, but he's too blunt.'

From the start, a key tactic of the gender identitarians has been linguistic prescription, and it's proved shockingly successful. Trans activists' shibboleths and euphemisms have been allowed to penetrate the upper echelons of our culture with devastating consequences to freedom of speech and belief. Huge swathes of liberal media, the arts, academia and publishing have thrown themselves with gusto into the defence of a quasi-religious belief causing provable real world harm, and in their arrogance they've been outraged when people they assumed were part of their In Group have refused to march meekly along in lock step.

Time and again, I've seen and heard well-educated people who consider themselves critical thinkers and bold truth-tellers squirm when put on the spot. 'Well, yes, maybe there's something in what you're saying, but it's hateful/provocative/rude not to use the approved language/pretend people can literally change sex/keep drawing attention to medical malpractice or opportunistic sexual predators. Why can't you be nice? Why won't you pretend? We thought you were one of us! Don't you realise we have sophisticated new words and phrases these days that obviate the necessity of thinking any of this through?'

As the vibe shifts, and a lot of people in the elite professions start trying to reposition themselves, the obvious place to start is, 'it's not that I couldn't see your point, but did you have to say it that way?' We dissenters were supposed to find a way of questioning the chemical castration of children while calling it 'gender affirming care.' We were meant to defend the rights of vulnerable women while also using female pronouns for male rapists. We should have found a way to discuss fairness for women and girls in sport, while pretending that the ineradicable physical advantage men have over women doesn't exist.

Either a man can be a woman, or he can't. Either women deserve rights, or they don't. Either there's a provable medical benefit to transitioning children, or there isn't. Either you're on the side of a totalitarian ideology that seeks to impose falsehoods on society through the threat of ostracisation, shaming and violence, or you're not. The alternative to being 'blunt' - using accurate, factual language to describe what was going on - was to surrender freedom of speech and espouse ideological jargon that obfuscated the issues and the harms caused. We've always needed blunt people, but we need them most of all when being asked to bow down to a naked emperor.

[thom @thomblweed]

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[thom @thomblweed]

43

[Jay Mewes @JayMewes]

Oh we totally do 😋

#jayandsilentbob #clerks