About fat shaming

Recently I've started seeing a lot of opinions about what is called "fat shaming", the practice of making fun of someone or being offensive towards them because they are overweight. Some say that being morbidly obese should feel shameful, others that shaming people for their weight is cruel and doesn't help in any way, as stress and low self esteem lead to even more weight gain. There are even scientific reports in mainstream media about this.

I am here to tell you that, as someone who has always been heavier than desired, that probably shame doesn't help, but having a clear idea of your normal weight does. When I has about 115kg I felt fine, I felt normal, I had to have friends tell me that I gained too much weight. So I went to a nutritionist, lost weight, it wasn't even very difficult. I went to 102kg and stabilized around 105. I felt absolutely thin and sexy! I gained weight again after, but my image of myself had changed. I didn't feel normal at 115, so I started taking care of what I was eating. I am still orbiting 105kg now and probably it will be very hard for me to go under that limit, however what I am trying to tell you is that if I feel fat at one level, I will make at least a modicum of effort to not gain more weight. If my image of myself, both conscious and unconscious, is that normal is somewhere, I will go towards that limit.

Picking on someone or intentionally offending them is an asshole move, obviously, but changing the level of "normal" to suite the current average or culturally accepted weight in the name of niceness and political correctness is absolutely wrong. Just my two cents.

Read More

Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1), by Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is a Native American and she writes of a world after an undefined global catastrophe, with the reservations united as a true separate nation. Magic is back, too, monsters and gods and everything in between with it. Our hero is a girl who was trained to kill monsters by a demigod after her grandmother was brutally murdered in front of her. She must now unravel the mystery of monsters terrorizing the land, her own emotions about the now absent demigod and solve the riddle of her own story.

Trail of Lightning has an interesting story, reminded me a lot of Obsidian and Blood, by Aliette de Bodard, only that was with Aztecs and was more technical and this is more adventurous. The writing is competent, the logic holes in the story are small and forgivable. I liked that is had that Native American background, even though I felt it wasn't explored enough.

But what bothered me was the plot. It's all convoluted, but suddenly pieces fall together to further the plot or clues appear out of thin air, while things that should be immediately obvious or at least evoking curiosity are ignored and left for later when they are planned to be revealed. In the end, everything was connected. Surprise! I feel that the characters were butchered or at least boxed in by this overarching cliché of the mandatory connectivity in all things. Chekhov's Gun is important because we are talking about a violent tool for death. If a napkin is described in a scene it doesn't mean somebody is bound to blow their nose in the third act.

Bottom line: Post apocalyptic Obsidian and Blood, only not as good.

Read More

The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, by Richard Preston

A few weeks ago I watched the mini series The Hot Zone, the TV adaptation of this book. And while more than 90% of the show is contained in the book, the rest of 10% is pure soap opera garbage and the characters and situations are jumbled about to make the show runners' point, not the book's. The pointless dramatization of inconsequential events makes no sense to me when the first part of the book, the one detailing the gruesome deaths of people from Marburg and Ebola and the last part of the book, examining how a "bullet dodge" did not make people more apprehensive and careful - quite the contrary - are more dramatic and were not really presented in the film. And frankly, the differences in characters between the show and the book should be a bit offensive, to the real people at least. That being said, you can opt for watching the show, but I recommend the book instead.

The book itself is much better structured and carefully crafted. It consists of four parts: the first is about the deaths of people (the discovery of the virus by people - or more accurately, the other way around), the second is the setup for the outbreak in Reston, Washington, the third is how they dealt with it and the fourth is more like an epilogue.

It is obvious that as I am reading this review, Ebola did not invade Washington, then spread over the continental U.S. so I will not spoil anything by saying that the (real life) heroes save the day, but the devil is in the details. So many things could have gone wrong - and did. So many procedures put in place to encourage safety ended up circumvented because they were badly designed. The book praises the general who decided to act swiftly, rather than go through endless "asking for permission" with all the different, segregated and non-cooperative agencies which have carved their own administrative turf. Was that the correct decision?

If there is something I did not like in the book it's the title. The Hot Zone describes the first outbreaks, but it doesn't have anything more to do with exposing the actual origins of Ebola other than "they came from Africa". And the book treats Ebola and Marburg as close cousins and examines them together. Probably "The Terrifying True Story of the Outbreaks of Filovirus and Our Inability to Handle Them or Learn Anything Useful" would have been a less commercial title, but still...

Bottom line: I liked the book, even if I was mostly interested in the clinical symptoms and the technical exploration of the virus than the Reston case, but I do agree they should be examined together. Richard Preston writes well and even if sometimes he got a bit carried away trying to set up the mood of a place and what people thought and felt, I didn't feel annoyed at any time. Also, if you like what you read, he wrote three more books in his "Dark Biology" series.

Read this, it's a fascinating story. If you are squeamish, though... maybe you should try something else.

Read More

The Color of Distance, by Amy Thomson

I got this book because I heard it was good and the synopsis reminded me of the Xenogenesis series by Octavia Butler, which I liked, despite its global rape undertones. In fact, The Color of Distance is also about a woman changed by aliens to be more like them, but it is an overly positive story.

Amy Thomson tells the story of Juna, left behind for dead after a shuttle crash on an alien planet inhabited by non technological beings that have deep social connections and the ability to see and change things at a very fine level inside living creatures. Thus set up, the only possible direction for the plot is that the aliens save Juna, remaking her in order to be able to survive in their world.

From then on, things could have gotten really nasty. Think Shogun, or Xenogenesis, or The Sparrow for that matter, since I've mentioned rapey things. But no, the aliens are amazingly benign and there is a "noble savage" beauty in their calm and harmonious world that should teach us something. In fact, I was hearing Thomson's voice ever couple of chapters whispering "Hey! This should really teach us something!". It wasn't as heavy handed as that, but I felt it a bit.

The lack of real conflict and only a few almost technical problems to solve made it a bit boring, but as world building goes, it's pretty interesting. In fact, I thought the best part was then humans come back for Juna, where the book explores how people react after "going native" and coming back to their old environment. But this also was almost devoid of conflict or real issues.

Bottom line, it was a fine book. If you are looking for a nice alien world and society book, this is it. If you are looking for terrifying and exciting adventures navigating an unknown society and the clash of worlds, this is certainly not it. And no one gets raped! Yay!

Read More

The Doomfarers of Coramonde (Coramonde #1), by Brian Daley

Imagine something as pompous as Lord of the Rings, with the many names, and the fancy speech, and the heavy lore, but worse. Imagine characters so cardboard and childish as to be the basest of archetypes: the young prince, the evil vizier, the good mage, the wise intellectual, the down-to-earth soldier, the evil step-mother queen, the noble savage, the beautiful red-head that doesn't speak much or voice any opinion of consequence, but all men talk about her and plan what to do with her (when they are not saving her) and so on and so on.

Why would you read it? I don't know. I managed to get past halfway through The Doomfarers of Coramonde until I asked myself the same question and decided to switch books. However it is clear that Brian Daley put his heart and sweat into this. It is not a bad book, it's just not very good, and the work that went into the world building and the naming of each and every character, whether they matter or not, make me want to rate this book higher.

Bottom line: B- for effort, but a D for enjoyment.

Read More

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases, by Paul A. Offit

Vaccinated is an ode to Maurice Hilleman, a rather modest man with a big heart who worked tirelessly towards making vaccines for serious diseases and taking almost no recognition for it. Clearly biased towards the man - Paul A. Offit positively worships him - but informative and well documented.

And it is not only about Hilleman, although he was a giant in the domain of vaccination and affected most important decisions in it. For example you learn about Andrew Wakeman, the man who, while financed by the Personal Injury Lawyer for several families that were suing pharmaceutical companies, imagined a connection between vaccines and autism, a move that has repercussions even today. You also learn about how hepatitis vaccines were tried on mentally challenged people in asylums. Doctors, including Hilleman, convinced themselves that they were attempting a cure for a disease that would eventually affect their guinea pigs and who, when ill, would have no resources to go to doctors or receive proper medical attention. And you learn about how vaccines are the only medical devices that can virtually eradicate disease, often with just one cheap dose for life, therefore there is little incentive for big pharma to invest in them. As opposed to something more lucrative like alimentary supplements, pills that just alleviate the symptoms, etc.

It is a book worthy of a read, that teaches a lot about what a vaccine is, how to make it and why and how it works. Also why some cause problems that then are misinterpreted by the general public.

Read More

Had to move the blog to another URL because of DMCA

As I was saying in a previous post, I came back from vacation to about 5 DMCA notices about posts that had no infringing content that I could see. I've tried changing the URLs of links, the images, then reposted the posts. DO NOT DO THAT ON BLOGGER! Apparently, even if their rule says to not publish the post unchanged, they consider any republication of a post automatically put in Draft because of a DMCA notice to be infringing. And what happens after trying to republish five posts a few times? Your blog gets deleted and any attempt to contact the assholes at Blogger is ignored or, worse, a complete farce.

Example: A DMCA requests comes for a blog post containing only my text, a link to IMDb and a YouTube embed. The post gets sent to Draft. I send a counter notice to Blogger, then republish the blog. This might be considered "infringing" of their policy, but it only happened once, so I don't think this is the reason why they deleted the blog. Then they delete the blog (all the blogs on that user, I had some private ones that I hadn't backed up at all and now they are completely gone) and send me an email containing, I kid you not, this text: "we have removed the blog. Thank you for your understanding."

I've tried contacting them about my user being blocked from Blogger and the blogs deleted, but they have replied only with an automated message saying it usually takes two days to get back to me. Two weeks later, no reply from them... except the ones for the DMCA counter-notices. Guess what they said? I kid you not: "Thanks for reaching out to us. We have no record of the following URLs having been removed by Google due to a legal complaint". I replied with a quote of their previous email. No reply.

So the only solution, until I find my own hosting and I set up my own blog, is to rename the blog and move it on another user.

This is a cautionary tale, too. Always backup your blog and any content you post on another platform, no matter how "no evil" it is. Also, make sure you backup everything, even the little details, checking the result, because backup and restore tools don't bring money to the platforms, so they usually suck big time. For example for Blogger there is no way to import a post with a JavaScript script in it that contains comments, because the newlines have been stripped and the comment affects the next line of code. And most of all, when your post gets DMCA'd, leave it in draft, file a counter-notice and pray that they actually mean something.

On the administrative side, because of the domain change and the backup SNAFU, the blog might not work completely as expected. Please let me know if anything goes wrong so I can fix it. For example, the links to the blog are automatically converted by JavaScript, because I can't export, replace and import the posts again without losing the JavaScript in some pages and posts. Plus, I have no idea if this blog is going to last.

Wish me luck, folks!

Read More