We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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7 Responses
Weirdo. Course you can’t kill yourself that way. Experts are apparently recommending we eat 10 portions of fruit a day … I can’t even afford to buy that many. Plus I hate the taste of the sugar in fruit, it’s just icky, and the citrussy berry-y ones that don’t taste gross are too expensive to buy a lot of …
Eat as much fruit as you want. 🙂 Just cut down on the fizzy drinks. :p
Do you guys import a lot of your fruits? The weird thing is that a lot of the fruit in the Safeway by my house is imported, but it shouldn’t be. California has a lot of land dedicated to agriculture.
But fruit isn’t cheap here either. 3.99 a pound for a lot of stuff, which adds up since a pound isn’t very much anyway.
I’d just stay away from poisoned apples.
Otherwise you’re lucky. Most of us have problems with Snicker bars.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the fruit unless you don’t vary what you eat. For instance, my aunt turned my cousin orange twice as a baby from feeding her too much cantaloupe/yams/carrots.
If you want to buy local, I find smaller non-chain produce stores and especially organic stores have more local products, and aren’t actually unreasonable cost-wise. It’s also a great way to reduce environmental impact from travel-related fuel emissions and such.
gfs3: I still have problem with the candy, but thankfully I am more obsessed with fruit. I just plowed through half a bag of cherries last night.
sara: I eat other stuff. Or I try to. I have meat and sandwiches and somewhere there are some veggies I need to eat. I just was curious if you can kill yourself from eating too much fruit :P. I eat fruit more than I eat anything else, but that’s also because fruit is like candy to me…literally.
And I don’t necessarily want to buy local, I just notice that in California it is often cheaper to buy California-based produce rather than buying imported stuff. I don’t necessarily want things from my immediate area, but I do want to buy California stuff to save money and to help out the state, but maybe the reason the Safeway by my house only had imported is because some of the things I’m buying aren’t quite in season yet. I’ll see if there is a more local-based store somewhere around here. Usually Safeway is pretty good about having California-based produce, since they are, for the most part, a west-coast chain store (they are in the midwest and a little east, but mostly all the stores are on the west coast).
So yeah!
I doubt one would die from eating only fruit…especially if one defines fruit as anything with seeds in it: pumpkin, tomatoes, etc and the like.
Read somewhere that a lotta the congestion in folks bodies is because we eat too many cooked foods. -C
Well I imagine you could still die if you ate ONLY fruit. There are essential amino acids you need to formulate proteins and what not that are not exactly easy to find in fruits, let along veggies. That’s why we, as a species, have been eating meat for thousands of years. We’re simply fortunate now to have access to a wider variety than our ancestors had, so we can choose to be vegetarian, etc.
But, more news that I’m not going to die from eating too much fruit. The only thing I feel bad about now is the money I’m paying for fruit *glare*