When explaining why I need to go into Emergency Medicine as a specialty I tell people that I’m a naturally nocturnal basement-dwelling gremlin with weapons-grade ADHD.

It usually gets a laugh.

(For context, most ERs are in the hospital basement)

I didn’t take it as a negative! Just expressing that you’re right on the mark about my username being quite relevant.

Look, I’m a 4th year med student in my 30’s. I know what I’m about. My undergraduate degree is in History and I worked in IT and sysadmin for a couple years before I went back to school to go into medicine.

I had so much fun cracking open my Surface Duo 2 phone to fix the hinges. I literally cracked the glass shell and had to get a laminate skin to hold the glass together. I ended up getting another phone after I broke the hinges and couldn’t find someone to repair it quickly, so now I just use it as a very fancy mini-tablet. I’m so pissed they killed the platform because I adore the 2 separate screens that can run apps side-by-side and the fact that my Surface pen works on it flawlessly.

I don’t know why I keep trusting Microsoft to keep supporting good platforms, but here I am with multiple Zunes (someone else gave me their old one when they got an iPhone), and a Surface Duo 2 phone…

I worked in the bookstore computer repair shop in college and I was one of 2 techs that was actually willing to crack open Windows laptops and work on them. The bookstore had to have an Apple Certified repair shop to be allowed to sell Apple products, so most of our folks got certified as Apple technicians. I never bothered because I always had plenty of work with the myriad random models of laptops that folks brought in that the Apple bros didn’t want to touch.

I wish they were more repairable. I have a Surface Pro 8 that serves my needs quite well and I was able to upgrade the SSD to a TB from the 256GB it came with, but I had to do some shenanigans with power settings and whatnot because the only SSD I could find was technically only compatible with the Surface Pro 9 and newer. But it works now and it has been a very good machine for getting through medical school. An iPad would not have met my needs and as much as I hate to admit it, having my Surface and my desktop terminal linked through OneDrive has actually been very helpful.

Full disclosure, I am one of those nerds that bought and used a Surface Duo 2 phone until I broke the hinge by dropping it wrong. I did eventually crack it open to mostly fix the hinges, but shattered the glass in the process. I fixed that with 2 layers of laminate sticker things after assembling the shards back onto the phone.

Given how many Nazis are kicking around these days, I’m starting to think that might have been the case. The 3rd reich just played the long game.

But when they’re really young you can do things like convince them that trees walk and that’s why trees in cities are in those little cages or pens. (They do actually use their roots to pull themselves around a bit, but it takes a very long time for the amount of movement to be noticeable.)

The age group of children that gets put on leashes doesn’t have the brain development to feel shame or humiliation. Their brains have literally not developed the cortex that does that yet.

From the age of about 2 to 4, my Dad made a harness out of climbing webbing for me and clipped the leash to a carabineer on his belt when we were out and about. We were constantly going to places like Haight St in San Francisco and hiking on the sea cliffs in Santa Cruz. I 100% would have gotten myself killed without that leash because I was very curious about the fishies in the ocean at the bottom of that 50-100ft high cliff, and my Dad was wrangling me and my sibling by himself while Mom was at work.

I’m pretty sure there’s a picture somewhere of me leaning over a cliff being held back by the leash because I was a rambunctious little gremlin that was about 20 years off from having a fully developed frontal lobe. And I want to find that picture and share it with my friends because I think it’s hilarious.

That’s why the trailer has me so hyped for this game. It looks like the game is going to be different because Ciri is the protagonist. Her experience, reactions, and approach to saving a young woman from being sacrificed are totally different than what Geralt’s would be. I hate it when games like Mass Effect are like “Oh! You can play as FemShep! That totally counts as representation!” even though it changes literally nothing about the story.

I want more games that actually address the real and significant differences in the experiences and perspectives of different characters. I’m always disappointed when there’s a “female” option that’s just a re-skin of the male character with no changes in how the character interacts with the world and the story. (This happens a lot in non-video game media too.)

90% mortality rate for pregnant women.

My apartment at school is a couple blocks from the hospital. I can hear the air ambulance helicopter take off and land. It’s profoundly less annoying than the active railway near the apartment in the other direction.

There is no reasonable way to eliminate all noise and I can guarantee that there are sources of noise that are louder and more pervasive/frequent than aircraft that you could focus this ire on. If someone is really so sensitive as to suffer immense harm from the noise of aircraft in their area, they should not live in that area.

Before you start on some tangent about how small, rural communities have aircraft noise as well as large cities, I would like to inform you that those small airports can be a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable in our communities. I have helped care for a patient that had to be flown to our hospital in a small airplane from a rural community about 500 miles away because an air ambulance helicopter couldn’t make the distance and a ground ambulance would have been too slow. Putting too many restrictions on small airfields, especially in remote communities could very easily cause actual fatalities, not just disruption or distress.

If you’re talking about the constant noise from bit mining operations and the like, I’d agree with you. But having grown up very close to a US military testing airfield, I disagree with the assertion that aircraft noise is anything more than a nuisance. Throughout the first 26 years of my life, I lived in a place where squadrons of C-130’s would do take-off and landing drills over my neighborhood. While it was irksome, like all aircraft, they were limited to flying during certain times of day, excluding emergencies, just like personal or private aircraft are. I suffered no permanent harm from it, and to be honest, our neighbors blasting loud music all the time and late into the night was more of a problem than the aircraft.

I think you are focusing far too much and placing entirely unwarranted importance on this issue, and your efforts would be better spent elsewhere. It will win you no favors to burn any good will you have on this issue when there are others that are much more important problems.

This is a very grim subject, but this is going to be a growing problem in many areas of the world. If your personal belief system and culture permits it, you should consider lower-impact burial options such as cremation. There are options for water-based dissolution “cremation” now in addition to the traditional incendiary variety.

This video by Caitlin Doughty (Ask A Mortician on Youtube) talks about some of the new, eco-friendly options, and this playlist has a bunch of videos about practical death questions.

Noise is not violence in the same way that murder is violence. And if your issue is them flying near residential areas, that increases the likelihood of another, uninvolved, innocent person being injured or killed in the crash. As I said in my other comment, violence inflicted on bystanders is abhorrent and not acceptable. Noise is a nuisance, murder is a permanent bad “solution” to a temporary minor problem in this case.

The rich people flying their own aircraft are almost always flying very small prop-planes that make less noise than the average semi-truck. The oligarch-parasites are never flying their own planes, so taking down an aircraft that they are in is going to result in multiple casualties of innocent people just trying to make a living. The only pilots who don’t go into debt to get their license are military veterans who just paid for their training with years of their lives and a decent chance of racking up some not-insignificant PTSD.

I can see where you are coming from on this, but you’re just wrong on this one. Luigi had the right idea by causing zero ancillary casualties and preventing harm from coming to anyone who was not his intended target. Any act of violence that doesn’t take that into account is just expanding on the already pervasive suffering in our society. As an EMT, I helped care for a toddler that had their distal femur obliterated by a stray shot in a drive-by shooting. I was in the ER, so I never found out what ended up happening to them after we stabilized them and sent them off to the trauma and orthopedic surgeons, but with my medical education since then, my best guess is an above-the-knee amputation because the growth plate was destroyed. So I’ve seen innocent bystander casualties before, in person, and there is no excuse for causing that kind of suffering. The impact that can come from inflicting damage on innocent bystanders is profound and no one with remotely decent virtues could inflict that kind of pain intentionally.

Oh goodness, you’re the one folks have been talking about. I am suddenly much less confused.

Unfortunately, the swing to the right and the rise of shit like “Blue Lives Matter” has changed this in some places. When I was in the western part of Virginia for school, there was a local car dealership called “Pinkerton” and I saw their dealership license plate frames and emblem on a LOT of cars in the area. Many of those cars also had the Gadsden vanity plates and a bunch of blue lives matter, trump, etc. stickers on them.

MRI sometimes uses a non-radioactive contrast depending on what you’re trying to get images of. MRI is probably the safest imaging modality, but it’s very expensive, kind of difficult sometimes due to how long it takes, and isn’t useful for every kind of imaging that needs to be done.