Did I just employ the "Treat Them Like You are A Kindergarten Teacher Again" method with my insurance company today? I surely did. Did it work? Probably better than intended because I made an actual doctor feel contrite.
So, my insurance has been trying to not cover my SNRI because it is new on the market and no generic available yet, so pricey.
I apply for a refill and the request gets locked for review. Again. For the 3rd time.
This time I call and immediately ask to speak to the actual doctor making these clinical decisions. Very politely. Must be a slow day because they allow it.
ME: [Teacher voice] I'm calling in regards to the SNRI you have placed a lock on. Why was this decision made?
DOC: Well, there are dozens of other medications on the market in that tier, and far cheaper for you and [insurer]. We have sent a request to your doctor to consider alternatives.
ME: I am aware of that. So, can you do me a HUGE favor and look up my prescription history really quickly and tell me how many SSRIs and SNRIs were only filled once in 2022 for me, showing they were poorly tolerated?
DOC: It looks like eight.
ME: Great job! Now, can you please look at my genetic test for psychiatric drug tolerance and tell me how many medications are listed in the safe category?
DOC: Two.
ME: Awesome! Now, can you tell me what type that other drug is that I'm not taking?
DOC: Yeah, totally, it's an MAOI.
ME: That's correct, you're really knowledgeable! Should I be taking something as dangerous as an MAOI with my other medications, or even just in general?
DOC: It's contraindicated for sure.
ME: It is! So true! So, last question since you've been incredibly smart and helpful. Is it less expensive for [insurer] to pay out for the medication knowing they already get a huge manufacturer discount anyway, or is it more expensive for them to pay for me to need potentially long-term inpatient psychiatric care?
DOC: I'll clear the code, ma'am and flag it as medically necessary. I'm sorry about this.
ME: I appreciate you SO MUCH. You have a great day now.
WALGREENS PHARMACY TECH WITH 5 NOSE RINGS AND PURPLE HAIR STARING AT ME: ........... OKAY! It'll be ready in five minutes. You wanna come work here?
āI think about my father being called āboyā, my uncle being called āboyā, my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called āboyā. So I questioned myself: āWhat does a black man have to do before heās given the respect as a man?ā So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybodyās mouth is āMr.ā Thatās a sign of respect that my father didnāt get, that my brother didnāt get, that my mother didnāt get.ā
Victor Frankenstein after achieving the impossible and building a fucking person from scraps of the dead: Oh god, ew, ew it's ugly! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew! Ew! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew!
"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."
Think about what you can do at your job or in your daily life to resist fascism when the opportunity presents itself!
A few months back, you might have read about two Logan City, UT court cā¦ William Joma needs your support for Support Legal Fees for Logan Ci
Here is the link to contribute to their legal fund. They are facing multiple felony charges and I have no info on whether they have any community support at this time. If their actions are something you support, consider helping them out through the aftermath and investigation by the "justice" system
Reasons for hope: Lots of amazing people did a ton of work to make this fantastic, fully interactive resource available - because no matter how bleak things seem, there are millions, and millions of people doing everything they can to protect both the world and their own communities.
You can use this to view and subscribe to updates, project statuses, and for at least some of them even whole dossiers. This is an amazing resource, I highly recommend checking it out
I love that Jules Verne asked the question "What kind of person could circumnavigate the world in 80 days?" and decided that the answer was not a groundbreaking explorer or genius inventor, but a guy who's really, really, really obsessed with train and boat schedules.
my final paper for my CS degree was literally "how can we algorithmically optimise for the fastest possible circumnavigation route on commercial flights?", which incidentally required me to adopt a very good working knowledge of what flight options are available at what times (and also led to me accidentally memorising several hundred airport codes)
incidentally the fastest possible route seems to be about 51 hours, if you're working from 2022 schedules like i was. if you use current schedules and are very optimistic about how quickly you can transfer between flights, you can maybe get it down to around 48 hours (also known as 25 millivernes).
i re-watched it several times, looking for what he does differently. finally i spotted it. look at the line of motion in his strike. itās not especially fast, he doesnāt wind up more than the others, and itās not a matter of strength ā the guy who knocked over the stand probably put more muscle into it. but thereās a unity of movement he has that the others lack. his body and sword are all one curve. everything moves at once along the same line.
from a physics perspective, that means all the force heās applying is concentrated at the point of contact between his swordās edge and the target, and it moves at just the speed that breakage propogates through the material. too slow and it wouldnāt have enough force; too fast and heād get ahead of the break, shoving the target over instead of cutting it.
from a writing perspective, that means that i should focus on describing a master swordsmanās smoothness more than their strength or speed, and can also have witnesses be confused at the effectiveness of strikes that donāt actually seem all that fast.
Martial arts are all about physics, my karate sensei is has a mechanic/physics diploma and he loves to explain the biomechanics of human body and how this was turned into fight via martial arts. Itās a very good way to teach. The sword master has a larger stance of the feet, much more than the others, allowing his barycenter to lower and thus giving more stability. This, united with the movement of the sword that follows the angle of his body increases the power of the blow without actually using too much muscle strength. Pretty sure heās also just tending (not contracting) the muscles under the armpits, near the rib cage, the serratus anterior. That makes a huge difference.
masterpost cw: the JL are going into the GIW facility so there's mentions of experimentation. Nothing is too graphic though.
The GIW really are overconfident bastards.
Barry tries not to cuss about this whole thing around the kids. It isnāt that he thinks the kids havenāt heard cussing, or even that cussing doesnāt have its place. Itās more that heās worried if he starts that he wonāt be able to stop. The kids didnāt need to deal with his frustrations over this. They need him to be strong.
Most of the time.
Right now is about wrecking these overconfident bastards.
Barry can feel the anti ghost shielding. Moving through it is like pushing through a door strung with clingfilm. It slows him down, but it doesnāt stop him. Wally is fractions of a second behind him. Barry would have rather had Wally at the other locations where there would be less chance of being shot at, but there had been no convincing the Titans of staying away completely.
Wally takes the left path as Barry takes the right. Something about them coming through the shielding triggers the alarms. Something about them says āghost. Barry tries not to think about it, because he canāt afford to think about it right then. They have a mission.
Locking the GIW out of their own armory is ridiculously simple. Again, overconfident bastards. He avoids taking out any of the agents just yet, just to cut down on panic. Next step was to find the security room. Wally made it there first. Two agents are passed out on the floor. Barry leaves the computers to Wally for the moment and focuses on securing the agents with zip ties. He uses their ties as gags. Which really, white suits? Overconfident bastards.
āSecurity room is secure,ā Wally says. His voice is an even double through the comms. āRelay the time to breaching.ā
āFive minutes,ā Bats replies.
āArmory is locked up. There didnāt seem to be any exterior guards, but not promises,ā Barry added. There was a soft noise of confirmation back.
Barry crosses his arms, foot tapping. Five minutes was an eternity for a speedster.
āDid you feel it?ā Wally asks.
Barry nods. āComing through the barrier? Yeah.ā
Wally nods. āThereās also a feeling of, like, static shock when touching the goons.ā
āI just thought that was the ugly carpet.ā
āIt is really hideous carpet.ā
An eternity later, and far too much time staring at the carpet, the rest arrive. After grabbing the hard drive that they hope Technus has moved onto, Barry and Wally speed back to their teams and then forward again, mapping out the facility and taking the odd agent out as they go.
The full alarms are blaring now. The GIW are doing the equivalent of shredding the documents, except itās trying to wipe data. There are Bats making sure to stop that. That one is easy. Harder is stopping the GIW from destroying the active experiments. From destroying the ghosts that they have pressed into cages and test tubes and machines that Barry doesnāt look too closely at but that turn his stomach.
Most of the human shaped ones rise with a wail as soon as theyāre freed. Some vanish. Others swoop through the building. The ghost of a lunch lady embraces another that looks like a dock worker of some sort, but itās hard to tell with the pieces that hang off him like dripping skin. Something large and white and furry attacks an agent.
Barry doesnāt stop them.
āFlash,ā Wally says across the comms. āLeft side, big lab.ā
The strain in his voice is enough that Barry rushes to his nephewās location, arms full of weird, blobular ghosts that rumble like purring cats. Heād been grabbing them out of one of the machinesāat least grabbing the ones that werenātā¦ bits of green are stuck to his suit like mashed up jelly. The ghost coo as Barry zips at full speed.
Bits of green go flying as he slams to a stop next to Wally.
One of the blobs rumbles deeper and nuzzles Barry in a weird sort of comfort. Absently, Barry dips his chin down to shield it. He doesnāt look down. He canāt. His eyes are glued to what heās seeing in the large tube in the center of the room.
āIs thatā¦ā
āā¦It looks like it, right?ā Wally asks. His voice isnāt above a whisper. āDanny said they had his core, but I didnātā¦ā
āHow could we?ā Barry asks back. Ludicrously, Barry says the first thing that comes to mind. āWeāre going to have to move. We donāt have enough bedrooms.ā
Wally barks out a surprised laugh and covers his mouth quickly. Itās not the time to be laughing. Barry bites his lip to stop his own, slightly hysterical laugh.
The blobs purr.
The Flashes watch the floating figure in the tube. The figure that has Dannyās face, a glowing sphere in their chest, and fades to nothing before their feet can touch the ground.
once I did an Americorps position & I wonāt get into exact details but two months in my one other coworker & I were rly frustrated bc we werenāt doing anything in our job description or the contract we signed whatsoever & instead we were basically being used as extremely underpaid retail staff and slowly the ppl in charge of us were cornering us more and more into that until I was finally like okayā¦.what the hell? I opened up the work contract I signed and realized I hadnāt done a single thing listed in my role so I sent a long (professionally worded) complaint email to Americorps and they called me an hour later in total outrage because it turned out the work we were being made to do was explicitly prohibited by the program and we were being 100% exploited for cheap labor and the very next day we got a new supervisor and spent the rest of our year doing what we signed up to do and it rocked.
Iām kinda surprised that nalbinding isnāt as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.
I guess itās because itās slower or something.
I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they donāt know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding
Yeah I hadnāt heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.
I was surprised that Iād never heard of it though. Itās older than knitting and crocheting and even though itās been done all over the world itās super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so Iām surprised Iāve never heard of it.
It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.
You also donāt need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.
Itās also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isnāt really necessary.
Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.
I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric
I thought this would be kind of a niche post to make but I was quickly reminded that Iām on tumblr, the website full of gay people with one billion hobbies.
Why do they even make apps for ADHD. You want me to use my 24/7 handheld immediate distraction device? To manage my 'gets distracted too easily' disorder? Ooooh we developed the perfect tool for managing your anemia. Its hosted in Dracula's castle. š
I'm instituting a new policy of "if I can't easily read your crusty scanned PDF then I'm sending it back to you, telling you to get your shit together and save your .docx as .pdf, and causing snakes to manifest inside your house"
this but also if you are in accounting and you have an Excel file please do not save it as a PDF or take a screenshot of it and then paste it into another Excel file
