The Ex- Med-Student's notebook

Personal blog of a UK GP (former hospital doc) taking life one day at a time. Medicine and science, art and literature, and everything in between. I write a comic about the funny side of medicine; over at @dxmedicalstudent. I give tea and empathy, but I cannot give medical advice; please see a qualified medical professional you can trust. *Susquitare aliquos ad magnificentiam - Raise others to Greatness.*  *Quia Omnis Successus - Success for All.* *Vos Facitis - you do you.* *Kindness inspires more kindness.*

[rosieandthemoon]

Vintage photo of the Brookdale Lodge, CA

Much of this room was lost in a fire and it’s a lot different now. My friend lives very close to here, and I still like visiting but was so sad it doesn’t look this way anymore.

[rafioso0412]

yes this is my first post and yes it’s unfinished ………….. no repost

[ammnontet]

my nothing

[babushkaat]

[babushkaat]

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

I have a lot of neurodivergent kids in my family. And I’ve worked with a lot professionally. And I often see their parents think the kids don’t want to connect, when they would love to — they just want to do it differently.

If they don’t like jokes and teasing, they might like silly noises or yes-and improv.

If they don’t like playing a competitive or narrative game with toys, they might like to take apart a toy, or sort/stack/line toys up, or get buried under toys.

If they don’t like biking or walking a trail in the woods ‘properly,’ they might like to walk along fallen logs, stand in the creek or look under rocks and leaves for creatures.

If they don’t like hugs and cuddles, they might like to bump shoulders, touch fingers, hand hug, spin around together, or (if they like more intense input) wrestle, push faces together, squeeze each other hard or run into you.

If they don’t like putting on kids’ music in the car or to dance to, they might want to listen to a game or show soundtrack, nature noises, a podcast, binaural beats, house music or metal.

If they don’t like animated movies where sad or scary things happen, they might like younger kids’ gentler shows, or adults’ science and history shows, or live zoo and nature cams.

And so many of them would benefit so much from the adults just slowing down. Not scheduling so much in the day, not rushing them through an activity, not stopping them playing the same song or watching the same bug for an hour, letting them absorb everything their way. Seeing it as a meditation instead of a problem. Joining them there.

And if you were one of those kids being rushed and scolded, trying to make yourself like teasing or competition or intense movies or a full social schedule — I’ve been reparenting myself and you can too. Whenever you notice something isn’t giving you joy — you can do it differently. Not everyone is forcing themselves through things they hate for “fun,” and we don’t have to.

[the-mitochondrion]

Medical school is so funny because it is literally like “what if we take every undiagnosed autistic with gifted kid syndrome and mix them into the same institution as the neurotypicals with superiority complexes who peaked in high school and then offer no mental health support to either side whilst they study for one of the most challenging degrees available”

[markovchaingang]

hey you. teenage girl writing in her diary. quit talking about the boy you have a crush on and start writing about the current political situation, the valuation of currencies, and the level of technology your people hold. your diary might be the only piece of evidence our society existed after nuclear war fries all of our data backups. future historians don't need to know about damian, they need at least a secondhand accounts of the great water wars and whether or not your leaders truly did worship a deity called "the free hand of the market"

[mothnem]

Keep writing about your crush Teenaged Girl. About your clothes, and how that other girl wore the same dress as you. Paint me a picture of what you were like.

[enchantedlantern]

Historians are going to hear about Damian and they're gonna LIKE IT

[therealbeachfox]

Make those future Historians reverse engineer the socioeconomic hierarchies of the 21st century from dreamy descriptions of Damian's current fashions. It's giving them enrichment.

[stuckinapril]

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

[homosapiennns]

This job gets me thinking like damn this person on tiktok has a huuuge tongue and short neck and “if their life was in danger and I had to intubate them it would be hard as fuck I wonder if they know that?”

[shrimpodile-art]

week 4 of kittenhood is the peak. their ears haven’t even straightened out and they have triangle tails. unbelievable.

[tokkibean]

i do not “delete sentences” when they start “hindering the plot” i COPY PASTE THEM into a SEPARATE DOC made just for keeping all my USELESS LINES that i will also NEVER USE so therefore i should JUST DELETE THEM but i DONT because id FEEL BAD if i did

[harpyharpyharpy]

You don't actually have to kill your darlings. You can just put them in the oubliette #myoubliette

[maidthings]

im generally not a very jealous person so i am feeling lots of brand new emotions right now

[demilypyro]

i'm an expert on being jealous you can ask me anything you're confused about

[maidthings]

how do i kill everything thats ever lived

[smolspacecreature]

Carry the moon - copics on lime green paper (microns and white gel pen for details)

[smolspacecreature]

An update:

I painted a gouache version of Carry the Moon!

[lake-lady]

Cross stitch for friend's xmas gift 🌸🧪📊

[yodaprod]

[dietspam16]

[foone]

Hi, Foone here, I'm a retrocomputer educator! I'm here to explain the real reason this laptop is like this.

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.

Next question!

[ellievsbear]

Lunar frog

[cyclic-abelian]

The anime is wonderful.. I am so inspired! i needed to finish this right away!!