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.*

[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!!

[themarchingbeetle]

[theinternetarchive]

System wallpapers from Windows XP's RTM, Build 2600; Microsoft Co., August 24, 2001.

[theinternetarchive]

It’s Earth…

[depsidase]

[jarl-deathwolf]

If anyone would like to read a thorough take down of Sparta as a state not worth emulating, then ive got just the series of articles for you!

[heroineimages]

Reblogging because pissing on Sparta is one of my hobbies. And yes, totally check out the link above. Brett has a lot of great discussion and scholarship on why Sparta was proto-fascist garbage, and he presents it with both snark and accessibility.

[fierceawakening]

Holy shit. That’s… that’s worse than I thought it would be. Yikes.

[doctorjanedee]

Reblogging because more people should read the ACOUP Sparta takedown and fewer people should get their concept of history from fucking 300.

[fierceawakening]

No one should get their concept of history from 300, and I say that as someone who enjoyed 300. 300 is a comicbookification of a legend, and legends are already exaggerations.

[disorganisedautodidact]

A Great Divorce has also done an audio version of the ACOUP Spart takedown if audio is easier for you!

[re-the-bear]

The tweets (Fuck Elon it's still tweeting) fail to notice that the fucking marble is what endures. Sparta may have had men, but it's Athens that still stands as the seat of power. So who won after the dust settled? Athens. Be so fucking for real.

[dantes-infernal-chili]

A paragraph from the second article in the series that feels especially relevant to the original post:

"Put in more blunt language: armies that abuse and beat recruits or junior soldiers in training and in peacetime will tend to abuse and murder civilians in occupied territory and in wartime. Violence also rolls downhill, it turns out. Soldiers who are abused by their superiors tend in turn to abuse their subordinates, both as a learned behavior, but also as a transference mechanism (they repair the humiliation of receiving violence by inflicting it on someone even more powerless than them). This relationship is best documented in the Imperial Japanese military (e.g. S. Ienaga, The Pacific War (1978), 46-54); but also observed in the German Imperial Army (I. Hull, Absolute Destruction (2006), 93-103 – though I should note that Hull focuses largely on the failure of command and political structures to apply the brakes to this tendency; see also for the Wehrmacht in WW2, O. Bartov, “The Conduct of War: Soldiers and the Barbarization of Warfare” (1992)) – and hey, what do you know, two other armies that somehow gained a reputation for ‘badass’ military effectiveness despite a comprehensive inability to achieve strategic objectives resulting in the complete annihilation of the state they were supposed to defend. It’s almost like we have a pattern."

[cursedpossums]

unrestrained summer fun

[cursedpossums]

every year around late may, without fail, this post starts getting notes again . and my little wet raw chicken breast of a brain gets puzzled. because i forget that summer is , in fact. a yearly event

[shinonart]

More galaxy bugs! 🐛✨

In late 2024 I got inspired to paint a bunch of galaxy bugs for my galary animals series. I'm very happy with how popular these have been at conventions!

Find me and my art elsewhere!  

[to-orrr]

here are some more cats 🍓

[guineapiggies]

Via aleksartemporium

[rxttingcorpse]

[zegalba]

The maneki-neko (招き猫) is a common Japanese figurine which is often believed to bring good luck to the owner.

[ploobytumbls]

I took a bus to a conference today and the bus driver fully stopped the bus to identify and chastise a person who was playing music out loud on their phone. That is how you get me to actually complete the customer service survey specifically so I can give you top ratings

[ploobytumbls]

It's days later and I'm still thinking about this man. Full ass bus pulled over to the side of a state highway with the hazards on, stalking down the center aisle intoning "ALL RIGHT. WHO'S GOT IT. YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ON SPEAKER." I want to commission a statue of him. a hero. a king.

[punkitt-is-here]

quirky fourth wall breaking character but theyre just fucking. wrong about the medium theyre in. they keep making references to cinematic techniques and directorial styles and the other fourth wall breaking character is like "dumbass we're in a fucking comic book" and they are in a video game.

[totally-cis-offical]

Well currently they’re in a tumblr post but I see your point

[moon-of-curses]

we're actually in a youtube video if this turns out to be funny enough

[homunculus-argument]

The fun thing about finnish is that the way you ask for things in a polite way has been in-baked into the suffixes you use, so you don't have to use many words when few do trick. Like asking someone "could you give me [-]" is "voisitko antaa" in written and some variation of "voisiksä antaa" in spoken dialects*, but instead of asking "could you", the polite polite way to ask is "haluaisitko", not as can you, but would you want to. The tone distinction is so clear that asking someone "could you [do thing]" instead of "would you want to [do thing]" is less of a polite request and more of instruction - someone's gotta do it, and the task is being assigned to you.

On the other hand, dropping out the conditional out of the question turns the tone into a passive-aggressive threat. If someone tells you "stop that" as an imperative, "lopeta", that's a command. Asking in conditional, could you stop that, "voisitko lopettaa" is a polite request. "Haluaisitko lopettaa", would you like to stop that, is so polite that depending on the tone it might be sarcastic politeness that indicates hostility.

But asking someone "do you want to stop that", "haluatko lopettaa tuon" is a matter of "do you want to stop doing that voluntarily, or do you want me to stop you." By physical force, if necessary.

* the different form varies depending on what first and second person pronouns are used in the specific dialect. This is a whole another rabbit hole so for shortcut I'm doing the examples in the southern finnish dialect that I have grown up speaking

[weepingwidar]

Mia Bergeron (American, 1979) - Ancestors (2021)