more people have been to russia than i have

she/her | trying out a new URL for the first time in over a decade | currently redoing my theme pardon the ugly layout for the time being. I tag for CR Spoilers until the Tuesday morning following each ep I have an sca sideblog I should probably just merge with this and might do soon

[thesixthstar]

maybe gonna try this pinned post thing bc folks on mobile can’t see sidebar links

Here’s my about me

Here’s all my original posts

I feel that those should be sufficient lol

[facelessoldgargoyle]

Covered in Theory, Denied in Practice

My Five-Month Battle for Reimbursement of a Covered Expense

Hey! One of my partners wrote a really good blog about fighting with Cigna.

My insurance plan covers laser facial hair removal as a gender-affirming procedure for transgender people. My partner, a trans woman who is on my insurance, got this procedure done, and getting it reimbursed was like pulling teeth.

Representatives of my health insurance company, Cigna Healthcare, told me falsely that my plan didn't cover the procedure when I called them to ask about my claim. Even after I got my employer's Human Resources department involved, Cigna continued to lie to me and deny my claim despite the terms of my plan. It took me five months, 12 phone calls, 3 emails, and an HR ticket to get my claim reimbursed.

[facelessoldgargoyle]

Currently, most people get insurance through their employers, because it's much cheaper than buying insurance on the open market. The insurance company's revenue is determined by their relationships with employers, not patients. In other words, the employer, not the patient, is the customer.

This is why I had to contact HR in order to get any meaningful progress on my claim. When the employer is the customer, the employer must be involved in any claims process complicated enough to require human judgment. This means the patient must disclose private medical information to their employer, which can expose them to discrimination. I was lucky in this case, because I'm already out at work and the procedure wasn't for me, but I still had to pass personal medical information through a member of my employer's HR team. If I were a trans woman getting my own laser reimbursed, this process would have forced me to out myself to my employer.* Ideally, there would be no such thing as employer-sponsored health insurance at all.

*Applications of this dynamic to other types of claims, such as disability care and fertility treatments, are left as an exercise to the reader.

[bugthingsdaily]

Today's bug thing is this pair of horseshoe crab earrings from Bamboo Jewelry!

[ozempicofficial]

[geopsych]

Early morning at the lake.

15th of June 2022

[cuntnikida]

I hate explaining dog whistles to white people because they look at you like you're a goddamn conspiracy theorist. Like Lord forbid bigotry is more subtle than someone shouting "I HATE (INSERT SLUR)" to an oppressed person's face and violently beating the shit out of them.

[robertreich]

Trump purchased tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock in UFC’s parent company while promoting the event, according to a May financial disclosure. Every president since Ronald Reagan has either put their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees or sold off their stocks to eliminate conflicts of interest. Trump did not.

[frankendykes-monster]

[immaplatypus]

so I looked up the article to make sure it wasn’t taken out of context and it’s even better than I could’ve thought:

Holland said this allowed him to “lay down the law” on the “Spider-Man” set “and say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out. We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s ‘Spider-Man 4’ and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’ And Destin was super instrumental in that, but it was just really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.’ ”

Apparently Sony allowed Holland to postpone Spider-Man production due to how reliable Christopher Nolan is to actually wrapping up on time. Holland said this ended up beneficial because it allowed them to hire Destin Daniel Cretton (director of Shang-Chi) and give him a proper six months for further script development.

Holland also says The Odyssey was “the best experience I’ve had on the film set,” and that “I feel like I have a new perspective on where I want to exist in Hollywood.”

[gwendolynnderolo]

universal rules of campaign 4:

everything is birds

everyone is 5’11

only teor is teor

you can’t prove there’s allegory in this

[feralratbitesu]

[bark-barkley]

I WANT TO LOOK AT THINGS MADE BY HUMAN BEINGS

[softwetmoss]

And also occasionally by pufferfish

[s1xseasonsandamov1e]

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[willgrahamscock]

⚠︎ ! your body has kept the score.

[willgrahamscock]

⚠︎ ! hospital ⚠︎ !

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

The most terrifying part of having memory issues is when you can feel something from 5 seconds ago be thrown out the window and there's an empty hole where it once was. You remember that you forgot something.

[syn4k]

[yteicosanievilew]

“this makes me personally uncomfortable”, “this seems in poor taste”, “this is somehow harmful but presumably because you’re misinformed” and “this is actively malicious” are all different things. remember that

[hard-times-paramore]

Rock OC slider