Vampire Survivors is so much better than it has any right to be. It’s a great way to kill time if I have my Steam Deck around.

I think container tabs, which is currently an official Mozilla extension, should be native.

I’ve never had rhubarb. I’ve heard it’s sweet (people make pies out of it), but it looks like celery, which is one of my most hated foods. What does it actually taste like? Is it palatable raw?

Good advice. I’ll add that any time you have to parse command line arguments with any real complexity you should probably be using Python or something. I’ve seen bash scripts where 200+ lines are dedicated to just reading parameters. It’s too much effort and too error prone.

“Why don’t we just get together and get it done?”

Seems like an invitation to work together to me.

It’s always a consideration, but the question is where would we move to (and how much am I willing to uproot my family)? Canada is a nice place with a better healthcare system, so maybe there? But that’s expensive all on its own, and I have to consider that I have two autistic kiddos who are currently receiving their education at the best school in the state for special ed kiddos. Is it worth it? Maybe not. For now, I think we should stay where we are. I love it here, except for the high cost of my own care. Think I’d rather stick it out and fight for a better system here. Maybe we can improve things for everyone instead of jumping ship.

Because insurance pays for a portion of your treatment, rarely 100% of it, and the moment you start racking up bigger bills, insurance starts looking for ways to not pay your claims. They’ll put a hold on payment until you call them and broker a deal or they go back and forth with your doctor demanding that you receive some treatment other than what that doctor recommends.

I have Crohn’s Disease, an autoimmune disorder that is often treated with immunosuppressants. First, they did not want to pay for my initial “loading dose” because it has to be done by infusion. That’s a ~$25,000 procedure (3-4 hours on an IV). I talked them into it by telling them that only the first dose would be by infusion and the rest by self injection.

But when my company decided to pay for a less expensive insurance plan that started at the beginning of the year, they suddenly didn’t want to pay for the injections either. Now I owe 30% of the cost of my injections. That’s almost $4,000 a dose that I take every 8 weeks, about $25,000/year.

So now I use a coupon program through a separate company, and they bill the remainder of the balance to the company who produces the medicine who give me a $21,000 annual credit toward paying the remainder. So now to get my medicine I must coordinate between my doctor, a specialty pharmacy, my insurance provider, a company that runs the coupon program, and the company that produces the medicine… Just to get a syringe delivered to me on a schedule. And the credit probably won’t last until the end of the year; I’ll probably end up shelling out a few thousand for my meds around Christmas time this year.

If any of the complicated web of companies that collectively get me these meds doesn’t have everything lined up in their system, I don’t get my meds. My last dose was almost three weeks late to me because of all the calling around I had to do. Because we don’t have a central health care authority, that means each company maintains their own system of record. Each phone call involves working through a phone tree to get to a human agent, working through the same set of identity verification steps with them, explaining the situation over again to a different person every time…

It’s a real pain in the ass, and they do it on purpose to get you to give up. Having insurance doesn’t mean your health care is paid for, and you pay a premium (hundreds of dollars) on every paycheck to keep the insurance that still doesn’t pay for your medical costs. Having health insurance does not mean you don’t still pay through the teeth for your health care. Having health insurance does not mean that health care is accessible to you. Having insurance that makes health care accessible today does not mean they won’t change the rules behind your back, and that you will still have access to health care tomorrow.

🫂

I think ethical nonmonogamy casts a wider net. I wouldn’t call myself a swinger. I don’t do parties or anything like that. But I’m still not monogamous and it’s still not cheating since my partner and I have an existing arrangement and regular check-ins.

Right. Some people handle this well, others are not open to it. Willingness to adhere to monogamy is a thing that varies from person to person and must be discussed in any relationship. Ethical nonmonogamy is a thing, but it’s not for everyone, and it is a lot of communication and intimate work.

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I just realized the theorem could be reworded slightly: Step on a crack, break a (not your) mother’s back. What if I’ve been inadvertently cracking spines on the other side of the planet this whole time?

If I’m walking on a sidewalk and one foot falls on a crack, I have to step in a crack with the other foot, and the crack has to land at the same place on that foot. If it doesn’t, it creates additional imbalance that must be fixed by stepping on a different crack with the first foot in the position the other crack connected on the other foot. This is very silly, but it must be done. It also disproves the hypothesis that stepping on cracks breaks mothers’ backs because my mother has never broken her back and I’ve been doing this since childhood. I’m 39 years old. That’s a lot of cracks.

Not a flavor profile I would have come up with. Sounds delicious, though.

Pepperoni, pineapple, and jalapeno.

Yes, it’s invalidation of feelings followed by the infliction of physical violence to make the abuser feel better.

Wicked Garden’s a good one to be on top. I’m partial to Sweet Remains and pretty much anything from Tiny Music. Always loved the way the DeLeo brothers made complex jazzy stuff palatable to a mainstream rock audience.

The character has turned their body to face the other table to their left, but has not turned their feet.

Yes, while standing, too. Kind of perched like a bird on one leg.

Not OP but I think they meant supporters of neoliberal economic policy and somewhat progressive social policies. “Liberal” like American liberal politics. The point being that they think they have good politics because they think trans people are people and aren’t the kind of right wing fanatic we get a lot of. They’re “left” to the extent that the American political spectrum allows for without understanding what “left” actually means, without being conscious of the overarching machinations that make then think their politics are good even as they continue to feed a system that intentionally blinds them to any honest criticism.