illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

andmaybegayer:

I’ve taken to grinding my salt extremely fine with a mortar and pestle before I put it on popcorn or chips and this is very good because it means you don’t end up with loose salt at the bottom of the bowl, but, it also turns your salt into an aerosolised chemical weapon if you move it at all.

I like to grind up a bunch at once and keep it in a shaker bottle.

As for how to pour the popcorn salt into a shaker bottle without aerosolised-chemical-weaponing oneself: masks are a solution to many of life’s problems.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #food #recs #illness mention

DC Police: Persons of interest sought in US Capitol riot

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://www.abc15.com/news/national/dc-police-persons-of-interest-named-in-us-capitol-riot}}

{{OP by the-real-numbers}}

rustingbridges:

judiciousimprecation:

rustingbridges:

voxette-vk:

Noice

shout out to the six people pictured who actually covered their face. just seems smart, y’kno

Politicizing masks as a 5D chess move to make sure all the MAGA rioters get caught on camera but antifa doesn’t

getting arrested to own the libs

Tags:

#politics cw #home of the brave #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #illness mention #covid19

mirthur asked: Surely a tax evasion game would just be “filing taxes but lying, the game” considering the list of things you’ve already disqualified from being direct tax evasion

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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prokopetz:

(With reference to this post here.)

Nah, there are plenty of things you can do gamewise that constitute direct tax evasion (i.e., as opposed to shenanigans that are merely tax evasion adjacent).

For example, suppose that the player characters are inhabitants of a medieval village whose yearly tax assessment has come due, and the royal tax assessor is touring the village in order to estimate its total wealth and thereby calculate how much is owed in tax.

The player characters’ mission is basically to run around behind the tax assessor’s back playing reverse Weekend at Bernie’s and ensure that the village appears to be much less prosperous than it really is. Keep those cattle out of sight (easier said than done), disguise that lavishly appointed tavern as a church (churches are tax exempt!), maybe cover up any discrepancy between the village’s actual and reported population by faking a plague or two (where are they going to get that many skulls on short notice?), and so forth.

Basically, the easiest way to make tax evasion gameable is by contriving a scenario where taxable assets are assessed rather than reported, then identifying entertaining ways for the player characters to fuck around with the assessment process.

Tags:

#some of the context #story ideas I will never write #games #(although it seems worth noting that I *did* once see a game that was ”filing your taxes but you’re a dragon”) #(maybe you can have the dragon do some tax evasion?) #death mention #illness mention

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

king-of-fuffies:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

Concept: the old robot-with-Pinocchio-syndrome bit, except they don’t give a shit about art or love or anything like that; the thing they’re yearning for is something completely off the wall which would never occur to any reasonable human to think of as essential to the human condition, but which the robot is prepared to argue – rigorously, methodically, and at enormous length – is in fact the very heart of what it means to be human.

Some favourites from the notes:

  • Itching
  • Back pain
  • Being bad at video games
  • Freudian slips
  • Cracking open a cold one with the boys
  • Paying taxes
  • Evading taxes
  • The capacity to have cold toes so you have a legitimate reason to wear cool socks
  • Shaving
  • Schadenfreude
  • Seasonal allergies
  • Existential dread

it comes back to tax evasion in the end. it really do be like that

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #robots #story ideas I will never write #high context jokes #illness mention

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

twinicegiantorbiters:

i don’t know why but i’m really amused by the winner of some ‘new kanji’ contest:

7868cb5fcfedda13b9d3c876bd1ed9316986df78

compare with the real kanji

ae82e4910a58e2dd2ab91aad1797ee6e42d53c03

座 (seat/gathering), but the two 人 (person) radicals have been moved from next to each other within the 土 (earth) radical to diagonally from each other, making this “social distance(d seating/gathering)”

Tags:

#covid19 #language #illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

femmenietzsche:

The Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start the Fire is 4:49 long and covers 41 years worth of history. Recorded history began ca. 3000 BC with the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia. Therefore a version of We Didn’t Start the Fire which covered all of history at the same pace would be around 590 minutes long.

Or you could reach the first chorus with bad news from the first day of 2020, which also covers 41 years worth of history.

 

Are you telling me…that the fabled dedicated-to-2020 version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” *existed*…but was *lost*?

I don’t think “spared” is really the right word here, but I don’t want to beat you up over it. In any case, perhaps people will be in a better position to write it after 2020 is over. Hindsight is, after all, 2020.

Tags:

#is what my 2023 self will tell people when they ask her why she owns a P100 respirator #reply via reblog #illness mention #music #history #amnesia cw #please get a cloud sync Nate

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

the-bright-path:

6bcbcbcacdc3a1106c9350d53d794984bdcad9ba

I wrote this as a tag ramble because it felt like a tag-register kind of post, but I’m running out of space in the tag box and also I don’t want to discourage people from responding to me (apparently a lot of people interpret tag rambles as followers-only posts? and it’s certainly more effort to quote them, in any case), so here it is:

#the great thing about living with your parents is that it gives you potentially as much as two or three decades to figure out
#where the fuck you’re going to find platonic nesting partners after they’re dead
#(the other great thing is that you don’t have to spend years trying desperately to make your savings outpace the rise in house prices)
#(because you can just take over your dad’s HELOC)
#(but that’s *somewhat* tangential to this post)
#I guess I could *try* living alone for a while but I don’t think I’d like it
#I could probably *tolerate* it and there’d be *some* upsides
#but yeah it *is* very inefficient
#and it seems like it would be rather lonely and frankly kind of dangerous
#(I have this suspicion that a lot of the lifespan benefits of marriage are simply from having a housemate)
#(someone to take care of you (and also of basic household maintenance) when you’re sick)
#(someone to hear you choking)
#(someone to find you passed out on the floor)
#(someone to hug you in lockdowns so you don’t break down from touch deprivation)
#one-breadwinner households were a historical aberration and their time has ended
#it’s time to spruce up the homestead system to make it less dependent on having [living family] [that you like being around]
#(okay I went and looked up homesteading and maybe that’s not *quite* the right word)
#(I think it’s just that most of the family-sized communes I know of
#–that *weren’t* forged in the extreme pressures of San Francisco†–
#are homesteads)
#((I mean *ideally* it’d be good to have enough skillsets and executive function and physical function and land between us that
#we *could* retreat into self-sufficiency in a crisis))
#((but “division of labour is good” extends beyond the household level))
#†I really don’t want to live in San Francisco‚ please don’t make me move to San Francisco just to find a commune

Tags:

#tag rambles #reply via reblog #death tw #adventures in human capitalism #illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slatestarscratchpad:

Today’s lesson on health care economics:

On GoodRx, a month’s worth of sildenafil 20 mg costs $17.25

On the same site, a month’s worth of sildenafil 25 mg costs $507.24

Does anyone buy the 25 mg version? You bet – I saw a patient who was on it yesterday (don’t worry; he’s since been switched over).

What’s going on here? Sildenafil has two FDA approvals – one, under the name “Revatio”, for hypertension. The other, under the name “Viagra”, for – well, you know.

The FDA only approved Revatio at doses of 5 and 20 mg, and only approved Viagra at doses of 25 and 100 mg. So sildenafil 20 mg has “Revatio” on the box and sildenafil 25 mg has “Viagra” on the box. Revatio is generic and dirt-cheap; Viagra is still on-patent and expensive.

But can’t people who want Viagra just buy Revatio?

Yes, totally. But the average patient doesn’t know this is going on. And the average doctor doesn’t really have any incentive to care because they’re not the one buying it (I’ve had patients who have asked their doctor to prescribe the cheaper version, and the doctor has refused because they want to do it the “proper” way). And I think it’s illegal for the insurance companies to insist, because technically the FDA only approved sildenafil 25 mg for erectile dysfunction but didn’t approve sildenafil 20 mg.

(also, some people are like “But I need a higher 50 mg dose of Viagra, and Revatio only goes up to 20 mg!” As the ancient rationalist proverb goes, have you tried thinking about the problem for five minutes?)

At the advice of my doctor, I’m on pseudo-prescription naproxen. Instead of one 500mg prescription pill, I buy the 220mg OTC stuff and take double the dose on the label: it’s close enough, and it’s somewhat cheaper per mg if you don’t have prescription coverage. She said if I ever do get prescription coverage I should let her know and she’ll write me an official prescription then.

I love my doctor.

—

(Please do not take prescription-strength naproxen without medical supervision: you can fuck up your liver.)

—

Side benefit:

People in the spring: “it’s horrible that they’re making *chronically ill* people go to a *pharmacy* *every month* and risk plague! patients aren’t allowed to keep buffers of medications they often need to *survive*!”

Me: *looks with a mixture of relief and awkwardness at my 200-pack of Aleve*

(Note: I only need it around the onset of menstruation, so 200 OTC-sized pills is about a ten-month supply.)

(Store-brand naproxen doesn’t come in 200-pack, and the bulk-discount benefit outweighed the name-brand penalty.)

Tags:

#other things my doctor has done: #prescribed prune juice for constipation #prescribed string for skin tags #used Big Pharma ”samples” to keep her poorer patients supplied with meds they would struggle to afford on their own #readily admitted that people in my situation don’t actually need gynecological checkups #and I should only see a gynecologist if something goes wrong or I decide to start having sex #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #medical cw #illness mention #covid19 #menstruation #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what