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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Web pages didn’t exist. I remember when Netscape began and it was such a surprising idea. We would use telnet talkers, which basically meant opening a telnet session and entering an IP address which you had written on paper, and there were all of these people there, mostly from a university, that you would talk to. I still have several as friends 30+ years later. It was super benign by and large, although there were sex telnet talkers that were sometimes full of pedophiles if you didn’t realize it. Nobody has the Internet at home unless you were in higher education, but there was what was called Freenet, which like it sounds was free internet, which you could only connect to for small amounts of time each week, and it was a question of whose modem got in first. It was super binary and full of ASCII art that was a marvel.

    Later when web based social media became a thing, we migrated to Livejournal, and as far as I’m concerned everything that was good about social media ever was there for a brief shining moment, and I still have friends from there and we know EVERYTHING about each other. Nothing has ever replaced those deep friendships. Before it got enshittified it was an absolutely beautiful place. I’m convinced that the earliest Russian forays into weaponized disinformation happened there because it definitely helped give birth to the crunchy parent movement, with mild vaccine disinformation (pre Wakefield), unassisted birth (the wildly dangerous birth stories I’ve read!), and silly things like claiming shampoo was bad and how you should clean your hair with cider vinegar, or things like extreme breastfeeding. I think it was Russia’s first steps into seeing what the west would buy into being manipulated with, and it was extremely successful. The Russian government bought Livejournal as a propaganda tool, thinly veiled by a company called SUP, and used it to disguise what they really do. Reply All did an episode about Russia disinformation on Livejournal.


  • I am fanatically polite, helpful, and very friendly in person and go out of my way to make people feel welcome and helped. My church friends and my patients absolutely love me, and I genuinely would give a kidney to most of them (well not every patient because some of them aren’t nice no matter what you do but I try to be very patient and hold space for what troubles them). I go out of my way to be generous in other ways despite the fact I have extremely little money, I’ll babysit your kids so you can go on a date, for example, and would never think of being paid. The kids at church adore me and I’m always sitting with a pig pile of them on top of me. People say I’m like a light in their lives. I genuinely want to do everything I can to make their day good, and I’m very funny and genuinely interested in other people.

    But life at home is simply awful. My spouse is a violent manipulative narcissistic sociopath who I am only living with because he’s wrecked my finances and my ability to cope alone, and I cannot afford to leave, and I think he’d hurt me if I tried. My ability to cope comes out of amber bottles, if I didn’t have meds I’d be hospitalized and ripping the hair out of my head. My spouse only speaks to me about bare necessities. I have no control over money at all, I work two jobs, usually 12 hours a day save for Sundays but that’s still 8 hours, have almost no time to myself and he judges me for what I do to relax (which is reading, television, and church). Underneath it all I feel like a black hole because of what he has done to me, I’m not even scratching the surface here. I feel like five different people sometimes even though I have a very good sense of self, but I feel like I have to keep these parts of my life separated so I don’t emotionally bleed on anyone. I really don’t know what will happen to me.







  • They do look benign and just curious with the child, I won’t be unfair, and he’s really well versed in their care. I don’t want to make him sound bad or anything, he’s really a nice guy and I’ve asked him some questions he has good answers for. But who wants to run that risk? Those kids in Nova Scotia who died because a pet python escaped its enclosure and climbed into the air vent, fell through the ceiling because it was 100 pounds,and reacted to the screaming kids it fell on top of? That’s terrifying.



  • There’s a guy on Instagram who has two absolutely massive pythons, like 16 feet long and thick as tires. They drape themselves across his young daughter very casually, and she spends time playing Barbies with the big one. The owner is very educated about snakes and obviously takes very good care of them, and isn’t some trash person who just wants violent animals, but much like pit bulls all it takes is one wrong turn and that child could die in a terrible way. I know some pet snakes are very docile, but something that could take it into its head to strangle me for dinner is not a pet to me.

    People’s pit bull apologia is bad enough, we had a person in my ER one night who had been walking their friend’s pit bull who they walked often, who yanked the leash when he saw another dog, and when they tried to grip it the dog turned around and began mauling them, and ripped their arm right off. Someone called 911 and the cops showed up and had to shoot the dog and kill it to get it off them, and they took both them and the arm to our hospital but couldn’t save it. My niece is also missing part of her lip because of a pit bull. Those are exotic animals that are extremely dangerous to me, fuck that nanny dog bullshit.







  • I work in health care, one of our delayed young patients needs urgent surgery for their condition. I called them because the surgeon’s secretary tried to contact them several times re getting them in next week without success, and the parent told me they didn’t want the surgery because they were certain that the surgeon would do “extra” procedures, which in their mind meant the patient would be given the COVID and flu vaccines while under anesthesia against their will. The doctor called them and explained that the patient needs it very badly and that nothing else would happen, so they reluctantly agreed, but they still called me yesterday fussing about this idea. I explained that there were several people in the OR for the procedure, not just the surgeon but nurses and residents and the anesthesiologist, and that none of them particularly wanted to lose their professional license doing something they didn’t consent to even if for some reason the surgeon thought that stealth vaccinating the child was a good idea.

    Um, surgeons don’t consider it their job to secretly vaccinate people. In my decades of health care work I’ve only seen one technically unconsented patient because otherwise they would lose their limb and die of sepsis, and were so unable to respond to discussion about it and they had no next of kin or SDM, that the decision had to be made as life or death, because a pit bull mauled them so badly and ripped off a limb. (Sadly they lost the limb anyway). Surgeons really don’t want to do that, and they sure as hell don’t want to also stealth vaccinate crazy people.