Alternatively, maybe we should keep him to ourselves as a shield against whatever bullshit the federal government is getting up to.

Walz was all set to get feisty with the GOP when Harris, et al put a leash on him.

As a Minnesotan, I’m partial to Walz. I’m furious about how they set him up to fail in 2024 by putting him on the ticket then promptly shoving him in a corner.

The pre-exposure prophylaxis shot is also pretty amazing. The initial clinical trials in Sub-Saharan Africa demonstrated a 0% HIV infection rate for people receiving the shot every 6 months as directed.

This one’s more likely to result in homicidal rage than suicidal despair. Probably still a bad time.

(For something with a completely opposite effect, I highly recommend K-Pop Demon Hunters. It’s so fun and the animation is amazing.)

If you need to get your heart rate and blood pressure up without doing actual exercise, check out the Behind the Bastards episodes on RFK Jr.

It was just announced in Nature a week ago. It’s extremely recent news. (Of note, the article talks about how it is successful in instigating a strong immune response, but that doesn’t always translate to immunity.)

Methylene blue is an actual antidote for methemoglobinemia which is a blood disorder in which red blood cells become really bad at releasing oxygen. It’s usually caused by a reaction to certain drugs like lidocaine or compounds containing nitrites. It looks like methemoglobinemia can be caused by “poppers” (which RFK Jr thinks are the cause of HIV).

Here’s an article from the Cleveland Clinic that goes into more detail.

The “poppers” thing is probably why RFK Jr takes methylene blue because he likely thinks its a way to prevent HIV. (For which there is now a pre-exposure prophylaxis shot with a nearly 100% success rate and progress on a vaccine…but it’s an mRNA vaccine so RFK is trying to kill it.)

I think it’s important for people to recognize the toxic effects of general misogyny and phenomena like Gamer Gate have on gaming communities. To this day, I see plenty of cis-male and trans-femme gamers wonder about why there are so few cis-women in gaming spaces without recognition of what gaming communities are like towards young women and girls who express interest. Nothing quashes your desire to join a community quite like incessant harassment, abuse, rape/death threats, and doxxing.

(To be clear, I am not insinuating that trans-femme folks have an easy time of things, but I can say they outnumber cis-women in gaming communities like Arma by a factor to 2 to 1 or greater. There are 3 trans-women in my Arma group and I’m the only cis-woman there.)

I’m pretty sure that’s a state-by-state code. I know in California PC5150 is the code for removing someone’s rights for being a danger to themselves or others for the purpose of a compulsory mental health examination.

The environmental impact of using generative AI is obscene. I don’t have the source for the claim, but I’ve seen an estimate that an AI generated image creates as much damage as a gallon of gasoline being burned for substantially less actual use.

Welcome to being a woman on the internet.

One thing I don’t understand is why the built in tools for self managing are insufficient, such as mute and block. If willing, I would be open to hearing your experience with that.

These tools have improved immensely over the years. It was particularly bad in those days because there was no option for private or party voice chat and a lot of games came with 3-day trial cards for Xbox Live which allowed people to make tons of sock puppet accounts to evade blocking.

I don’t really play FPS’s any more and I haven’t turned on an Xbox in about 7 years. I just play on PC now, almost exclusively with a gaming community on discord comprised of online and IRL friends. My experience is very curated now and the games I play either have minimal social interaction or are well known for their welcoming communities (eg Warframe). It felt a little bit like admitting defeat, but shutting off the public mic and just sticking to private VCs and servers has been a good way of dealing with it. I certainly don’t get rape and death threats with a side of doxxing these days.

I played a lot of Halo on Xbox live as a teenage girl in the late 2000’s. I sincerely wish they were more stringent about cracking down on assholes. A lot of the rules were in place to attempt to discourage some of the atrocious behavior I was subjected to.

If you cannot bring yourself to listen to small talk and engage with people regularly, I don’t think healthcare is the right field for you. I’m fairly introverted myself, but I turn that around to listening more than speaking and responding thoughtfully to the things I hear. I believe that I can speak with some authority on this as I have worked in healthcare (mostly ERs) for years, and I am going to be graduating medical school soon.

I will say this bluntly: as a physician, I would be hesitant to trust a nurse that cannot engage with others. Not only is healthcare a team sport, patient care is 90% social interaction. If I can’t trust you to engage with my patients in a way that is reassuring and comforting to them, I don’t want you involved any more than strictly necessary. The fact that you can’t get along with your coworkers is the canary in the coal mine for how you are likely interacting with patients.

I have the pixel watch 2, and waterproofing is very important to me when it comes to a smartwatch. I work in healthcare and have to wash my hands upwards of 30 times a day. If I had to take off my watch every time or gamble on a rubber flap adequately covering the charging port, it simply would not be worth the hassle.

The comment was referring to preferred pronouns as just “pronouns” because the cultural zeitgeist has conflated the two. There are tons of right wing assholes that say that they “refuse to use pronouns at all” without processing the difference between “preferred pronouns” and the grammatical construct of pronouns as a whole.

I can’t condone this because the children don’t really get much choice in what food their parents provide them with. There is no reasonable world in which we can expect children to make good choices for themselves when their parents are the ones being absolute idiots.

I’ve been noticing more of this recently and it doesn’t encourage me to spend too much time here. There are so many posts that I don’t even open the comment section because I know it’s going to be a disaster and make me feel like I’m intruding on the boys’ online clubhouse.

The vast majority of rapists are never even convicted, let alone end up on the registry.