Due to the old myth that vampires don't show up in photographs, you could probably write a pretty fun story about a nature photographer who's just trying to shoot some bats

It's June 1. It's time.

Go be gay.

They need to invent an amount of sleep that would fix me.

when i say i like hiking, i don’t mean “eight mile backpacking trip with special gear and an emergency beacon” sort of hiking, i mean a three mile loop to go look at pretty things and then a huge brunch after.

Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.

[image description: a crow with a speech bubble to the above words. End description.]

love the word lackluster. well it sucks because it’s not shiny

Accurate quiz result is accurate. I’m the guy who died from the plague.

Not queer as in "queer is not a slur" but queer as in "I do not give a fuck if its a slur, you don't get to censor my identity regardless". Queer as in "I HOPE my identity upsets you". Queer as in "my identity is not only a slur but a threat"

It says so much about the thematics and worldbuilding of the Radch that the big in-universe media trope everyone knows isn't "You have to be careful because AIs can go mad with power" but rather "You have to be careful because AIs can go mad with grief."

“You may not be hurting me intentionally, but even then I have a right to walk out of this relationship” has revolutionized my concept on human connection for real. Like someone doesn’t have to be an awful person for me to walk out of something that’s making me uncomfortable?? I can still decide enough is enough in spite of a person’s best intentions??? Mind blown

“i don’t block people just because of a difference of opinion” cool i do

My go-to questions are:

"What is the best thing about this role (if it's a common role like there are a lot of people with that job title) (substitute "department" or "company" as necessary)."

And the corrolary:

"What's one of the big challenges or frustrations about this role?"

I've found that interviewers really like it - and it gives you a good sense. If they gush about how great the team is, or work/life balance, it's typically genuine. And similarly... very few people will want to straight-up give a negative but when caught off-guard will reveal something. I had one where it was "some of the work can get repetitive, but we try to spread those projects across the team so no-one gets stuck doing the same thing over and over." Like... that's great! I can handle repetitive so long as folks acknowledge that it sucks sometimes!

Actually, that vampires can only go out at night is a myth. The real rule is that they can only come out at night. They can walk around in sunlight but they have to pretend to be straight.

talking with my boyfriend about the local cult and i’m curious

something something reblog for sample size

I really wish there was more control by the patient to opt out but in the absence of that, yeah, patient has the right to the info.

I used to do Social Security Disability claims. The number of times I would see something where a test came back Clearly Abnormal In The Bad Way and the provider just.. never followed up? Is way too many.

The time I accidentally told someone she might have cancer because it never occurred to me that a medical provider might not tell someone when they're getting a certain diagnostic test, used for staging cancers, for a mass, without saying that cancer was one of the possible outcomes? Like in retrospect she and I were both glad that she found out from me, who could at least offer empathy and an "if it is cancer, here's what it looks like from the getting-disability-payments perspective" even if I could offer Zero medical information but Holy Shit. I was not prepared for that conversation. She was not prepared for that conversation. We muddled through. And then she was MUCH better prepared when she did get the diagnosis.

But I've also had a ton of imaging that doesn't note things and I gotta say as a patient that is also really frustrating.

"Unchanged from 2019 imaging" what there was no note about this being an issue on the 2019 imaging you were the same radiologist what do you mean I've had a benign brain tumor for years that should be clinically correlated and I'm here for something else so you didn't note it but um it does actually explain some other issues and my neuro-ophthalmologist would have liked to know about that so she knows what is pushing on that nerve. Why. What the fuck.

Yesterday had an infuriating situation where someone who should have known better messaged a patient about their new surprise serious diagnosis when I specifically told them to call. Today found a new breast cancer diagnosis dumped in my inbox as if it were nothing with note “patient unaware.” NOT FOR LONG THEY AREN’T, the results automatically release, what the fuck is wrong with you? If you’re the provider who ordered the test and it’s positive, call the patient and set up the urgent referral, don’t wait THROUGH THE WEEKEND. Jesus Christ.

golem that protects a daycare. it is made of playdough.

“And then [Vimes] realized why he was thinking like this. It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No-one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”

— Terry Pratchett, Jingo (via captainofalltheships)