• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle
  • There are a lot of edgy athiests using all their time attacking trans people these days, because an unfortunate number of them are mainly athiests as a way to hate Muslims. And the ones taking the time to attack trans people have almost all joined the alt right, which has been responsible for a lot of attacks on innocent people.

    They may not be killing in the name of atheism, but they have been in the same of “reason” and “defence of women”.




  • I was lucky enough to hear him play this live in Hunter Mountain, NY a few years back. I saw him, Tom Petty (RIP) and Steve Miller Band, all in one weekend, and (imo), Frampton put on the best show. It was a daytime show, it was raining, and he kept playing.

    When he got to Black Hole Sun, he opened with a very heartfelt message about looking after each other and ourselves and getting help when we need it. And then, as he started to play and led everyone in singing the lyrics, the clouds split for one shining moment, and we had rain and sunlight pouring down on the whole area surrounding the stage.

    One of the most memorable concert moments I have ever experienced. Thank you for sharing this and reminding me of that amazing moment.


  • As someone who has suffered from night terrors and other disturbingly vivid dreams, I would recommend starting to do “wake checks”.

    Set an alarm on your phone to go off every few hours at random times during the day. When the alarm goes off, do something that produces a reliable result, like turning a light on/off, turning on a faucet, checking the time on a clock, or pinching yourself. Make your checks as varied as possible, and do them in a different order from day to day, because you don’t want the results to become part of a pattern.

    Once you are in the habit of doing that, start doing those checks any time something ‘out of the norm’ happens. What ‘out of the norm’ means is up to you, but essentially any time you think that something is weird or out of place, do a check. What you are doing is training yourself to check whether you are in reality or not.

    Once you start doing that, you will probably continue that habit when you end up in a dream. However, these checks will not produce reliable results when you do them in a dream. Turning on the faucet won’t make it give water, the time will change drastically, lights won’t turn on when you flip the switch, etc. These are now your cues to see if you are awake or not. If one of these things ever DOES start to give reliable results in a dream, stop using it immediately and substitute a different one.

    Once you have a way of determining if you are awake or not, you have a way to wake up. Most people wake up after realizing they are in a dream, and even if you don’t, realizing you are dreaming should result in a massive shift in what is happening in the dream.

    One warning though: if you have night terrors where you end up paralyzed, you will want to have a contingency plan. My night terrors usually started in a situation where I was unable to move, and that is the main reason I struggled with them for over a decade. The only thing that helped there was meditation where I would focus on “feeling” my fingers and toes and how they moved, and then getting myself in the habit of using that meditation as an anxiety response. Doing that in a dream will usually end up waking me up because it forces my brain to focus and eventually move my body irl.






  • Thankfully it won’t, but I had to deal with more of their shenanigans.

    Did you know that they refuse to transfer a prescription if they haven’t filled it at least once? I had to call the urgent care clinic back and have them transfer it instead.

    Bless the retail pharmacy worker who walked me through how to get everything in order and got me discount coupons. It took them 30 minutes to fill and cost me a total of $15. So I will be okay, but in spite of Express Scripts, who gave me an ETA of the 17th, more than a week after the script was ordered.


  • I am sitting here, in incredible pain from a combined sinus and ear infection, waiting for the antibiotics I need to be shipped to me in 3-5 business days because my insurance will only provide prescription coverage through Express Scripts and not a retail pharmacy.

    This same insurance company has also denied to cover a surgery they have prior auth for, denied coverage for routine lab work that is expressly covered, waited months to review disputed charges and gotten them sent to collections, and forced me into a lower tier of coverage twice due to premium increases.

    The kicker? I work in the health insurance industry. But I’m not an exec, just a support worker.

    They can try to stop the online support all they want, but they should know that the active censorship will only cause people to go elsewhere. This issue is uniting everyone who watches the evening news, and they can’t risk not covering the story because they are hoping to make an example of him.


  • I agree with the other poster, but wanted to share what I did in a similar situation.

    I woke up one day with a rash on my hip. Over the next three days it spread to my whole body, I started getting swelling in my hands, feet, and face, and I was in an incredible amount of pain. This was in the middle of shutdown for Covid, so I couldn’t just go to my doctor. Eventually I went to an urgent care after my husband insisted and drove me to four different locations to find one that had room. They diagnosed me with an allergic reaction and gave me IV Benadryl and light pain meds.

    After confirming I hadn’t eated anything new recently, the nurses there suggested I check my meds to see if I had any allergies there. I hadn’t technically been on any ‘new’ meds, so I looked them all up online to review the interactions and warnings myself. Turns out one of the meds I was on had a rare, but not unheard of, effect of a patient having a delayed allergic reaction. I made sure none of my other meds had the same thing and called my doctor to reference that specific section of the drug overview. They checked on their end and agreed and told me to stop the med immediately since it was safer to do than risking further reaction.

    I would suggest doing a bit of research on those and, if you go with an elimination method, check which ones can cause dangerous complications if stopped immediately.


  • Anything that was a major thing in your life, good or bad, can be missed in some way once it is gone. The trick is to remember that quite a bit of that feeling is missing the predictably of daily life, not necessarily missing the thing itself.

    I was also kicked out, though it was during my college years, and there are still times I find myself missing my parents, even almost 10 years later. The feeling isn’t as strong, and it is mostly just me lamenting the fact that I will not have a lot of experiences most people consider universal, such as having family to visit for holidays, or having someone to talk to no matter what you have going on in your life.

    It is a bit like grief. The parents you thought you had are gone, even if they are physically living, and you had no choice in the matter. The feeling will come and go, it will change over time. But it will get easier.



  • Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

    I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

    Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.