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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m from Australia, that looks like a huntsman.

    When I first moved here and saw one I freaked out and begged my husband to catch it. He laughed and said they are good spiders, and very fast so hard to catch anyway.

    That spider lived above the window blinds, and I realised I would have to sweep the dead bugs off the windowsill every few days.

    He definitely became an honoured guest!






  • I have nerve pain and understand the feeling of the meds not taking the pain away, and the knowledge that there is a trade off with taking them. I have refused to up my dose, but try literally everything else.

    Unfortunately I am allergic to codiene and natural opoids, and so tramadol is my long term pain management medication.

    I also take broad spectrum cbd oil and flower, triple strength fish oil for inflammation, magnesium, etc. I have also been using lignocaine patches over the nerve roots after reading a study that showed promising results, and despite it not making any sense to me that they should work topically, it does seem to help.

    Besides medications and supplements, I use a TENS unit, IR heating pad, ice packs, massage gun, and positioning to reduce pain on bad days.

    I have tried every locally available treatment, experimental medication, therapy, consulted with pain doctors and surgeons. Unfortunately nothing has helped so far.

    On good days, I can spend 4 - 5 hours up at most, and will pay for it the next day. Most of my time is spent in a zero gravity bed.

    I don’t like taking the pain meds, but acknowledge that taking them means I can do more. Push further. It’s not a tradeoff I like either, so most of the time I don’t.






  • I have traveled to very conservative countries and have never found the sort of puritanical hand wringing that comes from a certain subset of Americans.

    I say this as an American expat who has lived everywhere from Hawaii to the bible belt, to New York.

    Can you imagine the pain and anxiety you would cause a biological woman who does not look feminine enough for your line of reasoning here?

    You see her in the restroom and act like she doesn’t belong there - maybe you say something, maybe you keep your “discomfort in your vulnerable place” to yourself, but your stupid ideas about what a woman is and how one should look in order to be accepted into a bathroom are hurtful.

    I was in an art class last month with a lovely young woman who has pcos. She is a Sikh woman, and therefore does not remove her facial hair.

    She had a beard that would put a young man to shame, and now it occurs to me that had she been unfortunate enough to be born in America, she would have had to choose between honouring the basic tenets of her religion, or conforming so she is not shunned - or worse, assaulted for using the womens room.

    https://www.learnreligions.com/some-sikh-women-have-facial-hair-2993341







  • This shit is getting old. I was in the Novavax trial here in Australia and one of the things the clinicians said that stuck with me is that they were “surprised that there wasn’t much interest”.

    See, Novavax is a traditional vaccine, not an MRNA vaccine. It is (and has been) approved everywhere.

    They expected that all the antivaxxers who were afraid of “changes to their DNA” would come in for this traditional vaccine.

    Except they didn’t. Because it isn’t about MRNA, it’s about being part of a group, part of people who “understand you” and echo and validate the fears you have about living in this world.

    This is killing people.




  • I bought Red Dead Redemption for myself and three friends, super excited about the game, the lore. I had never spent that much money on a game.

    We all played through the single player tutorial, and finally into the open world. We meet up and begin exploring and trying to complete quests when suddenly one of us just … drops dead.

    Then another is hit by a meteor and caught on fire?

    I am thrown up into the sky.

    An alien ship?! Appears and messes with us for a while. I try begging in pub chat for the hacker to please leave us so we can play, which seems to goad them further. This continued for an hour.

    A quick look around the internet told us that this was par for the course for RDR and GTA and Rockstar couldn’t/wouldn’t do anything about it.

    We ended up refunding all the games through steam. Sad times.