MetaFilter

And: McIntosh is MeFi's Own.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:59 AM on February 29, 2024

[Side note.

Usually, when I post to the front page, my posts get significantly more favorites than they do comments. In the past ~14 months, my posts that have gotten more comments than faves have been about:

* bacon
* changing a flat tire
* biking and stop signs
* web browser market share over time
* endless dishonest "please rate us" customer surveys
* a word puzzle… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:51 PM on February 29, 2024

apartment dweller wrote:

I recommend the SuTab pill prep, if your doctor approves. My prescription plan D (Medicare) doesn't cover it, but you can go to the manufacturer's web page and get a coupon that brings the cost down to $50 (you have to affirm that this is being obtained outside your plan D).

I believe this is https://www.sutab.com/Savings.

If you don't have Medicare Part D, the form asks for… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:15 AM on March 2, 2024

The instructor responded “no, they’re out of the way when on their back like this” and demonstrated as best they could

Excellent!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:43 AM on March 1, 2024

Very cool!

On Instagram, his mission statement - I am on mobile right now but perhaps someone here could transcribe it from the image.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:02 AM on March 1, 2024

I've been listening to Keep It Together and Look Alive and Easy Wonderful and Lost And Gone Forever quite a bit recently so this is such welcome news! Thanks for the links!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:54 AM on February 29, 2024

antiwiggle, China Mountain Zhang is one of my favorite books and I hope you read and enjoy it! Let me know if you would like spoiler-y content notes/warnings.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:50 PM on February 27, 2024

From a total of 261 patients, 30.4% treated with this strategy survived, compared to 13.3% when standard resuscitation protocols were followed.

AMAZING. Great news! Thanks for sharing it! Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests soar with the presence of a defibrillator -- even an automated unit used by an untrained bystander (previously) -- and having this new option for use by trained emergency medicine practitioners who could bring 2 defibrillators with them sounds super helpful!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:31 AM on February 27, 2024

Previously
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:36 AM on February 24, 2024

Kitteh, I'm fascinated. Thank you for sharing those complaints. I hadn't heard those!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:28 AM on February 25, 2024

He seems like a great guy. Thanks for posting about him. I hadn't heard of him and am glad to do so.

I read in the article that he was homeschooled as a child; I'm so glad public libraries were so helpful to him in his educational path!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:40 PM on February 24, 2024

So glad to share!

I'm thinking of going for Wilderness First Responder training in the next few years. I welcome thoughts from any of you who've done it.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:24 AM on February 15, 2024

Metasyntactic, thank you for the report! I also think the hybrid option might be better for me -- textbook-type classroom material online, and then in-person simulations and scenarios to hone my skills. It's a good question, what I'd want to get out of it. I want to be more capable of helping myself and others, in wilderness settings but also elsewhere, when dire situations emerge -- medical stuff but also other kinds of unpleasant surprises. So it feels useful to get some practice and a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:56 AM on February 16, 2024

Memories.

Playing an X-Men arcade game during a long Saturday speech & debate tournament with other high schoolers.

Travelling the week of the Dark Phoenix saga and arranging to watch the show in some distant relative's living room.

The endless well of excitement that theme tune and intro sequence could summon in me.

All the other stuff I got jazzed about in weekday afternoon/Saturday morning… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:37 AM on February 15, 2024

I'm partway through a wilderness medicine textbook from NOLS (formerly National Outdoor Leadership School).

Something from the section on burns keeps ringing in my head because it's interesting in its literal truth but also figuratively resonant.

Burns that injure only the epidermis, or that go deeper into the dermis, are generally painful. But deeper ("full-thickness") burns penetrate deeper, injuring the subcutaneous tissue as well.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:40 AM on February 12, 2024

I really shouldn't read anymore of this thread, because I see books that I want.

Reminds me of some expensive old threads that gave me several useful pointers (mostly nonfiction): the 2007 Ask "What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?" and a 2005 Crooked Timber thread:

Which academic books are fit for human consumption? Or, to put it less polemically,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:04 AM on February 12, 2024

Ryvar, I appreciate your point of view and how carefully you've worded things. I was thinking of sharing some ways friends and I have used various LLM-based tools to do good things we couldn't do before, but (a) Artw has made it clear that no points that others make could possibly cause him to consider modifying his thinking on this point, and (b) I hope to also talk about things other than AI/ML in this thread.

Such as:

I'm in the midst of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:48 PM on February 14, 2024

I've also been enjoying reading the gentle fantasy romances of Celia Lake. As the author describes them:

These cosy historical romances explore life, magic, and love. My characters have come through challenging times (emotionally, physically, or both). They’re ready to look around and figure out what’s next and make the world around them a little bit better.

My books are full of magical potions, numinous experiences, competence, and romance.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:20 AM on February 15, 2024

And - since I am rereading some of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books -- I recently reread the amazing short Discworld fanfic that justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow posted as a MeFi comment in 2012, a letter from Vetinari to Drumknott, that speaks to me as a person who sometimes stewards institutions.

"....We are flawed creatures, and we live in a world such that the choices that seem open to us generally make us contemptible, or evil if we seek something grander. The… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:22 AM on February 15, 2024

I am grateful for his work "The Book on the Edge of Forever" (also known as "Last Deadloss Visions"), which helped me better understand the context and controversy over Harlan Ellison's unpublished Last Dangerous Visions anthology.

.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:29 PM on February 3, 2024

Oh thank you so much for telling us about this. I have enjoyed Billy Joel's work so much for so much of my life, and it's such a pleasure to get more of his work, oh and there's a signature intricate piano bit at 2:30. And the melancholy and hope and voice and his musical style....

Oh and the top YouTube comments are super sweet too, people reminiscing about how long they've loved his work, about sharing it with family, someone saying Joel's music is the reason they… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:13 AM on February 2, 2024

My spouse and I the other day discussed the fact that "Tell Her About It" and "How Will I Know?" are about the same problem.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:12 PM on February 2, 2024

Oh no oh no oh no.

I learned so much music appreciation from Schickele Mix.

.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:31 PM on January 17, 2024

He brought so much joy and education into so many lives .... What a magnificent legacy.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:13 PM on January 21, 2024

My spouse has launched a new effort to make it easier for people to access Schickele Mix recordings.


....This site presents all of the extant information online about Schickele's amazing music-education radio show Schickele Mix, which stopped airing in 2007 and has been in copyright clearance hell ever since—an inevitable but undeserved fate.

I've scraped the now-defunct official Perl CGI that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:42 PM on January 31, 2024

chavenet, this is a fascinating article, as is the original Reuters report it links to. I am glad to have read it so thank you for bringing it to our attention.

The cyberespionage firm and its offshoots and descendants have, in particular, allegedly been involved in subverting journalism by spying on at least one reporter (for a US-based newspaper) and their source. So that's another reason why being able to read reportage about them is important.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:34 AM on January 31, 2024

"Laxman" is a common South Asian name, pronounced "luck-shmun". Sometimes you'll see it as "Lakshman." Transliteration of names into Latin characters sometimes leads to spellings that can include sequences like "shit", "dong", etc. as well as sequences that seem pretty innocuous most of the time such as "lax".

I recognize that the coincidence here can seem striking, but it would be nice if reading a funny… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:05 PM on January 30, 2024

Lars's PyCon US keynote speech from a few years ago

An amazing spectacle of code and story, memoir and math and music. 52 minutes long.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:54 AM on January 30, 2024

Mystery in a box recommendation: the noir murder mystery "Post Mortem LA: Lucha Muerte", which I think they now call "Death Match". My spouse and I liked all 3 of the Post Mortem LA games. I believe we liked "Death in La-La Land" least and "Lights... Camera... Murder!" reasonably well, but we did like all of them, and we liked "Lucha Muerte" best for the writing, the puzzles, and the surprises. I think it took us maybe 4-5 hours of play. Such a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:47 AM on January 22, 2024

BTW I hope people in this thread who wish they had more gaming companions consider posting proposed events to IRL. And check out whether games you like are available on Board Game Arena to remotely play with friends and/or strangers! They have Concept, which I've been enjoying recently -- like Taboo or 20 Questions, but with token and icons to visually represent the word/phrase you're trying to get across.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:53 AM on January 22, 2024

Hogshead, thank you for co-designing Once Upon A Time. It's a game I've enjoyed for a long time.

I have a very fond memory of a night nearly 20 years ago -- dinner with a few friends and a friend-of-a-friend, playing four games of Once Upon A Time, each time with a different person starting the story with "An alarm rang out in the night."

I also remember, a few years after that, playing Once Upon A Time with a family I didn't know well,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:04 AM on January 22, 2024

A few of you have mentioned dismay that it is difficult to persuade some friends and family to play games with you, or to persuade them to learn complicated rulesets for the sake of playing a game you have proposed.

In the world of librarianship there is a craft called reader advisory. It is the craft of learning more about a person and then being able to recommend and introduce a reader to a book they are likely to enjoy. What is that skill called in games, and do you… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:16 PM on January 22, 2024

Apologies. Link should be

https://unmaintained.tech/

and I've used the Contact form to ask mods to fix that.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:46 AM on January 15, 2024

Yes, it's obvious from the context in my opinion. This is a principle that individuals can use to help themselves be more relaxed about solo art and hobby projects.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:23 AM on January 17, 2024

Over the last few months I've started watching Taskmaster UK and I enjoy it SO MUCH! Grateful that it's free to view in the US via YouTube on the official Taskmaster channel.

(BTW, for those who aren't caught up on past series, the linked article lists the cast of a Champion of Champions special, which thus means it's a list of some past winners and would spoil you for the outcomes of some past series.)
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:32 AM on January 15, 2024

For Taskmaster fandom commentary I look on Fanfare after finishing a series, but also, the top ~30 YouTube comments on each video are honestly fun and educational and happy.

And that's how I found out about Kongen Befaler (the Taskmaster Norway franchise), which is also a delight so far -- my household is partway through Season 1. In the US (but I think not the UK), Kongen Befaler is available to watch for free on YouTube. I learned of Kongen Befaler through a YouTube… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:39 AM on January 15, 2024

Followup tip: if you are marginalized because of your disability, gender, race, etc., try to bring with you a patient advocate against whose whose appearance, demeanor, etc. there's less systemic discrimination, if that's possible:

It can be something as small as “has a more CNN-anchor-like-accent than I do” or “keeps their hair relaxed” or – and I’m telling you that I’m serious about this – “can fake looking comfortable in ‘business casual’”

posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:04 AM on January 12, 2024

c3rvida3 writes:

Apparently there are a bunch of hoops you can jump through to get all of your medication completely covered that my new psychiatrist was able to do and my old psychiatrist wasn't, so if you're struggling to cover your medication, make sure that's something your doctors are aware of. I think the vocabulary you want is, "Can you petition my insurance to cover this?" and "Does the manufacturer work with any patient assistance foundations?"

posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:08 AM on January 15, 2024

So many of us in this thread have been talking about the difficulty in getting doctors, nurses, and similar medical experts to listen. One part of that is: Sometimes one takes pains to ask them a specific, deliberately-worded question, and they don't really seem to attend to the specifics. They answer a question different from the one asked, maybe a more common one. They recommend xyz, not noticing that the patient said xyz won't work for them. And so on.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:18 AM on January 15, 2024

For many months I've been off-and-on working on a front page post about finance writer Daniel Davies. One interesting thing he's done a couple times is write a CYOA-style interactive fiction experience to put you in the shoes of an expert trying to save a country's economy from a crash.

https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/16/so-what-would-your-plan-for-greece-be/

https://crookedtimber.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 2:24 AM on January 13, 2024

Fire on the Mountain is such a superlative work.

And his interviews are a staple in the PM Press Outspoken Authors series and I will miss those.

.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:18 PM on January 10, 2024

[Previously in "is this word/phrase gendered or not" comment threads.]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:38 PM on January 5, 2024

Bits About Money previously on MeFi.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:57 PM on December 3, 2023

I hope there are scholars appreciating and analyzing the body of work Kritzer is writing that, together, sketches out how ordinary neighbors and friends can take the tools we already have to make better worlds.

“Because I want to live somewhere that people take care of each other,” he said, his voice cracking.

Sitting here with tears on my face.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:46 AM on November 11, 2023

ngaiotonga wrote,

I've worked with good project managers and terrible project managers. The main difference to me was that with the good ones, I had enough EF points left at the end of the day to clean the bathroom on a weekday. It was amazing.

Thank you. I'm a project manager and I find what you've written motivating -- if I do my job well I can concretely reduce needless fatigue that otherwise lands on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:22 AM on November 6, 2023

Hey so I'm the original poster and here are some thoughts to help this discussion not go terribly:

First off, the author of the piece, David Forbes, is a trans woman so please do use "she" to refer to her.

It would be great if we could center the perspectives of trans people, queer people, Black and brown people, domestic violence survivors, unhoused people, neurodivergent people, and people from other groups whose… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:37 AM on November 2, 2023

OH MY GOD THERE IS A NEW MOUNTAIN GOATS ALBUM?!?! AND IT IS A SEQUEL TO ALL HAIL WEST TEXAS‽‽‽‽‽

I am THERE. I am UNPREPARED. Literally within the past week? I have used a Mountain Goats song to help me reflect on grief ("Genesis 3:23").

Found them because my colleagues Jim Fisher and Scott Rosenberg at Salon.com loved them.

The "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats" season on AHWT was so spectacular.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:19 AM on October 28, 2023

Thank you for sharing this. What a tale.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:10 AM on October 17, 2023

sonascope, when I read a comment by you I feel, inarticulately, like it's all worth it. Like this whole mess we're in has a meaning and a beauty to it. Maybe MetaFilter is a little like a Citroën 2CV, too.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:46 PM on October 11, 2023

The shopping guide from The Cut's Transgender Family Handbook links to a more detailed Shopping Guide for Trans Kids and Teens, According to Trans Families that covers clothing, swim and underwear, and skin care and beauty. Today I Learned that, instead of binders,

Some people prefer using tapes, like TransTape or kinesthetic tape, to bind — they offer a fuller range of movement and can be worn for days at a time.

posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:37 PM on October 11, 2023