quintessence @quintessence@hachyderm.io

Images from 🐦 user kapebeansies

My caption: Inside you there are two cats.

How's everyone on here doin'?

I hate re-opening tabs I just closed....

Odd question, but has any service really stepped up to replace Meetup with it kind of ... sucking?

How is everyone, lol?

Whenever I see medical bills for greater than 4 months ago I wonder what other industry(-ies) would get away with that delayed a billing cycle, really.

For the internationals: not unpaid bills, just the first bill taking this long to go through insurance to arrive.

Because of the way a friend of mine relayed her muscle cramp to me I am now imagining a calf named Charlie (Horse).

Sometimes I wish Zillow / Redfin hunting let you do things like "budget with percentage" or "land with percentage" so that you didn't have to round up and down horribly. Like "N +/- 5%" or something.

Something nice on Hachyderm / Mastodon vs Twitter: less disturbing "what the hell is this now" trends.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it because I've been in "research my own health woes all day" mode, but whew. So many things when I've gone down the rabbit hole of "what is X" and then "how do you dx X", where the latter returns MRI and then other things more unique to X.

And because it's magnetic (magnetic resonance imaging is what the acronym stands for) you have no radiation exposure. Imagine how many things, tumors etc., we could catch before people became symptomatic just by having regular-ish MRIs looking for common ailments, similar to mammograms and prostate exams. Just part of the "keeping up with your body" data. You'd have a baseline from a (hopefully) healthy state and then everything after is monitoring.

So in general I don't post about health in public / quasi-public forums; however, while researching health stuff I realized just how powerful MRIs are as a diagnostic tool. Depending on what you're looking for, of course, but can be used for Basically Anything ™️ involving your soft tissues - neuro, organs, etc.

And yet when I have a knee/hip injury insurance requires an x-ray before an MRI. Mind you we're not looking at my bones and x-rays **cannot** be used to dx issues with soft tissue.

Reminded of my dislike, nay hatred, of services that require you to contact support (or similar) to cancel their services.

Hail the Rules of Acquisition: make the wrong choices easy and the right choices difficult for profit.

Because I'm not sure I've brought this joy here: pecan butter exists and is delicious. This is my favorite brand of it. It also comes in small squirt pack sizes.

https://artisanaorganics.com/products/organic-pecan-butter-with-cashews?variant=31851758944301

Ah yes, another rousing round of "our systems don't handle death well, even though people die all the time". In this edition: fully automated with NO option for representative. I have all the PII **except** for the PIN. I cannot proceed to pay the bill without a PIN, even with the rest of the info. Her account is marked as deceased and I am put on as the estate handler. Doesn't matter. Can't speak to a person to rectify. Cannot take over her online account.

ok then????

TIL you can have multiple pinned posts on Mastodon which is neat.

I've thought about this on and off for years but originally not around these issues but for mental / social training. Something I do is do mental swaps when reading things to try and see if it's "that bad" or I've been "desensitized". So originally I wanted something that I could toggle to manage that. But now I'm thinking the same idea could apply to remove some of the "dance around the issue" language we see everywhere.

Sometimes I think about making the time to make a Chrome extension to refactor news / etc. to use the correct verbiage. Not pro-life, forced-birth, etc. Nothing like a AI that can fix grammar / syntax, literally just a search and replace. "s:/pro-life/forced-birth". ":s/Proud Boys/American Terrorist Organization the Proud Boys" and so on. I would leave the list open and available so people could see what swaps were being made.