Does HIPAA have any teeth? My state seems to think it’s optional.

Yep. States like Oklahoma are already petty fiefdoms ran by whatever christofascist can yell the loudest. We have zero government transparency or accountability because the federal government refuses to enforce the law.

This feels like a practice run for covering up when Trump eventually dies.

The funny thing is I played it in the mid 2000s. We had a GameCube and a PS2, but a lot of the time I chose playing ACS or writing mad libs BASIC programs over Final Fantasy and Animal Crossing.

And now, even if you do get the error code, Google and DuckDuckGo are so shit that they’ll find only AI generated slop pages instead of the forum posts with the solution.

Physically. Inventory would be smart, to stop me from buying shit I already have, but I’m worried that my apartment is in the early stages of something from Hoarders.

Other complication right now is that I’m still recovering from surgery - standing for fifteen minutes fatigues me and bending over is painful. It sucks, because I had taken off a week for cleaning at the end of last month and spent all of it in bed sick with the thing that sent me to the hospital.

I like technology (mostly pre-2010), but I think there’s been a philosophical shift in the things that modern tech companies prioritize. AI is a huge part of the problem obviously, but it’s more of a symptom than a cause.

I want something that I can repair and modify. I want the internals to be easy to access and made out of parts cheap enough for me to replace. I want to be able to play pretend like I’m Terry Davis and not have to deal with UEFI bullshit telling me what I can and can’t run on my computer.

It’s all a move to walled gardens with very limited access to the OS or hardware, where the focus is on touch screens and amplified UIs. I’m the kind of person who customized Xmonad and Vimperator (RIP, I know there are dupes but it’s not the same) to never even bother with a mouse, and so it all feels unnatural. I spend so much time fighting my autocorrect when I’m on windows or Mac products, another one of those “helpful” features that is forced and obnoxious.

It’s a move from computers as toy (LEGO set) to computers as toy (needoh squishy). They’ve become machines designed to deliver content and extract data while you zone out. Some of the most fucking fun I’ve had in my life has been spending 6 hours writing PERL to do something I probably could have done manually in 30 minutes or strange journeys into the windows registry as I try to figure out why all of my / changed into ¥, and that’s just not the vibe of anything in modern technology. Everything is designed to hide as much of itself from you.

I actually don’t have insurance so it probably wasn’t a factor.

I am super fucked lol.

I need to get my IUD replaced (it’s been 10+ years) and I’m terrified. I don’t have insurance, so my best option is Planned Parenthood, who told me that it was “just a little pinch.”

I’ve been fucked with knives and wartenberg wheels (abusive BDSM relationship). That shit was not “a little pinch.” I filled up a diaper with blood afterwords.

It’s to the point where I avoid seeing doctors, unless it’s the nurse practitioner who does my hormones - he’s the only doctor I’ve felt listened to me.

They’re so damn condescending too - I’ve taught biology and chemistry - I can understand a real explanation of what’s happening and want one!

Part of why my condition got so bad to begin with was because I’ve had so many bad experiences with doctors that I didn’t go to the hospital until I started feeling unbearable pain. I spent a full two weeks with an infected abscess just getting worse and worse because I figured that whatever it was would be blown off if I went to the hospital - because that happens any time I’ve ever gone to an ER.

If I give them back the leftover oxy from what they sent home with me, would that help in getting any potential “drug seeker” notes removed?

I don’t even get how I’d abuse the stuff. It just makes me sleepy. Like - marijuana is fun because it makes food taste good and helps me think more creatively. Opioids take away intense pain just enough for me to sleep it off. I ended up throwing away most of a bottle of Percocet after I got my top surgery because I’d rather have a little breakthrough pain on Tylenol and be cogent than sleep 18 hours a day.

As a trans guy, I got about 50/50 “she” versus “he” despite being a fat balding bearded guy. I’m guessing that factored into it too.

My work laptop has windows 11, and for some reason I keep losing my mouse pointer. I’ll boot it up and there will just be no cursor. I can reset my graphics driver (which is what googling suggests), enable and disable my mouse in the hardware manager, tweak all kinds of mouse settings - and nothing. Sometimes opening a pdf in the edge browser brings it back, but it can still disappear afterwords.

Also, pulling up the menu to print something can take several minutes. If I need to change printers on that menu, another several minutes. Sometimes, it’ll just crash the entire program I am trying to print from. It’ll also just ignore some settings occasionally - things like landscape versus portrait.

The search feature in explorer is also absolutely broken. You can type in the exact file name of something and it’ll find everything but that file. Even the “recent files” section is broken.

I don’t understand how anyone at Microsoft thinks Windows 11 is an acceptable product. Do they not use it?

The problem with leaving it to the states is that you can live in a place that just fucks you. I visited with a social worker recently about how I was going to pay for a hospital visit with no insurance, and she was like yeah there’s no help here.

Where I live, unemployment is inaccessible. Housing assistance is inaccessible. Pretty much all social services have collapsed.

Is it my fault for being born in a state that hates me?

My UU ordained friend is a nonbinary activist who was in Minneapolis during the ICE shit.

The first time I went to a UU service, I was invited to a rationalist group that meets there.

It’s all of the good things about religion (ie - community. People who will meal train for you when you are in trouble, people who will teach your kids good shit) without much of the baggage.

I’m personally going to start attending either a UU or a really loosely Methodist group just for the social aspect. I think one of the failures of atheism is the lack of acknowledgment of the benefits of community and ritual. There’s not enough “third places” in the world, and churches can fill that roll quite well. Perhaps this is just my own recent near death experience speaking, but it’s good to have a community that cares about you.

I had a friend that was really involved in UU (now ordained), and one of the great things they do is sex education. Age appropriate and queer affirming, better than anything you get at public school.

The impression I get is some UU congregations lean more pagan, while some lean more Jesus, but in general they’re all willing to welcome everyone. My local one hosts atheist meetups even. The sermons are usually more focused on social justice and history than focusing on holy texts - I’ve attended just for some medieval history lectures.

Really, it seems the perfect space to get all the social connections of church without all the extra baggage. If I had kids I’d be 100% taking them every Sunday.

I agree with your complaints about Skyrim - it’s a lazily made game and the romance is pathetic. It’s possible to have well written romance in the series with the present game mechanics - see companion Vilja and the spectacular Ruined Tail’s Tale mod series (for Oblivion).

But there’s gotta be something notable in that since 1992, if you wanted to play a black female character, any mainline Elder Scrolls game has had that option, and it’s always been no big deal. Heck, one of the few games that forces you to play a set character, Redguard, despite being mechanically shit has some of the best character writing in the series and fully fleshed Cyrus out!

I’m not arguing it’s perfect. Morrowind’s bisexual character was originally only intended to harass female characters, but when they discovered they had messed up during play testing, they left it in because they thought it was fun.

The kinds of representation you are wanting are things I’ve only really seen in the Sims or indie games (as a trans guy, I think I cried on the character selection in Dream Daddy).

You are right in that it’s nice to have more representation of different bodies, but the games have always been able to adjust to that with mods. Not that Bethesda should get credit for modders work - they do tend to rest on unpaid volunteers fixing their games for them - but there has always been a community of people making those games represent and include them.

I think the Elder Scrolls and Sims series both have some of the most diverse fandoms of any game series for a lot of these reasons. A lot of my initial exploration of my gender identity personally was in those games - allowing myself to play as a male protagonist in Morrowind was my first time that I allowed myself to think of myself that way.

I’m okay with a mechanical tax on furries. /s

Admittedly, one of my favorite ways to play Morrowind is to use a combination of slavery and farming mods to create an agricultural plantation empire, dozens of farms with hundreds of slaves.

The worlds might be racist, but the game doesn’t really punish the player for being any race. Thematically the racism is always shown to be wrong.

I’m sure there’s more.

You’d be surprised. I think there is like one fighting game character and that’s it. I invite anyone to share if they know more for sure. I think there’s also clearly something special about being able to play a black character as a protagonist in a first person roleplaying game versus a random game show tie in game.

If dealing with comments on line drives young men to the alt right, I can’t imagine what they’d do if they lived my life.

Cry more when you are working 80 hours a week because you have to leave you state because they are about to revoke your drivers license for being trans. Or maybe help people in that situation instead of whining.