random acts of pigeon

Real

Once knew a guy from LARP who told a story about when he had first gotten his hands on chainmail and was getting used to wearing it and maintaining mobility and balance with the weight of it (it was heavy stuff). So he started wearing it under his clothes when he was out running errands and stuff to practice for when he had to wear it in mock combat.

Then one night he was coming home late and got mugged by a dude with a knife.

Apparently the look on the dude's face was amazing when he went in to gut the guy for his wallet and found out he was wearing medieval armor under his hoodie.

So, you know. Pretty good argument for wearing it under streetclothes!

so maybe my type isn't totally unrealistic

Fun story, i talked to two people who worked at a convenience store in the Kingdom of An Tir (SCA medieval society, An Tir's territory is WA, BC, northern ID, and OR, and in the past included AB and SK).

This convenience store was notorious for getting robbed in the evenings one or two times a month, so nobody wanted to work the night shift. The one fellow, he desperately needed a job, but he was also learning how to be a heavy fighter (sword & shield) in the SCA, so he had just finished a chainmail shirt, and asked if he could wear it under his uniform shirt, so long as it didn't show. The manager was just happy that he had someone willing to work nights, and said yeah, sure, so long as it doesn't show.

Guy starts working the night shifts, things are fine, he's getting used to everything, then late one night, a guy in a hoodie comes in, and asks for a pack of cigarettes. Our guy turns to get the pack, and feels a thump on his back. Turning around, scowling, he demands, "Did you just hit me??"

Guy in the hoodie widens his eyes, goes ash-gray, and faints. Clerk can't budge from behind the counter in case this is an attempt to distract and rob. But the guy remains out coold. Confused, our clerk calls the emergency services. EMTs come along and start checking out the patient, who is still out cold on the floor. While they're doing that, one of them comes up to the counter and asks what happened, exactly.

Our man tells the EMT, "Well, he just came in, looked around, came up to the counter and asked for a specific pack of cigarettes, so I turned to get them--"

And he demonstrates by turning his back to the EMT, who suddenly starts shouting, "--Sir! Sir! Are you okay? Don't move!"

Our man feels the EMT groping his upper back, and then the EMT asks,

"What the hell are you WEARING?"

"A chainmail shirt. I have to get used to the weight of it, so I wear it a lot. Why? Is something wrong?"

"You have a KNIFE in your back!"

"Uhh...no, I don't? I mean, I don't feel hurt? He only, like, punched me or something. There's no knife back there--I mean, I'd KNOW if there was a knife back there, right?"

EMT grabs the knife and pushes on his shoulder, yanking it out. "THIS knife! I'm going to need to examine your back!"

So they manage to get him out of his uniform shirt and out of the hauberk and out of the linen shirt under it (because chainmail bites suck, plus it's not nearly as fun as a Brazilian waxjob, because my SCA friend was hairy)...and it turns out he only had a very small scratch from the tip of the knife...which had gotten lodged in the riveted links.

...That was why the guy fainted. He'd stabbed the store clerk, who had turned around angrily, knife still lodged in his back.

Manager was so happy to have hired the guy, as that was the first time in like eight or nine months that the store hadn't been successfully robbed.

It's a cliché to say that Tolkien's experiences in WWI affected all aspects of his writing, how he wrote about friendship and grief, how he wrote about desolate blasted landscapes. But I wish someone who knows more about Tolkien's military career could help me understand how Tolkien related to retreats. His description of Faramir keeping his people together on the retreat from Osgiliath is one of the best-written sequences in the trilogy, and hardly anyone remembers it. It's about a desperate retreat, and a leader whose presence, whose strength manages to keep it from turning into a rout. There's something very vivid in the descriptions: don't break formation, don't start running or they'll pick you off one by one, keep together, keep moving, hold all of that fear at bay. Tolkien describes that retreat as genuinely heroic, a superhuman act of will, one that exhausts Faramir almost to death, and Denethor still does not accept it as heroic because it's a retreat. It saved men but it lost territory, therefore in his eyes it's a failure.

Tolkien has strong opinions about heroic retreats, in the Silmarillion he sometimes gives the retreat-through-the-dangerous-wilderness plotline to female characters (Emeldir, Idril), he always writes them with respect. Sometimes, getting out of there and keeping most of your people alive is a great act of valour. I feel like he must have had a personal experience about what it means to retreat, and what it means to hold a retreat together, and what it means to get no thanks for it.

Sirens going off, lightning is more or less continuous. Wind is high but also just...weird in a way that's making my hair stand on end but isn't actually a tornado. I've lived in the Midwest more-or-less my entire life and this storm is giving off some very bad vibes...

So it passed over us and we're all safe, which is good news. Checked in with my family and they're safe too. But uh... Well this is right by where my nephews go to daycare, there are a bunch of apartments and a lot of their teachers live there:

(Link is to a video of a tornado rolling through)

I can't find anything about damage yet.

The same storm system and possibly the same tornado also leveled a warehouse and apparently there are people trapped inside the rubble. All in all not a great day.

Scratch that just got a fresh warning alert and the sirens are going off again...

Okay I think it is past for real this time. The lightning has died down quite a bit

Sirens going off, lightning is more or less continuous. Wind is high but also just...weird in a way that's making my hair stand on end but isn't actually a tornado. I've lived in the Midwest more-or-less my entire life and this storm is giving off some very bad vibes...

So it passed over us and we're all safe, which is good news. Checked in with my family and they're safe too. But uh... Well this is right by where my nephews go to daycare, there are a bunch of apartments and a lot of their teachers live there:

(Link is to a video of a tornado rolling through)

I can't find anything about damage yet.

The same storm system and possibly the same tornado also leveled a warehouse and apparently there are people trapped inside the rubble. All in all not a great day.

Scratch that just got a fresh warning alert and the sirens are going off again...

Sirens going off, lightning is more or less continuous. Wind is high but also just...weird in a way that's making my hair stand on end but isn't actually a tornado. I've lived in the Midwest more-or-less my entire life and this storm is giving off some very bad vibes...

So it passed over us and we're all safe, which is good news. Checked in with my family and they're safe too. But uh... Well this is right by where my nephews go to daycare, there are a bunch of apartments and a lot of their teachers live there:

(Link is to a video of a tornado rolling through)

I can't find anything about damage yet.

The same storm system and possibly the same tornado also leveled a warehouse and apparently there are people trapped inside the rubble. All in all not a great day.

anyway just a reminder for the myth lovers out there

king arthur was welsh. merlin was welsh. camelot was in wales. the lady and the lake she pops out of; welsh. excalibur; magic inanimate welsh object. etc.

on the way to see family, i drive past a lake that in which is welsh legend, is the last resting place of excalibur.

i’m just saying in my experience a lot of these legends had been so anglo-fied in the past and it’s like, all this cool shit is celtic welsh legend.

Arthur’s wife was called Gwenhwyfar first.

Like the kraken I emerge, summoned by the English theft of Arthur

Anyway it’s particularly irritating because traditional Welsh culture and beliefs have been so thoroughly stripped away and destroyed by England over the centuries, and Arthurian legend is one of the few surviving fragments we have left to preserve. And he’s specifically an anti-English figure. So the ubiquity of the boring and appropriative English Arthur across the whole fucking world is… Well, it’s not great.

remembering that time i met someone who attended high school in west bend, wisconsin and they told me how their school district works. to them it was completely normal while i was wondering if they were messing with me.

their schools are conjoined twins???

Resisting tyranny takes a lot of forms.

I still think it’s objectively fucked how the world is built for morning people and if you wake up later than everyone else you’re seen as a malicious aberration of some sort. I am that but it’s not because I wake up at 11 fuck yourself

“A wish?” the genie scoffs. “You mortals always waste them.” You shake your head. “No wish. I need to talk to the last person who made a deal with you.” The genie goes still. “That… is not something you want.”

Richard Quinn Fall 2024

Doctor still practising in the UK

Petition to have NHS fire his ass

A hippocratic oath is the very antithesis of hypocritical. It is indiscriminate. If he, or anyone and there have been others, cannot practice medicine without their political, personal or religious beliefs and agendas interfering with patient care, they shouldn't be practicing. Period.

Ok, but it's not interfering. He says it himself, he hates doing it, but he does treat Jews. He respects the oath. He's an antisemite asshole, sure, but he's a proper doctor, and I'd rather get treated by him despite his hatred than wait in a waiting room bleeding. He SHOULD still be practicing.

This a brain dead take when professional medical apathy and prejudice already cause women to be the sufferers of medical malfeasance in incredibly high numbers.

There's a huge difference to being treated by a doctor and "treated", which you would know if you had any medical background.

I do not have any medical background, I do not understand the difference, please explain it.

It's the difference between actually caring and doing the bare minimum.

Here's an example. The first rheumatologist I saw did not give a shit about me. None of our appointments lasted more than thirty minutes. She ordered a bunch of tests, which came back normal. She brushed off my concerns about my health declining rapidly. She kept ordering more tests and refused to see me in person until I threatened to call the ethics board. (This was during COVID, but you cannot treat a patient for months over telehealth alone if there's no diagnosis. At some point you need to look at the patient and test their joints and mobility.) When she finally saw me in person, she diagnosed me with fibromyalgia and basically said, "there's no treatment and I can't help you. Don't come back."

Very curt. Very dismissive. Would not recommend.

My second rheumatologist actually listened to me. He took notes on my symptoms, looked at my medical history, and was able to give a diagnosis pretty quickly. He spent nearly three hours with me during the first consultation. His interventions worked and I got better. (Well, comparatively.) He never dismissed me or my concerns and always explained why he was ordering tests and what we could expect. "If the MRI comes back normal, we will do this. If it comes back with an abnormality, I'll send you to this specialist." All of this was really detailed.

I would highly recommend him and I sent my girlfriend to him when she had similar problems.

This is just one example and it wasn't based on me. I think the first doctor was just a bad doctor. But I have heard plenty of horror stories of Black people being dismissed as drug seeking, of Black women being seen as whiny or bossy, of fat people being seen as greedy or weak-willed, of women being dismissed as anxious, et cetera. A friend's grandmother died because doctors saw a Black woman in pain and decided she was trying to get painkillers, so they ignored the signs of an aneurysm. She died on the bus ride home. My mom was told to lose weight over and over again and that she just wasn't trying hard enough, when she actually had a tumor that was causing weight gain and exhaustion. My girlfriend's arrhythmia and eventually heart failure was dismissed because doctors thought she was just anxious. Only one of those examples led to a death, but every one of those people had shitty outcomes because of their doctors.

Any prejudice that a doctor holds is a problem.

That prejudice is going to leak into their practice whether they like or not and that's going to result in decreased patient care. There's a reason my university makes medical and nursing students take at least two classes on biases and how to combat them. It's to keep the doctors from ignoring the very real pain their patient is in.

So yeah, this schmuck might say he's going to treat Jews like everyone else, but will he? Or will he assume that a Jewish patient is prone to complaining? Will he take our pain seriously? Will he try to diagnose a Jewish patient using the cheapest methods available, or just immediately suggest the more expensive option because he thinks Jews are rich? Will he care if his patient is given a non-kosher meal, or will he dismiss it as not important?

That's why this kind of rhetoric is unacceptable from doctors. Or nurses or PAs or dentists or anyone in the medical field.

if someone says that they would murder all the jews if they had the power, i promise you they are not treating their jewish patients with equal or even basic care. you cannot treat a patient effectively if you don’t see them as human.