• 5 Posts
  • 352 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Some imaginary audience of post 40 wine aunts that also love marvel and pay for Disney+?

    Who do you think writes half the stuff on AO3? This audience actually exists, and is fairly sizeable.

    If it’s not for you, that’s fine. But a Marvel universe intended only for teenage boy nerds is pretty dull and repetitive; the MCU didn’t get that big by aiming solely for them.

    And yeah, when you start gatekeeping, saying “those people don’t exist” and “you don’t belong here”, maybe it is time to take a look at your prejudices.


  • Apparently he and his wife have been living in separate houses, so there was some mind of problem there. The ones I feel sorry for are the kids. They look to be mid-to-late teens, so they likely have a poor understanding of exactly what their dad’s company did, and they certainly have no standing to change things - and they’re the perfect age to be spending lots of their time on the internet.

    They wake up one morning and their dad’s been shot and literally the entire internet is celebrating? That’s absolutely brutal.










  • I have never had worse “insurance” than when I had United “Healthcare”. They have you a big book full of all their “providers”, but when you called to make an appointment, you were told they’d left United quite a while back and shouldn’t be in the book. A few providers were still in network, but they weren’t accepting new patients. Their “provider support” line was completely useless, because they would only read you out the “options” available in the book, the one with all the ghost providers.

    My SIL in southern New Jersey ended up with them for some reason. She needed to see an OB/Gyn due to some abnormal bleeding that had been going on for too long. She went through their provider carousel and finally found one provider who was still in network and also still accepting new patients. That provider was 2.5 hours away from her, in the very other end of New Jersey.

    I eventually did find one local provider who was in network, except they never did any comprehensive medical visits; you had to visit them for one issue at a time, at least a week apart. They’d give you a prescription or a referral but (once again) you were entirely on your own finding someone to accept the referral. Like there were times I’d make a dozen phone calls a day for weeks, trying to find someone who could see me - it was very much an entire part-time job trying to see someone!

    I ended up switching insurance and have ended up ‘captured’ within a regional hospital’s provider network. The hospital bought up a bunch of local independent providers in all the different specialities. I’m really unhappy with the continued corporatization of healthcare and the conglomeration of hospital networks - but the ability to call one number, be given a specialist within reasonable driving distance and (in that same phone call) be given an appointment within a reasonable timeframe is just so refreshing!