Sort-of borrowing the title from one of Randall Monroes books, it serves to remind us that there’s still relatively little that we know about ourselves on a fundamental physical and psychological level. Observe:
The transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration requires six weeks of once-daily sessions. Only about half of patients who undergo the treatment improve, and only about a third experience remission from depression.
Stanford Medicin: Experimental depression treatment is nearly 80% effective in controlled study
So by pulsing magnetic fields through that fatty blob you carry around in your head, you can potentially remedy the debilitating depression you’ve had your whole life. How is that for a discovery? It just feels so random – like percussive engineering. Then again, there’s plenty of research and DIY folks doing tDCS which uses current rather than fields – but it just feels so blackboxy. The subreddit tDCS is full of hopeful folks doing self-experimentation should you be into that.
All of this leads to something kind of strange. I’ve talked to other people about it, and a few bartenders have even brought it up to me. After a while, you start to develop a contempt for your customers, even the ones you like. It’s a tough thing, helping people make the same mistakes over and over again. I don’t juggle bottles for pretty people. I get working stiffs, many of them very lonely, very drunk.
Datasecretslox.com: Ask a bartender a question
Many in the healthcare sector came to the same conclusion. Even before Bill C-7 was enacted, reports of abuse were rife. A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days. Virtually every disability rights group in the country opposed the new law.
Spectator: Why is Canada Euthanising the poor?
Yeah, so as much as I’m in favour of the right to die, it should go without saying that every avenue of support should be offered to the person considering it. This is some dystopian shit right here, and even though the history of senicide and mercy killings isn’t anything new, this is truly a THX1138 take on it.
Our AI:s are being taught on the corpus of tagged images, and the world being what it is it’s impossible to completely avoid biad – and for many it’s even expected. Do a search for “two men” in any image search engine, and you’re likely to find caucasian middle aged men, and the problem of representation carries over into AI generators. It doesn’t stop the generators from being useful – you can just refine your prompts or nudge the image selection along whatever path you’re interested in – but the default bias is there, and it’s damaging since it cements what we ought to consider “the norm”.
Within this universe, characters can experience “omegapause,” a menopause-like end to their fertility, and “rut leave,” a personal leave from work or school to go off and fulfill their insatiable desire to mate. Some fics will include “heat suppressants,” birth control-like medications that prevent characters from experiencing the need to mate or emanating a scent. Again, it’s a lot.
Morgan Sung: What the hell is the Omegaverse, and why is it all over TikTok?
The kids do the darnest things, are all right, are species-fluid furry-adjecents with rape-fetisch.