The internet is in an uproar after a question and answer session featuring Google co-founder Sergey Brin over the weekend, where an attendee in a mostly male audience wore a shirt depicting a naked woman’s body.
Microsoft har tillkännagivit att Androidenheter snart kan användas som trådlösa webbkameror i Windows 11, via appen Link to Windows. Tack vare att smartphones erbjuder långt bättre kameror än exempelvis en laptop kan bildkvaliteten under videosamtal på så vis förbättras.
Enligt Microsoft fungerar länken i ”alla videoapplikationer” så det är möjligt att det finns fler användningsområden. I skrivande stund är nyheten bara tillgänglig för ”Windows Insiders” men den kommer släppas för alla senare i vår.
Funktionen kräver minst Android 9 Pie.
With this feature, you’ll be able to wirelessly enjoy the high quality of your mobile device’s camera on your PC with flexibility and ease. Some of the abilities include being able to switch between front and back camera, pausing the stream during interruptions, and enjoying effects provided by your mobile model.
To enable this experience, go to Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Mobile devices and choose “Manage devices” and allow your PC to access your Android phone. Your PC will get a Cross Device Experience Host update in the Microsoft Store that is required for this experience to work.
Most people turn on mobile push notifications and then promptly forget about them. However, it turns out that if you’re up to no good, those notifications could get you thrown in prison. The Washington Post reports that the FBI has been using mobile push notification data to unmask people suspected of serious crimes,…
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski bragged on Tuesday that his company’s new OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot was doing the work of 700 people—nearly two years after Klarna laid off about 700 people.
Or, in this case, restarts—that’s the theory, anyway, now that the WGA writer’s strike is in the rearview mirror, and progress can resume on so many projects, including J. Michael Straczynski’s long-promised attempt to reboot his classic sci-fi TV series, Babylon 5.
The reboot was first confirmed in 2021 by Straczynski on his Twitter account. Writing that the show was in development with the CW, Straczynski said:
As noted in the announcement, this is a reboot from the ground up rather than a continuation, for several reasons. Heraclitus wrote “You cannot step in the same river twice, for the river has changed, and you have changed.” In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question: if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then? … So we will not be retelling the same story in the same way because of what Heraclitus said about the river. There would be no fun and no surprises.
From that detailed announcement, it’s apparent that the rebooted Babylon 5 will be quite different from its original iteration. I think it’s clear that this was always going to be the case, though—and not merely because of recasting and updates in special effects technology.
In its very bones, Babylon 5 was a unique experience. It was a bold attempt to experiment with the conventional format of TV, with a serialized storyline and continuity, unlike earlier shows like Star Trek or Quantum Leap or any number of other “story of the week” style science fiction programs. Here in our current era, post-prestige TV, that kind of storytelling is common, but in the 1990s, when Babylon 5 first entered pre-production, it was nearly unheard of.
Occasional radical programs like The Prisoner or Twin Peaks were the exception, not the norm, and in both of those cases, they were cancelled before they were able to tell complete stories. With Babylon 5, Straczynski set out with the deliberate intention to make a show that would last five seasons: No more, no less. It was a bold proposition… a dream given form, one might say.
It was also a massive exercise in planning, not just in terms of TV production, but in the writing and plotting of the show.
In fiction plotting, there are two broad schools of thought. One suggests that writers should allow themselves to permit characters and actions to come as they will—to “fly by the seat of one’s pants,” as it were. The “pantsers” are writers who don’t necessarily know where a story is heading, and are willing to adapt on the fly as ideas and character motivations evolve.
The second school of thought is that everything should be meticulously plotted. “Plotters” are writers who know precisely where the story is headed, and operate with a high degree of certainty as to how they’ll reach that conclusion.
Straczynski, at the start of Babylon 5, was unquestionably a plotter. Fans of the program will likely have heard about his penchant for building in “trap doors,” a term Straczynski used to refer to plot resolutions for main characters that branched off of the main story, should the need arise for recasting and the like.
In a forum post—which was one of his main tools for talking with fans at the time—Straczynski wrote about how these “trap doors” were a vital part of his writing process:
As a writer, doing a long-term story, it’d be dangerous and short-sighted for me to construct the story without trap doors for every single character… An actor can get hit by a meteor, walk off, whatever…That was one of the big risks going into a long-term storyline which I considered long in advance; you can’t predict real-world events, so you have to compensate for them and plan for them in advance. Otherwise you could paint yourself into a corner.
And of course, real-world events did impact the show. Michael O’Hare, who portrayed main character Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, began experiencing psychosis and paranoid delusions, including hallucinations. These issues, which Straczynski kept in confidence until after O’Hare’s passing in 2012, led to the creation of a new lead character, which was a disruption that Babylon 5 had not prepared for.
“I could write him out for a couple of episodes,” Straczynski said at a special “promise panel” (named for the promise he gave to O’Hare to keep his illness a secret until the actor’s death) before stunned attendees at Phoenix Comic Con in 2013, the first time he revealed the actor’s mental health issues publicly. “But I couldn’t write him out long enough to get the kind of help he really needed. I was prepared to shut down the show.”
O’Hare instead urged Straczynski to let him complete the first season, and afterwards agreed to part ways, save for a two-part appearance in the third season that tied off some loose plot threads and wrapped up Sinclair’s story arc.
From a narrative standpoint, it’s fascinating to consider how this particular challenge affected the trajectory of Babylon 5 on a profound level. Originally—as revealed in the single-spaced, seven-page synopsis that Straczynski parcels out through the 15-volume (14 plus a bonus volume) Babylon 5 script books—Sinclair was supposed to be the main character for the entire series’ run. As part of that run, Sinclair would not have become Valen, a prophet-like figure to a race called the Minbari, but would instead have fathered a “Minbari not born of Minbari,” as was prophesied by Valen in the distant past.
The mother of that child would have been Delenn, the Minbari ambassador to Babylon 5 who, at the end of the first season, undergoes a metamorphosis to become part human. Her purpose for doing so, as stated in the televised series, was to improve relations between humans and Minbari. In truth, the original motivation would have been to allow her body to be capable of bearing this prophesied child.
Indeed, in hindsight, this change does seem a little bit dubious without the pressing need to force prophecy, as it were. It also makes certain plot elements a bit clearer, such as the motivations of the Minbari assassin in the original pilot. Looking at that small arc through the lens of Sinclair as father to a half-Minbari child of prophecy, it becomes apparent that there would have been a faction of Minbari opposed to the very notion of mating with humans, and would treat a child of such a pairing as an abomination. Additionally, the “old Sinclair” shot we get in “Babylon Squared” that seems to show a potentially grim future is instead reduced to a somewhat flimsy retcon, as Sinclair is affected by the time dilation effect around Babylon 4. In the original plotline, it seems clear that the series meant to proceed into a potentially decades-long future, where the grown child of Sinclair and Delenn would meet his destiny.
Nevertheless, while Straczynski had meticulously plotted out his five-year arc, he also expressed a willingness to stray to the “pantser” side of the writing spectrum, as he mentioned in the same forum post where talked about his “trap door” escape plots:
As a writer, you have to be flexible enough to recognize a stronger, better path when it presents itself; to be so rigidly locked into your prior structure eliminates spontaneity and the chance to explore new routes.
Another unexpected speedbump in Babylon 5’s path came around the fourth season, as the now-apparently unstoppable show hit an immovable network. The Prime Time Entertainment Network, which aired the series, announced they would be shutting down, leaving Straczynski’s five-year plan, which had seemed much more solid after the end of the third season, in doubt.
As such, he felt obliged to produce a truncated version of his grand plot. The major threads of the Shadow War and the Earth Civil War were all wrapped up by Season 4’s conclusion. They even shot the finale, “Sleeping in Light,” but by the time Season 4 started to air, Babylon 5 had been suddenly saved by another network, TNT, and so that episode was ultimately shelved for the end of Season 5. Instead, Straczynski had the crew shoot “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” to wrap up Season 4, and actor Claudia Christian, who by this point had departed the show amidst the confusion around Season 5, was absent.
Season 5 itself is sometimes maligned by fans as a strange coda to a completed story, but it nevertheless offers some incredible moments of deep emotional impact, particularly for series mainstays G’kar and Londo Mollari. In this respect, it’s worth noting that the “pantsing” side of writing, as Straczynski suggested, yielded some rewarding returns.
What makes Babylon 5 so singularly fascinating is that it managed, largely through the adaptability and force of will that Straczynski brought to the table as a writer and showrunner, to persevere in telling its story through a striking balance of “plotting” and “pantsing.”
Even in modern television, we still see the perils of trying to adapt or plan for long-running storylines. The Expanse, for instance, was cancelled twice. In the first instance, this led to a rapidly-paced third season that aimed to complete adaptations of the first three novels on which the show is based, and in the second instance, it led to an even-more-rapidly-paced sixth season, as Amazon shortened the episode order before axing the show.
Babylon 5 miraculously endured, and arguably thrived in spite of the various setbacks and challenges over the course of its run.
There are, of course, some elements which may have been stronger, had they survived the vagaries of production issues, cast departures, and so on. For instance, the original first officer of the station, Lieutenant Laurel Takashima, was intended to be the person who shot Garibaldi in the back at the end of season one, and who would have been implanted with the “control” personality that was instead given to telepath Talia Winters.
However, because that plot was given to Talia, it paved the way for the return of Lyta Alexander, who roared back into the show with a deeply badass background as a “doomsday telepath” enhanced by the enigmatic Vorlon race.
Then there are elements which maybe didn’t pack as much of a wallop. Catherine Sakai, Sinclair’s old flame who appears in a handful of episodes as a talented pilot and explorer, was clearly being set up to explore the ruins of Z’Ha’Dum—and everyone knows if you go there, you die. Her likely re-appearance after having her personality completely destroyed after being forced to serve the Shadows would have been harrowing, and would have been much more emotionally impactful than the Anna Sheridan plotline we got.
What this all adds up to is that Babylon 5 was, and remains, a fascinating early experiment in TV writing, and one that will never be repeated with the same results. It blazed a unique path, setting a standard for plotting a serialized story in a way that was revolutionary in television at the time, while allowing for Straczynski and his team of writers to fly by the seat of their pants when it became necessary, and because of that, it will inevitably change when it is rebooted.
But that is what makes it interesting, and endlessly exciting.[end-mark]
Putting your phone in airplane mode when boarding a flight feels like common sense. You wouldn’t be crazy for thinking your phone signal could interfere with an airplane’s navigation systems, potentially causing a disaster. However, the necessity of airplane mode is largely a myth, and there’s another reason airlines…
Avast har fått 16,5 miljoner dollar i böter av FTC i USA för att ha lagrat och sålt användares data utan deras tillåtelse. Ironiskt nog var det mjukvara som sades öka användares säkerhet och integritet som utnyttjades för den otillåtna datainsamlingen, likt antivirusprogram och insticksprogram för webbläsare.
Företaget har även förbjudits från att sälja användares data för annonseringssyften i USA. Enligt FTC utnyttjade Avast sin mjukvara för att samla in data om användares internetaktivitet från åtminstone 2014 till 2020.
Avast påstås ha samlat in uppgifter likt platsdata, politiska åsikter, trosuppfattning, hälsoproblem och ekonomisk ställning och därefter lagrat uppgifterna utan tidsgräns och sålt dem till över hundra utomstående parter.
FTC menar vidare att Avast förde kunder bakom ljuset när de påstod att mjukvaran eliminerar spårare på webben – när Avast själva stod för spårningen. Avast säger i ett uttalande att de motsätter sig FTC:s anklagelser och hur FTC ”karakteriserar fakta”, men att de är nöjda att frågan är löst.
In my experience, Twitter worked by boosting content you engage with, regardless of how bad it was. This means that every time I complained about some transphobic content, the algorithm started serving me more and more of that particular content, to the point where I was constantly seeing everything by JKR and other transphobes, despite never subscribing to them. And it got really unhealthy after a while.
Bluesky was made by the guy who used to run Twitter, I expect it functions exactly the same way. I advise people, particularly trans people, to stay away from it.
Bluesky doesn't have algorithms. It has a healthy block function. And while Jack Dorsey was one of the founders of Bluesky it's a "public benefit company" and very much not a Twitter clone (nor does he apparently have very much to do with it).
What Neil said.
Though Bluesky started life as an offshoot of Twitter, and its UI is very reminiscent of Twitter, it's worth knowing a few things.
There's no built-in algorithm. There's feeds, most of which are user-created, and some of which can behave algorithmically, but none of them are mandatory and your timeline is purely chronological and shows your follows. You can even customize if you see their reposts, replies and the like on your timeline.
Jack Dorsey does technically sit on the board of directors of Bluesky, but he hasn't done anything meaningful there in months. He's almost entirely abandoned Bluesky in favor of Nostr, and good riddance. Very few people on Bluesky actually like him.
The block function is actually very robust, and user-created Moderation Lists let you quickly mute or block a user-curated list of people (such as crypto-shills or transphobes).
All that being said, it's not perfect, but the queers and furries got there early and have done a lot of work toward cultivating it to a nice environment. I was skeptical of Bluesky initially too, for the same reasons as folk still are, but it's pretty solid, honestly. It doesn't have DMs yet, which is my only major gripe with it, but everything else about it is pretty solid.
Google’s AI chatbot Gemini has a unique problem. It has a hard time producing pictures of white people, often turning Vikings, founding fathers, and Canadian hockey players into people of color. This sparked outrage from the anti-woke community, claiming racism against white people. Today, Google acknowledged Gemini’s…
Reddit reportedly signed a $60 million deal with Google to allow its online communities to be scraped for AI training data, according to Reuters Thursday. Google will sift through millions of posts on Reddit, and train a large language model on Reddit’s threads. The content deal was originally reported by Bloomberg…
Apple users seem unanimously convinced that closing background apps is a good habit, but it’s more likely a waste of time. For too long, I’ve watched friends and family orchestrate a frenzy of up-swipes from their iPhone’s multitasking screen to cleanse themselves of countless open background apps.
If a pack of sugar-free gum has ever given you a nasty stomach ache, you might have your gut bacteria to blame. New research in mice found a link between the gut microbiome and a food intolerance to sorbitol, a commonly used sugar substitute. The findings could even point to an effective treatment for the condition,…
I think it’s fair to say that the astonishing thing is how enthusiastically the American, Canadian (and British?) people involved in the Hugos took to censorship. I’m proud of the whistleblower, and am still puzzled by the removal of Sandman Episode 6. But this appears to have been what was going on:
I do not share Neil Gaiman’s astonishment (I had personally pegged this as the most likely scenario), but everything about this really sucks.
However, the part of the report that actually made me gasp out loud was this one:
“One interesting aspect of the “validation” spreadsheet is it appears to show a number of Chinese works that may have been removed from the final ballot. For example, in the Best Novel category, four Chinese novels are listed including We Live in Nanjing by Tianrui Shuofu. None of these novels made the final ballot.
In both Diane Lacey’s apology letter and an interview, she said some of these Chinese works were removed due to ‘collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated.’”
In her letter, she states:
“We were told there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated, exactly as many have speculated.”
This is astonishing, and alarming. For context:
Slating (politically-motivated slating, no less) has been a problem with the Hugos before. In fact, it formed the basis for a high profile (relatively) recent scandal. HOWEVER, the result of that scandal was formal changes in how votes are calculated.
To my knowledge, there is ZERO basis for “eliminating” slate ballots under the rules. Again, these are the rules that were created specifically with concerns about slating in mind.
The idea of a bunch of North American/British administrators either initiating or signing off on the elimination of ballots by Chinese fans because of alleged slating suggests that those administrators hold Chinese fans, and works by Chinese creators, to different standards (and grant them much less respect) than they do to English speaking fans.
Unlike the English-language works and writers that were at least given the respect of being marked as disqualified, we would not have know about the disqualifications without the whistleblower. It’s still not clear whether all works removed this way have been identified. This is disgusting, and the administrators should immediately release (in a form and language accessible to those Chinese Fans and creators) the full list of names of the works, along with a further explanation.
Additional burning questions:
“We were told” - by who? Why was this person/people considered credible? What proof did they show?
“there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list” - “collusion” is a very specific and loaded word! What *exactly* do is meant by that? What more did they do than publish a nomination list? And what the fuck is wrong with publishing a nomination list?
“those ballots were identified” - by who? And how? What vetting was done to ensure that they were the result of “collusion,” (and again, what the fuck does “collusion” mean in this context)?
“and eliminated” - were the entire ballots thrown out? Or just works on those ballots which someone engaged in “collusion”?
I cannot emphasize enough, given the context, and given the lack of answers to the above questions, right now it sure as fuck looks like a bunch of North American/British administrators heard that Chinese publications were promoting recommendation lists, a thing that is not only objectively allowed under the rules but seems normal and fine, and decided this meant Those Deceitful Chinese Fake-Fans Must Be Cheating, and so threw out a bunch of ballots of Chinese fans - fans who, by the way *paid for the privilege of submitting their votes* - without bothering to even tell those fans and creators.
If this is not what happened, and there is a reasonable and good explanation, fans (again, especially Chinese fans) have a right to know.
Absolutely. I think the way that the Chinese fans and authors have been treated during this process is utterly shameful.
Dealabs rapporterar att instegsmodellen av Nothings nästa lur Phone 2a inte kommer kosta mer än 349 euro i Frankrike. Prisangivelsen avser upplagan med 8GB RAM och 128GB lagring. Källan skriver att modellen med 12GB RAM och 256GB lagring kommer gå på 399 euro.
Nu är förstås varken priserna eller specifikationerna bekräftade än, men om ryktena stämmer är detta en konkurrenskraftig prissättning utifrån hårdvaran som erbjuds – i alla fall i Frankrike. De specifikationer som nämndes i senaste ryktet är en 6,7-tums OLED (120Hz), 4nm-chippet Dimensity 7200 Ultra, dubbla 50MP-kameror och en 32MP frontkamera.
This report is being released simultaneously on File770 and Genre Grapevine and is also available to download as an e-book epub file and as a PDF. By Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford “You acquire information and you convey the … Continue reading →
“I’m not eating the dog food because the dog food tastes good. It’s dog food. It’s complete trash. I’m eating the dog food because the dog needs to learn her place.”
Yes, Smudge eats the dog food from time to time. Yes, the dog seems confused about this. But she also doesn’t get in his way. That said, Charlie will happily push Smudge out of the way if she thinks he’s about to get a treat that she’s not going to get. She gives as good as she gets, is what I’m saying.
“You wouldn’t steal a car. You wouldn’t steal a handbag,” said that infamous 2000s anti-piracy commercial from the Motion Picture Association. “Piracy is stealing.”
I mean, the little bugger’s basically invisible until like ten feet away…
I’ve seen coyotes do this in real life. Just like in predator, I was just watching some kind of weird shimmer going through the sagebrush. Even though I knew what it was I couldn’t make myself see the dog.
I went in for a physical the other day. Now, I was sick at that time — not real sick, not COVID, probably RSV since that was going around, and since also the transmission timeline tracks. I was in the middle of it and honestly, still have a really irritating cough (though, be advised, nothing serious, just annoying). I went in with a mask on.
Nobody at the doctor’s office was wearing a mask. Lady at the front desk: “Oh, you don’t have to wear that!” That said, while pointing at my mask. I say, I’ve got a cold, she lets it go. I then fill out the paperwork that talks about my current situation: what meds I’m taking, have I been in surgery, etc.
Then, the nurse lady comes and gets me. First thing she says, pointing at my mask: “You don’t need to wear that in here.” She says it like it’s a favor to me, like, oh, honey, we’re not going to be mean and make you wear that big ol’ horrible ugly mask around your beautiful breathing hole and your luxurious food-catcher of a beard, why don’t you just pop that thing off and suck in a lungful of America.
You don’t need to wear that in here?
Well, I fucking do, SANDRA, because as it turns out, the doctor’s office is where the sick people go. It’s like going to the pharmacy. You mask anywhere, do it in the pharmacy. Everybody in there is horking up lung beef. The respiratory illness is so thick in the air you can catch it on your tongue like snowflakes. I go there, or the doctor’s office, sick people are going to be present. That’s the deal, obviously, wtf. I don’t want what they have, and nobody present should want what I have, what the fuck.
I say, again, I’m sick. I’ll keep the mask on, thanks.
Then she measures me and all that shit, and says, somewhat aggressively, “You are not 5’8″.”
“What?”
“You have it down that you’re five feet eight inches.”
“Okay.”
“You’re only five feet seven and three-quarters.”
“…okay. S… sorry?”
It was such a weird ding, I still don’t know what to make of it? Like, “Hah, gotcha, you were pretending to be a NORMAL HUMAN with a NORMAL HUMAN HEIGHT, but I have discovered a GNOME AMONGST US.”
So then Nurse Sandra, not her name, asks what medications I’m taking and if I’ve had surgery and all those same health questions, making me think that I filled that shit out in the waiting room and then they immediately took the form and threw it in the trash. “Fuck this piece of paper,” they say, with vigor and spite. Fine. Whatever. Then we go throughs some new questions, the fun ones about, “So, who in your family is dead now, and what did they die from?” And that’s a fun little litany to recite.
Nurse takes my blood pressure. It’s high. Not like, blood is about to squirt out of my eyes high, but like mid-high, and that’s odd, because my blood pressure is never high. So, that’s noted.
She leaves. Doctor comes in.
Now, my doctor has the bedside manner of a lamp. Some may find this comforting but you can’t joke with him, you’ll learn nothing about him, he knows nothing about you — he is simply present, like if one of those grocery store robots were a doctor.
Oh, also, you also get like, one question. If you go in for WEIRD ELBOW, you talk to him about WEIRD ELBOW and you get the fuck out. Do not ask him about the ODD EAR GURGLE. He does not want to talk about that. You’re signed up for a WEIRD ELBOW session. You got EAR GURGLE, that’s a different appointment, and this train is a-rollin’, pal.
So, he sits down.
And he says
wait for it
wait for it
waaaaaaait for it
“You don’t have to wear that.”
That, meaning, presumably, my mask.
(Better that than, say, my pants. “You don’t have to wear those dungarees,” he says, a coy twinkle in his once-dead eyes.)
I sigh, and explain, well, there’s a lot of sickness going around, and also, I am presently sick.
When I say this, he visibly flinches and asks, with serious panic:
“Do you have COVID?”
And I need you to understand here that in that exact moment I proved undeniably that I have a superpower, and that superpower is unshakeable willpower. Because I really, really wanted to take my mask off and then answer, confidently, “Oh, yeah, it’s COVID.” Just before coughing.
I did not do this, thus confirming I am a good person.
But I mean, what the fuck, they don’t ask before I get there if I had COVID. They don’t supply tests. They just gleefully tell me to take off my mask. I absolutely could’ve had COVID. And given how glibly the entire office treated the situation, I’d think they actually don’t care very much about COVID — or any other illness! — at all.
(Which is why I mask there!)
So, he then asks, and once again, please wait for it, wait for it —
“What medications are you taking?” And then, you know, have I had surgery, who in my family is alive and how did the dead ones die.
At this point I’m fairly convinced that I’m being punked, like this is some kind of joke, right? They all tell me, ha ha, no masks, also, please give us the same information you just gave to the last three people. Is anybody writing this down? Two of the people seem to be tapping it into a fucking iPad, but at this point I’m pretty sure they’re just playing Wordle. There is literally no continuity of information. I sigh, and I tell him the information AGAIN.
So, he says, “You’re still on the lansoprazole.”
Meaning, my heartburn meds. Proton pump inhibitors.
OTC, yes, yep, I take it every day.
Last year, he asked me this question, and I said yes, and he said, “OTC? I’ll give you a prescription for the prescription dose,” which is twice as powerful, I guess, but I said I didn’t need it, and he gave me the prescription anyway. I asked him then, “Well, I hear there are some risks with the PPIs, so I dunno if I should get a bigger dose when arguably I should wean off this one maybe?” And he said those studies aren’t really great, don’t worry, get the prescription, you dolt. So me, the dolt, said fine. (I did get the prescription. I did not take any. I still have the bottle.)
This year, he says, “You should probably try to get off that.”
That, meaning, the thing he wanted me to be on last year at a higher dose.
He says to just take a lesser heartburn med, I say those work but not like the PPIs work, and we’ve had this conversation before, and he’s like, “Well maybe we oughta get you scoped to see what’s going on.” I also explain last year he didn’t seem that concerned and wanted me on a higher dose.
The doc shrugs that off. Like, so what.
Okayyyy. I’m not opposed to changed thinking. Changed thinking is good! But this isn’t presented as changed thinking, it’s just, wild spasms from one direction to the next.
Then: time to address blood pressure. It’s high. I don’t know why it’s high. It’s been low all my life, except when I’m sick. And, during this appointment (and even now, a little), I’m sick, so maybe that? Also… I had COVID over the summer. And COVID seems to be consistent with a risk of triggering a rise in blood pressure after the fact. Doctor waves this off. Says it’s because I’m basically a fat piece of shit. Not his words, precisely, but he said blah blah blah, high BMI, blah blah blah, I could stand to lose 50 (!) lbs. Which, I mean, feels like a big suggestion? “Hey, you should lose 22% of yourself.” I have not been that thin since *checks notes* high school.
“We need to whittle you down to your teenage weight” does not seem like a healthy, or even doable, suggestion.
And then he’s on about cholesterol. “Your cholesterol is high.” I haven’t even tested this year, but it was high last year, and it has been my entire life. Not one test has ever come back without it. It’s familiar. I dunno. We’re Eastern European. Pork fat is in our blood, literally. My grandmother had it, but okay, she cooked everything in lard. My mother had it, but she was thin as a bird and ate very little. Father, yep, sister, yep, cholesterol. We’re just made of the shit. We’re like animated wax figures, except, fatty blood goop. And to be clear, not one of these people ever had a cardiac event. Cancer was what killed them, not cholesterol. But he’s like, “Well, it’s bad and you need to be on a statin.” I tell him everybody I know who went on one did pretty poorly, from mood changes to muscle pains to headaches to diabetes to depression/fatigue — obviously, this is artisanal data (aka anecdotes), but if you Google statins and side effects, holy crap, it’s a lot. A lot of people with a lot of problems. And he’s like, nah that’s fine, it’s rare, you need to be on a statin. It’s familial, I need to be taking the pills. I don’t want to be taking the pills, but no other alternative is on the table, from his view. Okayyyyy.
“You need to get a colonoscopy,” he says.
I tell him, yeah, I know, I’m scheduled for one in a few weeks. “Because you have to get one at this age,” he insists, and here is another dose of irony, because at age 45, 46, and 47, I told him, “They changed the guidelines, I can get a colonoscopy now,” and he said, “no they didn’t, not until 50, sorry,” every fucking time. Now, now he’s like, “WELL YOU BETTER DO IT, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN WAITING FOR.”
The appointment is over, then, and I say, with great reluctance, “I think you have to check my prostate.” Which means, y’know, the ol’ wiggly finger test. One of our least most dignified tests during a physical, for either of us. Last year he did it. This year he said, “You’re not at risk until 50.”
And I’m like, motherfucker, you JUST ASKED ME five minutes ago about all the deaths in my family, and I said, as I have said every time, my FATHER died from *does jazz hands* PROSTATE CANCER. Which is why I get the prostate checked. It’s not because I enjoy the experience! It isn’t a treat for me! There’s no romance! No Lindt truffle gently pressed into my mouth! It’s unpleasant for both of us. (Though I note, no joke, I had a doctor many years ago compliment me during the process saying, and I quote, my sphincter had “good snap.” As if it were a bratwurst he was biting into instead of a butthole his finger was plundering. I guess he meant my nether-ring returned to form easily, like a rubber-band? Better that than a blown-out pair of elastic underpants, one supposes.)
Well, no such compliment from this current doctor. I remind him that, hey, hello, my father died not from cholesterol but from eating a big ol’ bowl of Oops, All Prostate Cancer, and he says, crestfallen, “Oh.” Then he thinks about it and you can see the war on his face where he’s deciding if he’s going to glove-up and do the deed. The slot machine in his eyes stops spinning and it lands on, mmm, not today, Satan.
Instead he just says, “We’ll just have the blood test check your PSA numbers, no digital test necessary.”
And so endeth the appointment. Now, I get it, this is far from the worst anyone has experienced — and certainly women get a lot more handily dismissed than I do. (God only knows what trans people have to deal with at the average American doctor; I imagine it is, how you say, unideal.) When I had COVID this past go-round, they gave me Paxlovid fast. My wife got COVID and they told her to eat rocks. I had to call and kick over a bunch of bee-hives telling them they were being sexist by denying her the same medication I was getting, and they finally relented and gave her the drug, too. So, even there, a disparity from the same doctor.
I bring this up because, you know, I find when you have a lack of trust in one doctor, it kind of cascades outward — the doubt, the distrust, it reverberates. It means I’m less interested in going to him for problems, for care, because either I can only bring up the one thing that’s bothering me, or worse, he’s just gonna say “BMI cholesterol” loudly at my broken ankle or my pulsating neck tumor. When I get inconsistent, incomplete, or outright wrong information from a health provider, it dents and dings my overall feelings about healthcare in general — and my feelings about healthcare in general, as a capitalist endeavor driven by money as much as (if not more than) actual health, ain’t great as-is.
It’s not just that they’re wrong sometimes. Science is wrong often! Then we adapt, we course correct, we learn and grow. But healthcare providers seem extra resistant to that growth, to any new thinking, and are still just as happy throwing antibiotics at a clearly viral infection even though it… doesn’t do anything, like teachers who give an excess of homework just because parents demand it, not because it actually improves anything at all. And once you start to doubt the doctor, once you start to doubt why they want to just throw medication at a thing instead of trying to root out a cause or find deeper adjustments, that doubt swells and blooms.
And it becomes much easier to end up in the place where you’re questioning good advice, where you’re doubting settled science, because your doctor — your representative in this strange world! — isn’t someone you trust as easily as you’d like. It’s like holes in rotten wood — spores are going to get in there and grow, and those spores could be stuff like anti-vaxxer nonsense bullshit. Right? We have to be our own advocates in medical spaces, but being our own advocates means… trying to know ourselves but also trying to know more than our own doctors know. Which leads us to potentially harmful sources of information and, of course, as information fidelity online is getting worse and worse (search engine enshittification!), the fidelity of good medical information is worse, too. Made worse, by exploitative actors and by unregulated unfettered capitalism.
Not everyone is well-versed in critically-thinking every problem, and it’s easy to be like, “Well, yeah, my doctor was wrong here, so when they tell me to get vaccinated, I’m like, hey, maybe I should question that a little bit. And then I found one of the Kennedy’s saying that nature is good and vaccines are bad and I agree with the first part and my doctor is a dickhead soooo…”
What I’m suggesting here is that your doctor is your first line of defense against all the bullshit, and all too often, they’re a very, very weak defense. I know friends who had doctors tell them stuff like, “Whoa, don’t get that COVID vaccine, it changes your dang DNA.” Like, no it fucking does not. But there they are. Medical personnel. Saying it. Telling you that, or not to wear a mask, or take these antibiotics for a non-bacterial problem, or, or, or.
It just kinda sucks.
I have no solution here, I have no deeper thoughts, I just want to yell and sigh and grump a bit here. But also I wanted to point out that bad experiences with doctors has a knock-on ripple effect. (And no, I am not an anti-vaxxer, give me the shots, get a mask on my face when needed, and I try to take my health seriously, erm, maybe sometimes too seriously, given that I have hypochondriac obsessiveness at times.)
Again, tl;dr I don’t like my doctor, and I need to find a new one.
Which is a sucky journey, even suckier than like, buying a mattress. And buying a mattress is a journey into Hell.
INTO HELL.
Anyway.
Have a nice day.
Buy my books or I explode, like the bus from Speed.
Worldcon Intellectual Property (W.I.P.) is the California non-profit corporation that holds the service marks of the World Science Fiction Society (www.wsfs.org) including the mark “Hugo Award”. In the midst of social media discussions about the continued viability of these marks, … Continue reading →
