skruffie

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our fates are entwined whether you like it or not you stupid bastard

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the people that are like "i wish people cared more about the loss of democracy instead of the loss of an app" don't realize the loss of the app was part of the loss of democracy and it being restored by the man that is destroying democracy is also part of the loss of democracy

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there's a post going around asking for your most millennial take and mine is that the livejournal icon ecosystem was essential for a certain type of fan and this loss of critical habitat is why the bios of so many people under 25 are Like That

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man I've been writing out this Thing about trying to summarize my government job experience and unpack it in a more raw way as I try to stumble my way into healing my creativity again, but like

I had this moment where I was realizing I barely remember 2021 at all. It took me several paragraphs of writing to remember I did the sequential arts workshop (YOU KNOW, THE YEAR LONG ONLINE RESIDENCY) that got me published in a fucking anthology which was a BIG DEAL FOR ME

It's the exact kind of blanks in memory I have for 2010-2014 where I know I had honest to god objective trauma happening quite often

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This is going to be a weird and kind of cringe post: tiktok was the thing that got me back into a spiritual practice.

I had been on youtube four years ago and a compilation of "witchtok" videos popped up as a suggestion, and I thought it'd be fun to see what the witches of 2020 were up to. I had been Wiccan with my family when I was younger and then just kind of wavered between atheist-but-open-to-spiritual-awakenings and vaguely-interested-in-the-occult, so I was curious about what modern pagans were doing.

In the late 90s and early 00s, the primary books we had were by Silver Ravenwolf so I had this sort of expectation when I was young that you needed to keep your religion a secret. I have some books now (not written by her) that are from that same era that talk about regular hearth witchcraft but also has sections of "what to do if your spiritual practices come against you during custody hearings" and shit like that. I don't actually know how much of that was a true risk, but nowadays there are still places here in the US and likely elsewhere that have antiquated laws that ban witchy things, so... shrug

But still. There was the part of me from childhood that was like "nobody can know I'm a witch" but there were these compilation videos of people sharing their practices, doing skits involving deities, teaching spells, and my first impression is that the modern witch is very into spell jars. I was satisfied doing my little tarot readings as a hobby and reading about mythology but I had no consistent practice at all.

Then I watched a compilation video. This occurred like the same week a friend of mine gifted me a pendulum and the same week I had pulled a card from my deck that just instinctively felt very significant without me really understanding why. I was just minding my business, watching these clips, and someone had done one to talk about a deity they worship. I was going to guess it was Hades with how they were doing their makeup, but then it turned out to be Ares and this clip was set to "Come Along" by Cosmo Sheldrake, and like. How do I say this.

I had a very intense emotional reaction?

Like I didn't cry or freak out or anything, but there was a very immediate and noticeable draw I had to it. There was a bunch of other stuff that was happening around the same time, a lot that I've forgotten by now, but it could be coincidental or it could be spiritual. Over the last four years I've a few experiences while rediscovering my spiritual practice that after exhausting the mundane explanations I couldn't figure out how or why. They just are.

This was also when I was still working at the state, within the first year of the pandemic, so having a spiritual practice gave me a routine. I carved out a space for it in our little apartment so I had a spot to sit at when I was overwhelmed. I started learning about Hellenic polytheism. Moving last year kind of threw my whole practice out of whack and I still need to get the rhythm back on it, but I know that it's always there. It was something that came to me in a time when I really needed something to crawl out of the very dark place I was falling into, and the person who had done the video that sparked it all was the first one I followed. She stopped posting long before the ban though.

Tiktok objectively was full of a lot of bullshit, especially on the witchtok side. There were a lot of infamous incidents that happened, big personalities that turned out to be grifters, scammers, etc. When I finally signed up on the app I stayed out of the actual witchtok community but I followed a lot of folks from it (and still do on other platforms). The amount of misinformation on that app felt like I was mainlining pure stupidity at times, but it was fun to laugh at. Importantly, despite how stupid it was, it should still be allowed to exist.

My spiritual practice has kept me grounded during a very difficult time in my life and I'll be leaning on it in this coming four years of rising fascism. Watching the app go down is just the canary in the coal mine for our first amendment rights. Hail Hekate, Hail Ares. Let's fucking go.

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Hi. I work in optical. I see the vision plan(s) through this exact same thing on a near daily basis and it is almost always senior citizens who use it in our area, and they almost always say the same things when coming in:

"They told me I have $300 (or whatever) for my glasses", and

"I'm on a very limited income so I only want what's covered by my insurance."

What is happening in reality is that these patients call the insurance, the people there tell them that their frame allowance is the cost that the insurance will pay for their glasses, but that's the thing. It's a frame allowance. That's what the insurance pays for the frame, and the lenses are separate. Seniors have a lot of stuff happening with their eyes and almost always they need things like thinner or more durable lenses, photochromatic, multi-focal, the works. They also need to do the health screening, which we try to encourage retinal imaging over dilation over because it captures more of the back of the eye but isn't fully covered by like... any insurance company except a few plans.

So these elderly come in and I have to tell them "Your insurance company lied to you." I'll just straight up say it.

Say we have somebody with a prescription like this:

OD: -5.25 / -1.00 / 097 / ADD +2.50

OS: -5.75 / -1.25 / 008 / ADD +2.50

These are going to be thick lenses in the material that's fully covered by basically any plan, which is CR-39 or basic plastic. While CR39 doesn't risk having refractive errors like other materials do, it's thick and heavy and also can break a lot easier compared to things like polycarbonate or trivex. You know, the population that can also be a fall risk. This is a prescription where I recommend a thinner lens (the thinnest we sell is a 1.67 index), but the thinner lenses need anti-glare. Say they're not a fall risk but they want a progressive so they get the full reading add.

With our pricing where I work and this Medicare advantage plan, the lens cost is roughly over $300 because the advantage plan prices the best non glare at $95 out of pocket. This cost is with a digital progressive which is the best kind of multifocal because it doesn't have as much distortion. It's also wildly expensive for something all of us are going to need in our lifetime if we're lucky. But hey, they can get Ray Ban frames fully covered with their allowance!

Then they ask "If I buy a cheaper frame can the rest of the cost go toward the lenses?" and I have to say no, it doesn't. Why? Because vision insurance is a nightmare.

The prescription above is a fake example and not based off a real person, but this is a real frame fit and order that I helped someone with who had this plan. They did a line bifocal which is thankfully covered by insurances, but had a distance correction strong enough to where I typically recommend the 1.67 index lens. This is in CR39 because they had zero dollars to spend on glasses. Just look at the difference in lens thickness even when the astigmatism is mild. + prescriptions (farsighted) are convex lenses and I specifically had helped style them into a round frame and adjusted it so their eyes were as centered as possible because I knew the lenses would be thick, and the end result actually made them really happy despite the weight. Rounder and smaller frames mean lenses that aren't as thick, centering the eyes also helps a ton too, and getting the right width on the frame and not getting something oversized are all important factors too.

There's a lot that can be said about how every healthcare industry has everything absurdly priced, and glasses are no exception. This industry is famously riddled with monopolies, often with a lot of these insurance companies owning the frame brands and then closing down independent optical labs to send orders to their own labs, thus continuing to line their pockets. I don't know if Spectera specifically owns any frame brands on the market, but the opposite can happen too. Luxxotica, who owns like 90% of everything in optical, also owns Eyemed which is a vision insurance company I also see through Medicare plans.

Government administered and fed with endless capitalism.

You know what since I’ve got a ton of new followers because my post on puberty blockers took off and people apparently want to see me rant, I’m gonna get up on my soapbox for a PSA for tumblr’s aging userbase.

Do not! Get! A Medicare Advantage plan!

Tell your parents not to get one. Tell your aunts and uncles not to get one. Tell your friends not to get one.

Why is that, you might say? Kouri, what is a Medicare Advantage plan, you might say?

tl;dr Medicare is the government healthcare plan for Americans of a certain age or with certain disabilities. It is owned, administered, and operated by the government. You are entitled, if you wish, to outsource your Medicare and have your policy run by a commercial group, such as United HealthCare, Cigna, Aetna, et cetera.

Here’s how it works: For everyone who signs up for, say, a plan that rhymes with Figna Medicare Advantage, Medicare gives Figna a certain amount of money and says ‘use this to take care of this patient’.

You can see where this is going, right? Figna says ‘sure boss! *wink nudge*’ and then shoves as much of that money into their own pockets as possible, and they do that by finding excuses to NOT pay for your medical care.

Medicare Advantage plans are pushed and marketed heavily. They’ll call you. They’ll set up stands in your PCP office to try to encourage you to buy in. They will say things like ‘with Medicare, you have to pay a 20% coinsurance, but with us you only have a 10% coinsurance’ and completely neglect to tell you that having a smaller coinsurance only matters if they approve the fucking care that you need, which often they won’t (while Medicare would have) and if your doctors are willing to accept it, which often they don’t (while they do accept Medicare).

Is Medicare perfect? Absolutely not! I've got my share of bones to pick with them. But simply put:

Medicare is government administered. It is a service. It costs the government money, which is why the GOP is always trying to cut funding to it. Medicare Advantage is corporately administered. It is supposed to make money. Which gives them incentives to deny your care and fuck you over that Medicare simply does not have.

Do not. Get. A Medicare Advantage Plan.

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Made it 18 days into the new year before someone asked me about my name lmaoooo

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i'm sorry i don't know the source of this because it was posted on reddit without credit but i'm obsessed with this

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ASSAD ZAMAN as Armand

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (2024) 2.05 – Don't Be Afraid, Just Start the Tape

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got my new boyfriend from Ikea. Unfortunately he's made of particle board and with a single thrust of my hips I broke him into five pieces

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hey, I was just at "things got better" island and everyone there is talking about how excited they are to meet you

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earlier I was talking about creative burnout with Kaz and how I've been stuck in this for years at this point, and it manifests sometimes even when I'm trying to sit down and write and not just draw. I'm trying to write, decided to try to jog my memory on PTSD because what I wanted to write about was a very traumatized character of mine, and found the blog post I made thinking about my time in state government + creative burnout and trauma.

So I'm like, well, I do probably need a therapist. Bounced around on psychology today to look at therapist profiles, started to get that sorta imposter syndrome of well the job wasn't actually traumatic though, and then thought

well, wasn't it?

I'm writing, but I decided to go back in time and write about the whole job experience! Where I've paused is somewhere in 2020 where I'm realizing the period of April 2020 to like... July is blank for me, and most of 2021 is too. I'm detailing these things about how the stress had such an immediate impact on my physical health, or how I was dismissed about how the job was making my insomnia worse, dismissed about the workload, not to mention the fucking RA process for my adhd

My boss in my current job will sorta joke, but it's not really a joke, about my job PTSD because she gets it. She truly does. I'm resistant to calling the government job traumatic but the physiological response it had in my body and how I'm still dealing with the aftermath years later is making me like... you know

rethink that

EDIT: adding another anecdote about my current boss when we last joked about this. I think I said something to the effect of "yeah, the trauma I have from having too much of a workload??" and she was like "dude. yeah." in complete seriousness

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kaz has introduced a stupidly pretty man into his pathfinder campaign and this is what i've commentated on him so far just on discord alone

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“it could’ve been worse” ok and it also could’ve not happened to you

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what are you guys’ most “tumblr is a website” moments

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My fellow bitches under 5'5. Whatever the money, do not take a job working at a middle school. A fellow adult tried to put me in detention last month and would NOT give up until I showed her my badge proving Yes, The School Hired Me To Work Here. It's not meant for people our height.