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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • …they put just enough oxygen in those helium canisters consumers can buy to stop people…

    I’m not so sure that’s true… At least, I know for certain it wasn’t true for at least one brand of consumer grade helium canisters sold in the US, around 12 or 13 years ago.

    In the early 2010s, I worked the day shift as an EMT for a small town ambulance company. One morning, right as I was clocking in for the 5am shift change, a call came in for an adult male unresponsive. My partner and I didn’t think much of it - it was a college town and we worked the Friday morning shift, so it wasn’t unusual to get early calls for drunk frat kids passed out in a yard from the Thirsty Thursday parties - don’t get me wrong, these were often serious situations, but run of the mill stuff for the job. So we told the overnight volunteers to go home, jumped in the rig and got on our way to the scene.

    I started to get a bad feeling on the way over though, because it was at the local fishing pier, which was in a park - kind of a scenic place, not really near the college - but my partner played it down, said rush week had just finished so it’s probably some pledge bullshit or something.

    We arrive at the park, pull into the parking lot, and see the police lights off to the right - the dock is off to the left, with a small beach to the right, with the parking lot overlooking the coast - the police officer has back against the trunk of a grey Nissan, thumbs in his vest, head hung low - looks up at the ambulance makes eye contact with me and shakes his head.

    We get out of the rig, ask him what’s going on, he tells us that we’ll need to pronounce, and it isn’t pretty.

    I walk around the driver side of the car and see a kid in the front seat. He couldn’t have been older than 20. There was a clear plastic bag over his head, the edges pulled taught to his neck with a length of string tied in a bow, the bag mostly inflated so it wasn’t touching his face. There was one end of a tube inside the bag, held in place with an extra knot from the string. The other end traced back to a tank sitting on the front passenger seat, still in its cardboard box with pictures of happy children playing with balloons on the side. There was a bottle of brown liquor in the cupholder.

    I’ll never forget the blank stare of his semi-open eyes, set in his young, handsomely featured, yet now lifeless face - his skin the ashen, mottled, and pale blue-grey color of the recently deceased.

    It was immediately obvious this young man had parked there for one last nice view of either a sunset or sunrise, drank up some courage, donned his gear, and drifted off to a final sleep.

    I stood there only for a moment, but it felt like an eternity passed as I absorbed the emotional intensity of what had transpired there. I regained my sense of composure with the crack of my partner shattering the driver-door’s window, saw him reach to check for a pulse, turning his head away after a moment while waiting for the full, painfully requisite 60 seconds, pronounced him dead, and we were back in the truck on our way back to the station.

    I’m still not right from that call.

    I really hope things have changed, and that manufacturers are required to add oxygen or bitter compounds or something that prevent this kind of thing from happening.

    If you’ve read down this far, I thank you. Writing this out was helpful for me to process - I took a few minor liberties in writing this story, mostly to obfuscate potential recognition, and for dramatic effect - but made no changes to what I felt and saw in my description of that scene.

    And lastly, if you’re struggling with your mental health or substances - you’re not alone. This world can be hard and cruel, terribly isolating and dark - but there is warmth and kindness too. If you feel like hurting yourself, please don’t. You are loved. You will be missed by the ones who love you. If you’re in crisis, and there’s someone you know and trust, call them and talk to them. If they cant talk or don’t pick up, or if there’s no one you feel you can trust, call a crisis prevention hotline any time, any day, and they will listen to you with the utmost respect, dignity, and empathy.

    [US and Canada] Call 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline. Call 911 for life-threatening/imminent situations. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/suicide-prevention

    [Most other countries] Call your local emergency line, most often it’s 112 if you’re outside of North America - they will direct you to help if you’re in need.

    Additional information: https://www.cnet.com/health/suicide-hotlines-crisis-hotlines-to-call-when-you-need-help/











  • Adguard and pihole rely on DNS redirects - googs has already implemented “secure DNS” for Chrome in Android, which circumvents network level/local DNS by connecting to a Google owned DNS, serving content using those listings instead.

    They’ll likely bring this to all flavors of Chrome.

    Yes, one should use Firefox. Yes that could also avoid the android problem, but also no, because Google forces chrome at weird times (eg, some apps will load a minimal web viewer for hyperlinks links, without leaving the app - sometimes apps don’t respect the default browser setting and instead just use chrome.

    🤷



  • Though I have opinions, I will not take the bait, as it is not relevant to my point whether humans distancing themselves from nature is “good” or “bad.”

    I think my signal is pretty clear - Your “it’s natural” argument fails entirely when one picks and chooses the aspects of human life to which they apply it.

    As an example - you wake up in your climate controlled house, put on your synthetic fiber clothing, jump into your Ford F150 Pickup Truck, Drive to a gas station, pick up a mountain dew in a plastic bottle, and buy a slice of pizza - in all that context, your big brained argument is that it is more natural for that pizza to have animal pepperoni and dairy cheese, vs plant-based alternatives.

    Tell me, who is the clown in this situation?




  • “cOnSuMiNg MeAt Is nAtUrAl”

    Setting aside the inherent ethnocentrism of this statement, which, in classic Western fashion, completely bulldozes the many cultures that have thrived on entirely plant-based diets for centuries, possibly millennia…

    This is still a shit argument, when you realize that EVERYTHING humanity does aims to separate ourselves from “nature,” and move beyond what is “natural.”

    If we actually lived according to nature, we wouldn’t have plastics, cell phones, cars, airplanes, air conditioning, and all the other myriad things that make our soft squishy lives easier.

    But you keep chowing down on your “aLl-NaTuRaL” chicken wings and Mountain Dew, you fucking neanderthal.