therebegold's recent activity

  1. Comment on Tell me about your favourite web-based logic puzzles! in ~games

    therebegold
    Link
    I am overwhelmed by the response! I am excited to look at each of these suggestions. Thank you everyone for taking the time to respond. These will provide many hours of amusement during those long...

    I am overwhelmed by the response! I am excited to look at each of these suggestions. Thank you everyone for taking the time to respond. These will provide many hours of amusement during those long months at sea.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on Disabled woman put in UK nursing home against her will says she feels 'betrayed' in ~health

    therebegold
    Link
    This is my job and so commenting using full sentences and structure feels too much like work, so I've just scratched out some key points: a news story like this will always be missing information...

    This is my job and so commenting using full sentences and structure feels too much like work, so I've just scratched out some key points:

    • a news story like this will always be missing information from the health care org's side. Even though the NHS is speaking about the patient in this article, the language is very vague because they cannot share personal information about the patient. Sometimes a decision makes sense once you learn the details, but in this case, we (the public) will never know those details.
    • that being said, health care administrators can and do make some truly insane patient care decisions. And they are almost never thinking about some grand theoretical "What is fair in a resource constrained system?" (It is more like the way @Greg described it: "is there a way to provide that at a more reasonable cost?”)
    • They're usually following some policy but policies leave a lot of room for interpretation, and wherever there is room for discretion, there is room for a human to completely miss the substantive aim of the policy.
    • Whatever policies they are going by are often outdated or (more often) don't account for the particular circumstances of the patient in question. This results in patient care decisions that follow policy, but together amount to very bad patient care outcomes.
    • And finally, diffusion of responsibility is a constant issue for people like this patient who might be an n of 1, and who might not fit into the neat categories of types of patients and the types of care those patients need, or the amount of care hours needed. With complex care patients (which this patient appears to be), there seems to be a constant struggle where administrators enforce policies (with little regard for the disruption it causes the patient) while at the same time claiming they are not the originators of the policy, and so cannot do anything to change it. Essentially, different parts of the health care system point at each other and say "It's their policy, we're just brutally enforcing it."
    • and one more thing I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else yet is that this patient is only 33, and nursing homes are designed and run with the elderly in mind, not younger disabled people. The activities, the food, the amenities will cater to elderly people. It is also an institutional setting, so it is run according to the schedules and needs of the staff, giving very little agency to its residents. I could not imagine living in one as a 33 year old. I wish I could give some examples of how disabled people have their autonomy stripped away in these settings, but I'd have to anonymize them and I'm too tired to do that right now. It's like kindergarten.
    15 votes

  3. Tell me about your favourite web-based logic puzzles!

    ~games Ask (recommendations)
    I was never a wordle fanatic, but I am hooked on this Alphable game now https://geoffpevlin.com/games/alphable/. I also play https://cluesbysam.com/. Do people know of other web-based (hopefully...

    I was never a wordle fanatic, but I am hooked on this Alphable game now https://geoffpevlin.com/games/alphable/. I also play https://cluesbysam.com/.

    Do people know of other web-based (hopefully free) logic puzzles like these? I like the daily format, but wouldn't limit myself to that if there are others that are also interesting.

    I've done all of the https://www.rustylake.com/ games too, which I quite enjoyed, but these types of puzzles require a little bit more time investment that I don't really have right now. (I also hated that some of the "logic" in those games did not seem to make sense to me, and I'd have to google the answer to continue with the game.)

    I also like https://timeguessr.com/ but don't return to that one as frequently because I can't play it on my phone.

    I really like in-person escape games but they are expensive and vary drastically in quality, so was very happy to find these types of games scratch that same itch.

    43 votes

  4. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

  5. Comment on Books: Your personal year in review for 2025 in ~books

    therebegold
    Link
    I was a constant reader in my youth, then stopped during university and only really picked it back up now in my 30s. (I am forever thankful to Susanna Clarke for that. I read Jonathan Strange & Mr...

    I was a constant reader in my youth, then stopped during university and only really picked it back up now in my 30s. (I am forever thankful to Susanna Clarke for that. I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell cover to cover in about a week. I was hooked!) My return to reading has been slow and I only read a couple this year. almost all were what I like to call "devastating" (meaning "oh no, this has revealed a T R U T H to me about myself that I was not prepared for"). In no particular order, I read:

    1. "The last days of new Paris : a novella" by China Miéville (Was in a list of recommendations on Tildes for someone looking for surreal fiction. It was certainly surreal. Took me a while to get into it, but enjoyed it once I did.)
    2. "Sure, I'll join your cult : a memoir of mental illness and the quest to belong anywhere" by Maria Bamford (I find Maria Bamford amazingly funny. She also straddles the line between tragedy and comedy so perfectly that I see how easily they are one and the same.)
    3. "Emergency contact" by Mary H. K. Choi (Technically a YA novel but her adult fiction "Yolk" was so good and I needed more of her kind of unapologetically millennial realness.)
    4. "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects" by Marshall McLuhan and illustrated by Quentin Fiore (I am too stupid to really understand McLuhan's written work. Turns out illustrations are very helpful to me for understanding his ....theories(?). In any case, "massage" is not a typo. My brain feels gooey whenever I read this book.)
    5 votes