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Lemmy has a strong atheism bias. You’d think as much as they cling to the “rationality” of it they’d realize that the stats literally show that religious people live longer. DIYing your own tight knit subcommunity that looks out for each other and have a shared set of traditions to mark both the passage of time and provide a structure for people cope with significant life events is a LOT harder than getting one off the shelf. Like it’s super hard to even find the people who want to do that without accidentally starting a cult. Like I’ve thought about trying to find people to do regular group meditations and create holiday traditions with and then realized I’m literally describing either a cult or something that could easily become one.

And that’s the other thing; most religions have some kind of regular meditation built in on how they relate to the world that usually focus on gratitude and prosocial behavior. Because it’s a tradition that almost always predates modern psychology they don’t always reliably meet those ends but the fact that they often do is a big part of why prayer of some kind is such an enduring tradition in most world religions.

People are so ready to dig on humans even a few centuries back for doing stuff like singing / chanting over an tincture / extract or other concentrated medicine they’re making but how the fuck else were they supposed to time how long it takes for to brew a medicine with a narrow therapeutic range that needs to be exact? They didn’t have fucking kitchen timers!

I do seem to be circling back to dissolving a card in acetone, yeah.

I’m seeing now that there are standalone RFID chips that are already loose. How hard would it be to clone the card to one of those and do I need a chip with a specific length of antenna or other specific quality?

Yes the etsy shops are why she wants one but I feel like I could make one that’s much more elegant. She does not have an apple watch or the means to purchase one. We also both share an interest in esoteric spiritual practices and a wooden implement would be more appropriate than plastic.

I felt like if I could just Frankenstein the visible part of a card chip into a much smaller balsa wood sandwich on the end of a wooden stick (plus decorations obvs) or into a pocket drilled into something like this for $20 and most of that being the card.

How does one get the antenna out too (a subsequent google search indicates that I would still need the surface area of a card which makes this less doable, which is why I asked in the first place, ty).

…although now I’m wondering how hard it would be to buy an RFID chip that’s more appropriately shaped or that has a loose antenna I can string up or down a wrapped handle and clone the gift card.

I rotisserie chicken when I’m actually washing myself (and take down there hose to wash my genitals) but if I’m taking a hot shower to self soothe / emotionally regulate I face away.

Honestly that dude and the person super into dragon sex are actually the best trolls I’ve met. 100% harmless and it’s wild how many people DON’T just hit the block button when they find them annoying. They’re like a built in litmus test for whether a Lemmy user is a fully developed adult who can avoid getting entangled in dumb conversations (which apparently you are).

One dude got into a highly uncivil argument about what constitutes “real physics” on a post of a tumblr screenshot with overwrought prose about… (tbh I don’t remember now but I’m thinking electromagnetism?) then reported the other user. Don’t get me wrong it was bad tumblr prose but like. It’s a genre some people like and a staple of tumblr culture which the comm was about.

Anyway I temp banned them both (I think I did accidentally remove too many comments but anyway) because they were having a toddler level squabble with profanity over tumblr poetry. One of them called me some kinda profanity so I permabanned them and they made a post on power tripping mods and pretty much everyone was like "you know we can still dig out the comments AND your DMs and you’re kinda just a menace… right? Like I woke up and pretty much everyone had already defended me. Anyway I blocked them and moved on with my life. People need to use the block button more often tbh.

And assuming OP has worked in their target specialty for 10+ years not the worst idea. The problem with current NP schools is that they’re banking on the person coming in with more experience than your average PA candidate, so the didactics are less rigorous.

The problem is that they don’t actually require that experience for enrollment or even to award the degree. So you have straight through ADN-to-NP degree mills that can get a newly graduated RN to prescribing medications in like three years of writing essays about philosophy while working 48 hours a week (now with CHATGPT!) which is just unbelievably dangerous.

They do seem to multiply rapidly.

definition of gatekeeping and immeasurably destructive to any community, real or online

so I looked into this because your comment sparked some curiosity and from what I can tell it’s less about the chemical itself and more about how your brain regulates and uses it. There’s also limited evidence as to whether GABA as a dietary supplement is even crossing the blood-brain barrier (where it would cause these effects). The other thing you need to keep in mind with most “natural” supplements is that the FDA regulates them under the F, not the D! Things like melatonin (which I even take personally) are regulated as FOOD, not DRUGS. Drugs have to

• be exactly the chemical they say they are
• in exactly the amounts they say they are per. pill.
• and as over the counter medications have to have approved safe dosages and frequencies on the packaging
• and all pills prescription or not have to have a unique alphanumeric imprint on each pill that can be used to identify it if it is separated from its packaging. Even different doses need unique imprints.

Food needs to:

• mostly probably be the thing it says it is. If it’s a plant it might be a different strain between different manufacturers.
• that plant also might have a variety of other chemical structures in it that aren’t advertised on the bottle.
• say almost whatever the manufacturer slaps on it in terms of dosage or frequency.
• have no imprint whatsoever to identify it if it’s not in the original packaging.

Like I said I use several supplements myself that even have good evidence behind them in terms of safety and efficacy. But you need to be aware of the ways in which they’re regulated differently than drugs and know that you’re gonna have to do a little more research for yourself to really find what’s going to be safe and effective for you. Finding a physician who’s educated in holistic and integrative therapies can be super helpful for something like this.

no good answer due to normal variations in physiology and variations in the specific person’s quality and severity of addiction but in terms of timescale I would say a day-ish? Would be better to ask an ICU RN or MD. At my level and specialty of care (acute psychiatry) and assuming the pt has been screened appropriately by the ED to not already be in high acuity withdrawal (needs medical or ICU) we’re generally not talking minutes to a couple hours but we’re also not talking a week. The scale we use to measure is called the Clinical Institute Withdrawal Assessment.

Depending on the half-life of the medication used for the taper I’m reassessing that score either every 4 hours (ativan) or every 8 (phenobarb). My unit usually does phenobarb because it requires less frequent and precise assessment due to the elongated half-life. And I can always reassess ahead of schedule and give 1 extra dose as a standing PRN order without even needing to call the on-call MD if they’re having breakthrough symptoms.

Also keep in mind that it’s not just mortality we’re worried about. I can’t make withdrawal fun but I definitely don’t want it to suck any more than it has to. There’s also a lot of permanent but nonfatal damage that can happen in the meantime. And it’s actually also an issue of my safety and that of my coworkers. My subspecialty is actually specifically the management of violence and drug withdrawal is an item on MOST violence risk assessment scales. Actually the only one I don’t see it on irrc is the BROSET and that’s just because it’s a rapid 6-12h tool and the CIWA is already addressing that under the agitation and paranoia items at that time interval.

The paranoid delusions and audiovisual AND tactile hallucinations are no joke. One of the COMMON reasons I get called to medical units for backup is CIWA patients because we can’t take them until they’re on the tail end of a high dose taper but the medicine nurses aren’t always equipped to address the psychiatric symptoms and there’s more equipment available to throw / swing at them.

tbh I’m not on the research end I’m on the butt end with the people experiencing it directly (which is where I wanna be the most I wanna do is maybe teach someday) so I have empirical backup but most of my knowledge is experiential. I guess the best way I can describe it is that certain stuff just starts giving you anxiety. Nurse knowledge is like 2-3 years of following strict rules you learned in school then when you hit your stride something crystallizes in your brain and you can just look at certain patients through that lens and your nervous system just says “absofuckinglutely not, no.” So I can’t cite stats I can just tell you where the needle is on how anxious it makes me. Which is it’s own type of knowledge.

it’s wild to me that they’re considered progressive when like. my aunt is literally an old white bitch that romanticizes the kennedys as “american royalty.” Like don’t get me wrong they’re way better but like in the sense that they don’t want to just like. Shoot me. They still want me to know my place as a peasant. They’re not gonna do anything that’s going to risk them actively losing any power in the normal electional way. They’re just crossing their fingers that the other guys won’t just like. Start shooting. We’re reaching the point where it’s the dems that are regressive in that they want everything to stay the same and it’s the alt right that’s pushing for change. It’s terrifying genocidal change but it’s attractive to a certain segment of the population on the sole merit that at least it’s technically change.

fun fact; drugs that act on your GABA nervous system (benzodiazepines such as xanax, also barbiturates and alcohol) are the only drugs that will kill you outright on withdrawal.

Stimulant withdrawal (amphetamines, cocaine, caffeine, nicotine) causes headache, confusion, fatigue, and occasionally suicidal ideation. Opiate withdrawal (oxycodone, heroin, fentanyl), causes anxiety and flu-like symptoms that can be fatal if severe enough (dehydration, GI complications) but, only in the same way that a flu can, and do not kill you outright. (THC / marijuana withdrawal is the chillest, usually only causing mild irritability and appetite loss, which the others do to a much greater extent).

Benzo (and other GABA active withdrawals) causes a rebound of your nervous system’s stress and fight or flight system that cascades from:

1. extreme anxiety and most of the same flu-like symptoms as opiates then into
2. vivid hallucinations (often of being covered in insects including tactile sensation) and paranoid delusions, then finally into
3. back-to-back seizures that eventually result in nervous system failure, hypoxia, and death.

The old-school word for this is “the delirium tremens” or “DTs.”

If you are using these substances at a high enough and especially an unsustainable dose (which can cause respiratory depression / hypoxia and weakness of gait / traumatic head injury, similarly to an opiate overdose) you will need to be withdrawn in a either a specialized rehab with medical capabilities or if the addiction is severe enough a hospital or even specifically an intensive care unit. It’s possible that if you’re a binge drinker (drink large quantities but don’t drink at all some days) you may not need special withdrawal precautions. That said, addicts often minimize the extent of their addiction early in the recovery process so a lot of facilities that are unequipped to manage this type of withdrawal will refuse those patients outright until they’ve been medically evaluated. I’ve actually had a few patients were the ED was like “oh yeah he’s a lil jittery but not actively withdrawing” and a few hours into being on the unit they can barely bring a cup of water to their mouth without spilling it.

Obviously the history of legislative bans on alcohol is a great example of why criminalizing substance use is pretty much always a losing battle but it’s also WILD that alcohol is legal when specifically compared to marijuana being illegal.

This has been a PSA.

One of my points of pride is actually using my teeth. A light scrape or nibble dramatically increases tactile sensitivity and emotional intensity. If you know how to simultaneously integrate the tongue and lips properly you can really leverage that “crazy girl sex” that drives dudes fucking nuts. I may have had years of therapy but there’s a few holdovers just because crazy girls do it better. The other big thing is gregariousness because once you learn to use it with real day-to-day support and respect for people it just magnifies it.

One of my coworkers said she loves working with me because she’s not scared of running into problems because I have the solution to 90% of what she runs into. I was like bitch. what. but then I remembered she doesn’t fight me on having to take charge nurse all the time and like. A few weeks ago she got in trouble for something one of the junior nurses didn’t handle quite right (tbh none of us would though that pt should not have been on our unit) and getting in trouble for shit other people do is exactly why I fight like hell not to be charge nurse ever so like. Just for you. None of you other people. If you’ve ever asked “well why can’t Apy be charge she has the most experience!??!???!” Exactly. Y’all stupid and idw be on the hook for your shit. I’d rather just solve the problem on the sidelines and you can take all the credit for whether it works or not (and like 90% of the time it will so 🫅)

Also if I have to deal with that demented old bint of a house supervisor imma throw hands (although months ago I said to myself that if she writes me up for a third bullshit that’s found completely unsubstantiated I’m filling a complaint of targeted harassment and I think someone actually alerted her to that subtext because I think she got in trouble for the two complaints she wrote about me. One because when they pulled the tapes for me being insubordinate she was standing over me in the nurses station shouting at me for questioning a safety issue and one for snooping in my patients charts trying to find dirt on me). And that second one she came to the unit to try to rub it in my face and I had that charge nurse I mentioned with me and just giggled in her face the whole time and she kept saying “I don’t know what your problem is with me” and I just really wish I could’ve been there when someone pointed out that girl you are the one picking these fights!

If you’re able to access primary care they may be able to bill your insurance for an EKG yearly. Wouldn’t catch everything but might notice if you pick up some a-fib or another lowkey issue that might snowball (although the main issue with afib is usually clots and afib clots usually hit the brain not the heart iirc).

Honestly I’ve spent a good part of my career working with men specifically in acute mental health environments and 90% of the time when a man expresses a lack of sexual attraction I’m relieved. The other 10% is indifference, but the amount of times they yell at me about how ugly I am and I’m like “…good…!?”

Like tbh there’s a not insignificant chance I’m just a gay dude but like. I’m not in a rush to decide. And in the meantime if not looking how they think an AFAB should keeps more men able to interact with me nonsexually that’s basically 100% beneficial. And honestly women aren’t great either (they’re not usually as pushy either but on the rare occasions they are they’re way worse). Tbh that’s probably why I’m a gay dude; bitches (in a romantic context) be crazy I just wanna drink a beer with my male bestie (now 💍) and talk about whether yeast or dogs have been symbiotic with humans longer.