Spyke

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piracy

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Help with wheelchair software

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I'm also disabled. We tend to refer to this as the "disability tax". Anything that could potentially be billed to insurance or for which there are no other options is incredibly expensive. If we can't afford it or don't have insurance, we're always welcome to go die under a bridge somewhere. Gotta pay for the owner's yacht.

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What's the most evil hellish thing you've experienced firsthand in life?

Testicular torsion. As a teenager, I woke up early in the morning with the worst back and stomach pain I had ever felt in my life. I remember thinking I might be sick, vomiting, then passing out from the pain. My parents found me later that morning because I was delirious and moaning. They took me to the hospital and it was fixed.

Just kidding! My parents are shit bags so they told me I just had the flu and I was being dramatic. After my testicle swelled up to over double the size later that day, they called our family doctor who said I probably had a hydrocele and he'd look at it when he got back from vacation. For the record, mine was textbook testicular torsion, my doctor was as idiotically negligent as my parents.

The pain again became excruciating that evening and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, so I started yelling and demanding my parents take me to the hospital, which they did the next morning. There was TV to be watched, they couldn't bother with taking care of their children. The ER determined my testicle was quite dead. Surgery was scheduled for that evening and I've had one testicle since. Get fucked, mom and dad.

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Mia Khalifa fired from Playboy for her pro-Hamas posts after the Israel attack

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They took her comment grossly out of context for effect. The actual quote was...

“Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal."

Yeah, pretty tasteless, but it's not what the article makes it out to be. She's largely getting dragged for openly criticizing Israel's genocide and the media is skewing the situation to make her look worse. Can't have the masses questioning the party line and all.

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Neurotypicals, what do autistic people look like to you?

Not really all that different. I have had multiple autistic friends and coworkers. Only two things really stand out and they're absolutely generalizations that are untrue for some people and exist on a continuum for the rest.

First, I find the autistic crowd interrupts people more, sometimes a lot more, and some ramble quite a bit without getting to the point. It can be frustrating for the NTs and I've had to implement conch shell protocols and thought mapping so we can get through meetings and conversations effectively.

Second, the autistic folks tend to be blunter in speech but also often can take things straight. I don't have to dance around issues as much. We put everything out on the table, work through it, then move on.

Edit: I should mention that I'm neurotypical but have CPTSD due to parental abuse. Those with CPTSD can have significant behavioral overlap with autism. Before getting a lot of therapy, I displayed multiple traits often associated with autism, including alexithymia. Thanks Dad!

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Why do they still dye the rivers green for St. Patricks Day? It's not a good look for downtown Chicago.

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It'd be bad. Real bad. An algae bloom of massive proportions. It has one huge issue.

Enough algae to make the rivers run green will use up enough oxygen at night to kill off fish and oxygen hungry invertebrates, starting a chain reaction of death.

Now you have a river full of dead organisms, so they start decomposing thanks to microbes. You know what many types of bacteria love? Oxygen. So they start using up oxygen, multiplying all the while. Night hits and the algae need to use oxygen, but a bunch die because there's not enough. Now the river is full of literally hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of decomposing matter. The river largely goes anoxic (meaning there's no oxygen) so things start dying left and right. A bunch of those bacteria can live with and without oxygen, so they use up what they can and keep on chugging without.

Now we've moved from aerobic respiration to anaerobic. You know what the primary byproducts of anaerobic respiration are? Organic acids and alcohols, which smell. The river begins to smell like an infected wound. It's no longer green but deep, murky brown from the suspension of decomposing organisms. This continues until the river flushes everything out, but it kills what's downstream as it continues until it hits the ocean, where it likely continues to kill everything in the vicinity until it becomes dilute enough.

I'm a microbiologist and worked with algae and cyanobacteria as an undergrad. Never underestimate the impact of uncountable billions of trillions of living organisms.

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Tacoma becomes first WA city to ban non-therapeutic cat declawing

My mother still declaws her cats, despite my telling her exactly what they do. She even had to switch vets once because her main vet began refusing to do it. I can't understand how someone, knowing full well what happens, would still do it to an animal they allegedly love. She originally claimed clipping their nails was too much work and that cats will ruin her furniture, but now just refuses to talk about it after my wife and I have demonstrated practically no cat damage to anything in our home with four fully clawed cats, all raised as (asshole) kittens, over the course of about ten years.

I'll remember all the cats she mutilated (plus all the other heinous shit she did when we were kids) when it's time to pick her retirement home.