happybadger [he/him]

Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.

  • 2 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 7th, 2020

help-circle




  • Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.


  • A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we’re chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I’m putting the needle in his arm he says “you’re from the government.” in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He’s furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask “what?”, he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming “you’re from the government” repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.








  • I try to cross-reference things and then look at the critical angles. Public media generally has higher editorial standards for me. I don’t trust right-wing sources or the New York Times because they lack editorial standards. State media I don’t trust for domestic issues, but while I don’t go to Al Jazeera for news about Qatar I trust their coverage of Palestine and France. I try to avoid sources that have an involved stake in the conflict, so something like Ukraine means no RT/Pravda but I’ll watch the primary footage coming off Telegram and then compare it to multiple countries’ coverage of it. I try to stay dialectical with all of it, so I’m cognizant of the history and material/social angles which create the issue and the biases of those covering it. I’ll read a socialist article but I don’t want to uncritically agree with news so that’s more supplemental unless the media hasn’t yet/won’t cover it.

    Otherwise I listen to a lot of podcasts that are leftist or left-liberal, keep a critical eye on social media coverage, and follow scientific journals/niche science websites that summarise those journal articles without editorialising.



  • He was weird. In addition to the posts on the daily election threads, he was sending me PMs that were flattering in a way Patrick Bateman would compliment someone. Everything was blatantly manipulative and worded in a way that was simultaneously an interrogation I knew he was feeding to the admins. Then the dog caught his car and had to drive it while everyone else on the road screamed at him. I think he lasted like three days before handing over control to one of the mods who was so offended that they quit the website.

    Nothing irks me more than someone who can’t handle positive chaos or slight inconvenience. He was so determined to stop the protest which was only over us not being able to moderate the subreddit without those third-party tools, all to preserve the sanctity of a community he hadn’t interacted with in almost a decade. There’s something deeply pathological about a power grab like that. Like what the fuck.


  • /r/snackexchange/ - I made it a protest subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy. Every day every single thing about the subreddit would be reset and users would have to vote for every aspect. The only rules were that you couldn’t abolish democracy and you couldn’t abolish me as the caretaker. /u/Icxcnika was a weird little goober who took it seriously instead of seeing it as a protest meant to derail the subreddit. He voted to make himself mod for a day and then the admins did a mod coup to make him the head, even over the other two mods that had been there for a decade and built all of the third-party tools we relied on to make the subreddit work. He had only posted once, some 8 or 9 years before, and had never moderated. The users and other mods fucking hated him and activity in the subreddit fell off. Now he no longer posts, one of the other mods no longer posts, and the last remaining one is apparently now a bot that sells funko pops.

    /r/fifthworldproblems/ - The other mods and I were all on board with the protest. They forced us back open so we refused to do anything. Now it’s restricted and the only link posted since the protest was a Lemmy instance that I didn’t have anything to do with.

    /r/modernart - I started rebuilding this one after it was overtaken by spam from people who don’t know what “modern art” actually means. I want to keep the subreddit because there’s good radicalisation potential with it in the right hands, but I stopped posting and only remove the most obnoxious spam days after it’s reported to tank the quality of the subreddit. I’ll be replacing everything with a Lemmy instance link at some point but was always holding out for Hexbear to open up community creation.

    I had a few others that I just left or let the admin bot take over.