Stuff & Nonsense

dude.

My boyfriend recently had his bill reduced from $5600 to $200, just by filling out a one-page application.

Even if they won't reduce your bill, you can ask to pay it in monthly amounts. I've had this conversation:

"Yes, I cannot afford my entire bill at once, can I pay it in monthly amounts?"

"Sure, what can you afford a month?"

"What's the lowest you'll allow?"

"Just tell me what you can afford a month."

"How about you just tell me what's the lowest you'll allow."

"We need you to tell us what you can afford a month."

"Fine. I can afford $1 a month."

"...that is below what is acceptable."

"So you do have a minimum that you require. If you just tell me that number, I'll pay that."

"...we can accept $10 a month."

"Great. I'll pay you $10 a month."

Here's the thing. Most hospitals undergo an upgrade to their billing system every few years. You know what happens to really old bills when they do that?

They lose them. Permanently and forever. They almost always don't transfer old bills to the new system.

So one day, when the bill suddenly stops coming? Don't call them. Don't ask about it. They've gone through a billing restructure and you fell through the cracks. Your debt is gone! Good job.

"But what if it suddenly comes back after a long time?" Then just call them, negotiate a payment plan again, and you're fine.

I've gotten rid of thousands of dollars of medical debt this way. It's perfectly legal, honest, and affordable.

The video switches to @dollarfor, who speaks directly into the camera and says

“Most hospitals in America are non-profits. This means they have to have financial assistance or a Charity Care policy.

This is gonna sound weird, but what that means is that if you make under a certain amount of money, the hospital will legally have to forgive your medical bills.

Let me show you how to do this.”

Showing an image of Google, following along with their own instructions:

“Type in the hospital name and financial assistance after this. It should be the top link, let’s check.

What you want to do is look for financial assistance applications and policies, and check the policy.

From here what you’re looking for is a sliding scale. Here: from 0-300% of the federal poverty limit they will forgive 100% of your medical bills.

So you can see here that 300% of the federal poverty guidelines is 37,470. So if you make under that amount, the hospital will legally forgive your medical bills. If you’re a larger household you can check it out from here.

 If you wanna test it out, I run a nonprofit that does this, so DM me and I can do it for you. I can crush those medical bills.”

end VD

ID 1: We have received and processed you request for financial assistance with your medical bills. You qualify for 100% assistance for Vanderbilt University Medical Center services covered under the Patient Assistance Program. Your account balance has been adjusted to zero.

Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.

One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for

a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.

These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control

But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.

If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."

What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:

https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf

This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.

But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.

Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

The moment he thought to give any sort of dignity at all to warfare. The concept of duty during warfare, and the honor of serving that duty, is predicated on the implication that warfare is a necessity. I think maybe we should reframe WWII from being the only just war anyone's ever been in, and instead view it as a tremendous global failure to do anything to stop this cartoonishly obvious threat before it could come to blows. A global failure motivated by national and economic interest. Even on the part of the Soviets, who had the most obviously righteous cause by way of the Germans' racialized invasion, who enabled them to enter that position through a series of strategic economic pacts and coordination of military operations in eastern Europe for the sake of national interest.

Everyone’s favorite Mon Calamarian angel baby Bant! One of my number one Star Wars blorbos who DOES NOT get enough recognition. I have so many ideas and headcanons about her and how it was never explicitly said she died during order 66.

“I had time to run home and pack a bag and get to the beach where the boats were waiting,” said a member of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation (Collins). “We literally had minutes to get on the boats and flee before it took our town. “Once we left my house finally after packing what I could in a pack sack, the fire was right behind our place. We had to run to the beach and once we got there, it was only moments before the fire had jumped over the (train) track and was coming for us.”

it has since been confirmed that namaygoosisagagun first nation has completely burnt to the ground. if you would like to help the community navigate an ongoing crisis, i urge you to donate to the anishinabek nation 7th generation, a registered charity seeking to improve the lives of first nations people. donations are going directly to members of namaygoosisagagun first nation.

Their page on CanadaHelps / CanaDon:

I don’t know whether Yoda or Obi-Wan or Mace would be more receptive than Anakin thinks if he were actually honest with them; I would like to think they would, but Anakin has very good reasons to believe they wouldn’t. What would have happened had he not hidden important parts of himself from the Council is an unanswered question for a narrative reason.

As for whether Luke’s redemption of Anakin at Endor is proof that attachments are good actually or instead both of them learning to love selflessly, it kind of doesn’t matter because either way the Council is proven wrong. They believed that allowing close relationships was a path to the Dark Side, but Anakin fell more so because of the Council’s denial of his close relationships than because he had them, and it is ultimately the bond between father and son—a bond the old Jedi Order would not have fostered, as we see with Anakin and his mother—that saves the galaxy.

Now, I tend to subscribe to the belief that there are as many different interpretations of the Code and its dictates as there are individual Jedi, and given how few Council members actually ever speak in the meetings we see, it seems quite possible to me that some Council members (like Plo Koon, going by his TCW characterization, for instance) do disagree with what I will call the Yoda-Windu-Mundi doctrine (because those are the three Masters we actually see speak), and that perhaps they don’t speak up out of fear of openly disagreeing with The Oldest And Wisest Jedi, Master Yoda. I fully admit that’s fanon and speculative but I like it because having the Jedi not be an ideological monolith makes them much more interesting.

I can definitely see Yoda losing sight of what close relationships mean for shorter-lived beings; 800 years of watching everyone you care about grow up, grow old, and die would destroy you if you love the way Anakin loves, but, well, that’s kind of the point. Most beings don’t live 800 years, so their relationship to love is different, and what seems to Yoda like a necessity feels like much more of a burden to them.

Can you actually demonstrate that Anakin Skywalker hides his emotions because he was told, they are dangerous? Or is that how Yoda’s teaching got distorted and once it’s treated as a fact that need not to be discussed any further, it’s “all there?”  

It’s very hard to discuss this without ranting about how this assumption is so strong among Star Wars fans that it actually made into the Disney comic re-telling of The Phantom Menace. Here, I only point out the fact that Yoda did not classify fear, anger, hate, or any other emotion on the basis of some externally imposed moral judgment such as “anger is evil” or “fear is dangerous” etc. The dark side is not a metaphysical principle of Evil – it’s our own dark side, the negative forces of our own consciousness or soul, however you like to call it. 

I think the problem is that what Star Wars teaches on emotions challenges the popular idea of “just express yourself,” the idea that the emotions are these sacred rivers that flow as they must and its other people’s responsibility to not to turn them wild. This mindset is not able to differentiate between repressing your emotions and challenging the truth of the image of the world they paint to us. This is not directed at you in any way, OP! I am talking about the general cultural landscape, which, unfortunately, fosters an interpretation of the Jedi Order that is so aggressive that it’s really hard to think about it critically and not accepting it as face value, especially when pop psychology arrives to back it up with outdated theories of emotion.

Similarly, can you actually demonstrate that Anakin Skywalker “forbidden by the Order from being with the ones he loves”? Which brings us to the next question: do you say, he did not love Obi-Wan, who, as he said it himself, “the closest thing to a father” to him and “like a father to him?” Wasn’t that a close relationship that in your reading, the Jedi Council deemed “a path to the dark side” – and again, can you actually demonstrate this in the story we’ve got? – or that they “denied” him? Did really what Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker had, would qualify as “a close relationship?” Does “the bond between father and son” really, as you seem to imply, categorically different and cannot exist between a Jedi Master who raises a child as if he was his own son, who is both an older brother and a friend and a father to him?

I do not address what you clearly declared to be your fanon – to each their own! But I would like to say that if all “individual” Jedi seem to be at odds with what the “order,” the group made up of by those individual Jedi, supposedly dictate, we should be able to demonstrate this mainstream position that they supposedly deviate from. Does our interpretation of the “Yoda-Windu-Mundi doctrine” really correct, if the Jedi demonstrably act in opposition to it?

And now, the part that bothers me the most – again, this is not directed at you in any way, OP, I am talking about the general assumption circulating in Fandom – the claim that Yoda is a fantasy creature who lives 900 years, so different psychological and spiritual rules apply to him than to “normal people.” What exactly I, a Buddhist practitioner of non-attachment, supposed to do with this, or rather, the suggestion, that the way I love my friends and family is just not how the real world and real humans and real “close relationships” work? Jedi philosophy, in many ways, was not merely inspired by Buddhist doctrines, but it actually depicts Buddhist doctrines, and the whispering campaign that they’re not “real” Buddhist doctrines allowed to go unthinking and full throat condemnation of a living tradition that is already under severe assault, unchallenged and even celebrated as an intellectually and morally superior way of discussing Star Wars.

To clarify, I do not try to attack you or put the blame for this on you in any way, and it should be clear that this is not about "the Jedi are flawless!44!!" As George Lucas said himself, "the Jedi are good, but they are not fantastic." But it's important to realize that too much assumptions are crusted on the Jedi teachings and practices that are doing more harm than good. Please know that I am writing about your take in the same way as you wrote about the Jedi: “critical but from a place of love.” 

If you are interested in exploring this further, I encourage you to participate in this discussion: https://www.tumblr.com/writerbuddha/821380839426457600/huh-thats-another-complex-issue-because-we-end

To the Sith people, traditionally a Dark Lord of the Sith wasn’t an angry, sadistic, and traumatized darkside user, that title went to the individual who proved they were capable of leading and protecting an entire civilization of people. Dawg when Naga Sadow fails, he’s so ashamed of himself that he exiled himself to Yavin 4. Forever. He owns up to his failure and lets go of the reins. Sidious would never tbh

Bros tomb is on Yavin 4. The Rebel Alliance uses the structures that the one of the most important Dark Lord of the Sith built to destroy Darth Sidious’ biggest military goal. And tbh, I don’t think it’s because the Sith are weak, or their force ghosts aren’t around (bc sith force ghosts get active they dgaf). I think it’s because the Sith as a people don’t like Sidious

This man is culturally appropriating the Sith. He one my faves but I gotta be honest. You can have your critiques about the Sith Order of the pre-hyperspace war and beyond but imo they all take way more personal accountability than Sidious. The OG Sith Order (for as flawed as it is) doesn’t have the whole “one master, one apprentice, monopoly on power” shit going on. A Dark Lord on the Dark Council knows that if they fuck up, somebody else is gonna take their spot. Even the sith of Sadow’s era had a council. Sidious doesn’t have that.

There’s nothing remotely “sith” about Sheev Palpatine outside of his self-proclaimed title (like “Darth” and “Dark Lord of the Sith” had actual real legal and societal weight in the Empire). He’s really just weaponizing very superficial aspects of an role for his own gain. He doesn’t even openly practice being a Sith Lord, which obviously goes against the entire point. There’s not a single Sith pre-Bane that would even fathom the concept of being a secret Sith Lord. It’s like being a secret Senator. Shit don’t make no sense

Sidious literally is some rich upper class mf who’s weaponizing all the most negative and toxic traits of an colonized and genocide-d culture for his own personal gain. He’s like one those Victorian era White men who’d go and steal other peoples’ shit bc they thought they’d get something out of it. Shit so crazy.

"Although Yoda clearly identifies fear, anger, and aggression as the dark side of the Force, and warns Luke not to use the strength that flows from them, as they will rule him and he will forever have to bear the consequences of what he has done under their sway, many fans and critics have distorted these teachings. The dark side is often asserted to be a malevolent metaphysical force or principle of wickedness that operates through fear, anger, and aggression. In the Expanded Universe novel Heir to the Empire, Timothy Zahn even altered Yoda’s teachings, writing, “Fear and anger, Yoda had often warned [Luke], were the slaves of the dark side.” In the 2000s, Matthew Stover spoke out against what he identified as the “dark-side-is-the-devil” perspective in the Expanded Universe, attempting to steer the narrative back toward Lucas’ canon. However, a few years later, in James Luceno’s The Unifying Force, Luke declared, “Anger by itself is not of the dark side,” and nevertheless insisted on fighting to “eradicate” the dark side, calling it “Evil” itself. Moreover, video games such as Knights of the Old Republic II portrayed drawing strength from the dark side as calling upon a mystical entity for magical powers through anger and aggression.

What Yoda teaches in the original trilogy is that evil behavior is the result of falling under the sway of, and being carried by one's own dark side - fear, anger, aggression, hate. In the prequel trilogy, he explains, all is rooted in fear. "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering" means, there's always fear behind anger, there's always anger behind hate, and these are adding up to suffering.

The arising of these negative states starts with the profound fear that you’ll be harmed in some way, that you won’t get what you want or that you’ll lose what you want to hold on to, and that you’ll be in pain as a result. Fear is closely related to attachment: the more attached we are to someone or something, the more we fear not having it or being separated from it. Fear is a predecessor to anger and hate – fear of loss, of not getting what you want, of pain etc. When fear arises, anger and hatred quick to follow. Anger acts as a strategy to protect ourselves and what we consider ours. This is the egoistic perspective that sees the “I” as the center of everything and “others” as sources of pleasure or pain that either keeps the “I” happy, thus must be attained by possession, or makes the “I” miserable, and thus must be pushed away and destroyed. This attitude eventually hardens into hostility and hatred.

In the original trilogy, Yoda tells Luke that the Jedi Knight feels the Force – the energy that flows through one and make one a living being with mental and emotional processes, rather than inert matter - running through him, and his strength flows from it. However, there is a dark side to this energy: fear, anger and aggression. They arise very quickly during a fight and they offer an easy, quick access to strength, but if you give in to them and let them carry you, there is no turning back, they consume you. This is what happened with Darth Vader - this is what makes him "twisted and evil." To discern these sources of strength from safe ones, "to know the good side from the bad," as Luke put it, one must enter into a peaceful, calm, passive state of mind.

The lesson is not that anger is "wrong" and "evil" and "bad" so it must never arise. The lesson is that whenever anger arises, a Jedi Knight should do as Yoda did in Clone Wars, when he tells the projections of his dark side: "Part of me you are, yes. But power over me you have not. Through patience and training, it is I who control you. Control over me you have not. My dark side you are. Reject you I do."

The reason why I struggle to complete the larger essay is that there are just so many things to unpack about the historical, cultural and social context in which these assumptions about the Jedi in Lucas' Star Wars were made.

For example, the romantic/sexual relationship thing - aside from the obvious attachment-based love concepts prevalent in American culture, one could argue that declaring Legends' Luke Skywalker as this great reformer of the old Jedi Order is an attempt to make the Jedi Order conform the American Anglo-Protestant ideal - this Luke is supposedly abolished celibacy, introduced a highly individualistic culture where each Knight can interpret the will of the Force etc. One Legends writer outright asserted that the Jedi Council is the Vatican.

Historically? We can point at the Second Gulf War, but also like the Catholic Church/Vatican scandals changed how an American audience viewed the Jedi. By the time Episode 2 is coming out, they're not just monks anymore, they're an "institution", which George never intended for them to be seen as.

Culturally? Well, we're fresh out of the 90s, the antihero archetype was trending, yellow-spandex comic superheroes were now clad in black leather, etc. More details in this pic.

So a morally-right ensemble of characters who isn't written likeably by a Film Director who doesn't like writing in the first place?

An early 2000s grown-up audience will INSTINCTIVELY dislike them.

So any nuance in the Jedi's teachings or any nuance in a Jedi character is now interpreted in the most extreme sense, and is now a "reflection of the Jedi's hypocrisy."

"Yoda says that you're not allowed to be afraid EVER."

If you watch the first movie, Obi-Wan explains, “The Force is what gives the Jedi his power. An energy field, created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” In truth, what he says is that living beings themselves are, in essence, an energy, and together, they all add up to a field of energy, the Force. As Lucas himself put it, the Force is “made up of all living beings” and “the Force is life.” Lucas actually believes, "one might think of life as a large organism, and we are but a small symbiotic part of it," and that life itself is unknowable and beyond words and thought, but we try to make sense of through personifying it and calling it God etc.

In Lucas' story, the "will of the Force" actually refers to the processes of the organism of life. Just like your cells are being governed by the larger structure they add up to, the way how reality happens - Anakin is born, he meets with Qui-Gon etc. - are the processes of the field of life, which is a complex, self-regulating system. Nothing is predetermined, because predetermination would imply that there is somebody external to the system who has decided what’s going to happen. However, there is no total free will here, because whatever happens arises from a complex web of causes and conditions. So, there are choices that will narrow down all to a specific outcome no matter what path you take (Anakin foresees that Padmé will die when she gives birth, Luke foresees that Han and Leia will be in pain in Cloud City) because the causes and conditions are already set for that future to arise. But the future is always shifting based on what path you choose (Anakin didn't foresee Obi-Wan being at Padmé's side until the idea that he might be able to learn to defeat death through the dark side started to take a root in his mind.)

I think it's safe to say that all chrysalides are sithspawn but not all sithspawn are chrysalides.

ALSO

If you are referring to the Sith species, you will want to use "Sith People", "Red Sith", or "Sith Purebloods" depending on the era. "Sith People" is the most self-explanatory, "Sith Purebloods" is the most commonly used (thanks to SWTOR), and "Red Sith" reminds me - to a very uncomfortable degree - of slurs used against me and other Native people.

For those who require visual examples, here is a chrysalide rancor and a nathema sithspawn (also previously a rancor):

And here is sentient species sithspawn vs Sith Purebloods:

It is also important to note that

there have been Sith Pureblood Je'daii (such as Sek'nos Rath) and Jedi (such as Praven), and