2026-04-28 01:18:00
I was sad today!
I love discovering, and reading new, personal blogs. I'm always interested in people and opinions.
Imagine my sadness when I stumbled onto a new (to me) blog, only to discover that the author had an AI Generated Summary at the top of each post.
In my opinion, this is devaluing the work. All that effort infused into researching, planning, writing, and editing. And then thrown through the sausage-machine for it to summarise the work in about three sentences.
It probably vacuumed up the discourse and threw it into the depths of its learning model, to later regurgitate as "AI content" to someone else.
Do you really think your own words are worthless?
For very long articles, it's nice to have a summary, but AI? Really?
Spend an extra two minutes and summarise your own content, please.
2026-04-27 21:49:00
I recently watched a video of a woman in Louisiana crying because she can no longer afford her insulin.
Between sobs, she blamed "handouts" to poor people and "crackheads" for her plight.
It was a tragic display of cognitive dissonance: a woman being fleeced by a system she continues to vote for, blaming the poorest in society while the Donald Trump and the party she supports protect Big Pharma’s profits at the cost of her life.
As a British expat living in Northern Italy, watching the American healthcare "debate" is like watching a different planet.
To help my American friends understand why we aren't "oppressed" by our social services, here is what life actually looks like under a functioning national health system in 2026.
Americans often claim we wait months just to see a GP. In my village, my Medico di Base (family doctor) is available Monday to Friday.
The Access: If I’m ill, I walk in and wait twenty or thirty minutes. If it’s not urgent, I can call, text or email her. I usually get an appointment the same or next day.
The Cost: €0.
The Quality: She is a brilliant Ukrainian doctor who knows my history. I don’t have to check if she’s "in-network," and she doesn't have to ask an insurance company for permission to treat me.
When I need a specialist or an ultrasound, I don't just sit on a list forever. Italy uses a very logical "Priority Code" system. My GP writes the prescription, and the wait depends entirely on how much trouble I’m in.
I contact a central booking system by phone, normally a 3 to 5 minute wait, and depending on the urgency the waiting time is from 3 to 120 days.
If I’m in a desperate hurry for a non-urgent issue, I can choose the "private" route and see the exact same specialist within 48 hours for a flat fee of €60 to €100. That’s often less than an American’s "co-pay" just to get in the door.
The Exemption: Because I have a chronic illness, I am exempt from almost all costs. Italy has a list of 59 chronic conditions, ranging from diabetes and asthma to heart disease, where the state covers 100% of the cost. I pay zero for my blood tests, my yearly check-ups, my insulin and my test strips etc.
The "Ticket": For unrelated issues, like having the skin lesion I had frozen off recently, I paid a "ticket" (participation fee) of just €27. No $5,000 deductible to meet first. No surprise bill for $400 because the lab was "out-of-network."
This is the part the Americans shout about: "You have to wait for surgery!"
Yes, we do. But context matters.
Emergency Surgery: If your appendix bursts or you have a heart attack, you are in the operating theatre within hours. It is immediate, world-class, and costs €0.
Elective Surgery: For a hip replacement, a hernia, or cataracts, you might wait 3 to 12 months.
The Trade-off: I would rather wait six months for a new hip than spend six years paying for one.
In Italy, less than 20% of cataract patients wait more than three months. In America, you might get it tomorrow, but you’ll be paying for it until you’re dead.
In Italy, we have a "mixed" system. You are never "trapped" in the public system; you always have the option to go private if you’re in a hurry or want to choose a specific "Star Surgeon."
The Price Tag: Because the private sector has to compete with a high-quality "free" public system, the prices are kept remarkably low compared to the US.
A private hip replacement in Italy might cost you €12,000 - €15,000. In the US, the same surgery without insurance often starts at $30,000 and can go much higher.
The Speed: If you go private, the wait time for "elective" surgery (like that hip or a hernia) drops from months to days or weeks.
The "Convenzionato" System: Many private hospitals are actually "accredited" by the state. This means you can sometimes go to a fancy private clinic but have the bill picked up by the government if the public hospital has a backlog.
The Professional: Most top-tier surgeons work in the public hospitals during the day and have private "extramural" hours in the evenings. You can pay to see them privately for a consultation, and they can often schedule your surgery in the public hospital much faster if it’s deemed medically necessary.
Whether you go 'private' or public for the surgery itself, you can return to the state system for your post-op care. This means your Physiotherapy, pain meds, and follow-ups are effectively free (or cost just a standard 'ticket'). You don't get trapped in a private billing cycle for rehab.
This is where the American system becomes truly ghoulish. I’ve read documented "horror stories" of American hospitals charging parents $39.35 for "Skin-to-Skin contact", literally charging a mother to hold her own newborn baby.
In Italy, we view that as a basic human right, not a billable service. Prenatal & Birth: All scans, blood tests, and the birth itself cost €0.
The Reality: You leave the hospital with a baby and a sense of joy, not a $30,000 invoice and a bill for a hug.
And the support doesn't stop at the hospital door. All post-natal care, including home visits from midwives, your chosen paediatrician, and the full schedule of childhood vaccinations, is 100% free. We don't charge parents to protect their children from disease.
I’m not pretending Italy’s system is flawless. Funding’s tight, staff are overworked, and plenty of hospitals are crumbling and held together with duct tape, especially in the south of the country. But even at its worst, it’s still built on the simple, humane principle that healthcare shouldn’t depend on how lucky you are with your employer, or how many zeros you’ve got in your bank account.
The American system isn't a "Free Market." It’s a protection racket where lobbyists write the laws to ensure their profits. You are paying the highest taxes in the developed world for healthcare, and then you’re paying the insurance companies on top of that just to be told "No."
I paid 18 cents for my medication last month.
I can call an ambulance (which is free) without a credit card in my hand.
You call it "Communism." I call it being a member of a civilised society.
I’ll keep my "socialised" 18-cent meds and my extra decade of life expectancy, thanks.
You keep your "freedom" to die in debt.
2026-04-27 21:00:00
Post is part of the blog bandwagon about maps.
You sit down ready to play some sicko dungeon ass dragons, all hyped up for the first session. The referee asks everyone to turn around while he preps the table. When you turn back, you see a map. At least, you think it's a map. A single hex is revealed, with a marker supposedly representing the party. Everything else is covered in black construction paper. With a wry smile, the referee asks, "Where do you want to go?"
After a brief pause, someone says, "Uhh... north, I guess?"
I love maps as much as the next cat, but I think a map has to serve a purpose in play. A map isn't automatically useful because it's beautiful or impressive. Those things can help, of course. But the maps I want at my table are the ones that help us understand the situation and make meaningful decisions.
A map can serve different purposes. It can support the backend, frontend, or runtime of your game. It can store the truth of locations for the referee, give visual clues about the world, or help the session run more smoothly in the moment.
So I keep wondering what use we have for a map. Can we point at it, plan with it, argue over it, mark it up, or ask better questions because of it? If not, maybe it's just decoration.
A regional map during play should give us a usable picture of the place we're moving through. No, it shouldn't reveal every location and secret. No, it doesn't have to be accurate. But it does need enough roads, landmarks, terrain, settlements, and rumors to make planning possible. It needs to make you look at the map and say, "We want to go there".
Blank space is good when it invites discovery. It's bad when it hides the choice. The old road, the forest, the lake, and the ruined tower gives us something to plan around. A hex, point, or path surrounded by featureless unknowns mostly asks you to guess.
The secrets can stay secret. That's why I like player-facing maps: they show what would be common knowledge, visible, rumored, or easily learned without handing over the complete backend map.
Procedure is the other half. A hexcrawl isn't just a hex map. The map shows options, and the travel procedure gives those options cost, risk, and consequence. Roads are faster but may be patrolled. Swamps are slower but may let you avoid taxation. Climbing a hill might reveal a landmark. Taking a detour might cost time and supplies.
The format should follow the decision. Whether the map uses hexes, points, routes, or blank space depends on what the game needs us to notice or interact with. Mythic Bastionland's hex maps work because they're part of the game's core loop, not just a pretty overview.
When in doubt, use more than one map. A beautiful in-world map can make the place feel real, while a table map helps track routes, distance, and position. The first gives texture. The second supports procedure.
A map should show more than what we already know. It should suggest what might be worth investigating. Secret locations are interesting not because they're absent, but because they leave hints or traces for us to discover.
That doesn't mean the map needs to show every road, ruin, lair, or danger. But we need something to lean on. A rumor. A landmark. Smoke on the horizon. A place the locals avoid. "The road north goes into pine woods where hunters avoid the old stones" gives us a choice. "North is blank" mostly asks us to guess.
This is where fog of war often fails me. It tries to feel like mystery, but if nothing is visible except the places already visited, the map stops pointing forward. It becomes a record of where you have been. Useful as a travel log, maybe, but not as a way to choose where to go next.
A better approach is to reveal the obvious, hint at the hidden, and reserve the secret. Show the mountain, not the dragon under it. Show the road, not every ambush along it. Show the ruined tower, not the tunnel beneath its cellar. The map keeps its mysteries by giving them edges.
A world map is usually not an exploration map. It's a context map.
A world map matters when faraway places start pushing on where we are now. The empire over the mountains matters when its war closes the north road, its coins change prices in the market, or its refugees bring rumors of what is coming next.
Otherwise the world map is mostly backdrop, or a menu of labels where we point at one and say, "Let's go there". That can be fun, but it's a different mode of play, one more interested in jumping from setpiece to setpiece than slowly learning a place through travel, danger, and consequence.
Sometimes a world map can help the referee stay coherent when the players suddenly decide to head for the horizon. On the other hand, there is real value in not even creating a world map when the campaign is focused on local regions. That preserves flexibility for later.
When the game starts operating at grander scales, the world map becomes more relevant. Presiding over a domain makes you care about your neighbors. Planning a long expedition makes distance, access, and conflict matter directly. The world map is now the board your campaign moves across.
When spatial navigation becomes the point, as it does when you zoom in on a dungeon or location, some kind of map is often necessary. Without a way to track space, locations have to be very small or very simple to follow.
But a common misconception is that the map has to be detailed, pretty, or gridded. Often a rough sketch, flowchart, or node map can do the job more effectively. What's important is how the spaces connect. I want to know where the exits are, what route loops back, what's above or below the room, where I have already been, and what I haven't explored.
Rise Up Comus suggests handing out partial dungeon maps, or even a simple copy of the map itself with secrets removed and rooms clearly numbered. A floorplan doesn't solve the dungeon but it removes boring ambiguity. We still have to discover what's in the rooms, find the secrets the map doesn't show, and learn about the inhabitants and factions. But now we can ask better questions. Which route? Which door? Which shortcut? Which risk?
Of course, player mapping is another way to engage with maps. A map given to you is information. A map you make yourself is play.
This was the missing piece that made dungeons click for me. When we map, we build a better understanding of the place itself. We engage with the fictional space, and that makes it easier to notice loops, shortcuts, dead ends, and suspicious gaps. It helps us ask questions, not just of the referee, but of each other. The dungeon starts to become a place instead of a sequence of scenes.
But mapping only works when navigational knowledge has value. If the layout never creates choices, reveals patterns, or rewards memory, mapping just becomes homework. The goal isn't to make mapping difficult. It's to communicate a shared understanding of a space.
A good player map, whether drawn from scratch or annotated on a partial map, becomes a memory aid and a log. It tells us how to get out, where to return to, and which routes are safe enough to move through quickly.
Tactical maps are where maps often fail me. A detailed battlemap can be marvelous, but it can also do too much imagining for us. The room is already dressed. The furniture is fixed. The terrain is settled. Before anyone asks a question, the image has answered.
In my experience, this often means we either ignore most of the visual clutter because it's just background dressing, or we treat the image as complete truth. I prefer a rough map that gives us enough shared space to orient ourselves, but leaves enough blank space for questions. Can the statue be climbed? If we're in a kitchen, is there grease handy to throw at our pursuers?
These questions matter. They aren't a disruption of play. They're play.
In very tactical games, the battlemap may be less illustration than rules interface. It can make distance, cover, and positioning feel fair. But there's a difference between a technical and a conceptual map, and not every situation needs the same kind.
I love looking at city maps, but I've to admit they're often the least useful maps for me. More often than not, they become address books, with numbered shops, inns, and landmarks. Most of these places wouldn't change much if they swapped locations.
Adding more detail doesn't fix this. Every building, alley, and shop you define becomes debt. It's one more thing for us to remember and reference. A more abstract map of neighborhoods, routes, pressures, and boundaries can be much more gameable than a complete street plan.
Why is that? Because crawling through cities isn't always the answer. Moving room to room, or street to street, becomes tedious fast. When the city becomes an adventure site, it's usually more interesting to think in neighborhoods, transit points, factions, and people. Social and spatial structures begin to merge.
The best town maps give some form of actionable insight. They show us what we can do here, who we might offend, and what boundaries are drawn into the streets. Buildings start to matter when their location changes consequence. If the poorer districts are outside the walls, the map says who is protected. If the watch houses sit beside the bridge, it tells us who controls passage.
A city map is weak when it only tells us where things are. It gets useful when it shows where we can go, who controls what, and what we risk by crossing a boundary.
So no, the problem isn't maps. The problem is when we treat maps as automatically useful.
Different maps have different jobs. A regional map should make movement legible. A dungeon map should make space navigable. A battlemap should clarify action. A city map should show access, pressure, and consequence. What matters isn't having a map for the sake of having a map, but knowing what need the map is answering.
A good map earns its place at the table. It gives us something to point at, mark up, doubt, plan around, or argue over.
A bad map may still be beautiful. It may still be worth having. But if it doesn't help play, it probably needs to be supplemented with one that does.
The best maps don't end the conversation. They start it.
2026-04-27 04:17:00
I’ve written about chronic illness being a second job before. I’m feeling it especially hard right now.
I think of all the time spent in waiting rooms, all the time in appointments, the time spent getting to them and back home again.
Getting referrals in time for the appointments. Inserting my insurance card at the doctor’s office or hospital once a quarter to be able to get prescriptions or referrals. Blood tests, stool tests, urine tests, MRIs, gastroscopies and colonoscopies, infusions. Ordering the meds to hopefully arrive on time.
Eating a certain way not to trigger stuff. Exercising and stretching for mobility, help my bones and keep muscle mass.
Injections every two weeks forever. A pill every day. Bad time? Another course of Prednisone. Pain. Rashes. Rage. Water retention. Muscle loss. Round cheeks.
There’s always something to track, something new. Medication adjustment, new medication altogether, now this works against that but not for this, and so on. Breakthrough bleeding I have to bring up at the gynecologist. Good control over my spondyloarthritis with adalimumab, but struggling with the Crohn’s, which I’ll have to bring up to both my rheumatologist and gastroenterologist. That’ll likely mean another new medication and a split, since I used to be able to take one drug for both. One more thing to track, to get prescribed, to reorder and pick up in time, one more thing to jam into my leg.
2 years and I still struggle with injecting anything and drag it out for minutes, wailing to my wife that I don’t wanna do it. 2 years with a diagnosis and while it has been long enough, sometimes it just hits me all over again that this will never go away and I’ll always have to deal with that, and I just wanna cry.
Sometimes, I just wanna give up and not go to the appointments, not take my meds, and avoid even thinking about it. Sometimes, I’d rather keep on living with some new issue and pain and procrastinate on it, than address it with doctors. It takes me a huge amount of energy to make the appointments, and sometimes I keep putting it off for weeks. On the day of, I keep thinking about not going. I haven’t missed a single one, because logically I know things won’t get better by avoidance, but the urge is still there.
Being chronically ill and having a doctor’s appointment feels like you keep being a victim reporting similar crimes over and over again to the police, and you have no influence over whether you’re believed and whether they’ll catch the perp. You always walk in not knowing what to expect. I’m lucky to be believed. But I still hate feeling like the endless victim all the time that has something to complain about, whether new or the same old crime. I no longer want to be a victim! Even I get bored and annoyed by it. Again? You’re having issues again? Are your meds even doing anything?
I don’t even wanna bring it up to people anymore or answer honestly when people ask. I’ll be in agonizing pain one week and fine the next, but I still do the same things (work, study, volunteering etc.) because the show must go on. You as an outsider can’t make sense of it and neither can I.
I have no good explanation. I know it all sounds like complete bullshit. Most people have no concept of this type of chronic illness. Their family member or friend got a diagnosis like diabetes or high blood pressure and take their meds and are fine. They’re not getting resistant to meds, no days where it works and days where it inexplicably doesn’t. Maybe the best comparison is your friend on several antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds who still struggles every couple weeks. There’s still so much we don’t know about the brain, and the same goes for our immune system, autoimmune issues, allergies and the like.
It’s even worse than my brain has me believe, and probably for my own good so I can mentally survive. Journaling and monthly reviews made me discover this. In my head, I had good weeks and months until a particular day, but then I look back on what I wrote down over the course of this year and I’ve forgotten 90% of illness flare ups. Demoralizing, but at least I can give the doctors better feedback.
It’s tiring to do it all while it also feels like my body is simultaneously a the boxing ring at the same time and I lose and lose and lose before a win. I’m always fighting something on the side, there is always something I work around, mask, or make up for, a setback I hide.
Chronic illness is like having a toddler with me at all times. The toddler is demanding varying levels of attention, rest, encouragement, and the balancing of body needs stats like a Sim. Too bad, I wanted to study, but my toddler demands me to nap with them! I wanted to exercise, but my toddler has the runs! The toddler has the worst stomach cramps and rages in a way that could make glass burst, gotta isolate them and calm them down!
I’m sick of that toddler and having to justify its actions and working around its existence. I didn’t choose to have it, and no one else can watch over it than me. I just wanna leave it in the care of someone else for a while and forget about it.
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Published
2026-04-27 00:03:00
Many videos exist on YouTube about minimalism and how to be distraction free. I came across this video recently after watching this YouTuber's video about the end of the Canadian free weather broadcast.
The idea here is to leave your tech in one spot similar to how we used to. The desktop computer in one room on a desk and your phone in one location, perhaps the kitchen, plugged in.
Uninstall apps you don't need and use your phone as intended. The value of your phone is a device for outside of the house. Turn on do not disturb and turn off the sounds.
Set up a schedule for daily use, perhaps an hour in the morning and evening, don't use any tech. Use this time for reading a book or exercise.
We used to use single purpose tools such as cameras and music players. These devices were the best of the best in some cases. No distractions and worked every time. Notebooks and pens to journal is another great use of single-purpose tech.
Get a life and touch grass! Do something you like, bike ride, play a guitar, just get curious about stuff.
Hopefully you find this list a good starting point and find some peace from this world of distractions and negativity.
2026-04-26 22:58:00
Image by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash. Glitched.
age verification but it's just a dialog box that asks "are you old" and the answers are "yes" and "maybe later"
So. The Liberal party here in Canada - the party that now has a majority in the federal government - has adopted a motion to ban children under 16 from social media.
Age Gating isn't It though, because:
Read the full article here.
And lastly - especially if age gating is being suggested, proposed, or otherwise discussed in your area - The time to speak up is now.
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