1. When Elon Musk took over Twitter and things started going bananas I initiated migration over to Mastodon (@dmmaus@dice.camp). I posted a few times to Twitter to let followers know, and then signed off, but I didn’t delete my account. I kept the Twitteriffic client open on my desktop and checked it every few days to keep up with any news from people I followed.
I checked it today, and discovered that my feed hadn’t updated in three days. I mentioned this to a friend, and he said that Twitter’s third party API had been turned off, so a lot of clients no longer worked any more. Checking the news myself, I found an announcement from the developers that indeed Twitteriffic could no longer access Twitter’s API, so they were discontinuing the app. So… today I shut it down and deleted Twitteriffic. I also decided I may as well delete Twitter from my phone (I rarely ever used it there – I much prefer desktop). So I’m now completely Twitter-free. Although my account still exists – I just can’t be bothered to delete it. And who knows, perhaps it might come in handy for something at some point.
2. Australia Day is on Thursday this week. I wrote about the ongoing and slowly growing controversy surrounding Australia’s national holiday last year and the year before.
Today there was an article on the ABC News site saying that a growing number of people are seeking to completely ignore the public holiday by going to work, rather than taking the day off. It discusses the complications that arise when people want to work on a public holiday, and mentions that increasing numbers of companies are in fact allowing staff to ignore the public holiday and work if they want. However this is not a standard thing that is allowed for in the holiday legislation, so companies are still allowed to say that the company is taking the day off and employees cannot work on the day, even of they want to.
It seems like quite a weird situation. It’s like imagining an American deciding they don’t agree with the principle of Independence Day and seeking to ignore it by going to work on 4 July. As I said in the past two years, this sort of weirdness is going to continue and escalate until we change the date of our national holiday.
3. I completed the week’s topic on medicine with my main ethics classes. Part of it is discussing the incredibly high cost of insulin in the USA, compared to almost every other country on Earth. Today I had one girl in a class say that if she gets diabetes, she’s going to move to Australia!
4. I received a package in the mail today! It was rewards for a Kickstarter that I backed in 2021, for a fantasy roleplaying adventure from Goodman Games, Crypt of the Devil Lich. Here’s all the loot I got: the hardback adventure book in a hard slipcase, bonus extra level, booklets of pregenerated characters, player handouts, and designer notes, plus a couple of posters and a sheet of stickers.
I chose to get it in rules compatible with D&D 5th edition – the other option was for Dungeon Crawl Classics, which I also own already, but have not actually used to run any games before. Of course I made the choice before the present kerfuffle with D&D and the Open Gaming Licence that everyone is talking about. I might have chosen to get the DCC version today, although really that’s mostly because after running D&D 5th edition several times I’ve actually grown to not like it as much as I did at first.
I find the 5th edition combat system too tactical. I prefer a fast and loose, more abstract style to combat, rather than having players counting map grid squares and calculating ranges down the foot. Thus my decision to use the old 1981-vintage D&D Basic Set rules for the game I’m planning to run with my friends soon. That’s scheduled for Friday 10 February.
New content today:
I’m sure you covered the fact that insulin is quite inexpensive in the USA? USD$3 per day?
There are expensive time-release insulins and whatnot, but generic insulin costs half of the price of a McDonald’s burger. Additional Federal restriction will kick in this year, lowering the price just over one dollar per day for at least a plurality of our diabetic people. (I have diabetes myself, but don’t currently need insulin.)
Changing the subject, did you see how your webcomics colleague Jeph Jacques quit Twitter? He impersonated Elon Musk until his account was suspended.
https://www.thefocus.news/sports/who-is-jeph-jacques-elon-musk-impersonator-booted-off-twitter/
US$3 a day is roughly 10 times the cost of insulin in Australia. Although to be honest the reading I did indicated that it was even more expensive than that in the USA, around US$6 a day. And there are any number of articles about how some people in the USA risk their health by rationing insulin because they can’t afford it.
The rationers exist, but they are the ones who need some unusual variant insulin, e. g. they’re allergic to some ingredient in the generic or need the time-release version.
I’m not saying things are ideal, they are not. At the same time, even $6 a day would be the full cost of a McDonald’s hamburger, not a dealbreaker unless you are very poor indeed. Which people are, of course. There are programs to help the indigent (such as Medicare) but they’re cumbersome and bureaucratic and hard to deal with, especially if you have to work two jobs to survive, like, well, the very poor.
It’s just that, on a daily basis, insulin is not much (or any) more expensive than things like blood pressure meds or statins, depending on which specific medication you need.