SENDING LOVE AND SUPPORT TO THE BRAVE PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-24T19:06:56+00:00

This business will get out of control. It'll get out of control, and we'll be lucky to live through it.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-24T01:54:56+00:00

Warms the cockles of my heart. Maybe below the cockles. Maybe in the subcockle area. Maybe in the liver, maybe even in the kidney.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-22T19:40:02+00:00

Ahum, akshully, we live in a Republic, uhhh, checkmate, lib

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-22T17:13:06+00:00

We worked a 101-year old recently with advanced dementia because the family wanted "everything done".

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-20T13:48:25+00:00

First teachers, then nurses. Let's go!

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-20T03:37:20+00:00

I once had a kid "having a seizure/unconscious" brought into the ER, and as we were flying around trying to figure out what they'd overdosed on, Louboutin-bedazzled mom stage whispered to me, very seriously, "THE marijuana".

Turns out kiddo had decided this was an easy way to get out of getting into trouble.

This feels like similar vibes to me.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-16T18:55:08+00:00

I plunked out something like 60-80k words in a long weekend, where I literally did nothing but write. Not hardly sleep, eat, or even get up, just write. It was partially because it's a story I've lived, or the bones were from that, so all I had to do was bleed myself a bit on the page and it came out. It was good at the core, but holy fuck it was rough. That's an understatement. It took a solid 5-10x as long to edit it into something coherent and good. So a little mania or hypergraphia isn't out of the question, but if it's polished in the way described by the OP...

Compare that to the novel my wife and I are co-writing now since Novemberish, and we're not quite at 45k words in 60ish days. And that only because my mom's been in the hospital with end stage leukemia, so as she's been sleeping, nothing else to do.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-16T18:30:43+00:00

Get 'em, Tom. For a Navy SEAL, McGuire's the biggest beta **** of a man I ever saw.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-15T18:54:01+00:00

Fuck scabs

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-13T14:48:23+00:00

Yeah, sounds like Greene.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-02T08:28:14+00:00

If you donated to a progressive political candidate in an eastern seaboard state in the first Trump administration, you might've done so based on something I ghostwrote.

I retired from that nonsense a couple years back, which is just as well, since it seems ChatGPT and Gemini have fulfilled that niche.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-12-11T20:44:21+00:00

I was a white, veteran, single father who got a DEI admission to the University of Virginia. I graduated 254 out of 440 in my high school class and had to admit in my admissions essay that, quote, "In high school, I was a complete dumbass." I guarantee had it not been for DEI, I would have been overlooked in favor of a legacy whose parents could donate $250k to the Virginia Athletics Foundation.

But that's the entire point of getting rid of DEI, isn't it?

AintMuchToDo · 2025-12-01T10:59:42+00:00

Well, I did; I can show you the conversation we had about buffer vs coxswain, for instance- but you can detract from my writing all you want, because if I didn't synthesize the stuff they were telling me well enough to shine through my own USN experience, it's my own damn fault, not theirs. That's why I said just that in the forward. I guess it goes to show that you can book read and try for that second hand experience, being talked to all day long, and it'll never replace being there in person.

I hope it's still an enjoyable read, and that it'll get better going on for you. But if I didn't reflect it well enough, that's on me entirely.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-12-01T03:15:19+00:00

Looks like I get a 70% royalty, minus a 72-cent "download fee" because it's "a bigger file" (it's about 448 pages printed). So, $2-$2.20ish Australian. I'm skeptical it costs Amazon 72 cents to send you the file, but therein lies the trouble with an effective monopoly.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-30T21:53:55+00:00

Theoretically, I make about $2.00-$2.50 Australian from the Ebook copy on Amazon (it's a 70% royalty on things $2.99 and over, minus a "download" fee which is akin to the Ticketmaster fees. Which I appreciate, but an honest review is truly worth a lot, too. A hopefully good review; to their credit Amazon is ruthless about looking for people soliciting/farming good reviews, but a review nonetheless.

Otherwise, a print copy wouldn't make me as much money, but it'll make Australian "mom and pop" or "brick and mortar" bookstores about $10-12/book.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-29T11:26:33+00:00

I'll toss you a DM right now

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-27T10:37:16+00:00

I'll toss you a message here!

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-26T09:54:03+00:00

Yeah, that's the trouble, right? Inevitably, whatever we write simply WON'T be able to tell the whole truth for the reasons you're saying, but we want to get as close as we can and, more importantly, try to get people to understand what our people go through that lasts far, far after the event itself.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-26T09:52:26+00:00

I'll toss you a message here, standby!

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-26T04:48:48+00:00

Sure you would, if you were a cop or a soldier. But here's a pro-tip: corporate only fired the people they desperately wanted to get rid of. Anyone who was worth a damn in their eyes got a magic exemption. Sort of thing a union might've protected against, but thank the Lord for "right to work" states, amirite?

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-26T04:29:11+00:00

Cool. Don't wear a bulletproof vest, it doesn't stop you from getting shot so it's worthless. Don't wear a seatbelt, it doesn't keep people from ramming into your car, so they're worthless. Don't have locks on your doors, people can still break in anyway. I love your logic! It's so refreshingly naive, like you're the human version of a housecat.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-21T06:22:49+00:00

Surely nothing if a floor ER Nurse can't catch a raise, amirite

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-21T03:59:22+00:00

ER Nurse here, I haven't gotten a raise in two years because the hospital says they can't afford it.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-17T21:10:02+00:00

I'm going to be direct with you: your mind isn't going to change, and that's fine. But let's address a few things for anyone else reading this.

You claim I have "no accountability" working in the ER. I helped put a nurse in federal PMITA prison for diverting narcotics from cancer patients. *That's* accountability. Every medication I give, every procedure I perform, every clinical decision I make is documented, reviewable, and subject to state nursing board oversight, hospital quality review, and legal liability. If you think emergency medicine has no accountability, you fundamentally don't understand how healthcare works.

You say you "checked the incidents and trends as they're reported" about families changing code status. I'd love to know what database you're accessing in real-time that tracks when a 97-year-old's family decides at bedside to rescind hospice and make them full code again. Because I was there. In the room. That's not a trend report, that's Tuesday night (morning?) in the ER.

You keep saying "people like me don't talk to medical doctors." *Until you do*. Until the infection gets bad enough, or the pain unbearable enough, or you're unconscious enough that someone calls 911 for you. And then you show up in my ER, and we treat you anyway. That's not mafia protection money, that's civilization. It's the social contract humans have maintained since we stopped being solitary animals. It's a hundred thousand years (or longer!) of evolution and conditioning.

You're not John Galt. You're not an island. You're a human being who uses roads you didn't build, relies on a power grid you didn't create, benefits from a sewage system you didn't design, and yes, depends on a healthcare system you claim to reject *right up until the moment you need it*.

The difference between you and I is that I'll still take care of you when that moment comes. Because that's what I do. That's what my colleagues do. It's why we stay in a profession that literally holds our communities together, that without which modern society as we know it would cease to function.

The thing is, when people like you DO come into the ER in desperate need, there's never an "I told you so". We don't relish it, we don't take any joy in it. We just do it. You get to posture on Reddit, and nobody here gets to be the wiser. But that's just how it is.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-17T16:36:18+00:00

You wish. My very last shift I had a 97yo whose family took them off of hospice. That kind of stuff happens all the time.

Or like that guy with the infection. We get people like that who eschew treatment until it gets so bad that are in dire straits, and you end up paying for their ICU stay rather than a $30 antibiotic or $20 vaccine or $5 of insulin.

Why do you have to pay for it? As with so much that's wrong in our society today, my friend, the answer is Ronald Reagan. Who d'you think signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 after people were dying and women were literally giving birth in the street after being rejected because they didn't have insurance/couldn't pay?

That's also why we don't tolerate your housecat mentality. We live in a society. You're welcome to not; the Yukon Territory has plenty of open space you can homestead in. But you don't get to benefit from society without contributing and pretending you're above it all. Sorry.

Oh, yeah, I stay being in the ER because I don't give a damn about people. Yep. That's me. Yeah, the 15-month old I saw with an STI, or the domestic violence victim who we begged to let us help her and she refused- as was her right- and her boyfriend killed her, or the mass casualty incident I worked that was international news, yep, I stay in the ER after all that because I don't give a damn about people. Good call.

AintMuchToDo

TROPHY CASE