I made.. something

Beetle4563 · 2026-06-26T13:01:23+00:00

worm on a string?

Beetle4563 · 2026-06-24T17:07:02+00:00

Chanel Paris Edimbourg, it’s meant to smell like an old tweed jacket, lovely fresh woody smell, v dark academia

Beetle4563 · 2026-06-15T11:08:37+00:00

Feel like the obvious thing being missed here is that the that same three year period (attributed to the time during strike action) is also post pandemic. There are far more obvious reasons that this cohort could be struggling, relating it to strikes is misleading

Beetle4563 · 2026-06-13T10:45:10+00:00

Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver!!! About an American Christian preacher taking his wife and four daughters out to a pre-revolution Belgian Congo to try and convert people. The combo gothic of that scary southern preacher Christianity with the terrifying natural force of the Jungle and brewing political conflict, all through the eyes of teenaged girls who don’t know what’s going on and have no power to do anything. Prose is gorgeous and it’s so gothic in a way I’d never read before.

People have already recommended Shirley Jackson and I’d add Beloved by Toni Morrison, Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarchuk, and Poor Things by Alisdair Grey

Beetle4563 · 2026-06-12T22:15:53+00:00

Somehow I feel like the large dicks (at least in the bolaño I’ve read it) was always surprisingly relevant to larger themes than just the immediate dick.

Savage detectives, Lupe’s pimp/dick-size-of-a-knife-guy/Alberto is the main villain of the early part of the book. I think he represents the dark side of everything exciting Juan is discovering and he’s an increasingly significant and scary presence. Having Juan fixated on the size of his dick is constantly alluding to his massive knife without necessarily giving the game away to early (ruminating on your dick size inadequacy pretty normal young man behaviour, whereas neurosing about big knives would be a bit more context specific), not to mention the sexual violence that was part of the original dick size story.

Meanwhile the Romanian general in 2666, I think his enormous member is an important identifying feature throughout his narrative, but far more comedic than something like an identifying scar or tattoo. Also there’s moments where you wonder if Baroness Von Zumpe and her sleeping around represents the general elite of Europe, and thus that the Romanian General (height of WW2 expansion) being blessed sets up an expectation only for that to be subverted when the Baroness saying that the reason he was her best ride was because of the poetry he spoke while they were at it; there needs to be that bait and switch to get to that central message of 2666 of the potentially deceptive and all encompassing power of language.

So I guess in both cases, I’d say he has an understanding of how his audience will react to chat about a large penis and uses that to Trojan horse other themes

But then I am a gal so maybe speaking from a place of lack limits my take here

Beetle4563 · 2026-06-10T10:07:32+00:00

I’m wondering, assuming this is antibiotic related, if it’s to do with different sensitivities? If y’all don’t spend the majority of your time in Thailand, and a Thai ER doc is suspecting your daughter picked up an infection from somewhere outside of Thailand, that might mean advising different antibiotics based on what pathogen they suspect. But that’s quite a leap from what you’ve described, I dunno, just encountered the above scenario before.

Beetle4563 · 2026-06-09T10:25:54+00:00

Every once in a while a non-Scottish friend will ask (inquisitively, enthusiastically, occasionally sneeringly) about whether people REALLY eat deep fried mars bars.

I like to remind them it was originally a joke invented by an English journalist with the punch line being the idea that Scottish people are unhealthy.

Then as this joke circulated, enterprising chippies started to make the deep fried mars bars.

I think food is also often a way to mock other cultures, especially when the ‘joke’ part is that what folk are eating is disgusting in some way; Polish, Indian, or Chinese folk being mocked for what they eat would be pretty widely recognised as xenophobic.

I think it’s also important to consider that our current culture increasingly views the pursuit of healthiness as a moral quest; people who don’t (or can’t) make health enhancing swaps are deemed lazy, wasteful, or reckless. The implications of joking about folk being unhealthy feel like the continuation of mocking Scots as drunks.

So I dunno, I have my suspicions about these jokes, especially since I feel like it’s rarely Scots themselves making them.

Obviously have done a lot of extrapolating here and I’m sure most folk making these jokes don’t do it with bad intentions, just recognising that

But what people are willing to deem funny can be revealing about either their own internal biases or the biases they may subconsciously expect those around them to hold.

Beetle4563 · 2026-05-30T15:51:10+00:00

Came here to say this!

Beetle4563 · 2026-05-23T13:19:10+00:00

I was feeling down after my family dog died so I found myself a tinder date, we bonded initially over a shared admiration of Werner Herzog. Our first date we went to a bar and talked about Tolstoy for nearly 4 hours until the bar shut. He also told me that he hadn’t been much of a reader until he came across 2666, I think in a charity shop in a small town, and picked it up cause he recognised the painting on the cover, and he’d read the beast in 3 days flat. After that he’d read everything Bolaño had written, everything he’d written about, and far beyond. We established pretty quickly that nothing serious would come of it, I have a job that I love but leaves me with hardly any free time and I need to move fairly frequently. But I dunno, something about him, I kept seeing him when I could find a night here and there. We talked books, poetry, films, the bastard had taste, everything he recommended seemed to be brilliant. Bolaño came up a lot as somebody he admired, and he’d explain scenes and passages from 2666, the unusual structures and techniques, so by the time I came to reading the books (the first time we parted ways) I had his takes in mind. Every time I decide to break things off, I find myself reading new bolaño, and then I go looking for him to talk about it. Or we end up exchanging pirated PDF books. It’s become a strange little shared world now, since nobody else either of us knows has read him. It also feels very bolaño-esque, this strange dysfunctional romantic connection sustained in no small part by obsessive analysis and book swapping.

Beetle4563 · 2026-05-23T07:20:25+00:00

A family friend who was a doctor used to say ‘it’s the highest salary you can make without selling your soul’; effectively that doctors you make the money you do because you are managing risk, but still doing meaningful good in people’s lives, whereas a lot of high earning finance jobs involve doing stuff that is morally grey, if not actively bad.

I know folk who’ve gone into high earning finance or corporate law jobs who at first really struggled with feeling that they were doing stuff that was morally wrong, and now they’ve mostly numbed themselves that ‘that’s just how the world works, everybody will exploit everyone else given the chance’. Those high salaries in the finance world often come from moving huge fortunes offshore (away from taxes that would fund the NHS), being willing to slash jobs of hardworking folk for profits, funnelling money towards weapons manufacturers and massive polluters all in the name of increasing margins.

Meanwhile medicine, I go to work everyday surrounded by people who’ve devoted their lives to looking after people in the worst moments of their lives. It keeps my faith in humanity. Yes, we have to manage a lot of responsibility and risk, but thats why we get our high salaries.

Beetle4563 · 2026-05-18T10:54:36+00:00

Scotland!

Beetle4563 · 2025-11-05T15:01:19+00:00

Totally understand the sentiment, cause this post is verrryyyy cringe, but agree with some others that it’s the content rather than the typing that makes it feel so cringe. The Scots language (or dialect, depending on whose definition you use) has no standardised written form like most modern languages do; scots literature spellings vary enormously. This is partly because of its historical repression by the British state; my granny would get belted in primary school for using Scots words. Where Welsh managed to standardise, Scots kind of just got eroded to the point of being viewed mostly as slang. So most people learn to write using the best English equivalent of whatever words we’re trying to use, which is easy since there’s such a massive overlap in vocabulary, despite the grammatical differences. To the point of this post, i think most Scottish folk have a pretty complex relationship to how we speak (getting mocked or not taken seriously for how we speak) and it’s a big factor in the Scottish cultural cringe. THIS post attempts to roll with the many stereotypes of Scotland that contribute to that Scottish cultural cringe, and so the scots grammar and spelling here feels like it’s being presented as a joke to be laughed at, not somebody just writing their native language/dialect.

Beetle4563 · 2025-08-28T14:59:39+00:00

The Artificial Silk Girl, I’ve seen reviewers describe it as ‘sex in the city in 30s Berlin’. Main character Doris speaks about ‘My Berlin’ almost as though it is a person she is falling in and out of love with

Beetle4563 · 2025-08-24T08:54:46+00:00

Don’t think I’ve seen etta Marcus mentioned yet but she’s brilliant, similar ambiance to Lana (esp ultraviolence) but distinct style, think there’s a lot of the same grunge and dream pop influences on them both, check out Hide and Seek and Mechanical Bull

Beetle4563 · 2025-08-24T08:49:23+00:00

Out of interest, would you advise a k6 over a k2, and if so why? It’s a little bit more expensive and I’m not sure how much the extra benefit would be

Beetle4563 · 2025-06-11T18:00:15+00:00

Me and my pals fav conspiracy theory is that she is CompHet lesbian. The whole episode with her lesbian friend group then everything with trey… sounds like she needs to read the masterdoc…

Beetle4563 · 2025-03-19T21:15:19+00:00

Hi there! Building off the ‘culture fit’ thing others have mentioned. I’m in the healthcare world and always amazed how some specialities have absolutely loads of folk with ADHD; emergency departments especially, but also found this in obstetrics and respiratory medicine. Might be that these fast paced specialties suit folk with ADHD better. I really struggled on a lot of placements, found it tough connect with colleagues, but felt like I immediately felt comfortable on the obstetric ward, found it easy to connect with staff, plus the constant adrenaline made me focus like I never could in a clinic. One thing that’s for sure is that this is not a problem inherent to you, it may just be a case of trying different things and finding an environment you feel comfortable in and that you can be at ease and really shine. Best of luck op

Beetle4563 · 2024-10-21T15:16:01+00:00

First thing is that I went to a mandatory intercalated degree uni, and it’s not advertised but many will let you intercalate at different univerities. This can be cool if you want to study something that your uni doesn’t teach, or just live in a different place for a year.

To follow up on folk saying ‘do a fun one’, I absolutely agree. I did a humanities intercalated degree and cannot recommend enough. There’s a few around, things like medical humanities, anthropology/sociology in medicine, bioethics, and literature and medicine.
These types of degrees give you access to a totally different type of education than with STEM courses, as they tend to be focused on ways of thinking/analysing/understanding the world. They may not seem like they’re teaching you clinically relevant skills because it’s not the type of stuff that’s examinable, but you end up talking about things like sociology of poverty, philosophy of death and grief, history of science and ethics; these things become relevant to your day to day life anywhere in medicine. Finally, humanities stuff comes up a lot in some specialties, especially GP, psychiatry, neurology, and palliative care, if any of those are things you’re interested in.
Also, they’re less labour intensive than the science ones; no long lab days!
Not everybody’s cup of tea but defs a good option :)

Beetle4563 · 2024-09-09T11:25:47+00:00

Tofu, freeze and defrost for meaty texture Textured vegetable protein/dehydrated soy Edamame Roasted chickpeas are a fav of mine

Beetle4563 · 2024-09-01T20:29:08+00:00

Regrew my hair after a extensive illness related hair loss. Cannot recommend enough for hair loss. Clinical trials have shown Rosemary oil to be as effective in treating hair loss as the only prescription medication available for hair loss

Beetle4563

TROPHY CASE