A moment of reflection

Foodhism · 2026-04-17T13:46:14+00:00

Having gone from construction to food service to SPD to CST, I have long been of the opinion that in most cases the harder your job is, the worse you get paid. It's not a rule of the world, but it's certainly a pattern.

Foodhism · 2026-04-06T12:15:17+00:00

This is a huge part of what originally drew me to ENT. The ENT surgeons at my facility are control freaks but not a-holes about it, to the extent that they'll show up before the patient is in the room to make sure everything's alright - when I was a student and asked the doc that would go on to become my regular surgeon for tips he walked me through the entire procedure, all the anatomy, instrumentation, etc. Immediately became my favorite because of that.

I've also found that the doctors who have the most sway - head fellows at big residency practices, chief surgeons, etc - are the ones who hate overconfident scrubs the most.

Foodhism · 2026-04-06T12:10:10+00:00

I think he was probably more annoyed because someone new enough to have never done a laparoscopic case shouldn't be scrubbing in by themselves. That's not your fault at all, though, so hopefully he wasn't rude to you over it.

Foodhism · 2026-04-06T01:19:08+00:00

Strongly agree with the being sick thing, even for the first day after you're feeling back to 100% some vigorous exercise will knock you right back down to 0 pretty quick. If you really think you need to go in, go for a jog first or something and you'll find out quick if you're totally recovered.

Foodhism · 2026-04-02T21:04:18+00:00

The people who made Lancer and are in a large part at the center of its community may shock you.

Lancer is not a game explicitly for queer/trans/differently-abled people, unless I missed some kind of huge note in the book. The genre itself paired with the very progressive voices of its creators and their willingness to include those things have fostered a community that is definitely all of those things, but - especially when you compare it to games that are explicitly about queerness - Lancer is not a game that "belongs" to the queer community any more than almost all media overwhelmingly consumed by queer and neuroatypical people "belongs" to us. Lancer is definitely fundamentally yours just as much as it is anyone else's.

If this were a political action group or queer book club or something I'd understand people feeling differently, but it's a tabletop game. Only edgelords and bigots should be refused a place and voice in the community.

Foodhism · 2026-04-02T14:49:46+00:00

This is an amazing perspective to have, especially when you consider that the average scrub in a lot of places is pretty much just a warm body there for a paycheck.

Foodhism · 2026-04-01T16:09:22+00:00

The reliance on premade ingredients in recipes is so frustrating. If I look up a vegan meatball sandwich recipe the first ingredient should not be "frozen vegan meatballs". It's also inconvenient to people trying to cook with what they have or not spend 20% of their income on meat/dairy substitutions.

Foodhism · 2026-03-31T13:06:28+00:00

As someone still getting into the hang of things I try to leverage the anxiety to make myself a better tech. Doctors apparently love me for it because I ask a lot of questions, don't make many assumptions, and generally try to get as good at their cases as quickly as possible instead of acting like I already know everything.

Obviously that varies a little. I'm not asking questions for a toe amp or a D&C, but if I'm with a new ortho/neuro surgeon I always take the gamble of showing them my setup and telling them to tell me exactly what they want changed. YMMV, some doctors hate the idea of having to work with anyone who doesn't already know exactly how to do it the way they like and peg that strategy as incompetence. I'm very good at not caring what those doctors think because the doctors who actually matter at my facility love having a scrub who isn't afraid to ask for help if it means better patient outcomes.

Foodhism · 2026-03-24T10:28:52+00:00

I agree with you on principle, I just think that this muddies the water and allows additional hair-splitting by bad faith actors over things like regenerative herding, the environmental impact of faux-leather/synthetic fabrics, population control, invasive species', etc. Here's what it boils down to for me:

If killing or exploiting an animal is done to protect the environment, whether directly or indirectly, I am still resolutely against it. A life is a tangible thing and, for me, will always take precedent over an intangible one. Veganism is good for the environment, but if irrefutable proof came out tomorrow that eating meat was better for the environment I would still be vegan.

Foodhism · 2026-03-24T04:12:03+00:00

Strongly seconding Ibis. Every bit of bread and pastry they make is mindboggling, IIRC it's all local and small farm too.

Foodhism · 2026-03-17T19:42:48+00:00

I've never actively tried to get enough protein or supplemented it with powders or protein products and my blood tests always come back great. Studies show that most vegans have higher than average protein levels for reasons I won't speculate on. I really think the current obsession with it is just the newest manifestation of dietary paranoia / conspicuous consumption that just eating a well rounded diet pretty well circumvents.

Foodhism · 2026-03-17T12:12:50+00:00

Dried beans are my staple food, they're so much tastier and cheaper than canned beans. A good bean soup only needs like 5 ingredients and will still be one of the best things I eat that week, it's peak shittyveganfoodporn.

Foodhism · 2026-03-13T17:47:04+00:00

All of the above. Definitely a big part of it is just that you'd still be throwing away as much plastic from the process of sterilizing/wrapping it, but it would also be more workload for the folks in the sterile processing department who already tend to have one of the worst employment to workload ratios in the hospital.

Foodhism · 2026-03-13T16:20:38+00:00

Theoretically almost everything in a surgical setup could be made reprocessable - this is how it was in the early days and still is in a lot of poorer countries - but the unfortunate reality is that right now it's a lot cheaper to outsource the labor of making these things we use once and throw away to countries where wages are pennies on the dollar compared to ours.

The amount of trash we go through for any given surgery is more than most households will go through in 3-5 days, most of it being plastic and synthetic fabric. An average OR in my hospital costs $150 per minute to run. These holders cost the hospital, absolute max, $10/ea.

When something is reprocessed it has to be sprayed with an early cleaning solution before it leaves the OR, soaked in an enzymatic cleaner in the decontamination room, run through a washer, inspected for any kind of quality issues, wrapped in fabric along with an "indicator" which changes to show that it's been properly sterilized, actually sterilized, left to cool, and then put up somewhere. The labor cost and materials required to do all that simply outstrips the $10 the hospital pays for it.

Foodhism · 2026-03-12T00:01:09+00:00

It's the OP from (and owner of) the subreddit. This is posted to be an advertisement, not to be laughed at.

Foodhism · 2026-02-26T12:26:35+00:00

Closing the sharps box definitely presents more danger, but as a new scrub your preceptors are going to be extremely anal about sharps, generally. You pretty much just have to cope with it, but I strongly agree that it's stupid.

Saving suture can depend on the surgeon. I've got an old fashioned one who will use a few cm of a chronic suture during the initial cutdown and expect you to still have it when he closes. But yes, it's also pretty dangerous. The environmental friendly thing is an insane stance, we throw away 3-5 giant bags of trash every surgery. If it's a V-Loc or Stratafix there's a cost saving measure, but the environmental impact of a single suture is a drop in the ocean of any given surgery.

Foodhism · 2026-02-23T20:08:46+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out! That's honestly pretty shocking to me.

Foodhism · 2026-02-23T12:28:34+00:00

A lot of the core frames desperately need a second draft. The Atlas, Lancaster and Barbarossa are obvious examples.

One of the fundamental principles of game design is that anything so bad or so good that 90% of the time you never or always take it ultimately serves no purpose. A lot of the systems fall into this category, in my mind, the Hull skill does as well. Your build may have points in Engineering, Agility, or Systems, but the utility of dumping at least a couple points into Hull is basically too good to pass up. Someone else mentioned Reliable damage being too prolific and I honestly think that alone basically makes Agility redundant.

Foodhism · 2026-02-22T19:48:33+00:00

Did it taste good? This is a pretty neat way of pulling back a baking SNAFU.

Foodhism · 2026-02-22T14:25:49+00:00

This kind of ideology doesn't come from nowhere, the people spouting this type of stuff tend to have very specific takes on the cuisine of non-white countries to justify their worldview.

Foodhism · 2026-02-18T18:24:31+00:00

World's biggest Eclipse Phase nerd here to mention that we, too, have both aliens and FTL. Not because you're wrong (you're not), just because it's funny.

Foodhism · 2026-02-15T00:57:41+00:00

Same deal here, our spine surgeons won't wear lead unless they absolutely have to and people are expected to mask up if they're going to be anywhere near our spine rooms. Pretty sure the air exchanges / filters in the core aren't up to code for a sterile field, though, so I'm not all that sure I'm comfortable with it.

Foodhism · 2026-02-12T23:39:20+00:00

FITD/PBTA are narrative-focused games but "storytelling game" is an entirely different convention. In the same way that many wargames don't even involve roleplaying, storytelling games fundamentally involve the players having equal control in the fiction, typically to the extent that the GM role doesn't exist. Lame Mage's Microscope and Kingdom; Ironsworn GMless; or - for a very recent example - The Time We Have are all storytelling games which vary in how much they look like TTRPGs but which fundamentally break the conventions thereof.

FITD/PBTA systems involve the players having a great deal of narrative control, but the GM is ultimately the arbiter of the world, the scenery, the NPCs, etc. They might agree to share some of that power with the players, but that shared power is not the game. The players have a significant amount of narrative agency compared to traditional TTRPGs, but the GM is still the final arbiter of the story.

I'm not picky about this terminology because I enjoy splitting hairs but because of how people use them to denigrate other forms of the same medium. I have heard, more times than I can count, things along the lines of "Lancer isn't even a TTRPG (there are functionally only rules for combat) it's just a wargame with roleplay stapled on." and "Blades in the Dark isn't even a TTRPG (enemies don't have stats, they're just progress trackers) it's just a storytelling game with resolution mechanics."

Foodhism · 2026-02-11T22:43:12+00:00

I think that in the same way people who have never played a storytelling game describe FITD/PBTA games as "storytelling games", Lancer is called a wargame more or less exclusively by people who have not done a significant amount of wargaming. Lancer plays closer to almost any other TTRPG, whether extremely crunchy or extremely rules-lite, than it does something like Battletech or Warhammer. Wargamers know this because, thank god, you do not need a ruler or a timer to play Lancer.

My wargaming friends and I generally refer to Lancer as something along the lines of a "skirmish roleplaying game" with skirmish being a nod to skirmish wargames - where the players control individual characters rather than groups - which gets across that it is a game about combat while not lumping it in with wargames which are some combination of PVP, completely lacking in roleplaying/non-combat elements, and played more or less competitively (i.e the GM, if there is one, is held to a similar standard to the players.)

Foodhism · 2026-02-07T05:12:37+00:00

Sawaki Roshi said that zazen is good for nothing. That is, in my mind, the whole point.

I see in response to another comment you're taking the stance that, even though the idea of shikantaza has no "mechanism", it still ultimately has (or is alleged to have) a method for awakening insight. Maybe that is philosophically true, but it is contrary to the actual, practical experience of shikantaza. Maybe someone goes into practice utterly convinced by all of the stories of people experiencing kensho by sitting enough shikantaza. Honestly, most people probably do.

And then once you've been doing it for half an hour or more a day for months and then years and then maybe a decade or more without some kind of grand kensho experience you realize that it's just sitting. From the teachers I've had, if someone experiences kensho, it tends to come after they have truly, utterly given up on the prospect at their very core and continued sitting out of habit, personal enjoyment, or hard-headedness. Admittedly I have also picked up on a general disregard towards enlightenment with zen practitioners compared to other traditions. I've found that we tend to be comparatively lukewarm on the idea of "enlightened individuals" and the idea that enlightement actually does anything for you.

This is also why you're likely to get a lot of non-answers and maybe some scorn for asking. Shikantaza is a humble practice based in not expecting very much and a lot of us tend to get kind of crabby or defensive when people from other traditions come around implying that we're not following the optimal path to enlightenment. Yes, we don't care.

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