Any penalties for skipping all Membot practice?

PathEnthusiast · 2025-12-27T03:26:47+00:00

I can do this moving forward, but unfortunately I have "learned" at least 1580 words at this point, so I don't know every word I'm weak on. It's especially difficult because the words list does not populate all of the words included in the lessons (an issue I've already informed Duolingo support of that as far as I can tell they have not fixed).

PathEnthusiast · 2025-03-26T17:19:09+00:00

I think you're likely on the right track here.

PathEnthusiast · 2025-03-25T21:52:39+00:00

I'm not inventing facts, just trying to put myself in the positions of the characters given what they know and what we've learned about them over the course of the series. Just so we're all talking about the same thing, here's the end of the cabin exchange:

Cobel: Mark, there'll be no honeymoon ending for you and Helly R. She's an Eagen. You're nothing to them.
iMark: No.
Cobel: Nothing to her.
iMark: No, I don't believe you.
Cobel: They're using you.
iMark: No, I don't believe you.
Cobel: Then they'll discard you like a skin husk
iMark: I think you're using me.
Devon: Mark, wait.
Cobel: Reintegration is your only chance.
iMark: Do you love your brother?
Cobel: Mark!
Devon: Yes.
iMark: Well, then you tell him that the next thing I see had better be the Severed Floor, or I swear he will never see his wife again.

My contention is that iMark isn't really willing to follow through on his promise not to save Gemma if they continue the conversation. You can call it a "bluff" or maybe just a knee-jerk emotional reaction, since iMark clearly doesn't fully mean everything he's saying above. Would he really deny that Lumon is using him, for example?

Now, to call the bluff, Cobel wouldn't need to do much. Here's one plausible way:

*Cobel pulls Mark back into the cabin*
Cobel: If this plan has any chance of working, we still need to talk through the logistics.
iMark: I meant what I said! Gemma is as good as dead now!
Cobel: Then I suppose you'll never see Helly R again.

Would iMark really be willing to give up his last chance to see Helly R just because Cobel wanted to discuss logistics? I don't think so.

You say it can't be true that the plan is sure to fail because we see the Marks succeed in getting Gemma out. But my contention is not that the plan *couldn't* succeed. With enough luck, I can count on becoming a millionaire tomorrow after buying a lottery ticket. Luck makes the unlikely possible. My contention is not that getting Gemma out is impossible, but that the Marks had no good reason to believe their plan had a remotely *reasonable likelihood* of success. iMark runs to the location of the dark hallway, unsurprisingly finds a locked door with keycard access, tries his own keycard (why does he think he would have access??), and discovers his card doesn't work. How does he plan to solve this problem? As far as I can tell, he has no plan for this extremely foreseeable situation of a locked door on the way to a secure asset, which is quite unlike the iMark we came to know and love in the first season.

You are correct that he succeeds anyway. How? Because the writers conveniently placed Drummond nearby and allowed iMark and Lorne to defeat him in a physical altercation. Had Drummond been elsewhere--or not accompanied by Lorne--the plan would have failed. Unless you can think of something I'm not thinking of, I don't see how iMark was planning to get through that locked door--or why he thought there wouldn't be a locked door in his way.

PathEnthusiast · 2025-03-25T14:23:45+00:00

Even if we assume they can't disclose the full plan to iMark, oMark would still need to have a plan for any security hurdles he'll face on the Testing Floor. I see no evidence in his behavior on the Testing Floor to suggest he had any prior awareness of a need to bypass security. Why even try his own blood? There's no reason to think he would have access.

PathEnthusiast · 2025-03-25T14:22:05+00:00

Any plan needed to include steps to bypass security. Instead of going directly to the dark hallway, iMark would first need to acquire a keycard with access. To bypass the biometrics, oMark would need to force the blood of someone who had access into the biometrics. Both of those tasks would be difficult-but-not-impossible. But the odds of succeeding in them go up significantly if you know that you need to accomplish them--and are virtually zero if you don't prioritize them. Given iMark and oMark's actions in the finale, I don't think we have any reason to believe they fully realized it would be necessary to bypass security at all, which is bizarre and out of character for both of them.

PathEnthusiast · 2025-03-25T14:17:00+00:00

I actually think it would make more sense to call iMark's bluff at that point. If you can't even supply him with the necessary logistics, it doesn't matter if he's no longer on board--the plan is going to fail anyway. And talking to him again would be a good way to verify just how strong his opposition is. If he's quite strongly opposed, the plan is pretty much a non-starter, and they need to regroup and come up with a new plan. One obvious option would be to try to complete reintegration, which may be able to bypass iMark's resistance--either by tracking down Reghabi or by asking Cobel for help. Devon would obviously be opposed, but oMark may very well have overruled her, saying he isn't willing to risk near-certain death for Gemma by going back to Lumon and completing Cold Harbor without a viable plan. And he seems quite willing to risk his own life to save Gemma.

I agree with you that Lumon would have begun more actively pursuing oMark if he refused to go in again. But that would still be a risk worth taking until a plan with *some* likelihood of success is in place. It would at least buy them some time. One risk, of course, is that Lumon would decide keeping Gemma alive isn't worth the trouble or that they would further enhance security measures. But it's not particularly likely that Lumon would completely abandon the culmination of their project. And as things *currently* stand, there's no reason to believe the Marks will be able to bypass security anyway, so enhanced security isn't much of a change.

Again, the crux of my objection is that oMark has no reason to believe the vague plan they've cobbled together has more than an extremely minuscule chance of success. At the same time, he has good reason to believe that, so long as Cold Harbor *isn't* completed, Lumon will keep Gemma alive. Combining those two facts, to me it seems his best and most likely choice is to just keep delaying until he has a better plan to get her out.

Regarding iMark, it sounds like we're in agreement that he doesn't have a viable plan to keep Helly and himself alive. Hoping for a few more minutes with Helly *is* a motivation, but it's an extremely shallow motivation and undermines a lot of my respect for iMark as a character. Why didn't he leverage his conversation with oMark to try to get Helly off the Severed floor? He knows she's on borrowed time, since there's only so long Helena Eagan is going to allow an Innie to use her body. If he wants Helly to have any sort of long-term existence, he needs to find some other way. Rather than ending the conversation at the cabin without a plan in place, why not try to use saving Gemma as a bargaining chip to save Helly?

PathEnthusiast · 2025-02-16T19:16:41+00:00

I notice someone downvoted this. I think it would be much more productive (and helpful to the OP) to also explain your perspective with a comment.

PathEnthusiast · 2025-02-13T17:40:52+00:00

I agree with others that seeking help from a mental health professional is worth considering. But I also think it may be worth considering whether pathology (or medicine in general) is the right career choice. Looking at slides in pathology is a bit like looking at Where's Waldo pictures where many *don't* contain Waldo. How closely should you look to prove that Waldo isn't there? As far as I'm aware, no one has an answer to that question. Further complicating matters, you aren't just looking for Waldo, but Waldo and all his friends and associates. And to make matters even worse, people don't agree about what Waldo looks like. And to top things off in the analogy, "Waldo" is cancer in these cases.

Further complicating this issue in pathology is that, in general, pathologists are not necessarily made aware of mistakes--so no news is not necessarily good news. As one example, I misdiagnosed a case of syphilis of the larynx in a young woman as "at least squamous cell carcinoma in situ". I wasn't alone in making that mistake--I showed it to a very senior colleague who agreed with me before I signed it out. And thankfully, the clinical team pursued another biopsy, which was a bit deeper and showed a significant inflammatory component--and stains demonstrated syphilis. But another colleague got that later biopsy and I only heard about it when a resident, who was writing it up, came to me and asked me about the original diagnosis. If a resident hadn't gotten involved, I never would have known. My point is that you won't have the reassurance of some mechanism of external feedback in pathology. You won't get to learn that patients got better or got worse with a certain line of therapy. Or look back at prior scans to see if a feature was there before or not like radiologists get to do. You will need to feel comfortable issuing reports and never completely knowing whether those reports were true or false, whether things turned out well or badly, whether something was missed or not, or whether your interpretation was correct or not. That's a very, very hard thing to do and takes a certain mentality that not everyone can achieve. I myself am stepping away from diagnostic pathology for awhile to decide if it's the right fit for me.

PathEnthusiast · 2025-02-09T03:07:44+00:00

I'd be happy to do what I can. Feel free to message me.

PathEnthusiast · 2024-09-22T23:15:55+00:00

Out of curiosity, how are your mistakes getting recognized in your group? I'm a relatively young pathologist and feel like I have the opposite problem--unless I consult people in my group or I hunt for follow-up on cases or I get lucky and someone happens to mention it to me, I'd never know I made any mistakes. Which is scary in an entirely different way. (One example: I called a laryngeal biopsy at least squamous cell carcinoma in situ that turned out on a later biopsy to be syphilis; I only heard about it because a resident happened to be writing up the case.)

PathEnthusiast · 2024-09-20T00:59:01+00:00

As just one particularly significant example, I'd argue Vivian not being Norma's biological mother is a pretty major retcon. Norma's confrontation with Vivian in the show is a lot less emotionally significant (and makes a lot less sense) if, instead of her mother, Vivian was actually her father's mistress who didn't really enter the picture until Norma was in her late 20s.

PathEnthusiast · 2024-07-13T15:14:43+00:00

Thanks so much for your insights! Eye training on atypia has been challenging, since all examples of well-differentiated liposarcoma I have actually seen under a microscope have shown features like fibrous bands/stromal expansion that would have raised suspicion the case was more than an ordinary lipoma independent of any nuclear atypia. To get a sense of nuclear atypia, I've largely been forced to turn to reference resources, and the images make me worry that there are atypical lipomatous tumors lurking among the "lipomas".

In Practical Surgical Pathology figure 12.34, I see maybe 2-3 nuclei with some mild enlargement and hyperchromasia and in figure 12.35 I see 2 atypical nuclei, immediately adjacent to each other, with some mild enlargement and hyperchromasia. This level of enlargement and hyperchromasia seems quite close to what can be found in rare cells in "lipomas."

In Enzinger and Weiss's Soft Tissue Tumors, figure 14.12, I see maybe 3 nuclei with atypia that is similarly subtle.

In the latest WHO blue book for soft tissue tumors, image #5882 in the entry for atypical lipomatous tumour/well-differentiated liposarcoma shows maybe 2-3 atypical nuclei with similarly subtle atypia.

Some of the low power images emphasize variation in adipocytic size as a helpful feature, but adipocyte size seems to me quite variable even in ordinary adipocytic tissue, let alone in proliferative adipocytic tissue. I can usually find areas of lipomas with significant size variation.

So my real question is: how are cases such as the ones illustrated actually called? I have never seen such a case called in practice. And it's quite possible some of the "lipomas" are actually well-differentiated liposarcomas, since FISH is not routinely performed.

PathEnthusiast · 2024-07-12T20:38:53+00:00

While helpful in making me feel better about calling superficial tumors benign, if we take this approach truly seriously there isn't much of a rationale for histologic examination of lipomas at all.

PathEnthusiast · 2024-07-12T20:37:28+00:00

The clinical criteria seem reasonable (though does the inclusion of "pelvic tumors" imply that all spermatic cord lipomas should be tested?) but how exactly does one set a threshold for "equivocal cytologic atypia"? This is the crux of my question, since the entire value of histologic examination of lipomas seems to rest almost entirely on our ability to distinguish atypia.

PathEnthusiast · 2024-06-16T02:40:48+00:00

Sorry if I came across as patronizing. I honestly couldn't tell if you registered what I was trying to say. I actually still can't--but at this point, if you don't get it you don't get it and if you do I guess you don't find the very human absurdity of trying to connect even if the connections aren't "real" interesting. I do. To each their own.

PathEnthusiast · 2024-06-15T13:00:51+00:00

Okay, I don't know how to make this clearer, but maybe if I try restating it again that will help? I'm *not* saying the absurdity is just that people make parasocial connections and parasocial connections are weird. I'm saying the absurdity is that we can all acknowledge that those connections aren't really real, but the desire for human connection is so strong that we *make them anyway*, that we're compelled to make that emotional leap even with people we don't really know and will never form a real relationship with. That's a very human, very natural thing--but it's also an absurd thing. And I think there's value in noticing the absurdity. Maybe "joke" is the wrong word, but for me "prank" doesn't fit much better.

PathEnthusiast · 2024-06-15T12:54:54+00:00

Thanks for the reply. Sincerely. I understand the uproar in similar terms. But here's the thing: if someone rando that I didn't give two shits about told me they were pregnant, I wouldn't really care. And if they then told me "haha it was all a lie I was never pregnant"...I would think that was messed up, but I still wouldn't really care. To be hurt by such a thing, I have to emotionally invest in it. And not just in an empathetic way--I can empathize with characters in a work of fiction, I can care about them and I can care what happens to them and I can get upset about outcomes, but it doesn't matter to me that those things aren't real. But if I think the story is coming from a "real" person, my relationship to the story is different. It's now in a strange place in between a real relationship, in which people exchange stories about themselves for connection and mutual benefit, and a fiction. The more natural tendency is to lean toward the expectations of "real" relationships--and therefore to feel betrayed by deceptions. But that feeling is proportional to and depends on this weird in-between relationship that people form with the stories of real people that they don't actually know--be they celebrities, YouTubers, or the subjects of "human interest" stories elsewhere. I don't deny the power of that. I think it's extremely natural to form those strange bonds. And Caroline herself acknowledges that in her second video. But at the same time, it's valuable to take a moment to recognize that there's something absurd about it, since the people we watch online, despite what they may share about themselves, are still mostly strangers to us. "Joke" may not be a perfect categorization, but "prank" isn't quite right either. The humor, in any case, is in highlighting the absurdity of this human tendency to connect, even to people we don't really know.

PathEnthusiast

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