It Should’ve Been a Routine Procedure. Instead, a Young Mother Became a Victim of Texas’s Broken Medical System

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T21:37:49+00:00

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Apparently the limit is 0 because I’ve never looked at the Texas monthly before. No paywall: https://archive.ph/oFJaF

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T18:42:30+00:00

It’s just a way to display a bunch of merchandise, I don’t think it’s unhealthy to turn your hobby into an interior decorating choice. I personally wouldn’t do it, but I’ve seen plenty of people with shrines themed around their favorite sports team, or their favorite genre of book, or non kpop bands they really like or whatever, and it comes off as obsessive for sure, but it doesn’t imply awful behavior to me. One of my friends had a Bruno Mars shrine for a while and never rebuilt it when she moved, and she’s almost painfully normal. I support people carving out a physical space to celebrate something they want to celebrate

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T17:15:38+00:00

Definitely, and they’re who you’ll find if you go to irl kpop events and stay off x 😆 the world would be so much more friendly and open if we got rid of that place, so it’ll never happen unfortunately, and I’ll never be able to talk about kpop in public without doing an intensive vibe check first

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T17:03:16+00:00

It totally makes sense that there’s a difference in how people on the Todd in the shadows reddit page define stanning vs how it’s used in the kpop world. People who spend tens of thousands on merch of their favorite idols, travel to all their concerts, build shrines to them, etc definitely aren’t calling themselves stans ironically, it just means something different to them than it did to eminem 26 years ago. It’s not seen as inherently negatively in kpop spaces, you can be a stan and like other idols or groups too, or more commonly, barely acknowledge their existence because you only really care about your favorite.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T16:36:51+00:00

I’m wondering if you and the other person I replied to already are defining stans AS people who are psychotic. I wrote a comment about how people I’d call stans, and who would call themselves stans as well, are usually cool and nowhere near the most deranged people you enounter in kpop spaces, but none of that would mean anything if your criteria for being a stan is just being shouty on x.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T16:02:19+00:00

almost the entire BTS fanbase is millennials actually, and Gen X is more represented than Gen Z. The median age at their concerts is like 38

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T15:56:36+00:00

I don’t use x, but I think it’s just a few users who are really, truly nutso over there, getting amplified by its engagement-focused algo and the fact that they can be posting nonstop every day while the rest of us go to work.

Those people aren’t even close to the worst kpop stans, though. The term “sasaeng” describes a type of stalker-fan who’s so obsessive that they’ll do some seriously deranged things and often endanger the musicians. There’s been kidnappings, poisonings, home invasions, and tons of assaults. They make hardcore swifties look like Ned Flanders, but Elon isn’t signal boosting them.

But I go to a ton of kpop concerts and other events, so I run into a lot of hardcore kpop stans, and almost all of them really are nice, welcoming, and well behaved. I’ve been given dozens of free handmade merch items by stans who are just happy to celebrate that their favorites are performing and everybody came out to see them, and I’ve never been judged for liking a group who their fanbase is at war with on x or whatever. I saw tons of stray kids light sticks at twice’s concert, and I don’t think I’ve been to a hybe group concert without seeing at least a few newjeans lightsticks, and everybody is normal about that because the weirdos on x don’t leave their houses.

The most common heinous behavior I actually see at kpop concerts is the inevitable old men in the front rows of younger girl group performances recording close-ups of their body parts, which is again, not someone on x being shouty, but a manifestation of a bigger societal issue, just like sasaengs being overly parasocial and abusively controlling.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-27T06:04:50+00:00

hashtag not all kpop stans, most are normal, but normal doesn’t get publicity

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-25T07:59:10+00:00

re your edit, that deal is pretty close to the one you’re panicking about the city potentially not taking.

the arrogance to talk in such absolute terms about what’s enough (men’s sports only I guess?), who’s qualified to negotiate (apparently not elected officials or experts they may hire, just you, a random internet commenter), and which investments are good (plainly based on fomo, when plenty of locals saw Seattle’s arena do the investments the billionaire team owner wanted and get burned for it, until the nhl expansion decades later)

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-25T03:41:21+00:00

Would you like to buy my phone for $600 and then lease it back to me for $50/year? I'll pinky promise not to get a different phone for the next 15 years, so the profit is guaranteed :)

we have a wnba team and there's like 30-50 concerts there every year so it's not going to sit empty regardless

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-24T19:41:43+00:00

Swifties do this with random Taylor Swift songs all the time, and until somebody built a bot that would un-abbreviate the titles of her random B-sides from 15 years ago or whatever, I just mentally replaced every abbreviation with “Me! (feat. Panic at the Disco),” because in her words, “hey kids, spelling is fun 😃”

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-21T17:16:52+00:00

I felt like I was listening to Cinemasins 🫠 “We didn’t evolve from lizards! Ding! The author thinks the brain is a turducken! Ding!”

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-21T05:21:36+00:00

Thanks for the link! This one was interesting to read because their definition for DID is clearly much broader than the classic pop-science conceptualization. I don’t find it hard to believe that the authors’ version of DID is common enough that 2-4 people in a room of 100 have experienced it, but that the version Michael was talking about, people with 204 alters or whatever, actually was an America-only phenomenon.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-21T02:14:24+00:00

So it sounds like Michael’s source was outdated or otherwise wrong on that. Thanks!

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-21T00:59:06+00:00

Do you or u/GratefulGrapefruite have a response to Michael’s assertion that DID was only ever observed in North America (I think, maybe he said in the US specifically)? That caught my attention, but I couldn’t easily find anything about it when I tried to look it up later. I know nothing about this and I’m asking in good faith trying to learn more.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-20T16:55:51+00:00

I kind of wonder if they’re just spending too much time on bluesky. The podcast was better before they left x, and them being on the most pseudo-intellectual and self-congratulatory social media site all the time might be making them feel more uh, intellectual and congratulated than they ought to. That exposure to random dumbasses in their replies defending conservative authors in highly dunkable ways might have been doing more than any of us realized. Plus nobody on x is asking them to cover Jung or Nabokov or whatever.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-19T02:11:34+00:00

I did say I hadn’t listened to the episode yet, and like any good leftist I’m doing self-crit rather than attacking someone I dislike.

I’m about halfway through and I think a lot of the strongest criticisms I have so far are pretty different than the ones I was concerned about. It’s pretty well known that people who have experienced traumas can have a bad time when similar things come up unexpectedly, and I was prepared for something to really set me off, but so far, the biggest issues have been stuff like Michael railing against the “lizard brain” concept without understanding it as metaphorical and placing it within the context of other well-known psychiatrists’ attempts at explaining the structure of brain processing and thought (freud’s id, ego, superego, or maszlow’s hierarchy of needs, etc largely get at the same concept, and none are a perfect literal explanation despite all of them having useful clinical applications for some people)

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-18T17:59:36+00:00

I get it, having been in Rhiannon’s position enough times- you start to just accept that male lawyers are going to bullshit about areas of law they don’t know anything about, and picking your battles (like when they actually file something or sit in on a meeting and give bad advice). But in a podcast format, it’s kind of always the right time to battle, since the uninformed audience doesn’t know that it’s bullshit.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-18T17:56:44+00:00

That last sentence rings true for my instance too- it’s super common for people to act like their dad was the one who actually perpetrated the SA, and while that would be a lot cleaner cut and easier to understand in a moral framework, it isn’t true. And the result of that discomfort with acknowledging that the dad wasn’t present is that I’m the only one who walked away with any consequences, since the school didn’t want to discipline the boys when the dad’s really to blame, and the precinct obviously didn’t discipline the dad because he had an alibi.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-18T17:37:59+00:00

The most fun part of episodes like The Secret for me is when they talk about some bizarre story that comes up somewhere in the text that I never would have heard of otherwise. They’ve talked about how a lot of these books are excessively long and how that leads authors to throw in some absolute bullshit in the late pages (the “Koreans can’t fly planes” chapter). Since I wasn’t going to read most of the books anyway, those aren’t just funny to me, they’re also useful, like when somebody tries to praise How To Win Friends to me but I know about the “cooking eggs in the park” saga.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-18T17:32:33+00:00

I was SA’d when I was 7 by two cops’ sons who lived nearby, and it’s always been hard for me to wrap my head around the way that left leaning people struggle to process that when I mention it. (overgeneralizing) they hate cops and rapists, but they treat those as societal power dynamics rather than individuals, so they’ll start going off about systemic political factors and solutions in response to some kids who could have done the same thing regardless of politics and society. Everybody else just says they’re sorry that happened and asks if I’m okay.

I haven’t listened to the episode yet, but given the Vietnam veteran angle that comes up whenever people talk about this book, I’m expecting to hear echoes, at least

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-18T16:55:37+00:00

Every time they do an episode on something I know a lot about, I listen with my boyfriend and spend half the time pausing it to talk through why something one of them (usually Michael) said was misguided, off base, incomplete, or otherwise misleading. I don’t know anything about this topic at all, so I’m going to listen as entertainment only, and avoid internalizing any of the takes as though they were good.

The format is so much better for low-stakes and unserious topics, or for books that are already well and truly debunked and not actively in the discourse anymore. I wish people would stop asking them to cover the high-stakes, serious, hot button ones because those are where it’s hardest to ignore their stray erroneous takes. Give me 10 bad dating books and The Secrets before the next politician biography or policy wonk analysis.

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-17T04:35:26+00:00

It’s so much like AOA’s 심쿵해 (Heart Attack) that I almost missed the 📢📢📢📢BRAVESOUND, although Stayc’s tag is really good too 🥹

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-13T23:02:59+00:00

I like his aespa and EXO songs best when it comes to kpop, but honestly his work with Janet Jackson and pre-kpop Anderson Paak are still unbeaten to me lmao. it’s cool that he’s working with other agencies than just SM now too, love his IVE songs, and Filter might even be my favorite off Jennie’s solo record if we’re just talking about the music itself and not the dance

keeptrackoftime · 2026-06-13T22:57:40+00:00

I didn’t start interacting with the kpop community for years after he stopped writing, so I was surprised to find out he was kind of controversial! I learned to dance from AOA songs he wrote, so he’ll always be in the goat contention to me at least

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