I got bitten by a brown recluse like ten years ago (different spider I know, but also very poisonous), I still have a scar that fills up with nasty ass puss every few years. Yes, I have seen a doctor about this and they said deal with it, some people have to get limbs amputated over shit like that.
I mean, he did. Such poison damage is a bit similar to bad chemical or fire damage, except it often affects deeper tissue stronger and can “hide” behind a relatively healthy surface skin.
The damaged deep tissue has died and turned to slush from the poison, which the body needs to dispose of and then rebuild from scratch. However, with large damage in the deep tissue, which is where skin repair should originate from, this is often impossible to achieve perfectly. So you often get enclosed pockets of “weird/wrong” tissue that has no proper drainage to the outside or inside to the lymphatic system. So occasionally, bacteria or viruses crawl in and fester. The bad circulation due to the previous damage means the immune system has a hard time fighting it, which usually leads to it cordoning off the area, forming a so called abscess. If this abscess can then be properly drained to the surface and sterilized(!), this can keep it calm for very long times and is comparably easy to manage and monitor.
And there is no good alternative. You can try and remove all the damaged tissue, which has the unpleasant side effect of having the surgeons carve a huge hole in you. Which the body again will have to try and repair, including massive scarification, possible los if function is nerves and/or muscle tissue is lost and a very high risk of formation of more abscess-prone internal scar tissue. If there’s no way to deal with the occasional infections in a hygienic manner, there’s a high risk of abscesses draining internally sooner or later. This almost always leads to intense sepsis, which is very often lethal after mere days.
Which is why the usual alternative to large-scale deep tissue damage is called amputation, even today and with all the crazy medical advances we have.
I suppose I would have been the one to take the ‘carve’ method, removing the damaged tissue and having new skin grafted on. If the doctor presented that as an option and it was refused, then that’s fair, but as someone who has damaged lymph nodes from an infection I’m keenly aware of the misery a chronic condition can cause with no real long-lasting solution. Yet I still was given treatment options and medication which I’d expect as standard practice.
If it was a scar on my face I might have gone the plastic surgery route and got it fixed, but it was somewhere where the sun don’t shine so I took the “just live with it” option. Cosmetic surgery is still an option, just not really worth it to me, the only people that will ever see it would be sexual partners and it’s not so bad that someone would see me naked and be like “that’s a deal breaker”. Most people don’t even notice it unless I tell them. It’s on my upper thigh so like for the first week or so when it was swollen and my balls rubbed up against it, it hurt like a bitch, but after that it was just whatever.
This would be a crazy interesting response tho. If it were actually from an extraterrestrial being then this would mean they already knew of earth and its language before we even made contact :D
And that the reason they do not contact us is that we are simply not worth it:-). (so this being a hint to get our act together first if we want to open up additional communications in the future, I suppose)
Or it could just be a prank, from a billionaire with their own private space force :-P. Nowadays the likelihood of the latter has risen to become higher than the former.
We may not want them to contact us. There is the hypothesis that if a civilization learns about another one on another planet, they might eliminate them before they become competition. It would easy to do too. Just hurl some asteroids or comets at the Earth at relativistic speed and we’d be toast.
I remember that was an episode of Babylon 5 - if you answered the test correctly, the probe would blow you up. I suppose it’s also a test of wisdom, not just intelligence:-).
But I also remember a short story in a book about humanity having uploaded itself into our sun, and thereby spread out into the stars, using those as supercomputer mainframes. i.e. what will come from us may look very unlike us now - similar to how a seed looks nothing like the plant that it becomes, or a child acts very differently than the adult that it grows up into.
Then again, if aliens now were to encounter the likes of Musk and Bezos as their points of first contact… I shudder to think what they would want to do to us:-( - after all, what would we do to us, if the roles were reversed? The very measure that we ourselves use is precisely the very thing that we fail at, i.e. we don’t look at them and call them “good”, do we? No, we are rather ashamed, but then again neither do we stop purchasing goods from Amazon or using Twitter/X (I mean… I do, but most of us do not).
That’s what makes it hard for me to watch shows with too much purposeful cringe, I just feel way too embarrassed for the people involved. The Office UK was nearly impossible for me. Even The Office US season 1 was almost beyond my limit, but luckily they fixed the formula by season 2.
Guys, is English is gonna survived? I see this double past tense stuff as often as I see apostrophes when someone just meant to pluralize something. And I see that lot’s.
If I’m playing Tank and I create a pathway and none of my DPS take it!? I’ll rage too! Also, why are none of my healers doing any healing? I shouldn’t have more healing as a tank than the healers!!!
Oh yeah I remember, the 20 pings and message on the chat so they can understand I’m going to engage. So they can watch me as I start the fight a almost kill the ADC, before they retreat.
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