Put the horses to bed and fire up grandpappy's ad-hoc barbecue, it's time for another convention-violating issue of #GarbageDigest! Volume 01 issue 04, if you're keeping track. This blog is grass-fed and free of recombinant bovine growth hormone.

more like colon-NOT-scopy

Content warning: this section contains gross details about hypothetical body stuff, and doom/cynicism about the US healthcare system.

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(the "show more" button probably doesn't work if you're reading the feed version, sorry. I don't know a good way to do a proper content warning for that version. Maybe I should just make a separate page and link to it. If you have any ideas, let me know.)

I've known since I was in my 20s that there would eventually come a time where I'd have to get periodic colonoscopies to screen for cancer, and I had resigned myself to that fate. "Well," I thought, "having a camera shoved up my butt isn't going to be fun, but it's just once every few years, so I'll probably be fine. My butt can take one for the team."

I still have a few years before I have to worry about it, but I've recently become aware that no, it's not just a camera up the butt: it's an entire week of preparation, too. You have to radically alter your diet, basically cut out everything but the whitest, blandest food a person can eat. You have to stop taking most medication a few days before the operation. You also need to take enough laxatives to empty out a horse.

I had come to terms with the colonoscopy itself, but now I don't know if I can endure the prep. Never mind affording the procedure, assuming my job situation hasn't improved by then—and I don't see any reason to think it will—I wouldn't even be able to afford to take the time off work to prepare for the procedure. If I'm subsisting entirely on mashed potatoes and bananas, going without the medicine that makes my brain work, and shitting my entire guts out for a week, they probably won't want me coming into work. Which would mean missing out on a week of pay and having to choose between eating and making rent that month. Looks like my risk of colon cancer just shot through the roof. If I had known all this, I would have stopped eating red meat years ago. Thanks, US healthcare system!

Well, to be fair, if I don't have a job with paid sick leave by then, they probably don't expect me to live long enough for it to matter. 🤪

palate cleanser

If you read the previous section and regret it, here, have this:

If you didn't read it, then today's your lucky day!

stay jung or try dyin'

My favorite PS2 game about Jungian psychology is Persona 4, but my second favorite is definitely Shadow of the Colonscious.¹

connection correction

In mobile data banditry I said that receiving MMS data requires an active LTE connection. Well, that's not accurate. It requires some sort of data connection. The data mode I leave my phone in is called WCDMA. I don't know what that is, but when I have data, my phone had a little 4G icon in the top-right corner. I was under the impression that LTE is 4G, but when I switch my phone to LTE/WCDMA/GSM, the icon changes from 4G to LTE, so I don't know what any of this shit means. I was going to say I guess LTE is 4.5G, but I looked it up, and it's even dumber than that: it's colloquially called 3.95G, because it doesn't technically meet the requirements of 4G, and yet it's better despite being 0.05 lower? Also, I looked up WCDMA, and that's actually 3G despite it having a 4G icon on my phone? All of this is fake.

Anyway, I leave it in WCDMA mode because my battery lasts longer and I don't need the faster speeds. With such a stringent data cap, I actually want my connection speed to be slow, so if I accidentally start downloading a huge file, I can cancel it before I'd burned too much of my data. Most of what I use my data for is sending and receiving text messages on various platforms, updating my RSS feeds and fetching new blog posts, reading fedi, and looking up stuff on wikipedia.

I have images blocked or hidden wherever possible. Sometimes I'll see a post on fedi that includes an image I'm interested in, but when I tap to load it, it starts downloading a 4MB png file. On WCDMA, I can cancel it before it can do much damage; on a lightning-fast 6G connection or whatever, it may download the whole thing before I can stop it, effectively wasting 6% of my data for the day.

Since February, my mobile carrier has been sending me periodic but increasingly urgent-sounding text alerts warning me that I need to "update the LTE settings on my device" to "avoid experiencing slower speeds".

I don't know what they're going to change, but I don't see slower speeds as being anything but beneficial to me. What do I need fast phone internet for? So I can accidentally burn through my entire 2GB data cap in a few days? Also, I don't know why the hell they care so much, they get the same amount of money from me either way. I guess they want me to burn through all my data and get frustrated, because they want me to upgrade to a more expensive plan.

I'll report back on July 1 when I find out what changes, but I'm not expecting it to impact me too much.

fake news headline

SLURPEE MACHINES AT CENTER OF $300M 7-ELEVEN SLUSH FUND SCANDAL 🦝

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1. I had to phrase it like this for the joke to work (counterpoint: is it a joke? Does it work??) but I need to state for the record that P4 is cool, but SotC was a masterpiece.↩