Incredible photos and a great story. Thanks for putting this together. People forget all too easily how everyone in this world is trying to live their best life with the resources they have. That becomes exponentially more difficult when someone treats you as less of a person for whatever delusional reasons they rationalize in their minds.
5 minutes in addition to the normal time you get when flying a wingsuit would feel like forever. Even 2 minutes (my average) starts to feel strange towards the end after being used to a typical 60 second skydive.
Even without additional power it's possible to gain a small amount of altitude with a wingsuit[0]. Modern suits can be very powerful with proper technique.
As a wingsuit pilot I would disagree. Donning the suit is a little more complicated than just strapping on a skydiving rig and you need a fair amount of experience to successfully fly one to begin with. Your parachute system threads through the wingsuit, you still need to tighten leg straps inside the suit before zipping up, tighten a chest strap after zipping up, then zip the arm and leg wings and exit the aircraft with a correct body position and delay to avoid slamming into the tail depending on what type of aircraft it is. It takes a few minutes to put everything on while on the ground, I can't imagine trying to put everything on while a plane is out of control and get it all adjusted properly during an aircraft emergency. Wingsuiters suit up on the ground before boarding so all that's left is to zip up your arm wings and leave the aircraft.
If they wanted to get sued for trademark infringement.
(McDonalds is working with Beyond Meat, one of Impossible Foods' largest competitors, for their plant-based meat substitutes; deriving their product name from a competitor's product is almost certainly a bad idea.)
There's a nice reddit community[1] dedicated to small-scale indoor growing. The sidebar has a lot of info to get you started and it's relatively inexpensive. Just be sure to check your local laws regarding cannabis cultivation and educate yourself on any potential risks.
While it may not catch everything, another way I've picked up on various tracking services is simply running pihole and customizing the lists based on permitted dns lookups. It's interesting and troubling just how much of my internet browsing is blocked at the DNS level on a day to day basis with no perceivable impact on what's being viewed. I do wonder how many services might start trying to hardcode IP addresses to get around such things in the future. I'll have to try mitmproxy and see what I might be missing.
Yup I do this too and I agree with your observations, about one third of my home network's DNS request are rejected with nearly no impact on my internet browsing. I've also observed the same thing when browsing the web with uBlock Origin set to block third party scripts by default. On most sites whitelisting ~20% of scripts is enough to make the site functional, the other ~80% apparently being redundant for the purpose of the site's core functionality.
Some skydivers will have "ash dives." Your body is cremated, ashes placed into a specially designed pouch, and friends take you up on a final skydive. Everyone exits, joins up in a formation with your pouch making up one of the links, and at some point in free fall the pouch gets opened. You're quickly scattered to the ends of the earth from a couple miles up.
Even though there's no cremation involved, Tibetan sky burial sort of reminds me of that.
I rarely comment on anything but this hits rather close to home. After a rather severe bout of depression my doctor started feeding me drugs. SSRIs, NDRIs, benzos, and a handful of misc other prescriptions that were the flavor of the week. I felt like every visit was a game of 'lets try this new drug!' which would lead to negative side effects more often than not.
Fast forward a couple years and I'm realizing that medications aren't the answer for me. So what do my doctors do? They try to push yet another pill or three down my throat. Finally I'd had enough of it and told them I didn't want to take anything anymore. Their idea of a tapering plan from over 2 years of medications was a week and a half. They were sure to tell me that if I stopped treatment I wouldn't be given any more refills and one doctor condemned me for even showing up to my appointment with the intention of discontinuing medications. He said I was wasting everyones time.
Anyway, I figured sure, I got this. I can get myself off these meds. I was very wrong. I made it about two weeks before withdrawals really kicked into overdrive. Dizzy, brain zaps, tinnitus, profuse sweating all hours of the day, insomnia, numbness in my face and arms, racing heart, involuntary muscle spasms... I started stuttering and couldn't force my body to stop twitching and shaking. My mind was completely fogged over and at times I couldn't even articulate words to talk to someone. It was a state of being in a perpetual panic attack multiplied by 100. After I thought I was actually going to die I setup an emergency appointment to try and get a prescription refill and a longer tapering plan only my doctors wouldn't have it. They flat out refused treatment and told me to go to the ER if I thought things were getting that bad. I was floored. Here this doctor got me physically addicted to powerful mind altering medications over the course of a couple years and now that I want out they treated me like a drug addict and dismissed me.
In the end I sourced some darknet meds and very slowly tapered myself down. To this day I'm still not even close to being back to normal, whatever that is. I get random panic attacks out of the blue on a daily basis. Sometimes the left side of my body will go numb. Other times I'll just start sweating while my heart beats like I just finished running a marathon. The ringing in my ears is horrible. I'm now extremely sensitive to stimulants of any kind (no more caffeine, meh) so I've had to make some significant changes to my diet.
The good news is I've been 100% off any medications for two months now and I'm finally getting to where I can get more than four consecutive hours of sleep several days a week (so much better than zero sleep every day). I feel as though being able to enjoy coffee, sugary drinks, and having the ability to actually sleep an entire night has been permanently removed from my life now.
At any rate, if there's anything anyone should get from all this rambling, it's that you should exercise extreme caution with pill pushing doctors. They have the ability to drag you into your worst nightmare of existence and leave you high & dry when you want the ride to stop.
> They were sure to tell me that if I stopped treatment I wouldn't be given any more refills and one doctor condemned me for even showing up to my appointment with the intention of discontinuing medications. He said I was wasting everyones time.
Wow. Just wow. That's very unfortunate that you had to go through that. That seems beyond malpractice and if its not, it should be. I don't want to dox anyone but those doctors should be avoided...probably by everyone...
Thanks, the tingling and numbness really does mess with ones head. It's disheartening just how out of touch a lot of healthcare workers are with prescription medication withdrawal. Glad to hear you're doing better.
I am really glad to hear you are taking action on your own, despite the ignorance of people who are supposed to be there to help you! Thanks for writing this; stay strong and I believe you will continue to recover in the coming months. :)
