The Gaming Den

My understanding of the Germany situation is that currently if you get COVID-19 and your lungs fill up with fluid and your heart gives out fighting against pulmonary hypertension that they mark your cause of death as "heart failure" and you don't go into the COVID-19 death toll. Which is....

@Prak: That's really both a legal and a medical issue. Probably more legal than medical, because the people deciding if you get anything are most likely social services clerks and medical experts working for them (and, eventually, judges). See if you can contact social services administration for de...

How do I fake a blood iron test? Long story short, I'm anemic, I failed a blood iron test and was rejected by a prospective employer. My options are: - starve - get a shitty job and die to an untreated condition - get this job , go private, recover The problem is, those other guys demand a medical ...

Seems very impractical. Given that food is often not just liquids and could get lodged in there, you want to be able to apply flexible pressure to move it. Plus the fact that a muscular tube can move stuff in *both* directions fairly well for when you need to vomit. Compare and contrast the larynx a...

The entire idea that collagen and elastin survive your stomach acids and digestive enzymes is absurd, no matter what food you eat to acquire them. Stuff you eat has to move into your blood to be useful to the body, so it needs to be degraded down from the molecules you would call collagen, which are...

I think most of the worrisome subtext in Bioware romances stems from the fact that the romancing is coded in such a way that the player is always in full control of the relationship. It's really unusual for a romance option to go after the player character - I can only remember one instance of that ...

The games are kind of two-faced about Celebrimbor's brand (haha) of evil - yes, the DLC spells it out crystal clear, but that also requires him to be a very calculating liar towards Talion through the main game, who sells his own lust for power as nothing but pragmatism with a composed facade. Now i...

But he defends her against the actually pretty reasonable assertion that she cannot be trusted after this - the fact that she's suddenly nice to Talion and just Talion shouldn't make her trustworthy. What if she's just trying to break up the team? Likewise, Celebrimbor's insistence on just bludgeoni...

If you don't give a shit about Tolkien canon, the story isn't that bad. Not award winning by any means, but far more fleshed out than Shadows of Mordor. I've yet to come across anything I'd regard as a 'shocking twist.' The first overlord reveal had me laughing my ass off, but that was about it. Th...

So Shadow of War is out. Neat new toys, neat new orkemon, godawful writing. I know Shadow of Mordor wasn't exactly thrilling either, but they seem to have forgotten the thing they did best in the first game was comedy, and insisted on coming up with shocking twists instead. It's a fun game mechanica...

@deaddmwalking: Have you considered the fact that Spain is not a common law system? We (meaning europeans, and brits no longer count at this point) don't really have the idea of "contempt of court" that people in the common law tradition have, to the point that it's impossible to translate...

Dementia is not a sudden process, but it's sadly not unheard of for elderly patients with previous mental impairment/suspected dementia to come out mentally worse after surgical procedures. I am not aware that anyone has demonstrated a conclusive mechanism for this yet, but something about the proce...

A strange one: I can flex something inside my skull (I think it's some muscle close to the jaw articulation/ear) and by doing this I can hear a continuous sound, kind of like a mix of a drumroll and white-noise, on both ears. Since this sound seems to be coming from something just besides the eardr...

White-ish discharge from the breast sounds very much like galactorrhea, meaning it's probably milk. Milk production is regulated by a hormone called prolactine produced in the pituitary gland. The most common causes of a prolactine excess are certain medications or just over-activity of the pituitar...

HPV produces a localized infection within the skin or mucous membranes that often goes without any symptoms, so it's most likely not part of any routine STI checkup. There's little need to screen for HPV subtypes that produce warts (you can still test any warts if they show up) and high-risk HPV are...

HPV infection is a big factor in cervical cancer, but it's not the only way to get it - and while subtypes 16 and 18 are typical, there are other high-risk strains for inducing cervical cancer. There are many other subtypes which are not generally carcinogenous but can cause genital warts. Others do...

"Dignity" has multiple meanings, and maybe some of it got lost in my translation. In the sense that it is used here, it can also translate to "reputation in the public eye". And that can definitely be injured by slander and misleading reporting, even if someone has the kind of ne...

How do Germans (and other non-USians, I guess) feel about free speech? https://www.popehat.com/2017/02/10/erdogan-and-the-european-view-of-free-speech/ Free speech is protected by the german basic law. So is art and the press. However, german jurisprudence tends to work along the lines that free sp...

It depends on whether you're looking at depression or at anxiety - these two often co-occur to some degree, but the treatment differs a little. You may not actually have both - generalized anxiety disorder in particular often looks like depression in some respects, and of course depression can highl...

You might have a disease like carpal tunnel syndrome, except that carpal tunnel syndrome affects the median nerve, not the ulnar nerve. Given your description, it's the ulnar nerve you have trouble with. The names for nerve entrapment syndromes here are different, but the problem is basically the sa...

That possible reading occured to me a while after, yes. I'd agree with the conclusion, but now I'm genuinely curious how that would work. Do you have any insights to offer, Mask?

That ED/masturbation thing is bogus. Frequent ejaculation reduces the quantity of sperm that comes out in each ejaculation, but it does nothing to erectile function - which is not what your problem is, anyway. I assume you've been able to ejaculate before, so my first guess would be some kind of mec...

If it feels like you are hearing your pulse, that may be, but maybe not - all kinds of ear noises can turn up when the auditory system is somehow disrupted. It's possible that your ear is clogged or overpressurized and not getting external sounds normally makes it hypersensitive to body noise it wou...

It comes down to me saying that pain by itself doesn't kill people in response to the actual question. OS made an argument that didn't exactly disagree with that, but went on a strange and probably wrong tangent about stroke. So I took that apart because I felt he was being wrong on the internet. I ...

Except that this is - again - in the context of surgery being performed. Surgery with very poor anaesthesia, too, which is certainly a situation in which pain can kill the patient, but it's not pain alone that is deadly. Which is the thing I was just saying above. More specifically, I was questionin...