Please don’t thank me for my service


Yesterday was veterans day, the day before that was the Marine Corps birthday. I purposefully was going to ignore both, but an interaction on twitter the other day made me realize that I should at least touch on the subject. My feelings surrounding my service have always been complicated, but why not talk about it?
(more…)Recovery: Day 3


Somehow things keep moving forward. I had an experiment yesterday, I have a meeting today to go over my grant proposal, and there is so much data to analyze. It feels weird not getting a break after such a rough surgery, but here we are. Things keep moving forward and if I don’t keep up I’ll get left behind.
(more…)The recovery


We’re post-op day 2 so far and the word of the day is ouch. I don’t know that I went into detail about the surgery I was having, I mean I’ve been out of it these past couple of days since the surgery. It was a spinal cord surgery, there was some scar tissue that was giving me some trouble and they went in bilaterally (both sides of the spine) to remove it. That was… fun.
(more…)The aftermath


Well I had a surgery yesterday and it didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped. I’m home now thankfully, but there were some… complications and it could be for a lot of reasons, but I’ll cover the most likely issue and then go and rest some more.
(more…)War and (hunger) games Part 2


Obviously I’ve had more thoughts since yesterday’s post. With the fourth book just being released I’m giving the hunger games series a reread so I can refresh my memory before diving into the new addition. Sure it’s a prequel, but reading in published order never hurt anyone. Others have had the same thought obviously and yesterday’s post was inspired, in part, by someone’s take on the books. Now that I have had some time to think about it, let’s talk about the Hunger Games.
(more…)Day 137: The reality of war


Fun fact, this is a staged photo. For an even more “fun” fact, you should learn about what happened to these people after the photo was taken and made popular.
Well, 2020 is off to an … interesting start. We have all of Australia burning, Indonesia flooding, and trump starting a war without congressional approval (that last one is a rather large crime fyi). So in typical american fashion, people are starting to fetishize war again. Of course these are the people who have never been to war, so as someone who has some experience on this, let’s talk war. It’s going to get messy so let’s just throw in a CW for combat talk.
Alcohol Abuse and Combat in the Military
It’s no secret, I’m a proud Marine and combat veteran. So while searching for the latest and greatest science to write about I was surprised to come across a study on combat and alcohol abuse. Thinking I already knew the answer I almost didn’t bother to read it — when I did, the results were a little surprising and I wanted to share them.