Have you ever had a health insurance claim denied? Before you run out and shoot an insurance executive, use the Claim File Helper to uncover the paper trail that led to the decision.

ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage. Get your claim file before submitting an appeal.

After you’ve followed the chain of decisions, then you can consider terminating some rich a-hole. It’s the polite thing to do.

My last post was a little cryptic. So let me clarify with some illustrations.

I hope that helps!

Today is the last day of classes! I don’t even have a lot to do: I have one class on Fridays, which is all student presentations, and then I’m free. Sort of. I have a bunch of grading to do, which I plan to wrap up this weekend, and I have to assemble a final exam that will be posted online on Monday. A lot of the pressure is off.

I chose to celebrate prematurely last night by walking to the theater to see Wicked. It was good, I enjoyed it, but of course I have a few complaints.

• It was long at 2½ hours, this is just the first half of the story, yet it stripped out almost all of the complexity of the Wicked novel. It’s fine to greatly change the story when adapting to a different medium, but as long as you’re doing that, why instead bloat it up rather than streamlining it? The first half of the movie took it’s time building up the character, but mostly omitted all the chaos and unrest of the book.

• Movies always do this one annoying thing: they take a character who is supposed to be unsettling and scary, and make her gorgeous. It’s the old trope of putting glasses on a beautiful women to signal that she’s ugly (she isn’t, not in the slightest) and whip them off to indicate that she’s now transformed into glorious beauty. I’m sorry, but Cynthia Erivo was stunning in the role of the Wicked Witch. She might have given me a green skin fetish now.

• I do miss Margaret Hamilton. Maybe Erivo will stop singing and start screeching in the next half.

• There are a lot of characters who are there to fill the stage, doing nothing. I hope they are given something to do in part 2.

• I will say that the flying monkeys are far more terrifying in this movie than they were in the 1939 movie, which is saying a lot, since many children were traumatized by the original monkeys.

Now it’s time to do the responsible adult thing and trudge through the ice and snow to get some work done. The semester isn’t really over until the grades have been submitted.

I got stuff done today. A quiz written and posted online, and I took this huge pile of my late mother’s savings bonds to the bank. Almost 200 slips of paper, and they’re being processed and interest calculated as a I type. Unfortunately, to get that done I had to personally sign each one there at the bank.

I can’t feel my right arm now. It’s simultaneously numb and sore. That represents one tedious chore done, though.

It would be really handy to be able to live on spite and self-loathing.

There’s a new phenomenon sweeping across the social media platform, BlueSky: lists. Lots of lists.

The way this works is that anyone can make a list of other BlueSky users and post about its existence — then everyone who sees it can click on the list and follow, or block, all the people on the list. For instance, here’s a list called “Bug Macrophotography” which contains the names and BlueSky accounts of people who do macrophotography of insects. Handy! With a single click you can subscribe to all of their feeds…or if you’re horrified at bug closeups, block them all. It’s a way to quickly fill up with people you follow.

I mostly like it, except for the fact that, a while ago, the only content you’d see is people posting their lists. I haven’t made any lists, because as some of you may know, I have an aversion to List Lords dating back to my old talk.origins days. Peter Nyikos left scars.

Anyway, there is also a tool called ClearSky.app that lets you see who you, or anybody for that matter, has blocked. Here’s everyone I have blocked in my short tenure on BlueSky:

Pitiful. I have to do better.

I can also see a list of all the people who have blocked me. It’s much longer so I won’t post it here; just go to ClearSky.app and enter my user name, pzmyers.bsky.social for yourself and you can see how many people dislike me. I don’t mind being blocked at all, I encourage more to shut me off.

You can also see a list of lists, all the lists that have my name on them. Some of them are from people encouraging more people to follow me, some are lists encouraging more people to block me. I discovered that there is a list called “FtBullies” that brought back old memories. It’s been years since all the bloggers here were called “FtBullies,” I guess the slymepitters have found a new home.

Still, I think it’s a good development that BlueSky has tools to help you curate your social media feed.

A while back, as Twitter lay dying and rotting, I went out and staked new accounts in other social media sites, gambling on which one, if any, would eventually succeed. One was Mastodon; I have an account at octodon.social/@pzmyers. The appeal of Mastodon was that it’s a distributed network, one that isn’t strictly controlled by a central authority. Unfortunately, that means it’s made up of thousands of interconnected instances, all your access to the wider federation, is through the instance you choose, and you’re at the mercy of whoever set up your particular instance. Back in August, I learned that the instance I had chosen was shutting down.

this is it. the ship is sinking.
on 2025-04-03, in 8 months, on its 8 years anniversary, the octodon will be permanently shut down.
use this time to slowly migrate your accounts and download your post archives. tell your local friends who might miss the instance announcement.
the first reply will contain a small list of instances to consider; the second a personal note for my followers.

thanks to everyone who supported us, to our crew and members.
i am glad to have built and shared this with you over the years. it was a beautiful horrible adventure. i hope you will remember it as a good place that united so many people for quite a while.

it always had to end eventually. for an impulsive little social website, 8 years is a good run. we have witnessed and remember so many friends who are gone. the octodon, too, gets to live impermanence and have a good end while we still can take care of it.

It was a good run, but this is a huge weakness in the service. The volunteers who run individual instances are allowed to just quit? Of course they are allowed, but there’s no automatic fallback to support individual users? Whoops. That’s not good. Do I need to go instance-shopping now, and figure out how to back up my posts there? Then there’s the personal note by the instance host about Mastodon in general:

i’ve had this moment on my mind for many years. 5 years, 10 years? one more, one less? Eight, of course. of course. i barely remember who created it. everything has an end and everyone needs to move on.

personally, i will soon move to a tiny gotosocial instance, and trim down relationships again. i am tired of asking myself if ppl talk to me as an admin or as a friend, let’s find out.

if you need more Whys, unordered:

• it hasnt been fun for so long. i really do not want to do this for the rest of my life. passing it on has limits and is itself tremendous work and trust.
• it knows too much. this database is huge, which is a technical feat to keep available at all times and fast already; and full of forgotten accounts and things that are long offline and should be let go of. yes it’s haunted
• i do not believe in mastodon. i have been less and less comfortable with the software, its direction, technical choices, and maintenance. even with the federated topology entirely. it was built like a twitter clone and requires the same work and has the same flaws
• it’s such a massive amount of personal data to care for, and concentrated for so many people i know. security patches are applied so fast bc it’s genuinely terrifying. it’s not healthy i can tell you, but i know what we all risk and did everything i could. i don’t want to any more. let’s burn it all
• one must imagine sisyphus letting the boulder roll and just sitting there, content and chilling. today i let eugen’s damned rock go down the hill, and i feel fine

i have so little energy left. such short time to use.
all this mess grew until it became a main occupation and i have so much more to do

hit me up if you want the exported blocklist, or the emoji collection. i might publish them later as well

Well, that just went from an “oops” to a “yikes!” Maybe I’ll just let my Mastodon account whither and die, unless someone wants to suggest a more stable instance. Maybe.

I also have a Threads account. I don’t care for it and have neglected using it. Threads too often feels like one of those subreddits full of people telling long stories about some trivial annoyance that they recently experienced, or worse, that they experienced 11 years ago and have been waiting for the opportunity to tell everyone about it. There are a lot of good people on there who are happy with it, I just feel vaguely uncomfortable with it. Also, it’s by Meta, so it’s got Zuckerberg’s undead cyborg fingers all over it.

Doubly also LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads.

Bluesky is taking off right now, and of course I have an account there. I worry that it could meet the fate of Twitter — some rich weirdo could buy it and use it for their public masturbation sessions — but it’s working out well so far, especially given how they’re dealing with the wingnuts.

So maybe I’ll just commit to Bluesky from now on, until it gets corrupted and wrecked, as happens to so many things nowadays.

You can see a bit of it in this photo.

Mainly, though, this is a picture of my wife’s swarm of bird feeders, which were also swarmed with birds this morning, which all fled the instant I stepped outside. There is a squirrel hiding in the photo, you might not be able to see it. They’re kind of sneaky.