I thought to myself, "fascinating but disgusting"

Look at this: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Far_Lands

The edge of the Minecraft beta's world generator. They're immediately fascinating to me as alien, world-sized crevices that one could become lost in until they emerge on the other side in a bright flash as they realize that the world generator breaks down even further (I made that up. It looks like the chance of corrupt blocks increases as distance from the normal world proceeds).

On the other hand, they remind me of the human-shaped holes in the Amigara Fault (which will frighten me until I die). None of these caves look like the run laterally! I'd be trapped to go forward until there is no forward (ugh I don't want to think about it or say what happens at the other end, I'm already horrified thinking of it).

Scroll down a little until you spot that cute little cartograph screenshot. Look at the Corner Far Lands! It's like the world in Septerra Core (never finished it. It was too slow for me), or what I immediately thought of, the megastructure in Blame. Imagine exploring a world like that (well-lit and with only a few spawning monsters) where it's just like an overworld map but in certain places one can climb between levels at enormous towers like in Blame, With a different biome on each level and a grander scale than possible in Minecraft, that'd be lovely. That's a world I'd like to explore.

5

So I'm into games, and especially game design as is clear by now. One subtle undercurrent to game design that was heavily discussed in the circles that I follow is "gamification": the use of achievements (lifted straight from video games) to incentivize real-life activities (interesting aside: note how gamification (a novel word and concept by itself) requires a new word "incentivize" to be coined to describe it).

Achievements are as follow: for completing a task set by the game/level designer, a player earns 1) a little popup at the bottom of their screen detailing that they have earned an achievement(s), and optionally 2) an in-game reward or meta-reward. What if it were applied to students in our faculty and starting tomorrow we were given a way to track achievements (I just had a thought: the way interprofessional portfolio points are kept track mimics gamification) and have a "Student Score" based on the points we earn? Attending particularly boring but educational options would provide the most points and thus be more attractive to students! However, the current state of achievements is lacklustre and harm or do not benefit students in a meaningful way especially if they overtake the importance of education itself. There are three prototypes of achievements that I take issue with: straightforward, easy achievements, progress-to-win achievements, and completion achievements.

The vast majority of achievements that I personally know of have straightforward goals and progression: kill 100 of monster X, kill 1000, kill 10 000, and so forth. Often the goal and the method of obtaining it are clearly defined before the achievement is ever earned. I don't like it. I don't like it based on the premise that they promote sticking with a "method of maximum-efficiency" rather than critical thought to complete objectives, the activity itself is rote and inconsequential yet is being promoted, or if the activity occurs regardless of intent (e.g. writing 10 000 words in a writing course where the assignments are marked for credit).

One egregious facet of achievements is that someone invented the model of "progress-to-win" achievements (i.e. those achievements can be earned just by playing the game rather than making any literal achievement). They are meaningless and valueless in games, and doubly so if anyone were to ever implement them in a education system ('attend class every Monday for six months') or a work environment ('hand in fifty TPS reports'). I'd additionally worry that these promote a culture of easy objectives and no challenge, and destroy impetus to reach for harder goals (which may be worth fewer achievements).

Conversely, another style of achievements is for exploring the content or universe surrounding the content above and beyond what is expected for completion. Taken to an extreme, this means players/students spending valuable time completing tasks of no real importance in order to achieve a 100% "completion rating" in a field or class rather than spending their time on actually-beneficial objectives. Again, the theme of the gamification distracting the student from education itself

4

What will history books in ten or twenty years say about science, medicine, and pharmacy practice? More specifically, how will the expansion of the role of pharmacists affects health care seen in a broader sense by the public?

3

I subscribe to several (computer) games journalists on Twitter, and one week in January I read tweets from them regarding a contest by a popular games magazine. Writers would submit their best articles and the winner would be given a permanent space on the magazine's blog to write about games. The winner would write for a while, get noticed, and be hired for paid work somewhere else, so the premise is. The tweets questioned the correctness of publishing the winner's writings without paying him. Later, Jim Rossignol John Walker, games writer for the website Rock Paper Shotgun had written an article on the topic. I had thought little of it other than to hope that Twitter users could stop the magazine from promoting the contest, or sway the magazine to turning it into a paid job.

Later that month, I thought about my job at an independent pharmacy in town. For about two years it was an unpaid volunteer position. I saw a slight parallel with the hypothetical writer. How fair was I treated to work without pay, doing the same tasks as a technician? How about other students in the faculty who might have also begun their jobs in the same way? I've always appreciated my employer for giving me a chance and hiring me, years before I ever started pharmacy school. But then that's exactly why, that's exactly where the parallels end.

The aforementioned hypothetical contest winner would not be new to writing and are likely well-practiced, at least not if they were deemed the best of all the entries. They could easily be professional  writers, or good enough to be professional. If the magazine thought that the costs of having a guest contribute to their blog outweighed the benefits to their business (i.e. very good articles), there would be no contest. The magazine thought that they could hire a new blog editor at no cost.

On the other hand, I was hired minus any training. I was hired as a volunteer under great liability to my boss, as I wasn't affiliated with the College of Pharmacists and was essentially being trained on the job. I wasn't immediately given tasks related to filling prescriptions, but I was eventually. It's benefited me massively in both not walking into practice lab unprepared, and not having to outright pay for my own training/certification as a technician.

2

I remember from my visitation at St. Paul's Hospital that the dispensary was far and away different from the dispensary of any community pharmacy I've been to. What surprised me the most was that the dispensary did not stock the same formulary as do community pharmacies. With introspection, I can discern some reasons why - hospitals are publicly funded so they are bound to use the alternative/equivalent drugs that are the least expensive, and of which the government espouses, and most patients are in hospital for acute care and so generally don't need the same medications on average for chronic conditions as patrons of community pharmacies do. And home care is on the uptick.

Without being privy to all the regulations, I would guess that there are significant differences in hospital pharmacy practice from what I'm used to at work. Are the alternative/equivalent drugs included in a hospital's formulary the same as in PharmaCare? (I was told that they weren't all identical so common drugs for chronic conditions occasionally had to be substituted, or a patient's own supply would have to be brought in). This puzzles me, because though it seems in line with PharmaCare's policies, it can't be the same formulary (I should remember to research this). That makes me wonder, what other hidden differences could there be in hospital and community pharmacy protocol?

A large number of drugs used in St. Paul's are not prepackaged; is it because hospitals need to make IV/IM/SC drugs fresh? Sometimes only a few pharmacists are on staff in the underground pharmacy at any time, and most are needed in the dispensary so do they have a large role in formulation still?

How difficult is it for a retail/hospital pharmacist to make the jump from one to the other?

1

When I was a kid, I used to read Reader's Digest a lot. My mom used to subscribe to the Chinese version, and when they came in the mail they always came with the English version for free. Those are the ones she usually never read but she kept a few issues in the bathroom, which I'd sneak out to read.

In one column in one issue, I read an anecdote by a physician about how he had a colleague who always addressed his patients as "mister" or "miss". When asked one day why he did that, he replied that he never addressed his patients on a first-name basis until they felt comfortable enough around him to use his first name.

It's been fifteen years since I read it, so I'm paraphrasing, and I might have missed his point. I had forgotten all about this for years, and I only remembered a few months ago, after corresponding with someone through email. I was addressing the president of a club at school, and I had never met her before so I addressed her in every email as "Ms. Dunn". I hardly ever use "miss" or "mister" now that I'm out of high school, so it felt out of place enough to jump-start my memory.

I think that's perfect. I want to start addressing all patients on formal terms until I've earned their respect, until they feel comfortable around me (although obviously, I don't have one so they never need to refer to me with an honorific). In fact, I would do this specifically so that one day I would transition to using their first names.

On the other hand, I don't know if I would even get my point across to most (when was the last time I had been addressed formally? (when was the last time I addressed anyone formally who I didn't have to? (answer: never))), or merely sound rigid and formal. I really have no idea, so I should just try it. When I'm in the practice lab, or when I'm discussing a case study, I'm handling information about an imaginary patient, but in real life, the information I'm given is really very private; it's too easy to use someone's first name especially when I am given so much information about them. It'll be a good exercise to intentionally not do this in practice.

Testing

Etrian Odyssey 1's guild was a pleasant, homey sort of common hall (furniture, bookcase, drapes) hosted by a adventurer-rogue, which I like, while Etrian Odyssey 2's guild is a large, airy, bluish hall operated by a fully-suited and faceless guard.