Reading

Entry tags:

loki,
pb no j

(no subject)

Chewy has a "Chewy Claus" thing around this time of year where you can help your pet(s) write a letter to Santa. How good they've been, whether they prefer treats or toys, and a free-answer "what would you ask for if you could have anything".

Last year I did it and at the end of December got a "sorry the sleigh missed you, here's a coupon code if you want to buy anything". And supposedly they donate food to pets in need for every letter submitted, so why not.

This year, I did it ... and today a box came addressed to Phoebe and Loki. (!!)

There was a dog toy that was a "lunch box" with a rope handle, and a green apple plushy and a juice-box plushy with Velcro to attach to the front of the lunchbox. Al three items contain squeakers. (So far, they are still intact, though the white parts of the juice box are rather, erm, dingy. That tends to happen with her toys, but it's impressive for 8 hours.)

There was a cat toy that was sushi themed (including a green wasabi packet) and has catnip in. Loki is mostly nocturnal these days but I put them in a cat bed that sits on my bed and when I came back in later, one was on the floor... so either he loves it or hates it, lol. Also a food purée treat thing similar to churu, though he's iffy about food.

There was an ornament, metal I think, with a sleigh and presents and "Chewy Claus 2025", which is now on my desk tree.

And there was a card with the cutest illustration of Chewy Claus helpers, and a handwritten note wishing them holiday cheer.

I'm a little astonished because I honestly hadn't expected to get anything, but it was a cute surprise!

Edit: Loki definitely likes. I may regret having them on the bed at the same time I am... lol

Entry tags:

science!

more on visual culture in science

This morning I am watching the lecture I linked to on Tuesday!

At 6:53:

Here is an example of how the Hubble telescope image of the Omega nebula, or Messier 17, was created, by adding colours -- which seem to have been chosen quite arbitrarily -- and adjusting composition.

The slide is figure 13 (on page 10) from an Introduction to Image Processing (PDF) on the ESA Hubble website; I'm baffled at the idea that the colours were chosen "arbitrarily" given that the same PDF contains (starting on page 8) §1.4 Assigning colours to different filter exposures. It's not a super clear explanation -- I think the WonderDome explainer is distinctly more readable -- but the explanation does exist and is there.

Obviously I immediately had to stop and look all of this up.

(Rest of the talk was interesting! But that point in particular about modern illustration as I say made me go HOLD ON A SEC--)

Entry tags:

endometriosis

[surgery] one year on!

I continue extremely grateful to no longer have ureteric stents.

( a bit of stock-taking )

Current Mood: Facepalm

Entry tags:

politics,
wtaf?!?

WTAF, 3

Apparently Calibri is un-American because it's easier for people with dyslexia to read.

Seriously.

State Department to switch from "woke" Calibri to Times New Roman

Perhaps Rubio should also insist they write everything in BOLD CAPS like the glorious leader?

ETA: what I hadn't noticed initially was that Rubio specifically calls it out for being a DEI_A_ initiative. Apparently accessibility as a whole is now un-American.

Current Mood: Boggle
Current Location: Airfield One

Entry tags:

politics

WTAF, 2

US at the weekend (new National Security Strategy): We need to oppose Europe for insisting the right to stop hate speech overrides freedom of speech

US today: We're going to insist we can see 5 years of your social media* before we let you into the US in case you said nasty things about us.

So one rule for people saying things they like, and another for people saying things they don't? Not quite sure that's how the Founding Fathers anticipated free speech working.

* Also your phone numbers, your email addresses, plus the names and addresses of family members, including children. And if you've ever worked as a fact checker or in content moderation there is apparently a blanket ban,

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/tourists-social-media-trump

side-tracks off side-tracks

One of the things I found yesterday, while getting distracted from transcription by regretting not having taken History and Philosophy of Science (or, more accurately, not having shown up to the lectures to just listen), was some tantalising notes on the existence of a four-lecture series entitled Visual Culture in Science and Medicine:

Science today is supremely visual – in its experiments, observations and communication, images have become integral to the scientific enterprise. These four lectures examine the role of images in anatomy, natural history and astronomy between the 15th and the 18th centuries. Rather than assessing images against a yardstick of increasing empiricism or an onward march towards accurate observation, these lectures draw attention to the myriad, ingenious ways in which images were deployed to create scientific objects, aid scientific arguments and simulate instrumental observations. Naturalistic styles of depictions are often mistaken for evidence of first-hand observation, but in this period, they were deployed as a visual rhetoric of persuasion rather than proof of an observed object. By examining the production and uses of imagery in this period, these lectures will offer ways to understand more generally what was entailed in scientific visualisation in early modern Europe.

I've managed to track down a one-hour video (that I've obviously not consumed yet, because audiovisual processing augh). Infuriatingly Kusukawa's book on the topic only covers the sixteenth century, not the full timespan of the lectures, and also it's fifty quid for the PDF. I have located a sample of the thing, consisting of the front matter and the first fifteen pages of the introduction (it cuts off IN MID SENTENCE).

Now daydreaming idly about comparative study of this + Tufte, which I also haven't got around to reading...

Entry tags:

on pain of pain

a confession: today I have bought two more translations of Descartes

Item the first: the 1972 Harvard University Press Treatise of Man, translated by Thomas Steele Hall. This translation is quoted by two of the other books I'm working with, Pain: the science of suffering by Patrick Wall (1999), and The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman (2021). It is also an edition that, as I understand it, contains a facsimile of the first French edition (1664, itself a translation of the Latin published in 1662). My French is not up to reading actual seventeenth-century philosophy, but being able to spot-check a couple of paragraphs will be Useful For My Argument.

Item the second: Descartes: Key Philosophical Writings, translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (1997). This doesn't contain Treatise on Man, but it's the translation of Meditations on First Philosophy that's quoted in The Story of Pain by Joanna Bourke (2014).

Meanwhile the Descartes essay, thus far composed primarily but not solely of quotations from other works, has somehow made it north of 4500 words. I think it might even be starting to make an argument.

( Read more... )

I am resisting the urge to try to turn this into a Proper Survey Of Popular Books On Pain, because that sounds like a lot of work that will probably involve reading a bunch of philosophers I find profoundly irritating, and also THIS IS A TOTAL DISTRACTION from the ACTUAL WORK I AM TRYING TO DO. But it's a distraction that is getting me writing, so I'll take it.

Entry tags:

Update on my life

I realized today that a lot of my friends don't know about what I've gone through this year.

Last year in June I moved back to Minnesota to look after my dad. My mom was in the hospital for a month and then moved to a nursing home with sudden-onset dementia (B1 deficiency) secondary to cancer.

I intended to support them temporarily but decided to make it a more permanent move to support them and their many animals. I struggled and kept expecting other family members to step up, but they did not.

I was hospitalized in May 2025 after a seizure. (Two seizures in 3 years means a new diagnosis of epilepsy.) I am missing about a week or 2 of memories from directly after that experience, so I don't know for sure what happened. I was busy looking after my dad and the animals, and then coordinating a move for my parents into assisted living, which I mostly did myself, While recovering from a seizure, with a broken rib.

I don't know why-- again, I don't remember (likely from medication side effects), but no one from the family came to help me directly after the seizure. My dad (who has dementia) and I did it alone. I'm angry about it and need people to know.

I supported my family for a year and half and did not receive any funds, no salary, very little emotional or logistical help from my brother, his wife, or his 4 healthy teenage kids. There is a wider extended family and they didn't show up either. We got some occasional visits but it wasn't enough.

Since moving my parents into assisted living, I have continued to support them in many ways, including looking after their farm and animals, again with no funds.

This week I asked my brother to help me advocate with my dad, to get me some money. He said no. He believes we should sell the farm (where I am now living). He made no mention of any provisions for me.

I'm obviously very upset, but the anger is at least helping me communicate about what is happening. I am reaching out to friends and various family members and trying to raise the alarm to protect myself.

I am safe for the time being but it is not the best idea for me to be living alone. I had intended to find roommates to come live here with me, but there are some barriers, including me not being the property owner, and the house being a bit of a mess. My next step is to directly talk to my parents about this situation. They both have dementia but I think they are capable of understanding my position.

I am currently unsure what the best course of action is moving forward. But I at least want folks to know what is going on. It's been very helpful to talk on the phone with friends who are affirming to me that this is a fucked up way to be treated. It's been a bitter pill to swallow, realizing that my family is exploiting me.

Warm thoughts, mail, messages are all helpful.

Entry tags:

If you're required to deploy AI

...here's an excellent use-case: feed your strong passphrase text as a prompt to an image generator

from the passphrase string "fabulous tattoo Harvey", Reddit user u/waydomatic and ChatGPT made ( this cheerful example )

The LLM thinks Harvey is a muscular white guy wearing a skimpy purple Speedo; arms, shoulder and upper chest covered in rose tattoos. He flexes his right arm and flashes a big white smile under his handlebar mustache. Of course he's wearing a rose crown.

Saving the generated image would certainly be more secure than writing down the password.

Entry tags:

food

(no subject)

Well, the first few boxes we shipped to ourselves from the US have arrived, including my Important Family Cookbook, so now I can make Traditional Family Cookies for the language school holiday party. Recipe below because it really is silly that I didn't have it stored digitally somewhere. Numbers rendered as decimals instead of fractions for ease of reading, all other Quaint Features original.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: WTAF?!?
Current Location: Mankind's Last, Best Hope

Entry tags:

politics,
racism

I'm sorry, but WTAF?!?

I haven't been able to bring myself to actually read the new US National Security Strategy, but according to reports the highlights from the European perspective appear to be:

Adoption of the White Supremacist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory as official US Government policy.

The US must therefore divorce itself from Europe because some European states might become non-White* majority in the future. (I think the appropriate description for this triumph of logic is utterly barking, the EU states average 5-15% non-EU born citizens, and that includes Brits nowadays, the only exception is Liechtenstein, and that has a population of 40,000, plus the whole international banking and financial services hub thing going on).

Apparently the US has to protect Europe against 'civilizational erosion' by working to undermine the EU and further the Far Right, because protecting your population against racial hatred is contrary to the sacred principle of free speech.

Meanwhile, South of the Border, they're reinstating the Monroe Doctrine because apparently the South American states need an American guardian to tell them who they can have relations with.

As I said, I'm sorry, but WTAF?!?

* They don't actually say 'non-white', but they're fooling no one.

Entry tags:

shiny mathy rocks

(no subject)

We're on the final boss fight of the campaign. Said boss is hovering over a deep pit -- bad for melee, unless they have some form of flight.

My character rolls the highest initiative.

She is a L20 owlin monk. She has flight. She also has a) 70 feet of movement per turn, and b) magic items (and a feat) that gives extra damage for distance moved in a straight line just before the attack. Oh, and a potion that does bonus

First roll hit a nat 20.

Rolling 20 means damage dice are doubled; if you would normally do 2d6, on a crit you roll 4d6. Between the damage roll (doubled), the extra monk ability I always like to throw in (also doubled, plus poison for a round), and the bonus damage for straight lines (doubled), I did 119 points of damage.

I also have a feat that says if I get a critical hit, all attacks against that creature have advantage until my next turn.

So... a pretty good start.

I love this character.

(...I got a crit the next turn too.)

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions

(Last week's also now exists and is no longer a placeholder!)

Reading. Pain, Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen. I want to be very, very clear: unless you are specifically researching attitudes and beliefs in pain clinics in early 2020s England, or similar, do not read this book. There are bad history and no references, appalling opinions on patients (), quite possibly the worst hyphenation choice I have ever seen, stunning omissions and misrepresentations of pain science, and It's Weird That It Happened Twice soup metaphors. Fuller review (or at least annotated bibliography entry) to follow, maybe.

Some further progress on Florencia Clifford's Feeding Orchids to the Slugs ("Tales from a Zen kitchen"), which I acquired from Oxfam in a moment of weakness primarily for EYB purposes at a point when it was extremely discounted. It is primarily a somewhat disjointed memoir for which I am not the target audience, but hey, Books To Go Back In The Charity Shop Pile but that I wouldn't actually hate reading were exactly the goal, so that's a victory. Mostly. I'm a little over halfway through it, sticking book darts on pages that contain recipes for easier reference when I go back through on the actual indexing pass.

I absolutely needed something that was not going to make me furious and furthermore that was not going to be demanding, and there's a new one in the series, so I have now reread several Scalzi: Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades completed, The Lost Colony in progress.

I've also had a very quick flick through the mentions of Descartes in Joanna Bourke's The Story of Pain, which is my next Pain Book. She does better than everyone else I've read, but I still think she's misinterpreting Treatise on Man. (Why do I have strongly-held opinions on Descartes now. CAN I NOT.)

Playing. ( Inkulinati, Monument Valley )

Cooking. SOUP.

smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto, two batches thereof, because I had promised A burrata to go with and then (1) the supermarket was out of it and (2) the opened part-pack of feta wound up doing two days quite comfortably, so the second batch was required For Burrata Purposes.

I have also established that the pistachio croissant strata works very well in one of the loaf tins if you scale it down to 50% quantities because there were only 3 discount croissants at the supermarket (... because you had to wait and watch the person who got there JUST ahead of you taking Most Of Them...), which also conveniently used up the dregs of the cream that I had in the fridge.

Eating. Tagine out the freezer (thank you past Alex). Relatively fresh dried apple. A very plain lunch at Teras in Seydikemer, which was apparently the magic my digestive system needed to settle itself down! And I am very much enjoying my dark chocolate raspberry stars. :)

Current Mood: Tired
Current Location: Surprisingly warmish

Entry tags:

drink!,
lancaster

I've never in forty years!

I was parked at the end of the London-bound platform at Chatham yesterday evening, waiting to catch the train into St Pancras, along with the passenger assistance guy with the ramp. As we're standing there the train to London Victoria heads out, and then we chatted for a minute before hearing an announcement about my train being delayed, despite it being at Gillingham station, which is only a couple of minutes away.

We're just wondering what the issue could be when a train pulls into our platform, but heading coastbound. Passenger Assistance guy's eyes bugged-out and he mutters something and then turns to repeat it to me: "I've worked here for forty years, and I've never seen a coastbound train come into this platform! Excuse me while I go and find out what's happening."

Turns out he still hadn't seen one, it wasn't a coastbound train, it was the Victoria train reversing back. Apparently a freight train had broken down alongside the platform at Rochester (two minutes up the line London-bound) and they'd sent the Victoria train back to Chatham to wait while they got things sorted out.

We were only delayed 20 minutes, which wasn't too bad because I was still five minutes early for meeting the university crowd for pre-Christmas drinks. And as we're now using the Betjeman Arms inside St Pancras station it was much more convenient for me than our get togethers used to be as I now just wheel from one end of StP to the other and don't need to haul myself and the chair down to Ye Old Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. (We swapped pubs a couple of years back to make things simpler for me, but this is the first time I've been able to get there since, OTOH it also makes things easier for another two out of the five of us).

We'd booked a table, and because they were using their dining room for a Christmas party we were put in 'the study', so effectively had our own wood-panelled private dining room for the night. Very swish! (As well as the big dining room and a big bar they also have an 'outside' patio area looking out across the Eurostar platforms, the place must be doing a bomb). Given how crowded it was at the bar when we arrived (I only maimed one ankle, and we'd told him to move), I let one of my friends get the beers in sight unseen, which is how I ended up drinking 'Hazy Pale'. You know how some wheat beers are slightly hazy? Well this is a bit like that, but hazy to the point of being completely opaque. Not something I'd drunk before, but would definitely drink again. Though I might have paced myself a bit differently if I'd known it was 5% ABV.

The food was mostly good - I thought the mushrooms on toasted sourdough was a bit bland, but the fish and chips I had were done to perfection, and the other choices around the table - chicken pie, Cumberland sausage and Lancashire Hot Pot - all got the ex-Lancastrian seal of approval.

I packed in at 9:30 in the hope of catching the 9:50, as my neck had suddenly decided to become very unhappy, only to discover when I got to the platform that there isn't a 9:50 anymore, so I had to wait on the platform for about 40 minutes until the 10:20 arrived. Fortunately it was a fairly amiable crowd, I was even offered a beer by the guy sitting next to me - 'No thanks, I've had quite enough already'. There were one or two sparkly party frocks and jackets wandering past in the crowd, but style points had to go to the woman wearing the Snow White dress and tweed hacking jacket, both of them adorned with large cardboard and tinfoil stars.

Into Chatham by 11, in bed and asleep by 11:30!

some good things (a post)

Breakfast in bed, accompanied by completing my first ever playthrough of the main body of Monument Valley. I think I wound up getting two prompts from A, who also spent a significant chunk of the afternoon attempting to get it working on two different large-format touchscreen devices -- I'd been struggling with the trackpad, and was gratified when A reported that they'd had a go at playing the very first level with a trackpad and it really was kind of wretched. (Made it to approximately halfway through Appendix 1 before deciding I needed to call it for the day...)
smitten kitchen's braised chickpeas with zucchini and pesto continues fantastic.
'tis The Season for my current Favourite Chocolate (I'm not sure if it's available year-round but the company we get groceries from only carries them during the winter, and I honestly probably enjoy them more because of the Seasonal Availability). I am writing this post with one of them + a mug of warm milk.
The box of meds I dropped in an airport this Monday gone has successfully been picked up! First step in a pass-the-parcel that will hopefully conclude weekend after next...
Got a substantial increase on my highest score in one of the silly clicky games in Flight Rising :)

Entry tags:

Spanish class things

One of the most delightful parts of Language School so far (at least for me) is the walking tours they have on Fridays. The guy who leads them is very fun to listen to, so I forgive him for walking extremely fast.

Yesterday's theme was upcoming holidays, which are - let me see if I've learned my lessons properly -

6 December - Constitution Day, when the current constitution was accepted after Franco died
8 December - day of the immaculate conception of Mary
22 December - official Christmas lottery drawing day, apparently it is traditional to split the cost of a ticket among a group of family & friends
24 December - Christmas Eve which is apparently the real party
25 December - Christmas of course
26 December - saint day for San Esteban, who is not extremely notable as a saint but people like having an extra day off to travel home after Christmas
28 December - day of the innocents which for whatever reason is a prank holiday here, like April Fools
31 December - New Year's Eve of course
6 January - Three Kings Day, for which there will be a parade and a speech by the mayor to "welcome the three kings", and kids can personally deliver their "please give me gifts" letters

December 6, 8, 25-26, New Year's Day and January 6 are all "días festivos", government holidays when schools and most businesses are closed.

Why did this topic need to be a walking tour? It doesn't, but there's supposed to be a walking tour every Friday and this week all the Friday special things are supposed to be holiday themed, so there we were.

Of course most of these are Christian and/or specifically Catholic holidays, but our teacher managed to spend most of his time talking about local history. While explaining Constitution Day he had to interrupt himself multiple times to remind himself to summarize briefly and not get too far off track (and he still ended up telling us about how Juan Carlos I accidentally shot his brother, and about the suppression of the Catalan language during the dictatorship.)

He also told us about how December 8, in addition to being a Catholic holiday, is also the anniversary of a 16th century battle over Spain's control of parts of what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, wherein Spanish army forces were beseiged on an island by enemy ships? But the Spanish troops won? I want to learn more about this, but I didn't catch the name of the location where it happened.

He also taught us a lovely expression, "ajo y agua" - "garlic and water" which is a minced oath / abbreviation for a longer phrase that means "go fuck yourself and deal with it".

Entry tags:

(no subject)

In my Spanish class on Thursday, the teacher showed us this music video, and it's very silly but unfortunately I really like it? At first I was just like "Wow that sure is a song from a genre with genre conventions that I'm not familiar with" but. It's silly in an intentional way that unfortunately works on me.

En el mismo folio
La lista de la compra y una canción
Como un cupón
De los ciegos
Rima la soledad
Con el atún en aceite vegetal
En oferta
¡Vaya precios sin competencia!

(On the same sheet of paper
The shopping list and a song
Like a lottery ticket (from the charity for the blind that does lotteries to raise money)
It rhymes loneliness
With tuna in vegetable oil
On sale
You can't beat these prices!)

Una mano pide al cielo
La otra en el cajón del pan
Hay manchas de grasa
De llanto, de tinta,
Estoy harto de tanto frotar

(One hand pleading to heaven
The other hand in the breadbox
There are grease stains, tear stains, ink stains
I'm tired of trying to scrub them out)

Tú que eres tan guapa y tan lista
Tú que te mereces
Un príncipe, un dentista, ¡tú!
Te quedas a mi lado
Y el mundo me parece
Más amable
Más humano
Menos raro
Y tú

(You, who are so pretty and so clever
You, who deserve a prince or a dentist
You stay by my side
And the world seems kinder, more human, less strange)

¡Qué bonito el mar!
Cuando lo miro a tu lado
Olvido las pateras
Las mareas negras
Los alijos incautados
La playa donde se dejan
Morir las ballenas
Este infumable plato combinado

(The sea looks so nice
When I look at it standing next to you
I forget about the refugee boats
The black tides (oil spills)
The captured contraband shipments
The beaches where the whales wash up to die
This inedible combination plate)

(Chorus again)

Aunque me engañe
Y me diga que no
Siempre estás tú detrás
De mi mejor yo
Aunque no soy pa ti
Que soy pa contigo
El mundo es tan redondo
Como el piercing de tu ombligo

(Although I might kid myself and tell myself no
It's always you there behind my best me
Although I'm not for you
I'm for being together with you
The world is as round
As your belly button piercing)

La cosa se pone dura sin tu aliento
Siento con amargura
Que estoy perdiendo la frescura
Que se vuelve frío sin tu calor
Y sin droga dura
Que tú

(Things get tough without your breath
I feel with bitterness
That I'm losing freshness
That it gets cold without your warmth
And without any hard drug but you)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

So my plan of quitting Duo at 4K days has gone from "vaguely in the future" to, uh, tomorrow.

It feels weird. And me being me, I'm second guessing myself. But then in a matching exercise it gave me patada (kick, as far as I can tell a noun) on the Spanish side and "to give somebody the push" on the English side, and that is a) a British phrase for firing someone, b) that is a verb, c) an unlikely translation, and d) completely novel to me both in general and on Duo and thus unhelpful for learning.

So, tomorrow is my last session and then I'm done.

quick note re bookshop.org

Previously: uk.bookshop.org were selling a Tor ebook with DRM applied, which I only noticed after I had bought it, because all? Tor ebooks? are DRM-free? at the request of the publisher? Like, Hive applies DRM to them, but given that bookshop.org lets you filter for DRM-free, this... was surprising.

My initial support request for (1) an explanation and (2) any chance of a refund, realise this is totally on me though, ... got me an almost-immediate refund, which I was not expecting, and a very entry-level explanation of What DRM Is, which I sort of was. So I wrote back saying thank you very much, and also, Tor went famously DRM-free in about 2012, and they're definitely supplying this specific ebook to other retailers without DRM applied.

There was A Pause.

A day or two later I received a response from someone with "Senior" in their signature, thanking me for my patience and saying they were Investigating.

A few days after that I noticed that the ebook in question was now marked DRM-free: hurrah! ... but when I bought it, and clicked on the "yes please download my DRM-free ebook" button, nothing happened.

I did not write back in because I have been. preoccupied.

But a few days after that I tried again and this time the download did work! So hurrah for bookshop.org needing me to do much less assertive escalation than I'd been expecting, and also for noticing that something was still broken and Fixing It without me needing to get around to e-mailing in about it.

... the quick part of this note was going to be: I know there were Questions on my first post about Hey They're Doing Ebooks Now, about how you actually filter for DRM-free. As far as I can tell this isn't actually possible from the ebooks landing page, which seems A Pity, BUT when you search for something (which can absolutely be as vague as "science fiction"), the FORMAT dropdown lets you filter for DRM-free ebooks only. Obviously this is Not Ideal, in that one might actually like to browse All DRM-Free Ebooks, but it does exist as an option, where as far as I can tell it doesn't, at all, on e.g. Kobo. Hopefully this knowledge is helpful! And certainly The Above Saga has caused me to think sufficiently positively of them that I'm likely to default to them for my ebooks in future.

Entry tags:

barcelona

Oh I forgot to crosspost this: the Maritime Museum in Barcelona

tl;dr there was a giant boat and I'm still not over it. Photos on Tumblr here.