2026-02. small changes & wins, cat things, and heavy thoughts.
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thelittleoneJust finished washing out the bowl of Jinx's feeder and checked the food compartment so that I could refill it with a fresh bag of his food and then took some extra time to wash out his new stainless steel water fountain to refill it with a full tray of ice cubes and fresh water. His old plastic fountain was having issues and as much as I knew that I could probably fix it, it felt like the better option to replace it since plastic is prone to bacteria and I've had it for over 2 years anyway with one replacement of the motor a few months ago.
Pet technology is funny. I never would have thought that I'd be the type to buy into it, but after crashing out last year and going through a bad mental burnout spell, I didn't want to risk... I don't know. I guess, that he wouldn't have what he needed because as much as I want to embrace slow living, ridiculous pressure at work doesn't really account for stuff like that.
vital functions
kaberettReading. I am up to AUGUST 2025 in my She's A Beast back-catalogue catch-up. Will I be able to read Anything Else At All Soon? Maybe?
Among several library holds that have now turned up (... ulp) I have technically started Run Towards the Danger (Sarah Polley), another memoir about embodiment, which I... suspect was recced via SAB one way or another. By "technically" I mean "I am a couple of pages into the preface, and trying to decide whether the formatting fuckery is worth sticking through".
Writing. So. many. e-mails. about. objects. and I have barely even Started the damn Object E-mails good grief.
Progress on Book also continues (look at me not using qualifiers!). Currently I am slightly going in circles about (1) how much background I need to give on why I think "biopsychosocial" can be a useful frame at least to the extent of providing structure for the first big chunk of the book, (2) what you've got to be very careful you're doing if you want that to be the case, and (3) whether I need to engage in depth with the goddamn philosophy of it all in re e.g. "it's not a model if it doesn't have predictive power" (which I am extremely inclined to sidestep by just......... calling it a frame).
Playing. ... we have tripped and fallen and are playing Librarian: Tidy up the arcane library. Initially we were co-playing with A doing most of the driving and me going LOOK THERE'S A PATTERN-- but then it became apparent that my ideal mode of gameplay (keyboard rather than controller, Manually Shelve Each Book Individually) is not compatible with A's (controller rather than keyboard, Use All The Magic). So I got a second copy. And have been playing through it merrily and slowly. To my amusement it turns out that my specific bullshit here............ gets you the rarest of the Steam achievements. (I am about 2/3 of the way through shelving, and things are speeding up substantially in more or less the same way as they do with jigsaw puzzles. This has eaten my brain and I really really need to do Other Things that are Not This but gosh it gets quiet in here when Allow The Brain To Just Focus. Will I do any further rounds of it? Unclear.)
Cooking. Continue to appreciate braised chickpeas in all their forms (still v keen on Adding A Tin Of Artichokes to the party).
Eating. Had my second hundoburger, which I had deferred until after E1, for the purposes of having an additional day where I didn't need to think about food. Also: STRAWBERRIES; bakery brunch (feat. both the bread pudding and the cardamom bun); ... almost certainly other things but the brain it says no.
Exploring. Bakery brunch featured a detour to visit a red horse chestnut I'd spotted from the bus on my way back from yesterday's hospital appointment, and also pointing out to A the pink bits on some of the flowers on the standard horse chestnuts on the way there.
Technically Finchley Memorial hospital, but mostly I got on a bus I was familiar with and played sudoku to keep myself vaguely calm, and then I managed to NOT panic and get onto a bus going in entirely the wrong direction by dint of it pulling out of the stop sufficiently far ahead of me there was no way I was gonna catch up with it, and then got the unfamiliar bus in the correct direction and... spent significantly more of that panicking quietly. There was definitely A Point at which, it having become apparent that the bus was On Diversion and Not Following Its Usual Route and None Of The Normal Stops Were Happening, I equally quietly Gave Up and decided this was simply going to be yet another hospital service I got discharged from for being disabled, BUT in fact that service TERMINATED at the hospital (and was the only one serving it!!!) so it did get there in the end. I would still prefer to not do that journey again please and thank you, even though I did per the above spot a convenient local red horse chestnut on the return leg, and for that matter several dramatic wisteria hidden from road level but NOT from upper-deck-of-bus level.
Growing. A took me to the allotment this afternoon! The josta is setting quite a lot of fruit and the cherry is even managing some despite my utter failure to water them! I put some marigold seeds in the ground in between rows of broad beans though this is clearly futile because the red ants are already Very Definitely farming on them; the oca in the bottom half of that bed are starting to come up despite the utter lack of watering, as above; none of the seedlings at home died while we were away; ... I did some weeding?
Observing. BABY BIRDS incl. cootlets going WHEEK WHEEK WHEEK all the way up and down the river; the Egyptian goslings are now at the stage of mostly having vaguely competent adult plumage coming in but still managing to turn into balls of ungainly fluff when they sit down; a second batch of coot eggs is being Definitively Incubated. We did not see the duckle again but we did see a very small starling. It was a very pleasant brunch down by the aqueduct.
Fancake Theme for May: Journey & Travel
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fandomcalendar
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Done Since 2026-04-26
mdlbearNot quite as unproductive as my weeks usually are, and there were some fascinating rabbit-holes to go down (I'll get to some of those later). And, yeah, a lot of good household-related things too. But not quite enough walking, and not nearly enough work (which includes music practice and writing). But some. But between stress around tax time, my ongoing health problems, and what's going on in the world, it's hard for me to be optimistic and hopeful, rather than pessimistic and depressed. So there was that.
With m and N returning from the US on Thursday, G's birthday (observed) on Saturday, getting (folding scooter)Lizzy back on Saturday, and N's next book nearing completion, there was a lot of great conversation and a goodly amount of sushi and other tasty stuff. I have some reviews to write -- hopefully overcoming my writer's block enough to do so. Here's a teaser.
Lizzy. When we got Lizzy back -- over a month ago -- from getting her flat tire repaired, she refused to start, displaying an error code (E8) on her dashboard. The manual does not have a table of error codes -- it says to call the dealer. They didn't know either. So we had them pick her up for repair. That was March 11. They called the factory. Several times, apparently. Finally I got the email saying she was ready to be returned, and that the error had to do with the freewheel lever not being engaged. WTF? Why was that not in the manual??!
Book. I recently read a near-final draft of N's new book, and yesterday I
confirmed with her that I can say a little about it in public. It's
called Paleomythic, and it's the first book in a trilogy. It
is, in fact, a collection of myths -- stories about the history of Earth.
As narrated, with close to scientific accuracy, by the gods themselves:
the planets, continents, and seas that who were
there and made it all happen. The framing story is narrated by Luna.
It's not often that a book makes me cry tears of joy. This one did.
I note in passing that N's first book, The World As it Ought To Be, is widely available, and can be found through her website.
Health. The latest problem is Trigger finger, which I have been treating with diclofenac topical gel and, now, compression gloves. Because I need to use my fingers to pull on my compression socks. I'm also having pain -- probably muscle spasms -- on my left side, which is the side I sleep on. With the arm that Ticia likes to lie on.
Linkies! From last Sunday: Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago and Bruce Springsteen’s Chimes of Freedom. From Wednesday, Scientists reverse brain aging, with a nasal spray (nice if it works out, though I doubt it will be released soon enough to help me), and The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. And from Friday, Scientists Finally Solved One of Water’s Biggest Mysteries and The Chord That Ended Classical Music - YouTube
The horrors do keep coming, but we also keep meeting them - Late April 02025
silveradeptBillionaires and the wealthy who want to say that their superintelligent AIs will eventually go rogue are also trying to genetically engineer humans to be smarter than those superintelligent AIs, and just about everywhere you look that they've put their money into, it isn't into things like trying to make healthier people, it's trying to make the children of the wealthy into having all the genetic advances and traits, and the rest of us will just be left behind by their super-genius statuses.
Given that these are people who like to post manifestos about they are already the superior people in the superior culture and we all have to bow down to them and let them do whatever they want, I think this is definitely one of those situations where trust is less than the distance someone could throw.
The public bench seems humble and ubiquitous, and yet it is neither, with a long history and significant amounts of contention involved about public seating and which members of the public are allowed to be seated. When benches aren't being removed, they're often having their architecture turned hostile to try and prevent people from sitting for long or for using a bench as a place to catch a nap or to sleep off the ground for a night. Because the cause of the problem is placed in the bodies of the people who might not have a house to go home to, or whose life activities are related to crime and vice because they have no other opportunities to make a living. Those doing the placing, of course, do not believe they are doing anything wrong, or worse, callously believe that they are not obligated in any way to any other person but themselves, and therefore, they are allowed to dictate who they want to see and what they want to be reminded of in their public spaces.
The goal of liberalism is to make all bodies invisible in the eyes of the law, but the way that people are liberated from oppression and bindings often imposed by law is through mutuality. Law has a role to play in this situation, and often that role is in highlighting and making highly visible the bodies that it considers to be illiberal. Law can lay foundations for others to implement toward mutuality, but as we have seen, and as the article-writer points out, law cannot require anything by itself, and those who have been chosen to interpret and enforce law are often the ones deciding for or against mutuality.
( More of men behaving badly, and the repercussions of having let men behave badly in the past )
Last out for tonight, a reminder to put accessibility into your social media as much as possible, so please provide transcripts, describe your images, and the like, so that everyone who's on your social media or enjoying the content can access it..
And A project that is offering clinicians and others guides on thinking of seemingly disparate conditions in people as constellations because of the likelihood of their co-occurrence with autism or ADHD. And to think of them as constellations because trying to treat one of them well might exacerbate another.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
pootling along
kaberettToday I have:
- successfully navigated some unfamiliar-to-me public transport with only the normal amount of panic
- MADE IT TO THE GYM post-unfamiliar-public-transport (having been Indisposed this morning, when I had planned to--)
- achievement unlocked: asked to borrow a pair of dumbbells from a much-stronger-than-me human For One Set while they were resting (because warm-up); they were a delight
- achievement unlocked: politely asked the human in the next rack if I could have the yellow plates they... seemed highly unlikely to use
- ... tripped and fell into Computer Game instead of doing most of the afternoon/early evening things I had grand plans about...
- and we UNFUCKED THE KITCHEN SOME, good job us.
(Everything is still very much a post-event disaster, but. Made food ate food made a stand against the forces of entropy. It Is Well.)
Weekly proof of life: we'll stick with media intake today
umadoshiI finished Gareth Hanrahan's The Gutter Prayer, which has fascinating worldbuilding, and I enjoyed the characters. Neither library to which I have access has the sequel (I think it's a trilogy?) in ebook, so we'll see if/when I cave and buy it. For a second book, there's probably not much future in just leaving it on my wishlist indefinitely and hoping for it to go on sale, although one never knows.
Then I read T. Kingfisher's Wolf Worm via the library (I'm trying this novel approach of using the library more again if they have a book and the ebook cost is too upsetting), which was distressing in very T. Kingfisher ways (another case of interesting worldbuilding + EW EW EW), followed by Common Goal, the fourth Game Changers book. (I did give in and just buy the ebook set of books 4-6.)
In other book not-really-news, I decided to just go ahead and get the new Murderbot in hard copy, given the price of the ebook (esp. since I think it's a novella this time? And hopefully it being just novella-length will increase my odds of still getting it read fairly promptly despite being a hard copy).
Watching: Last night
scruloose and I made it to ep. 8 of Justice in the Dark, AKA the last ep. that was released in China and the last one I'd seen previously. Onward!(I'm mostly coping with the name changes, but apparently I do better at keeping the different names straight in my head when it's different consonants than vowels. I mentally autocorrect the show's "Pei Su" to "Fei Du" and carry on, but when I don't actually have one version in front of me, I keep stumbling a bit over Luo Wenzhou [novel]/Luo Weizhao [drama].)
Listening: This week I listened to not one but two (new!) albums for the first time--Tori Amos' Time of Dragons, as mentioned yesterday, and Metric's Romanticize The Dive. I haven't done a proper lyrics-focused listen to the latter, but I imagine I will at some point. My initial feeling is basically "Yep, that's a Metric album, and I like Metric, so that works." (Fantasies is the only one I'm hugely attached to individually [and I'm not terribly familiar with their catalogue before that], but that's mainly because I used it pretty heavily when writing Newsflesh fic.)
Art Movement Finished/Amnesty Week Begins
bookblather posting in rainbowloungeThanks for participating in the Art Movement: Arts and Crafts Challenge! If you finished your challenge, post here to claim your novelty beads.
Today also begins Amnesty Week. If you didn't finish your Art Movement goal, or if you didn't complete the TV Tropes Challenge, take this week to finish either one for full novelty bead credit. Post here to collect those beads as well.
Thank you, and keep an eye out for future challenges!
[migraine] ... mrgh
kaberettToday has been. the first time in A While that I have spent mostly horizontal and mostly asleep on account of migraine, despite drugs. I am Not A Fan.
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