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Reading. ( Scalzi, Bourke, Barber + Bayley, Boddice, Cowart )

Writing. I have a document that contains the outline and extensive transcribed quotations for the Descartes apologia! ... it's already over 5000 words long! And that's before I even get into the argument about Against New Dualism! I think. It is going to wind up needing to be split into two essays. One of which is the quotations about How People Summarise Descartes + What Descartes Actually Said, and the second of which will then be the polemic about how you don't get to rail against mind-body dualism if you then replicate it unfailingly with commitment to the absolute separation of central sensitisation and peripheral nociception. With the former as non-essential background reading for the latter...

Watching. Encanto, courtesy of The Child. I had retained approximately none of the plot from the Encanto-flavoured Baby Yoga we did together recently, happily, and also I Did A Cry. (I am also genuinely impressed that "fish is in terrible bowl" was an indication of where things were going...)

Listening. The Instructions For Getting To The Child, while cycling, via the bone-conduction headphones. V pleased.

Playing. The Little Orchard avec Child! Using some definite House Rules. Also being Someone With Long Arms for various self-directed play. I continue to be told Many Numberblocks Facts. :)

Eating. I put in an order with Cocoa Loco, maker of My Favourite Chocolate For A While Now, for the purposes of A Convenient Present; I also acquired, because Why Not, a single brownie portion and the cocoa nibs & hazelnut bar. I'm not sure I think the cocoa nibs particularly enhance the experience but I do like the Good Dark Chocolate With Hazelnuts of it all; I think I prefer My Default Brownie Recipe to their brownie BUT I also think that having a bag-safe well-wrappped calorie-dense food was extremely valuable in the context of some of this week's more questionable adventures, and I did enjoy it a great deal while I was, you know, inhaling it.

Exploring. BIG HECKIN BIKE RIDE. Many fewer birds along the canal than last time I did that route (on an unseasonably warm day in April); extremely excited to confirm that Walthamstow Wetlands is Within Scope for a trip At Some Point, though possibly not until it's warmer again.

And then today I learned of the existence of and attended an event at the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre, just across the bridge from Blackfriars, which they blurb as "The London LGBTQ+ Community Centre is a sober, intersectional community centre and café where all LGBTQ+ people are welcome, supported, can build connections and can flourish." They have comfy sofas and a permanent clothes swap and a wee library and a very large bookshelf full of boardgames, and a whole bunch of structured social groups as well as walk-ins. I am charmed, I am pleased with my purchases (including MORE BULLSHIT CERAMICS), and I... am contemplating maybe actually getting myself out to some more of their events, not just when I have a friend visiting from abroad who suggested Attending A Market.

jesse_the_k

I've observed hockey RPF fandom from an immeasurable distance, and I still got a kick out of this post:

https://marina.dreamwidth.org/1576715.html

marina was in hockey fandom, spent her childhood in Ukraine, knows much about filing serial numbers, and has definite opinions about vodka.

I'm reading reading reading.

Hi!

ysobel

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

alias_sqbr

Little Known Galaxy is a farming sim IN SPACE I ended up with an extra key for in a bundle. I have played a little and it didn't grab me but it wasn't terrible and has good reviews. Mac and PC compatible.

kaberett

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--)

kaberett

I continue extremely grateful to no longer have ureteric stents.

( a bit of stock-taking )

kaberett

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...

marthawells

Some news:

* The Murderbot and fantasy novel Humble Bundle has returned for two days. The charity donation is still World Central Kitchen:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books-encore

* I'll be co-guest of honor with John Picacio at AggieCon 55 on January 30-February 1 2026 in College Station, TX.

https://www.aggiecon.net/

* Also you can preorder Platform Decay, the next book in The Murderbot Diaries, at whichever retailer you prefer, and it will be out on May 5, 2026. Published by Tor Books, cover art by Jaime Jones, edited by Lee Harris.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/platform-decay-martha-wells/8cf1662cf8bf8d15?ean=9781250827005&next=t

kaberett

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.

jesse_the_k

...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.

ysobel

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.)

kaberett

(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. :)

alias_sqbr

My therapist suggested I might be burning myself out working too doggedly on a game lately, I was dubious but whenever I feel stuck I've instituted a policy of taking a break not just until I feel up to working again, but until I have felt up to working on a different creative project for a while first. And the positive effects on my mental health and creativity, both generally and even regarding my game, have been significant!

And also it SUCKS. I have this straightforward option for immediate You Did A Thing dopamine right there and have to IGNORE it and find some other more vague, complex source. Excruciating! Especially since all creativity for me has to work around long stretches of Being Too Ill To Do Anything.

So yeah, after much thought about what creative thing I could be doing this time...I am writing this post haha.

Anyway. Life is not too bad! Had a bunch of annoying health stuff, nothing serious just tiring, but despite that I am successfully if intermittently working on a game! It's a remastered version of a game I released 7 years ago, because I'd run out of energy rather than being entirely satisfied with it. So I am happy to see something much closer to my original vision coming together. But making games is so sloooow it is taking forevver, even with the vast majority of it already done.

Also we got a benchtop dishwasher and it's been really good. We have to hand fill it with water because there was no way to get the plumbing to work, and it's too small to handle everything, but it still makes washing the dishes overall way less exhausting.

I'm currently playing the otome (romance) game Nor9 for the switch and it's pretty good, and am still having fun in Jack Jeanne fandom. A friend dragged me into Twisted Wonderland aka "what if there was a magic school full of hot boys inspired by the villains from various Disney properties" which is more fun than it has any right to be, I am not playing the game (gacha + phone game = no) but the plotty videos are on youtube and the ongoing anime is pretty good.

HMMM I feel there was something else but this will do!

kaberett

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 :)

ysobel

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.

kaberett

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.

niqaeli

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

kaberett

For lo these many years (i.e. basically since I got a smartphone) I've been using Swype as an onscreen keyboard. Some time ago it was announced that it had reached end-of-life-and-support, but it wasn't until I went looking earlier today that I realised that happened in 2018, that being when I posted asking for suggestions for replacements.

And then I didn't think about it again for, apparently, approximately eight years, through several new phones and quite a lot of new major versions of Android... and then a few-ish weeks ago Fairphone rolled out Android 15 to the Fairphone 4 and alas That Was The End Of That.

Recommendations back in 2018 were for Gboard and Swiftkey; a question posted to reddit in 2022 garnered similar responses.

Since the Abrupt Keyboard Failure I've swapped to Gboard more or less by default. I don't hate the bit where language switching is now automatic (for the purposes of language learning apps, at any rate), but good grief I am missing the ability to e.g. type < or | without needing to go like three clicks deep in menus. Yes, when I have "Touch and hold keys for symbols" enabled -- as far as I can tell that only gives me one symbol per key, not "now select from a variety of them" as with the much-lamented Swype. I'm also missing the gestures I know for "yes, that word, but change the capitalisation", and still grumpily adjusting to the shift key mode cycle being in a different order to what I'm used to.

I've experimented briefly with AnySoftKey but rapidly got annoyed by the total lack of any Irish language pack (and how difficult it is to navigate the app listings to establish this fact). I'm trying to persuade myself that it's worth giving SwiftKey a try even though it (1) is now Microsoft, (2) has gone all-in on Bundling With Copilot, and (3) apparently "contains ads".

Eheu, alas, etc; all is woe; ... unless anyone knows of any other Android keyboards that provide ready access to All the punctuation...?

jadelennox

For this week, for everyone who makes a donation to the BIJAN Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund, I will write a drabble about some character or show I know enough about to write. Since I've only written one fic since 2014 it's going to be rough, but BIJAN desperately needs the money and I'm going to try.

The Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund (the Bond Fund) raises money for immigration bonds to free people in ICE prisons in Massachusetts and Rhode Island or those detained elsewhere who are from or returning to MA.

Donate.

Tell me you made a donation and give me a prompt! If I don't know the source material we can negotiate.

(If you can't give money to a US org, make a donation to an org in your country that helps refugees and undocumented migrants stay.)

Current Mood: tired

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Ricky Buchanan

Not Done Living!

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Boost! marina's well-informed meta on Heated Rivalry

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Does anyone want a copy of Little Known Galaxy?

more on visual culture in science

[surgery] one year on!

side-tracks off side-tracks

News

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

If you're required to deploy AI

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vital functions

Random Life Update

some good things (a post)

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quick note re bookshop.org

there is too much, let me sum up

the inexorable passage of time and end of all things

It's giving giving tuesday

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