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lea_hazel) wrote2025-09-25 01:28 pm
kaberett) wrote2025-09-24 08:40 pmrecessional mentioned when it was first published and which I am only just now managing to get to, and Chihuly at Kew, the exhibition book for the 2019 installation. I am having so many feelings about getting to flip through professional photography of all this art again. I'm so so pleased.simont, who promptly went "hold on, isn't that the one that has a good Wikipedia article?" Turns out it very much is.(I have not today achieved my Assigned Reading, by which I mean "30 pages of The Challenge of Pain, with notes", because instead I finished reading the last five pages of yesterday's thirty pages and still need to go back and Make My Notes on, like, twenty of those pages. I am learning so much neuroanatomy good grief. But there is bread, and there is yoghurt, and there is drying laundry, and I went to the plot, and I have started digging myself back out from under my pile of PD e-mails, and there was an excellent sunset.)
sage) wrote2025-09-24 12:52 pm
ysobel) wrote2025-09-23 08:19 pmkaberett) wrote2025-09-23 09:55 pmA little while ago I got Stable cortical body maps before and after amputation via an NIH press release; today it was *Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia in people with chronic disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis...
... which dovetails neatly with the bits I just got out of The Painful Truth (Monty Lyman) about the bidirectional relationship between insomnia and pain, where each worsens the other but insomnia worsens pain more. (It's bedtime, so I'm not going to pick the book back up to get you those onward references just now.) With n = 5232, and their conditions including "cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and stroke", "CBT-I was associated with significantly improved outcomes" (for insomnia severity, and moderately improved outcomes for sleep efficiency and sleep onset latency).
What'll be next? WHO KNOWS.
mellowtigger) wrote2025-09-22 05:23 pmDuring the last week, I have completely ruined my online tracking data. I couldn't even guess what data algorithms now conclude about me from my behavior. I've watched video material from the far right and left, trying to make some sense of what's going on during these turbulent times. I've searched text that is problematic.
Most of what's out there is awful, low-data, conspiracy-related, emotionally-manipulative triviality. There are a few rare nuggets of appreciated perspectives, from sources that I never would have visited, absent our current point in history. In that vein, I wanted to record a handful of things that I was glad I watched, despite how uncomfortable some of it is. There was:
I'm sure that I've never heard the phrase "spicy whites" before, but I think I kind of like it. I wouldn't have heard it during the last week either, except that I was deliberately exploring outside my usual territory and arrived someplace new where I heard Joy Reid speaking.
Part of the danger of my most recent adventure is that I would get suckered by false information... and I was. I found a particular YouTube video very moving and politically significant. While I was writing this post, I tried to source the supposed speech quotations. I eventually realized that the whole thing was fictional. No such speech. Inspiration crushed with the false attribution. I dislike this modern age of digital falsehoods.
duskpeterson) wrote2025-09-22 04:31 pmMost of the official documents of the Koretian government are locked away or in active use, but the outer chamber of the historian's room boasts a magnificent chart of the bloodlines of the previous rulers of Koretia. You will see that there are two main bloodlines; both were cut off by wartime casualties, although the last surviving direct descendant of the second line died surprisingly recently. See the section of this book on Valouse for more details.
The Jackal's previous bloodline is unknown, but the Koretian ruler has established a new bloodline by selecting a young kinsman as his heir. The kinsmanship is dually established through a wardship and through a blood-brotherhood of an earlier generation.
[Translator's note: With his usual reticence, the Ambassador fails to cite plainly his own connection to Koretia's royal line. That connection is mentioned often in Empty Dagger Hand.]
umadoshi) wrote2025-09-22 03:17 pm
azurelunatic) wrote2025-09-21 05:37 pmlannamichaels) wrote2025-09-21 05:14 pmlannamichaelskaberett) wrote2025-09-21 08:22 pm[... sorry about the template, I hit return in the title field and IT POSTED. details to appear shortly. :-p]
Reading. ( Ann Leckie, Monty Lyman, Ronald Melzack & Patrick D. Wall )
Writing. ... I have actually put some more notes into The Document.
So many lost property e-mails. (And at some point I'm going to need to start replying to them, too.)
Watching. On YouTube: True Facts: Bats, The Science Of The Hunt. NSFW. Definitely... An Experience.
Cooking. ... yeah no I managed to make veg spag bol on Friday but otherwise we've mostly just been feeling faintly sorry for ourselves. Okay, no, that's not quite true, I did also achieve baked potato on Wednesday.
Eating. Misc takeaway from The Field (leftover Sunday night curry for dinner on Tuesday; leftover vegetable fried rice + Szechuan tofu for breakfast on same...). I remain mildly resentful that the Wagamama menu still does not contain any of My Favourites.
Growing. The second attempt at pineapple has NEW LEAVES. The second attempt at lemongrass is maybe Going? And other than that I have no idea because I have spectacularly failed to make it to the plot this week.
Observing. BATS. A variety of excellent dahlias and passion flowers on a Trip To Town (post office, pharmacy).
umadoshi) wrote2025-09-21 02:29 pmscruloose and I have been getting some household puttering done, which was desperately needed. We're both prone to letting piles of ~stuff~ slowly accumulate, and getting some of that beaten back before work swallows my life for however long is a relief. (Especially since that type of visual clutter is one of the sensory things that starts to bother me far too easily when I'm stressed. It starts to feel like I'm being loomed over.scruloose also hung up a piece of wall shelving for displaying things in my office! I have no clear idea yet of what will wind up on it, as most small things that go on such a shelf are just sort of stashed around my office in bins or odd places. I'll have to dig through some drawers and see what surfaces.mellowtigger) wrote2025-09-20 04:40 pmThis YouTube video reveals a very interesting discovery about our population living near the southeastern (and northeastern) coastlines of the USA. In maps of the USA, the southeastern states almost always feature heavily in the least-well-off areas of the nation. There were (and still are) good reasons to blame their socioeconomic policies for that big discrepancy. Researchers, however, have found a climate connection that was on nobody's radar as a possibility.
These researchers from University of California, Berkeley, tried for 5 years to find a flaw in their research, because the results were so surprising. After each and every hurricane that reaches these areas, there is a persisting health deficit that lingers in the area, even amongst people who were not born at the time of the hurricane. This deficit persists years afterward, peaking about 6 years (68.6 months) after the initial landfall event. It is cumulative with additional hurricanes that may arrive later, so more hurricanes means even more excess total deaths later. These less-visible indirect deaths eventually affect 300X more people than the direct deaths caused by the hurricane itself. The reasons for these excess deaths? State and local governments have reduced capacities after each storm, individuals have less spare money after repurchasing and rebuilding after each storm, and stress is always bad for health, regardless of circumstance.
It's a fascinating 14 minutes, if you can spare the time to watch the whole video. Here's the Nature article, if you prefer text and graphs.
zero_pixel_count) wrote2025-09-20 03:03 pmraven wrote a piece years back, broadly about how, you know, there's a tendency in some circles to laud sparseness in fiction, and how that impacts anyone who's trying to write in a setting which isn't [quasi-medieval-europe or whatever the genre equivalent is]. One of the examples they used was 'the Pitt-Rivers bell' vs just 'the bell' and while at the time I was getting some additional context, I clearly wasn't getting all of it.umadoshi) wrote2025-09-19 10:54 pm
scruloose and I finished listening to Exit Strategy, and reluctantly are not moving forward until after said crunch period. This is a good resting point. We're both really enjoying these, which isn't really a surprise (heaven knows everyone raves about the Murderbot audiobooks!) except that I so thoroughly think of myself as not being someone who takes in much(/any) audio media other than music. It's possible that these are the first audiobooks I've listened to since...maybe since some Robert Asprin book on cassette during a family road trip when I was a teenager (which I only recall even that much of because the reader's delivery of "'Gleep', said the dragon" has stuck with me), and whatever snatches of audiobook I've heard while road tripping with Ginny and Kas.Founded in 2014 by Lisa Kyung Gross, the daughter of a Korean immigrant and a Jewish New Yorker, League of Kitchens is a unique cooking school that empowers immigrant women to share culinary expertise and culture through hands-on cooking workshops, both in their homes and online. The instructors pass on their knowledge, skills, recipes, and most importantly, their secrets for how to cook with love. At its heart, League of Kitchens is a celebration of the invaluable contributions of immigrants to our food culture and society.IIRC from the intro to the book, they don't/didn't go searching for people from specific backgrounds as instructors; rather, it's about finding people who match what they're looking for, regardless of their country of origin. (Here's their current list of instructors.) Some classes are taught online, which is tempting, although I don't realistically like my odds of ever actually signing up.
scruloose about how the recipe I was reading--which was not for something super-complicated, I don't think--was broken down into seventeen steps. SEVENTEEN. Yes, please!)kaberett) wrote2025-09-19 09:32 pm... and doesn't quite make it.
On page 187 (of 218), we finally get this paragraph:
At this point we need to return to a crucial caveat. In most cases of persistent pain, whatever caused the initial injury has healed. Pain is now the primary disease. But there are a number of cases where there is continual damage that triggers nociceptive fibres; chronic inflammatory diseases are good examples. It is also important to point out that not every case of back pain is our brain's overreaction. A small -- but important -- minority of cases are caused by serious conditions -- cancer, some infections, spinal fractures and the nerve-compressing cauda equina syndrome -- but these can usually be ruled out by doctors, who will be on the lookout for 'red flag' symptoms. However, in the majority of cases of persistent pain (and over 90% of cases of back pain), there is no longer any identifiable tissue damage; our brain has become hypersensitive.
In a book that otherwise dedicates a lot of time to talking about gender and racial inequalities in healthcare access, including a solid half-paragraph on how common and how painful endometriosis (a chronic inflammatory condition!) is, the bit where "well this only applies to most people..." gets breezed past is certainly causing me more feelings. And yet it's still the closest anything I've read so far actually gets to engaging with the fact that the rest of us exist, so... no get-out-of-writing-essays-free card for me here, alas.
(The Painful Truth, Monty Lyman, mostly pretty good and definitely got me to think constructively about a few things -- like the merits of classical vs contemporary Pilates for my specific usecase via discussion of knitting -- and introduced me to some more, like open-label placebos and "safe threats" and the impact of paracetamol on empathy. It's incomplete, but not disrecommended.)
kaberett) wrote2025-09-18 07:19 pmA little while ago the toddler's household told me that you could turn the top of a pineapple into a whole entire pineapple plant (with the caveat that at least 60% of the time it goes mouldy). My first attempt at this had got as far as growing a whole entire root network but then suffered a Tragic Incident from which it never recovered; the second had been sat around with partially-browned but no-longer-becoming-more-browned and definitely-still-partially-green leaves for Quite Some Time. I had more or less hit the point of "... is this actually doing anything? at all?" and then upon my return from the most recent round of Adventures I rotated it in service of watering it, to discover...
... that it's growing a WHOLE NEW SET OF LEAVES. Look at it go! I am very excited!
(My understanding is that if I manage to keep it alive that long it'll take somewhere in the region of 3 years to fruit, and then in the fashion of all bromeliads will die having produced said single fruit. Happily this is about the rate at which we eat fresh pineapple...)
