horselizard | Reading

No, internet, I guarantee you that 100% of the time that someone searches for explain pain supercharged, results they do not want are anything you think matches the string "explain paint supercharged". Hope that helps! Have A Nice Day!

(Still not anything like as annoying as fuzzy matching on a[b|d]sorb in GOOGLE SCHOLAR, but nonetheless Quite.)

kaberett

I realised earlier today that I never actually got around to uploading photos from last year's Glow Wild. Since we'll be going to this year's on Friday, now seems like a good time to remedy that...

lanterns: a group of three badgers

( +6 )

rionaleonhart

Every so often, I post an analysis of how I chose my recent fic titles! We're nearing the end of the year, which seems an appropriate time for another roundup.

In reverse chronological order, my fic titles since July:

( Rambling about why I chose fic titles. )

What's really striking me here isn't actually anything about my titling habits; it's the fact that my last twelve fics in a row have been shipfics! That's very unusual; about half of my fics tend to be gen. I'll have to come up with some gen ideas!

rionaleonhart

Time for a dream roundup!

( Dreams from October to December. )

Oh, wow, is Christmas really only ten days away? My brother's asked me to write him a story this year; I'd better get cracking.

siderea

Watch on YouTube

kaberett

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.

siderea

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1891517.html

This is part of Understanding Health Insurance

Introduction
A Health Plan is a Contract
The Three-Stage Model ⇐ You are here

The Three-Stage Model

When you have health insurance, you have a contract (health plan) with the insurance company that says that for the duration (the plan year) of the contract, you will pay them the agreed upon monthly fee every month (the premium), in exchange for them paying for your health care... some.

How much is "some"? Well, that depends.

To understand what it depends on, you have to understand the three-stage model that health plans are organized around.

This three-stage model is never described as such. It is implicit in the standard terms (jargon) of the health insurance industry, and it is never made explicit. There is no industry term (jargon) for the model itself. There are no terms (jargon) for the three stages. But health insurance becomes vastly easier to understand if you think about it in terms of the three-stage model that is hiding in just about every health plan's terms (agreements).

( Read more: 12,170 (sic!) riveting words about health insurance in the US] )

This post brought to you by the 221 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

rionaleonhart

In twenty-five years of writing fanfiction, I think this might actually be the most obscure fandom I've ever written for. I hope there's someone in the world who's interested in reading this!

Be aware that this fic contains major spoilers for Death Trick: Double Blind, which is a mystery game and is best played unspoiled.

Title: Invisible Touch
Fandom: Death Trick: Double Blind
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Detective/Magician
Wordcount: 1,100
Summary: The Detective and the Magician get to know each other a little better.

( Invisible Touch )

siderea

So, I, uh, got my RSI/ergonomics debugged!* I then promptly lost two days to bad sleep due to another new mechanical failure of the balky meat mecha and also a medical appointment in re two previous malfunctions. But I seem back in business now. The new keyboard is great.

Patrons, I've got three Siderea Posts out so far this month and it's only the 12th. I have two more Posts I am hoping to get out in the next three days. Also about health insurance. We'll see if it actually happens, but it's not impossible. I have written a lot of words. (I really like my new keyboard.)

Anyways, if you weren't planning on sponsoring five posts (or – who knows? – even more) this month, adjust your pledge limits accordingly.

* It was my bra strap. It was doing something funky to how my shoulder blade moved or something. It is both surprising to me that so little pressure made so much ergonomic difference, and not surprising because previously an even lighter pressure on my kneecap from wearing long underwear made my knee malfunction spectacularly. Apparently this is how my body mechanics just are.

rionaleonhart

I am still thinking near-constantly about James Sunderland and, going by my experience with the original Silent Hill 2, will be doing so for the next twenty years, but I can spare some time to talk about a little indie game nobody's heard of.

A few weeks ago,

proustbot made a post about Death Trick: Double Blind, a murder mystery game taking inspiration from Ace Attorney and Ghost Trick. I like Ace Attorney a lot, and I absolutely adore Ghost Trick, so I was tempted into checking it out.

I stressed myself out more than necessary while playing Death Trick, I think! The game has a time mechanic; you have a certain number of time slots in an hour, and actions like questioning a suspect will take up a slot. Sometimes, these actions will lead to new evidence items that you can use for further questioning.

When I ran into a long sequence where I wasn't getting any new evidence, I started to freak out; was I asking all the wrong questions? Was I going to run out of time and fail to solve the case?

I think the issue here is that I'm used to games automatically moving the plot along once you have all the information you need. Because things weren't moving on, I assumed I was missing something. In fact, I'd already gathered all the necessary information; the reason I wasn't getting new evidence was that I already had everything. But that's not what moves the story along; the story only moves along once a certain amount of in-game time has passed. I should have just relaxed and enjoyed having non-plot-essential conversations with the characters to pass the time.

Anyway! Because my misunderstanding of the mechanics led to me constantly feeling I was playing the game wrong, I started to get a little frustrated with it, although I was enjoying the writing. But then it won me back over with an excellent little mystery-story moment: I noticed a small detail and went 'wait, that's weird??' and started trying to make sense of it, and, in pulling that one thread in my mind, I suddenly found myself unravelling a huge knot of mysteries, some of which I hadn't realised were mysteries until that moment. It was extremely satisfying!

Spoilery details on my sudden revelation below the cut:

( Spoilers for Death Trick: Double Blind. )

There is no Death Trick: Double Blind fanfiction on AO3, and I doubt there's a market for any, but a part of me still feels I should write fanfiction where the Detective and the Magician make out.

siderea

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1890494.html

0.

Hey Americans (and other people stuck in the American healthcare system)! Shopping for a health plan on your state marketplace? Boy, do I have some information for you that you should have and probably don't. There's been an important legal change affecting your choices that has gotten almost no press.

Effective with plan year 2026 all bronze level and catastrophic plans are statutorily now HDHPs and thus HSA compatible. You may get and self-fund an HSA if you have any bronze or catastrophic plan, as well as any plan of any level designated a HDHP.

2025 Dec 9: IRS.gov: "Treasury, IRS provide guidance on new tax benefits for health savings account participants under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill"

Bronze and Catastrophic Plans Treated as HDHPs: As of Jan. 1, 2026, bronze and catastrophic plans available through an Exchange are considered HSA-compatible, regardless of whether the plans satisfy the general definition of an HDHP. This expands the ability of people enrolled in these plans to contribute to HSAs, which they generally have not been able to do in the past. Notice 2026-05 clarifies that bronze and catastrophic plans do not have to be purchased through an Exchange to qualify for the new relief.

If you are shopping plans right now (or thought you were done), you should probably be aware of this. Especially if you are planning on getting a bronze plan, a catastrophic plan, or any plan with the acronym "HSA" in the name or otherwise designated "HSA compatible".

The Trump administration doing this is tacit admission that all bronze plans have become such bad deals that they're the economic equivalent of what used to be considered a HDHP back when that concept was invented, and so should come with legal permission to protect yourself from them with an HSA.

Effective immediately, you should consider a bronze plan half an insurance plan.

( Read more [3,340 words] )

This post brought to you by the 221 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

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...

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.

rionaleonhart

After finishing the Silent Hill 2 remake, I watched all the endings. They're all excellently done! But I was particularly struck by the new 'Bliss' ending, which you get if you drug yourself before watching the videotape. I absolutely had to write fanfiction.

Title: Trouble in Paradise
Fandom: Silent Hill 2
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: James/Mary
Wordcount: 1,100
Summary: James and Mary, living in bliss.

( Trouble in Paradise )

siderea

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1890011.html

This is part of Understanding Health Insurance

Introduction
A Health Plan is a Contract ⇐ You are here
The Three-Stage Model

Health Insurance is a Contract

What we call health insurance is a contract. When you get health insurance, you (or somebody on your behalf) are agreeing to a contract with a health insurance company – a contract where they agree to do certain things for you in exchange for money. So a health insurance plan is a contract between the insurance company and the customer (you).

For simplicity, I will use the term health plan to mean the actual contract – the specific health insurance product – you get from a health insurance company. (It sounds less weird than saying "an insurance" and is shorter to type than "a health insurance plan".)

One of the things this clarifies is that one health insurance company can have a bunch of different contracts (health plans) to sell. This is the same as how you may have more than one internet company that could sell you an internet connection to your home, and each of those internet companies might have several different package deals they offer with different prices and terms. In exactly that way, there are multiple different health insurance companies, and they each can sell multiple different health plans with different prices and terms.

( Read more... [7,130 words] )

This post brought to you by the 220 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

siderea

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1889543.html

Preface: I had hoped to get this out in a more timely manner, but was hindered by technical difficulties with my arms, which have now been resolved. This is a serial about health insurance in the US from the consumer's point of view, of potential use for people still dealing with open enrollment, which we are coming up on the end of imminently. For everyone else dealing with the US health insurance system, such as it is, perhaps it will be useful to you in the future.

Understanding Health Insurance:
Introduction

Health insurance in the US is hard to understand. It just is. If you find it confusing and bewildering, as well as infuriating, it's not just you.

I think that one of the reasons it's hard to understand has to do with how definitions work.

Part of the reason why health insurance is so confusing is all the insurance industry jargon that is used. Unfortunately, there's no way around that jargon. We all are stuck having to learn what all these strange terms mean. So helpful people try to explain that jargon. They try to help by giving definitions.

But definitions are like leaves: you need a trunk and some branches to hang them on, or they just swirl around in bewildering clouds and eventually settle in indecipherable piles.

There are several big ideas that provide the trunk and branches of understanding health insurance. If you have those ideas, the jargon becomes a lot easier to understand, and then insurance itself becomes a lot easier to understand.

So in this series, I am going to explain some of those big ideas, and then use them to explain how health insurance is organized.

This unorthodox introduction to health insurance is for beginners to health insurance in the US, and anyone who still feels like a beginner after bouncing off the bureaucratic nightmare that is our so-called health care system in the US. It's for anyone who is new to being an health insurance shopper in the US, or feels their understanding is uncertain. Maybe you just got your first job and are being asked to pick a health plan from several offered. Maybe you have always had insurance from an employer and are shopping on your state marketplace for the first time. Maybe you have always gotten insurance through your parents and spouse, and had no say in it, but do now. This introduction assumes you are coming in cold, a complete beginner knowing nothing about health insurance or what any of the health insurance industry jargon even is.

Please note! This series is mostly about commercial insurance products: the kinds that you buy with money. Included in that are the kind of health insurance people buy for themselves on the state ACA marketplaces and also the kind of health insurance people get from their employers as a "bene". It may (I am honestly not sure) also include Medicare Advantage plans.

The things this series explains do not necessarily also describe Medicaid or bare Medicare, or Tricare or any other government run insurance program, though if you are on such an insurance plan this may still be helpful to you. Typically government-run plans have fewer moving parts with fewer choices, so fewer jargon terms even matter to them. Similarly, this may be less useful for subsidized plans on the state ACA marketplaces. It depends on the state. Some states do things differently for differently subsidized plans.

But all these different kinds of government-provided health insurance still use some insurance industry jargon for commercial insurance, if only to tell you what they don't have or do. So this post may be useful to you because understanding how insurance typically works may still prove helpful in understanding what the government is up to. Understanding what the assumptions are of regular commercial insurance will hopefully clarify the terms even government plans use to describe themselves. Just realize that if you have a plan the government in some sense is running, things may be different – including maybe very different – for you.

On to the first important idea: Health Insurance is a Contract.

Understanding Health Insurance

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. :)

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 :)

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horselizard

July 2024

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Page Summary

kaberett - fuzzy matching: still a mistake
kaberett - Glow Wild 2024
rionaleonhart - Hallucinations Are Very Much A Recurring Theme.
rionaleonhart - Plus Something About Fraudulent Symbols Of Power, But I Don't Remember The Details.
siderea - "Chris did get out..." [in memoriam]
kaberett - vital functions
siderea - Understanding Health Insurance: The Three-Stage Model [healthcare, US, Patreon]
rionaleonhart - Fanfiction: Invisible Touch (Death Trick: Double Blind, Detective/Magician)
siderea - Update [me, health, Patreon]
rionaleonhart - Are You Allergic To Mallets?
siderea - Choosing Health Insurance: HSAs: FYI re bronze, catastrophic plans [healthcare, US, Patreon]
kaberett - more on visual culture in science
kaberett - [surgery] one year on!
kaberett - side-tracks off side-tracks
kaberett - a confession: today I have bought two more translations of Descartes
rionaleonhart - Fanfiction: Trouble in Paradise (Silent Hill 2, James/Mary)
siderea - Understanding Health Insurance: A Health Plan is a Contract [US, healthcare, Patreon]
siderea - Understanding Health Insurance: Introduction [healthcare, US, Patreon]
kaberett - vital functions
kaberett - some good things (a post)

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Page generated Dec. 19th, 2025 11:42 am

every little thing she does is cabbage

Reading

fuzzy matching: still a mistake

Glow Wild 2024

Hallucinations Are Very Much A Recurring Theme.

Plus Something About Fraudulent Symbols Of Power, But I Don't Remember The Details.

"Chris did get out..." [in memoriam]

vital functions

Understanding Health Insurance: The Three-Stage Model [healthcare, US, Patreon]

The Three-Stage Model

Fanfiction: Invisible Touch (Death Trick: Double Blind, Detective/Magician)

Update [me, health, Patreon]

Are You Allergic To Mallets?

Choosing Health Insurance: HSAs: FYI re bronze, catastrophic plans [healthcare, US, Patreon]

more on visual culture in science

[surgery] one year on!

side-tracks off side-tracks

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

Fanfiction: Trouble in Paradise (Silent Hill 2, James/Mary)

Understanding Health Insurance: A Health Plan is a Contract [US, healthcare, Patreon]

Health Insurance is a Contract

Understanding Health Insurance: Introduction [healthcare, US, Patreon]

Understanding Health Insurance:
Introduction

vital functions

some good things (a post)

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July 2024

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