Reading

Entry tags:

Update [me, health, Patreon]

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.

Entry tags:

Are You Allergic To Mallets?

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.

Entry tags:

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

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!

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 )

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:

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

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 )

Entry tags:

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

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

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!

Entry tags:

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

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

Introduction
Health Insurance is a Contract

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. :)

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 :)

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:

computer :-(

the inexorable passage of time and end of all things

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...?

Entry tags:

You Can't Try Bras On In Front Of James; He'll Find It Very Confusing.

I've just finished the Silent Hill 2 remake!

'James, you can't keep doing this!' I exclaimed, as James prepared to jump down yet another seemingly bottomless pit. I paused for a moment to consider. 'Although he might be thinking the same thing about me. I always have to press the jump button twice before he actually jumps, as if he's going "are you sure it's a good idea to jump into this pit?"'

( Notes on the Silent Hill 2 remake, up to the end of the game. )

The ending stats screen gave me two stats that combined alarmingly: I'd been playing for 19h4m, or 1,144m. I'd checked the map 1,131 times. I can't believe I checked the map almost exactly one time per minute.

That's a lie. I can absolutely believe that. I'm frankly surprised it wasn't more; I love checking the map in Silent Hill. It makes me feel so much more secure when I know where I am and where I'm going!

I just darted into the sitting room, where Tem was hanging out, and picked up the Silent Hill 2 remake's box to bring back to my bookshelf.

Tem: Going off to be alone?
Riona: I was just thinking that it does look like that. 'James and I are going to go upstairs now.'
Tem: 'James and I are just going up to my bedroom.'

What a fantastic remake! It's so clearly built on a deep love for the original game, and that really pays off. I absolutely loved it. It's been so good to spend time with James Sunderland, one of my most longstanding and unfortunate blorbos.

Entry tags:

It's Hard To Be The Only Person At An Orgy.

It's time for the end-of-year fic meme! As is tradition, I'm doing this right at the start of December, because I'm impatient. Last year I ended up posting two more fics after doing the 'end-of-year' wrapup. I evidently learnt nothing from this.

I've written a lot of little ficlets throughout the year, e.g. for promptfests, but for the purposes of this meme I'm only counting fics I've posted to my main AO3 account, or I'm going to get overwhelmed by indecision.

Number of fics written in 2025: thirty. You can find them on my AO3 account:

Riona.

Fandoms: Danganronpa, Danganronpa 2, Danganronpa: Despair Time, Project: Eden's Garden, Final Fantasy XVI, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, Severance, The Hundred Line, Horizon Zero Dawn, Deltarune, Star Trek DS9, Kingdom Hearts, Metaphor: ReFantazio, House MD. Ten videogame fandoms, three television fandoms, one web series. Mainly things I've written for before; only four of these are new additions.

One crossover: Kindred Spirits (The Hundred Line/Horizon Zero Dawn), in which Yugamu and Nil bond over their shared passion for murder.

( End-of-year fic meme, 2025. )

Here's to the next year of writing! And... possibly also the next month of writing, because this is by no means the actual end of the year.

I just tried to post this, and the Dreamwidth post editor told me 'you can't post this, it's got an unclosed italics tag'. Which is a useful feature! Unfortunately, Dreamwidth did not specify where the tag in question was, and there are ninety-four italics tags in this post, so I had a real adventure tracking it down.

Entry tags:

Choosing Health Insurance: Two Unobvious Marketplace Deadlines [US, healthcare, Patreon]

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1888828.html

Hey, Americans and people living in the US going through open enrollment on the state ACA marketplaces who haven't yet enrolled in a plan for 2026!

Just about every state in the union and DC (but not Idaho) proudly touts an end date to open enrollment sometime in January. This year for most states it ends January 15th, but in CA, NJ, NY, RI, and DC, it's January 31st, and here in Massachusetts, it's January 23rd. (Idaho's is December 15th.) [Source]

That sure sounds like the deadline is sometime in January.

No, it kinda isn't.

( tl;dr: Just assume if you want insurance to start Jan 1, the deadlines are to enroll by Dec 8 and to pay for the first month by Dec 15. Important deets within. [950 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!

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions is once again a placeholder

~~... to be expanded on tomorrow. <3~~ ("Tomorrow" was a lie; travel apparently took it out of me more than somewhat! So here I am instead on Sunday the 7^th of December...)

Reading. Treatise on Man, Descartes trans. Stephen Gaukroger. Very helpful, in that I now have a lot of opinions about what Descartes said that seem to be... decidedly in conflict with Received Wisdom about What Descartes Said. But, like, in such a way that I can see how they got there (by focussing on one paragraph in isolation) and can meaningfully argue that they're all wrong (based on the rest of the text). (Frustratingly many of the key passages supporting my interpretation are omitted from the other translation I have ready access to -- Cottingham -- and while my academic French is up to 1860s chemistry, I am not going to try reading the original text. In either language.)

Pain, Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen. See next week for details.

Watching. We were visiting some of A's folk and their habit involves much more film watching than we normally get around to! Consequently I have rewatched Knives Out and The Glass Onion (which latter I think I actually liked more on rewatch than on my first go through, even if I do have ongoing quibbles with fiction that doesn't give you enough information that you can reasonably put clues together yourself before The Reveal Sequence), Kinky Boots (never seen it before and LOVED IT), and The Intouchables (also never seen it before, mildly impressed at what a solid go it made at being ~heartwarming~ despite all the workplace sexual harassment and, of course, the fundamental "millionaire pays immigrant to perform personal care work" of it all).

Playing. Inkulinati! Lots more thereof.

Also new-to-me games Rummikub (note "In Turkey, the game is known as [Okey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okey^{[citation needed]}") and Five Crowns. Extremely impressed with myself for picking both of these up via verbal instructions only without any panic attacks.

Eating. POMEGRANATES and ORANGES from the GARDEN.

( Read more... )

Exploring. Şehit Fehti Bey Parkı (SNAIL SCULPTURES (); local-to-that Tuesday Market feat. PERSIMMONS and ROSE BUDS FOR TEA and YOGHURT SERVED BY THE HALF KILO, and also many good ducks, and also so many quince and tiny medlar and many many other things; Babadağ Teleferik up to the 1200m station, where there was an utter lack of the kind of Walks For Tourists that I expected BUT we nonetheless met Some Very Good Dogs and also so many Quercus ilex; and the ancient city of Tlos, which I would very much like to visit again in future with a slightly more cooperative body. And of course the agricultural museum at Yalçin!

Observing. WE FOUND A BAT on an evening Stupid Little Walk to Get My Stupid Steps. Also GOATS and SQUASH and infinite cats and so on and so forth, but we were definitely most excited about the BAT.

Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

[pain] oh this book is bad

The terrible hyphenation one can reasonably attribute to a failure to invest in subject specialist proof readers (or possibly any proof readers at all, good grief).

The wildly ahistorical nonsense about the history of medicine? Less so. I begin to understand why there isn't a references section, and I've only made it as far as page 7 before needing to stop and shriek about it and also stare at a wall for a bit...