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Current Mood: cheerful

Entry tags:

books,
read25

2025/129: The Prey of Gods — Nicky Drayden

2025/129: The Prey of Gods — Nicky Drayden

Now humankind is finally coming into its own, bending and stretching genes in the manner of gods. It was only a matter of time before they muddled their way into bending the exact right genes to reveal that they were gods. Those genes, gone dry and brittle from lack of use, are just begging for an open flame. [p. 61]

The setting is the Eastern Cape in 2064. Alphies (levitating robot assistants) have replaced smartphones; there's a new drug on the street, which seems to confer superpowers; and the roads and parks are overrun by hundreds of thousands of dik-diks.

( Read more... )

I have so many dishes to wash

And I have so little interest in washing them.

**********************************

( Read more... )

More spoons!

Long ago and just up the hill, I went to an estate sale for someone I wish I had known while she was alive. Her shoes fit me. Her pants fit me. I got a great silverware set I'm still using to supplement the set of 8 each that weren't quite enough.

Her set had 16 each of knives, forks, and tea spoons. I didn't need that many, so I stashed away 8 of each, wrapped up in a piece of fabric, deep in the back of a cabinet. Recently, I was drinking enough tea with honey that I was running out of spoons between dishwasher runs.

Yes, I could and did hand-wash spoons, but where were the backup spoons? I could clearly visualize them in the back of a cabinet - in Portland. Had I gotten rid of them? I looked through all the kitchen cabinets I have now, and didn't see them. I must have passed them along when I got rid of so much stuff before moving.

I did some internet research to see if I could buy some matching spoons, but didn't see anything I wanted to order. Back to hand-washing.

Yesterday, I was looking deep in a kitchen cabinet for a container - and there was the fabric-wrapped bundle of backup silverware. Behold the extra spoons! Now that it's summer I'm not drinking as much tea, but it's good to know the whole set made the move with me. And maybe it will give me more spoons (in the spoonie sense).

A while ago I was looking everywhere for the small black folding umbrella that I use about once every 3 years. (I'm a hooded jacket kinda gal. Umbrellas don't work with bikes.) I dug through various drawers full of outdoor stuff and backpacks, looked everywhere it should and shouldn't be, and didn't turn it up. I guess I got rid of it? I liked it, though. A rarely used umbrella should be tiny and unobtrusive. I finally bought another small-ish black folding umbrella and put it where the first one should have been, in the bin of hats and scarves.

Today I got out a backpack I hadn't used in a while. It felt oddly heavy, so I felt around in its depths. Oh! The umbrella! Completely hidden down there. I put it with the other one in the hat bin. Maybe I'll have a guest who needs to borrow an umbrella someday.

At least I hadn't replaced the spoons. So far, past me didn't get rid of anything I really regret. I've always been good at remembering where things are, but I did lose track of some things in the big move.

August by Dorothy Parker

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces’ pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

******

Link

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: home
Current Music: Get Together (Youngbloods)

Entry tags:

C'mon people, now... : Pride, prejudice, persuasion and politics

You'd think it would be self-evident that there are gays and lesbians and trans and non-binary people from all walks of life and at every conceivable point on the political spectrum. Certainly they vary immensely in terms of whether they're huddling at the back of the closet, peering through the keyhole or totally out and proud, but you can bet they're there. And everyone deserves to come out (or not) on their own terms.

To my mind, the purpose of a Pride Parade is twofold. On the one hand, it's to celebrate who we are, who we love, who our friends and family and colleagues and allies are, and the progress we've made over time towards a more harmonious gender-diverse society. On the other hand, it's to remind everyone that there's still plenty of work to be done: locally, regionally, nationally and internationally and also at the level of the individual and the culture. Shifting hearts and minds, questioning and altering long-held assumptions and traditions, and so forth.

When the early gay rights marches took place in the 1970s, the common enemy seemed obvious: The Establishment. Authority figures, both personal and institutional. They might be parents, teachers and other school officials, employers, police, the infamous Fruit Machine ... I don't want to tar all of these entities with the same brush, but the villains were typically found amidst those categories.

I was dismayed to see how Ottawa's Capital Pride March essentially disintegrated yesterday:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/ottawa-pride-parade-dissolves-after-palestinian-demonstration-blocks-route/ar-AA1L7SxN

Yes, Queers for Palestine would have been perfectly justified in carrying placards stating who they are and what they stand for. They did not, however, have the right to hijack the parade and demand that certain parties meet with them immediately, demand that everyone agree with them and that they apologize for having disagreed with them previously. Frankly they're shooting themselves in the foot with tactics like that, as even folks like me who generally support their political agenda (and there are lots of us) are turned off by their approach.

I really think pride rallies should do what they do best: celebrate and promote gender diversity and advocate for the progress we still need. Instead, they are dividing and disgusting their allies from within the movement. Capital Pride looks to me like a bureaucratic nightmare and quagmire.

Smaller groups within the Pride week events have, it appears, been a little more successful in achieving their goals: the Trans March and the Dyke March, for example, and the myriad one-on-one and small group conversations that other events may have spawned.

Yes, the Pride March has always been a protest as well as a celebration. Yes, the personal is political. But does it have to be Polarizing Partisan Political?

Entry tags:

fic exchange letter

Fic in a Box Letter

Full letter to come!

Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, story lengths, etc.

My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats. Very open. I love them.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, animals, landscape, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, magic, strange rituals, unknowable things, epistolary fiction, found footage/art/creepy movies/etc, canon divergence AUs anf alternate versions of characters. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.

( Opt-in Tags )

( General DNWs )

( Caught in Crystal - Patricia Wrede )

( Dark Tower - Stephen King )

( Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey )

( Marvel 616 )

( Piranesi - Susanna Clarke )

( The Stand - Stephen King )

Entry tags:

music

Untitled for Three Jigakkyu [music]

Yall, the bowed musical instruments have finally made it to the electronica party. This is the coolest damn thing. Audio required, video also extremely worth it if accessible. 3 min 17 sec.

2025 Aug 11: Open Reel Ensemble: "Tape Bowing Ensemble - Open Reel Ensemble":

磁気テープを竹に張って演奏する民族楽器「磁楽弓（じがっきゅう）」三重奏による調べです

This is a trio performance on the “JIGAKKYU,” a traditional folk instrument made by stretching magnetic tape across bamboo.

Watch on YouTube

ETA: I want to state for the record, contrary to what a lot of commenters on YT are saying, it is not that what is cool here is just how wackily innovative it is to use a reel-to-reel this way. The only reason this is going viral is because of how musically good it is; nobody would care about it otherwise, and I submit for evidence the half century plus of prior art of abusing reel-to-reel recorders in the name of music-making you have probably never heard of, because a lot of it wasn't very compelling as music so nobody ever brought it to your attention. What's most shocking here is how musical it is, and how they use the innovation to do something new in music recognizable as such. It isn't good because it's innovative; it's innovative because it's good.

As far as I am concerned, the great problem for electronic music has always been what I think of as the Piano Problem: the music is made by operating a machine, so there's a machine between the performer and the music. Great pianists master operating the machine so beautifully they make the machine disappear. But this is what makes piano playing hard. So much of what we love in music is its organicness, the aspects of it which are so beautifully expressive because of how intimately the performer's body interacts with the instrument.

Heretofore, the only ways to bring that kind of sound to electronic instruments were to use breath controlled midi controllers (electronic woodwinds), use an electromagnetic interface (e.g. theremin), or get really fantastic on keys. Or give up and embrace the mechanical nature of the instrument and use it for repertoire the excellence of which does not rest in expressiveness (q.v. Wendy Carlos' Bach recordings).

This instrument conclusively brings the organicness of bowing and all its delicate expressiveness to electronica. The result is simply gorgeous and I hope this creative vein is further mined.

Entry tags:

politics

Style vs. substance in foreign policy

Exhibit 27 on the difference between "leadership" and "rulership". The whole notion of an "alliance" implies a win-win deal. But if you don't believe in the existence of win-win deals, only domination and submission...

From Paul Krugman's interview with defense analyst Phillips O'Brien...

O’Brien: … the United States … has maintained arguably the most successful alliance system in history since 1945. What the U.S. maintained with NATO, an alliance which kept Europe very much on the American orbit, in the American orbit, both economically and militarily, also with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and countries in Asia is, they constructed this alliance system which hugely amplified both America's economic possibilities but also its strategic possibilities. Whereas now we seem to be saying, it's all about zero-sum, what do I get from you? What do you give to me? And within that kind of world, that MAGA world, there's no scope for alliances because everything is zero-sum.

So Trump ends up screwing US allies more than he does, theoretically, US competitors like China. He's throwing it all away….

Krugman: … the U.S. had a specialty of creating international organizations that were formally equal, where we were all partners together. Now, everybody understood that the United States was actually in charge, but we went to great lengths to make sure that the World Trade Organization or NATO were alliances of equals, at least on paper. And it was a very effective trick. Clearly the people now in charge of the United States have no idea of what the advantages of that kind of thing are.

O’Brien: That’s because the United States was getting the substance of power but giving up the style. They would treat everyone as equal without actually being equal so they get the substance. They're now giving up the substance in exchange for acting like a great power, acting like this dominant force, but all they're doing is losing the substance of power.

Washer's busted

The money comes in and then it falls back out again.

*******************

( Read more... )

(no subject)

Watch on YouTube

********************************

( Read more... )

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: home
Current Music: Dear doctor

Entry tags:

The Microform Murders

It has occurred to me that "microform murders" might be a good title for a post about how all of us, even those who consider themselves vegan, unwittingly murder (or at least kill) gazillions of microscopic life forms every second of every day, just by going about our day-to-day life. But that's not what this post is about. Instead, I'm going to report on how an actual microfilm machine inflicted grievous bodily harm on my partner's right arm, and the adventure that ensued.

If you'll bear with me, I'll backtrack a bit. Somewhere around the early 1990s, the Carleton University library was divesting itself of a whole slew of surplus microform readers, selling them dirt-cheap to anyone who wanted one. The librarian in me jumped at the chance. At that time, the Canadian Library Association (CLA) had reels of microfilm of historic newspapers for sale. Wouldn't it be cool, I thought to myself, if I could have a microfilm machine of my very own, so I could peruse all those old papers in the comfort of my own home?

So anyway, I bought one, for around $5 if I recall rightly. And it sat in our basement for a few decades. Because by the time I got around to the kind of newspaper browsing I had in mind, library and internet technology had advanced, we had home internet that you didn't even have to dial up to get, and it was much easier to doomscroll at home and look at all those old news stories and ads for corsets from days gone by.

Fast forward to 2025, our troubled oil tank and furnace are gone and the heat-pump installers are here doing their thing at this very moment. They started yesterday and expect to finish today. But our work started over the weekend and earlier this week, when we shifted some stuff out of the basement to make way for them. And one of those pieces of stuff was the microfilm machine.

On Monday, I was in one of the bedrooms listening to the late afternoon radio show, as I often do on Mondays. We don't get a newspaper on Mondays any more and after the weekend I tend to feel starved of news, especially local news. Suddenly I heard a moan coming from the hallway.

My partner was injured. After bringing that blasted microfilm machine up the basement steps, they had tripped slightly on the top step and fallen on top of it, sustaining a large gash to their right arm, close to the hand. Stitches would be needed. My partner was down on the floor, having felt quite dizzy and broken out in a cold sweat.

"What do you need?" I asked. The response was essentially: I'm in your hands, do what you think best.

OK. I hastily rounded up some gauze pads and an old hand towel from the bathroom to further deter the blood flow, which had already at least slowed, though not completely stopped. I was hoping to avoid an emergency room visit, so I grabbed an appointment card for the family doctor from the bulletin board by the front door, and phoned her number.

Naturally I got an answering machine. "If this is an emergency, please hang up and call 911." There followed a dizzying telephone-tree of touch-tone options, including talking to a nurse, leaving a message, contacting some sort of after-hours service and so on. I actually did all of those things, but the upshot was that there was no one available at that time to provide the necessary ministrations. An aside: I don't drive, but was perfectly willing to call a taxi. But which hospital would be best able to accommodate us? It seemed futile to call a taxi to drive randomly around in rush-hour traffic from one emergency room to the next, hoping to get in somewhere.

Anyway, after talking to a couple of people on the phone, it emerged that a 911 call was probably our best bet. "The paramedics are really good," said one of the people I spoke to, and there's quite a bit they can do on site or in the ambulance to get things stabilized, even if you're in for quite a wait in Emergency after that.

So wow. My first 911 call. Ever. There have been a few harrowing emergency room visits, but they were before 911 service came to our neck of the woods. And indeed, the paramedics were excellent. They knew the right questions to ask, they instructed us, they determined which hospital we should go to (the Queensway Carleton), and once we got there they ensured my partner was registered and wrist-banded and wheelchaired and settled in the Emergency Department waiting area before leaving for what was probably a hard night's night.

The Emergency Room people were all excellent too, even though our health care system is totally broken. There were triage nurses monitoring patients' vital signs throughout the night. Crises were dealt with with remarkable calm and efficiency, with super-urgent cases apparently swiftly dealt with (though with people directed off in different directions according to their specific situations, it's hard to know). But for many of us, it was a very long night.

My call to 911 happened at 5:05 PM Monday. We emerged from Emerge some time between 8:30 and 9AM on Tuesday morning. Took a taxi home and fell into bed for about 3 hours. My partner's family doctor's office had already arranged an appointment for them to get the stitches out, right after the long weekend.

We're both still a bit sleep-deprived, but we're now fed and watered and the universe now seems to be unfolding as it should ...

Entry tags:

Phone, again [me, tech]

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

Soooooooo

How does one compose an email to say "I got a job offer that seems just on the cusp of too good to be true, but as you and your company appear to actually exist I thought I should contact you and see if it *is* legit before I delete it"?

Entry tags:

admin,
patreon

Admin: Patreon: What fresh hell #728, #729 [Patreon]

Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:

I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?

I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:

From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.

So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:

Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.

I got this response:

Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]

Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

Entry tags:

Recovering from the infection, returning to work

My illness ran the usual course of a cold, though it took its time somewhat. From yesterday, my head felt rather clearer, even though I still had plenty of physical symptoms. So, I could work, and felt like doing other things too, rather than just sitting and resting. I still have some congestion and a sore throat but they're just inconvenient, I don't feel anywhere near as rotten.

I'll head into the office today. Because of other things going on at home, e.g., I have a dental appointment on Friday morning, today would end up being my only day onsite this week, so I want to go in at least sometime, and in recovery I would think I am well past being infectious.

I am up in the middle of the night because something happened with the toilet cistern so it wouldn't stop filling. I don't know how it gets into that mode, it's easy enough to remedy temporarily, but anything non-trivial in the middle of the night wakes me up. What annoying timing, I already didn't feel great and now I get to be sleep-deprived before commuting for a full day in another city.

I'd feel better if I were already more productive at work. It feels as if I take a while to get to grips with each aspect of what they do and my colleagues already have much of that familiarity. And, whenever it feels like I'm getting nearer finished with a task, it becomes apparent that actually I am not. Nobody's said, goodness, you're dangerously slow here, what's your issue? but I feel it plenty just from myself.

Part of it is getting used to Java again but more of it that I have never used some of their frameworks (my relevant background is mostly Hibernate and Spring) and I am still learning how their code is arranged, and how people like things to be done. It's certainly clear that my intuition often doesn't match others', sometimes quite strongly; each time I misjudge that, more time is wasted. I don't see why I won't get there in the end but, a couple of months in now, I would already rather like to be contributing better than I am. In the meantime, I'll keep on plodding through, and hoping that others remain more patient with me than I am with myself.

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The Disaster Days, by Rebecca Behrens

13-year-old Hannah, who lives on a tiny island off Seattle, is excited for her first babysitting job. Then a giant earthquake hits, cutting the island off from the mainland... and leaving Hannah alone in charge of two kids in a devastated landscape.

Hannah is not having a good day. She was recently diagnosed with asthma, forcing her to drop out of soccer and always carry an inhaler. Her best friend Neha, a soccer star, is now hanging out more with another soccer girl than with Hannah. Hannah forgets to bring her inhaler with her to school, and her mom doesn't turn around the car to get it as Hannah is desperate not to be late. When she arrives for her babysitting job after school, minus her inhaler (no doubt looming ominously on the mantelpiece at home, along with Chekhov's gun), she gets in a huge fight with Neha over text and the girls say they no longer want to be friends...

...just as a giant earthquake hits! Hannah gets her charges, Zoe and Oscar, to huddle under a table (along with their guinea pig) and no one is injured. But the windows break, the house is trashed, and the power, internet, and phones go out. The house is somewhat remote, an all-day walk from the next house. What to do?

Hannah is a pretty realistic 13-year-old. She's generally sensible, but makes some mistakes which are understandable under the circumstances, but have huge repercussions. She enlists the kids to help her search for her phone in the wreckage of the house, and Zoe immediately is severely cut on broken glass. The kids freak out because their mom (along with Hannah's) is on the mainland, and Hannah calms them down by lying that she got a text from their mom saying that she's fine and is coming soon. The next morning, she lets Oscar play on some home playground equipment. Hannah checks the surrounding area, but doesn't check the equipment itself. It's damaged and breaks, and Oscar breaks his leg. So by day one, Hannah is having asthma attacks without her inhaler, Zoe has one arm out of commission, Oscar is totally immobilized, and there's no adults within reach.

Well - this is a HUGE improvement on Trapped. It's well-written and gripping, the events all make sense, and the characterization is fine. It was clearly intended to teach kids what can happen during a big earthquake and how to stay as safe as possible, and the information presented on that is all good.

But - you knew there was a but - as an enjoyable work of children's disaster/survival literature, it falls short of the standards of the old classic Hatchet and the excellent newer series I Survived.

The basic problem with this book is that it has a very narrow emotional range. For the entire book, Hannah is miserable, guilty over her friend breakup and the kids getting hurt, worried about her parents, and desperately trying to keep it together. The kids get hurt so seriously so early on that they never have any fun. Even when Hannah tries to feed them S'Mores to cheer them up, nobody actually likes them because they're not melted!

The I Survived books have much more variety of emotional states and incidents, as typically the actual disaster doesn't happen until at least one-third of the way into the book. The kids have highs and lows, fun moments and despairing moments and terrifying moments. This book is all gloom all the time even before the disaster! Hannah eventually saves everyone, is hailed as a hero, and repairs her friendship, but we don't get that from her inner POV - it's in a transcript of a TV interview with her.

The information provided in the book is very solid, but I would have preferred that it didn't have BOTH kids get injured because of something Hannah does wrong. (That is not realistic! ONE, maybe.) It also would have been a lot more fun to read if the kids' injuries were either less serious or occurred later. The situation is desperate and miserable almost immediately, and just stays that way for the entire book.

Still, there's a lot about the book that's good and there should be an entertaining book that provides earthquake knowledge, so I'm keeping it. But I'm not getting her other book about two girls lost in the woods.

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media

A decent, pleasant anime movie

I finally got around to watching the Japanese anime The Colors Within (2024). It's a gentle, sweet drama about teenagers finding each other.

I watch various rubbish so this is a low bar, and it's not the first movie I've liked that scores unremarkably on IMDb, but I'd say it's actually the best movie that I've seen for a while. It's not puzzling or challenging or anything, it's just nicely done and it made me happy.

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computer,
rant

Battling with messaging apps

Having accidentally started group chats a few times, I've discovered WhatsApp's awful swipe up to talk. It's really annoying, given that one also swipes up simply to get to the latest in the conversation. I don't yet know if this worked but I've tried removing general microphone permission for the app, in case that restrains this feature.

Previously, working in cryptocurrency I had to have a Telegram account. It's mostly good for scammers and spammers. Recently, I kept finding myself being added to people's groups for random dodgy work tasks. I've now found some invites setting under privacy and security, which I have tried adjusting in the hope of ending this particular annoyance.

It would be nice if I could find such fixes for Gmail's web interface, which I use at work. Among other things, it's too easy to accidentally do things then too hard to undo them, and it's one of these interfaces that pops some control up right under your mouse pointer after you've moved it so you end up clicking on something that wasn't there a moment before.

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Tiny House, Big Fix, by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Of the MANY bait-and-switch books I've been tricked into reading, this takes the prize for the biggest switch. The back cover says it's about a single mom carpenter who builds a tiny house for herself and her daughters to live in. The title is about tiny houses. There is a tiny house on the cover. I read the book because I thought it would be about building a tiny house.

The book is actually about the events leading up to her building the tiny house. She doesn't build the tiny house until the LAST CHAPTER. It takes up about four pages.

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weight and sleep and health

169.2 lbs.
breakfast: yogurt, cereal, almond milk, dried cranberries
lunch: grilled cheese sandwich, apple slices
dinner:asparagus, sliced turkey, hollandaise

In bed 1:30 AM (MODF; D. was in bed with the lights on).
Up 7:30 or so. Underslept, obviously. Not much coughing overnight, but coughing every few minutes yesterday and today, with a "coughing fit" a few times an hour.

Exercise this morning: 30 leg-drops, 20 push-ups.