today I have mostly been asleep

Jun. 17th, 2025 11:47 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

The watch tells me I achieved +102 "body battery" points, which I am amused to see.

But I have also visited the allotment (on my way back from physio) and have eaten: raspberries, a strawberry, a cherry, redcurrants, jostaberries, peas, broad beans, kohlrabi. V pleased.

(no subject)

Jun. 17th, 2025 03:45 pm
stepnix: an expression of confusion or dismay (cute knight)
[personal profile] stepnix

I need either validation that other fields of art have equally self-destructive discourse (not in the sense of "produces flame wars" but in the sense of "literally arguing against the existence of the field") OR confirmation that ttrpg discourse is uniquely contradictory and needs to be put down

vital functions survived an event

Jun. 15th, 2025 11:59 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

... and has been doing very little of anything else. SHOCKINGLY.

siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
I have a question about eye safety, maybe someone here can advise me on.

Apropos of the protests going on, I've seen a lot of helpful pointers about preparing for getting tear gassed or pepper sprayed, such as not to wear contacts and to have tight-fitting chemists' goggles. But not wearing vision correction is not an option for those who need it, and the alternative to contacts is glasses, which are apparently incompatible with most eye protection from gas or particulates.

I am aware of the existence of some models of full-face gas mask that have internal mounting hardware for glasses, but in addition to being expensive themselves, they require getting lenses made and fitted to the gas mask (i.e. not compatible with regular glasses). I'm surmising the existence of these means that other, cheaper, spectacle-compatible eye protection doesn't really exist, but I thought I'd ask.

My personal interest in the topic is less about protecting myself from chemical ordnance at protests – I only wish I could attend protests (though if things got spicy in the right location I suppose I could collect my fair share of tear gas at home) – than from wildfire smoke. The conjunction of the No Kings protests and the local air quality alerts from fires in Canada reminded me I should really be doing some preparation in this space.

I'm allergic to smoke. (It turns out it wasn't con crud I kept getting at Pennsic.) My reactivity to smoke only seems to be gradually getting worse over time. So when I've heard reports or seen pictures from the left coast of the sorts of wildfire smog they have there, I'm like "...not enough steroids in the world." I mostly manage this threat by not crossing the Mississippi, but it could happen here. Or upwind of here. It has. If not quite so "blot out the sun" bad, certainly bad enough for me to feel it.

So I've been looking at half-face elastomeric respirators, but that leave eyes unprotected.

Any suggestions?

Edit: I'm getting a lot of suggestions that aren't really helpful because:

1) Most safety goggles are for protection against impact or splashes, and as such literally have vent holes that make them useless against gases and airborne particulates.

2) Involve buying a prescription eyepiece. The whole point of my question was looking for alternatives to buying additional prescription lenses. Like I said, I am already aware of options that entail ordering custom lenses, I am looking for alternatives that don't involve that and are compatible with regular glasses the wearer already has.

There may not be any*, which would be good to know, but that is the question.

Allow me to put a finer point on this. If there is no affordable, readily available option for eye protection against gas/powder attacks for people who are dependent on vision correction, then that implies something important about protest safety that is entirely missing from all of the discourse of the sort that recommends having a gas mask to go to a protest.

* Since posting, I learned the term PAPR, and am now wondering why they're so expensive and whether that's a technology ripe for DIY.

two some good things

Jun. 14th, 2025 11:59 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Item the first: I have no idea what the hell made the ominous donk-slither-donk noise in the portaloo at about midnight last night, but the phone I'd convinced myself it was was in a neat little pile with my laptop, in the tent, in the morning -- after I'd spent some time being sad about inadequate backups of photos of tiny sleepy rhinos -- which was an enormous relief (though I am also very pleased with myself for how well I handled things). (Especially given that my conviction that this was what had happened was in part based on being as aware as I could be of how abruptly my cognitive function had deteriorated with Surprise Unscheduled Migraine Onset.) (Still haven't worked out what on earth the donk-slither-donk was, but it's none of the obvious Truly Upsetting things to have lost, so I'm Currently Fine With This.)

Item the second: it is hot. This field contains lots of chamomile, and also lots of people. I am really enjoying the way it smells.

Item the third: I am really enjoying the dark chocolate + salt + nuts snack bars that crew welfare is providing, which I'd not previously noticed.

Item four: THE HALBARD THAT IS A SHARK.

The Prince With a Thousand Enemies

Jun. 14th, 2025 08:52 am
l33tminion: (Default)
[personal profile] l33tminion
I finished reading Erica the rest of the Princess Academy series by Shannon Hale. There's definitely a whole lot to like about the series. I'm always looking for good stuff to read to Erica, so grateful to Melissa for recommending that one.

For our next book, we've started on Watership Down, which has been on my "I should read this sometime" list for a long time.

Speaking of rabbits, it seems to be a good time for them this year. I've never seen so many about in the neighborhood, especially near the Knox bike path out back of Kendall Square.

Musing on Fire

Jun. 13th, 2025 01:02 pm
[syndicated profile] sarahgracetuttleblog_feed

Posted by Sarah Tuttle

mass ICE kidnappings spark terror and resistance— LA protests burn my Boston skyline hidden in a hot, thick haze— smoke crosses borders...

[fieldposting] day 0 complete

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:53 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

I am already very very tired.

But.

In a magnificent example of Prosocial Mammals: yesterday, when we were like 3/4 of the way to site, I realised that I no longer had "migraine stabs" on my packing list because I had carefully arranged things so that stabs would be due on a Tuesday so I would never need to faff with stabs in a field again.

... which I completely forgot. Until. 3/4.

... so I put out a Wail addressed to Londoners who would be Heading To The Field, and one of them ACTUALLY WENT on the terrible multi-borough fetch quest to get me my stabs so I HAVE BEEN STABBED and was only one day late, not a week! which is probably going to make the next month much more pleasant! and I just. continue delighted about this.

There you go that's your anecdote of the day.

WIR: The Everlasting (2)

Jun. 11th, 2025 07:25 pm
stepnix: Blue gear and sigil (theory)
[personal profile] stepnix
One of my weaknesses here is that it's going to be really hard for me to tell how much of the book is weird because it's trying to be Vampire, and how much is it because it's just a weird book. But I persevere.

Read more... )

delight of the evening

Jun. 11th, 2025 11:54 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Okay. So.

Admin: the LRP has a variety of in-game resources. One of the more valuable ones is mithril, which gets used for all sorts of things, like armour and weaponry and building works, particularly military ones.

This event we are seeing the launch of The Cow Stock Market. This inevitably was a topic of discussion over this evening's pizza: discussion of the designs of the I Promise To Pay The Bearer On Demand One (1) Cow slips! speculation over Cow Futures! debate over the impact on the gold mithril standard!

It'll be fiiiiiiiiiine, says A. It'll all be TOTALLY fine. You can absolutely build fortifications out of cows!

-- and at this point, for those of you who are abruptly cackling, I need to point out that A has not read Nona the Ninth.

I also need to point out that I am in a specific groupchat, specifically set up following the event where someone managed to get their hands on some copies of Nona a few days before official release and there was consequently significant in-field bartering for who got to be next in the queue to inhale them, that is named after. well. the cows. did you know that cows have best friends.

But A had no idea why I was abruptly losing it, and I decided that rather than attempt to explain I was in fact first of all going to Depart Our Table, find my Nona dealers, and relate unto them the story of The Thing A, All Unawares, Just Said.

The reaction was extremely gratifying.

WIR: The Everlasting (1)

Jun. 10th, 2025 07:39 pm
stepnix: an expression of confusion or dismay (cute knight)
[personal profile] stepnix
I was browsing the RPG shelves at Half-Price Books and found 1.5 editions of an obvious World of Darkness knockoff called The Everlasting. So I guess that's what I'm talking about now.

Read more... )
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Two things:

  1. I keep (especially post-surgery, cotemporal with relearning how to walk) finding more small ways that how I've been doing my various physio exercises isn't quite right. This is a good thing! Isn't it fascinating to be learning more about embodiment and how my body works and how I can best deploy my various muscles!

  2. Up until the hypermobility clinic, all the physio I was ever prescribed made me worse, not better.

It abruptly dawned on me, all at once, that the subtlety of the changes I'm making with adjusting how I'm shifting my weight around and so on and so forth? Are almost certainly not actually externally visible. Like, yes, people not understanding hypermobility and problems with it was also Definitely A Problem, but -- the part where I'm still, mm, not necessarily fixing things but certainly developing them, finding places where even with What The Hypermobility Clinic Told Me To Do I wasn't getting quite right... well, the hypermobility specialists clearly went "eh, good enough", and in terms of the effects on my ability to Things I think they were clearly demonstrably provable correct, but -- yeah, okay, sudden understanding of some of just how difficult it would have been to correct some of this stuff.

(I'm very sure that all my various epiphanies will turn out to be about things that still aren't quite right, that I can still refine further -- I'm having an extended phase of that with Pilates right now -- but this is a good thing, actually. It's really nice to have such clear evidence that I'm getting to know and understand myself better.)

kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Reading. FINISHED:

  • Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson. I can see why people like her! I have also remembered why I wound up unsubscribing from her blog. Very interesting proof of concept in re audiobooks, though.
  • Prophet, Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché. Very enjoyable reread in which many things landed differently, in service of...
  • a word you've never understood, [personal profile] rydra_wong. EXACTLY the post-canon follow-up I wanted but would have absolutely failed to articulate. Have already tried to lure one more person into reading the book so I can then make them go read the fic. Now I just selfishly want Even More Of It.
  • Pain is really strange, Steve Haines. Reread for the purpose of making notes, this time. Sparked at least one useful thought. Following up references is a work in progress.
  • How to cook... Desserts, Leiths Cookery School. Read all the way through for the purposes of EYB indexing first pass! Go me.

STARTED:

  • Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. Borrowed from library on a whim for low-brain non-fiction.

Writing. First pass through indexing a cookbook on EYB!

Some Actual Notes re pain for The Book, including (and I am very proud of myself for this) actually writing down my questions alongside the bare "here's what it contained".

Watching. Murderbot S01E01. I am dubious but expecting to keep watching. If you encourage me I might say more when it is not past curfew.

Cooking. ... apparently I have not managed Much Of Note this week.

Eating. POTATOES at the ALLOTMENT courtesy of ALLOTMENT FRIENDS. Also finished my choi sum and had my first AMAZING broad beans and nibbled kohlrabi speculatively, all on Tuesday.

Today I have nibbled: a cherry; the first few redcurrants; a pod's worth of Kelvedon Wonder peas; half a tiny tomato.

Making & mending. Made some progress on A's left glove. Realised, belatedly, that I'd done the same thing with picking up stitches unevenly along the two sides of the palm. Ripped back most of the way to where I started from and Sulked. BUT HEY I've remembered the pattern and where I'd stowed all the bits for it!

Growing. See Eating for my biggest excitements. Sugar Magnolia (purple sugar-snap pea) now setting pods; my main intention with it this year (given that I planted a whole packet of seeds and have wound up with ...fewer plants than that) is just to get myself sorted with a significantly larger number of seeds for next year, but hey, maybe they'll all be super productive and I'll actually get to eat some too.

Stockings now at the plot to go onto the cherry tomorrow, hopefully.

Tomatoes planted out when tiny not doing so great (i.e. have mostly disappeared). Tomatoes planted out when larger Actually Flowering. Desperately need to stake the lot of them.

Tiny single solitary surviving oca has started to Go.

V grumpy about how poorly the squash I got started A While Ago have coped with getting put outside given that they are in biodegradable fibre pots so I'm not even disturbing their roots. Getting the rest of them in the ground AND THEN SOWING MORE very much also high on tomorrow's priority list. (And the beans, augh.)

Observing. Met a neighbour!

proto-ttrpgs

Jun. 8th, 2025 02:07 pm
stepnix: Player One (break)
[personal profile] stepnix

Jon Peterson continues to be an extremely worthwhile read. currently in the section of Playing at the World 2e that describes the development of "character" as RPGs understand it. Apparently there were hacks of Diplomacy that used a map of Middle-Earth instead of Real-World-Earth, and put the players in charge of Lord of the Rings nations... and in the positions of LotR characters. We know these guys. They're in the books.

This is, if I were to describe art in terms of its component parts instead of as a social phenomenon, sufficient for a role-playing game in my mind. The game gives you a role to play, fulfilling that role is playing that game. LotR Hack Diplomacy is missing several components that are essential to the TTRPG experience for a lot of people (it's PvP, the GM handles paperwork instead of being a narrator, you're not creating your own character, there's no principle of "anything can be attempted") but I'm not a lot of people, and for me it's good enough to count.

has anyone created a dungeon crawler version of diplomacy. hold on lemme look this up

siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
2025 Jun 7 11:40 am: [profile] benjalvarez1 on Twitter:

WATCH THIS: https://x.com/BenjAlvarez1/status/1931375699786334704

Click through to see the video. You really, really should. Sound is irrelevant.

Text: "Tanks, fighting vehicles and howitzers arrive in Washington, D.C. ahead of next week's military parade. They departed from Texas on June 2." Two minutes and forty seconds.

Allegedly that train is a mile long and is transporting:

• 28 Abrams tanks (M1A2 main battle tank)
• 3 armored recovery vehicles (M88)
• 28 Bradleys (M2A3 infantry fighting vehicle)
• 5 Paladins (M109A7 self-propelled howitzer), and
• 28 Strykers (infantry carrier vehicle)

Source: 2025 Jun 6: @USAMilitaryChannel on YT [not official military channel]: "1-Mile Military Train -Texas to D.C. with Tanks, Armor, and More for Army's 250th Parade". I do not know if that source is reputable or if that inventory is accurate.

USA Today is reporting that "The military vehicles will be joined by 1,800 soldiers". (Source: 2025 Jun 6, USATODAY on YT: "Watch: Tanks, fighting vehicles head to DC for Trump's military parade", CW: face full of Trump, alt: screenshot).

I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking that maybe the guy who attempted one coup already bringing a well-armed military force into our capitol city and, crucially, within artillery-range of the Pentagon, is just throwing himself a birthday party, but also maybe not.

ETA: For those of you confused by this, thinking, but doesn't he already control the military? You might want to watch this video about the rise of Xi Jinping.

Now, obviously, Trump would never play a long game like Xi did. But, 1) there are other ways to achieve the same end and 2) he doesn't have to, because his buddies, the Dominionists, did.

some joys of the day

Jun. 7th, 2025 11:57 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. goslings! (Canadian; one still very yellow and fluffy, several more rather larger.)
  2. SNAILS. so many excellent snails. we went out on a couple of stupid little walks and saw MANY snails.
  3. ate the last of my birthday cake, with discounted raspberries courtesy of one of said stupid little walks. <3
  4. the post brought Several more books for me (two pain-related, ...some cookery) and I am very pleased with them. particularly looking forward to warm bread and honey cake, though given that I've still not actually read Salt Fat Acid Heat I don't rate my chances of getting to it any time soon...
  5. current borrowed-on-a-whim-from-the-library book: Adventures in Stationery, James Ward. First chapter was paperclips; current chapter is a whistlestop tour of The History Of The Pen, including a much more loving biography of the BIC Cristal than I am normally exposed to via fountain pen fandom!

Human in the Loop

Jun. 7th, 2025 10:27 am
l33tminion: (Default)
[personal profile] l33tminion
I've been thinking about AI a lot this week, in particular this hilarious take on OpenAI's approach to AI development, "If OpenAI Made Black Holes" and the AI 2027 scenario (including this very good video summary).

Still trying to make more of AI coding tools in my job. Those can be a real boost to productivity. These models aren't the best software engineers, a bit stumble-y, but they're very, very versatile, and they can write fast. It's impressive, and unsettling. As Cory Doctorow notes, It's not about whether AI can do your job per se.

Work's been chaotic, I'm moving on to fifth manager since 2022 since ours is changing teams. This was my first time reporting to someone less senior than myself in terms of span on company, team, and career, but two of my previous three managers have been less senior in some of those metrics. I'm a little fish in a big pond, struggling, even thinking this means I'm not cut out for it.

I've started playing Patrick's Parabox a mind-bending block-pushing puzzle game. Great so far. Reminds me of Baba is You, in that it's a block-pushing puzzle game with a twist: In Baba is You the rules of the game are also blocks, in Patrick's Parabox the rooms of the puzzle are blocks.

[pain] today's articulation

Jun. 6th, 2025 11:53 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

A significant part of the problem is that we only start saying "all pain is in the brain" (or "the tissue isn't the issue" or whatever) to people with complex or chronic pain.

And there's a good reason for that! It's the same reason that I need to have a much more detailed idea of the fine detail of what an atom is and how it behaves than the vast majority of the population, for whom the Bohr model is perfectly adequate!

... and we need to explain that, we need to explain why we don't tell people with simple acute pain that All Pain Is In The Brain -- it's not because it's any less true for them, it's just that for most people most of the time they don't need to worry about that level of detail. But if you don't explain that, it sure do sound a lot like "your pain isn't real (unlike those people over there)".

Lies-to-children. That. That thing. That's a thing I need to explain.

(no subject)

Jun. 6th, 2025 04:46 pm
kihou: (Default)
[personal profile] kihou
Watched Paprika on the big screen at the Somerville Theater. A favorite of mine, definitely benefited from the big screen format. Really highlighted how background music and lack of background music was used, which I hadn't focused on so much before.

I do have some nebulous thoughts about how motifs and locations are revisited to anchor the dream logic. I'd probably try to do something with that for a Dreampunk 2e (not that I'm likely to do a Dreampunk 2e).

In other news, I just read Becky Chambers' A Closed and Common Orbit, which I really liked, probably even more than The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Feels like a strong entry in second-wave robots-with-feelings media, with Murderbot and Ancillary Justice. It had some weaker spots (the heist at the end could really have been strengthened in line with the themes) but I feel like the interwoven narratives and the space it gave the viewpoint characters was very effective.

It makes me think about genre on two different axes:

1. I feel like there are two pretty distinct types of media that often get lumped under "cozy": works where nothing bad happens and character-driven works where trauma and other difficult emotions are given space, care, and value. A Closed and Common Orbit is firmly in the second category, but I do wish I had better terminology for distinguishing the two types of work. "Character-driven" is part of it but probably broader than I'm really looking for.

(Sometimes the former can be nice as well but I do feel like the conflation of the two is often used to dismiss/undermine things like Ghibli movies, Wanderhome, etc.)

2. It sorta feels like sci fi and fantasy have gotten pushed into this corner of needing world-saving violent adventurous stakes as the focus of their main plot, and this can really flatten characters' motivations and make everything feel really rushed and forced. I feel like there's a lot of room for strong stories that are character driven and have personal stakes, even if they're not going in a cozy direction. I used to associate this with long-running series, how e.g. Buffy and Dresden Files felt the need to keep raising the stakes to a point where they lost emotional aspects that were stronger initially for me, but I think it's more pervasive than that.

Meanwhile, we're taking a chill week in Western Mass with Auntie Grandma. Kiddo's at an age where we take him to cool places and all he wants to do is play in the mulch and such, but he did take some interest in cows and continues to be into ceiling fans, so gotta call that a win.

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