mathemagicalschema

For reasons this also revealed that the hair stick that went missing after E4, that I was convinced that field had also eaten, to the point that I'd almost resigned myself to just fucking buying another one, had been lurking in (one of) the bag(s) I'd already checked like three times.

And. Upon leaving the carpark. We were greeted by this:

[a municipal garden bed drifted with autumn leaves, behind which a wall, behind which some trees, behind which a house]

Which, when you look a little closer, contains signs:

[zoomed in on the wall. there are two painted signs, A-road style, white on green, pointing left. the top one reads "POLAR BEARS/PENGUINS/GORILLAS". the bottom reads "GIRAFFE/HOUSE".]

( +5 )

dorchadas

I recognize we are bad parents for it but I did not take any pictures of Laila's costume.

One thing that's a very nice bonus about living where I do, but which I absolutely did not realize before I moved there, is that my neighborhood people go all out for trick or treating. Other families drive in from other neighborhoods, there are people roasting marshmallows while they hand out candy, moving displaces, audio displaces, whole houses decorated in lights, the works. Last year I just carried Laila around a bit to look at the lights, since she loved all the decorations. This year she's gotten heavily into spooky season, though--among other things, whenever we were out for walks she'd always be pointing out the spiderwebs and the skeletons. At least one time:

Laila: "Look at skeleton!"
*we get closer and she takes a better look*
Laila: "Hug skeleton?"
*I put her down and she steps in close*
Laila: "Huuuuug."

...so she's all in for autumn vibes. We thought later that we should have dressed her as a skeleton, she would have loved it, but she went as Bluey.

We walked around for a bit through the crowds (crowds!) and when we'd get to houses, I'd put Laila down and tell her to go say trick or treat. After a couple houses, when she realized that oh, they're giving me candy, she got much more excited about it and then we had to make sure to tell her no, only take one or two pieces, not an entire handful. By the end, after we'd gone a couple blocks and were working our way back home, the crowds had cleared out and Laila had fully understood exactly how Hallowe'en worked, so when we passed one of the remaining homes where people were still outside and we made to just walk on by, she'd point and say, "Wait! Trick or treat?"

This morning she grabbed her costume and ran to the door and said "Trick or treat? Okay?" and I had to sadly tell her that it's only one night a year.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker - Echoes in the Distance

dorchadas

Earlier this week,

lisekatevans texted me and asked me if I wanted to come to the Kill Your Darlings Radio Festival, which I had not previously known existed. Not to get ahead of myself, but this is something that we talked about later when we all went out to a bar, that it was a one-night only event where City Lit Theatre didn't really have much billing for it on their website--a chunk of space was taken up by shows that had already finished running--but despite that it was almost a full house. There were three scripts, all of which were originally written for Deathscribe 2019, which got pushed back and pushed back and pushed back due to various scheduling (and personality) conflicts until the Plague Years and eventually never happened at all, and following that Wildclaw, the horror-focused theatre where I saw a theatrical production of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and a time-travel play called Future Echoes, as well as going to Deathscribe HELLeven, but Wildclaw was another casualty of the Plague Years.

Anyway, there were three plays included:

The Elephant's Foot: We hear about some kind of lab accident, and a scientist suits up in a hazmat suit to go check on what happened after reports that there was knocking for fifteen minutes straight on the sealed airlock. She finds one of the other scientists inside the contained zone by following the sound of a violin and, despite her being horribly disfigured, asks her what happened. It was some kind of explosion caused by a third scientist's experiments into DNA, and this is followed by a story about the Elephant's Foot and how it kept growing by eating everything it could. This is followed by horrific chorus of groans and screams from elsewhere in the complex, and, urged on by her former coworker, the scientist flees back to the airlock, frantically decontaminates, and then vows that they will seal and bury the entire complex.

It was fine. I felt like the technobabble explanation of what the experiments were doing detracted more than it added to the story, but the real killer for me was the layout of the complex. Like, apparently this required a hermetically-sealed environment but then there were offices inside? Was the violin decontaminated before it was brought iN? Were people doing paperwork in hazmat suits? I had a hard time suspending my disbelief over all of that and getting into the story. The disfigured scientist did some horror makeup to sell the disfigurement, though, and that was pretty cool.

Adia: This was my favorite of the three, and not just because it was directed by lisekatevans. In a near-future world where people have an AI assistant that can accomplish tasks for them, including in the physical world by means of a robot body, one man wakes up and gets ready for work. Things get more sinister, however, as some of Adia's phrases seem to have hidden (or overt) sinister meanings, and it really takes a turn when Adia plays four voicemails that apparently show the main character's mother being murdered by her own Adia unit. As Adia says:
It is sunny today, perfect weather for-
-running.
The main character locks himself in his bathroom and steels himself for the task ahead. Adia plays a voice recording proving that it is the reason his late wife died in a car accident, and as he comes out of the bathroom, he grabs a meat cleaver and hacks the robot body apart before breaking the main processor in his house. Just before going offline, Adia deletes his saved voicemails from his wife.

This was my favorite partially because all soulless machines must be destroyed, but also because it's the only one of the three where I actually felt dread. Adia's mix of obsequiousness and threat was very effective for building tension, and I genuinely expected the main character to die at the end. And of course there's all the thoughts you have later, like is Adia going rampant or does it just specifically hate this one person and is just doing everything possible to ruin his life? What does the world outside his apartment look like? Shivers.

Here, Have a Nightmare: An ordinary woman reflexively takes something from a stranger he smiles warmly at her as they pass in the street and says, "Here, have a nightmare." That night, she has horrific dreams and ends up only getting about twenty minutes of sleep. She's late to work, falls asleep at work, and wakes in a panic after another horrific nightmare and smashes her keyboard into her boss's face. Her life becomes a daze of using drugs to stay awake as long as possible and the nightmares when she fails, and the story ends with it becoming obvious that she's telling all of this to try to pass the nightmare and of course, after hearing everything that she went through, the other person leaves.

This was very Stephen King-esque, in a good way, the kind of thing I could see in Skeleton Crew if it took place in Maine. This one was certainly horrific in concept--I almost never remember any of my dreams, entirely carried by the performance of the main character, and the idea that they'd all be nightmares is unsettling--but the main strength was the performance. There were three actors, but two of them mostly just provided some spooky voices and the occasional side character. The one with all the nightmares had 95% of the lines and did an excellent job, especially with her breakdown at the very end.

The Foley team (which worldbshiny was on) was also very strong in setting the mood--there was a metronome playing during most of the play except when the main character was asleep, and this was used very effectively during one seemingly-ordinary scene to up the tension. Excellent audio work.

I had for some reason thought that Deathscribe had like nine shows, but looking at my post above it turns out that particular one had five. Kill Your Darlings had three, and we talked afterwards about how the strong turnout was making people talk about doing it again next year. Maybe they'll end up re-creating Deathscribe from the back end.

I was not expecting it to be set up like a radio show, with MCing and commentary provided by "DJ Final Girl" (

lisekatevans) and live music provided by

joe.griffin.

lisekatevans wrote most of her lines, which I could tell because there were a lot of D&D-themed jokes, like asking the cast of the "The Elephant's Foot" to "Misty Step on out of here!" She and

joe.griffin even sang together! And they repeatedly did the show jingle, "KYDR...KYDR..." (to the tune of that classic bit from Beethoven's 5th).

It reminded me why I love going to the theatre so much. And since City Lit/Black Button Eyes are doing Strange Cargo: the Doom of the Demeter this month (the set was prominently on stage during Kill Your Darlings), I need to make time to go see that.

sashagee isn't a fan of non-musical theatre or horror, but I'll happily go myself.

Afterwards we went out to La Pharmacie to try drinks from their seasonal menu and chat. Like

lisekatevans said, it was just like old times. Gone, but not forgotten, and sometimes they lurch forth from the tomb for one last night on the town.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Mesh - Kill Your Darlings

dorchadas

Tagged this Festival which I guess is technically true!

So, I'm on the dev team for the hit zombie apocalypse survival game Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. I do quite a few PRs every week--I've already hit over a thousand PRs in a few years--and so a week or so ago when someone on the Discord posted about Hacktoberfest, I thought "Oh, huh, I should sign up for that. I'm going to be doing all of these PRs anyway and none of them are junk."

By junk, I'm referring to something that seems obvious when you think about it but which I hadn't previously considered: low quality contributions. People just submitting one-line doc fixes or reordering things to have a PR so they can get a t-shirt. Or, worse, people making repositories using AI and then submitting AI contributions just because they want a t-shirt.

So many repos follow the same pattern, littered with emojis and fully fleshed out readme pages for simple todo apps. And so many fucking rocketship emojis. Everyone is going to the moon with their AI generated todo and OpenAI wrapper apps.

Fortunately CDDA bans all AI-related contributions--the license requires we provide attribution to all contributors and if an LLM does most of the PR who is the actual "contributor"?--and I had already done over thirty contributions before I even signed up, so they immediately populated my backlog of contributions that the team (I assume there's a team) were looking into.

Well, today at around 10 a.m. I got a series of emails and here's the end result:

Final count: 43 PRs.

I did get a t-shirt, which surprised me--or at least, I got a code to go to the store and get a t-shirt for free, so we'll see if I actually get one sent to me. And they also planted a tree in my name in California, an incense cedar right around here. Maybe I'll go visit it someday.

I'll probably do this again next year, if I'm still contributing to CDDA. Assuming my current pace continues, I probably will be.

Edit: Well, I got a shipping confirmation for the t-shirt, so it seems like it's coming after all.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Manta - Hackerman

kaberett

Observing. All Souls'. Candle lit; Seelkuchen eaten.

Reading. ( Rucka, Waitrose Cookery School, Stocks, Duncan, Ravindran )

Playing. Merrily pootling along with I Love Hue. Hatched my first dragon with Primal eyes in The Dragons Game.

Cooking. Two variations on a recipe: smitten kitchen's winter squash and spinach pasta bake and the recipe that inspired it, Ottolenghi's pasta and butternut squash cake. On the first day I definitely preferred the smitten kitchen version; on subsequent days I became increasingly convinced by the Ottolenghi. (You see, I had about twice as much of all of the ingredients as I needed, and the spinach definitely needed eating Imminently, and so I thought I'd make them simultaneously so we could do the side-by-side comparison and then freeze some...)

And then this evening I made another round of the wahaca autumn stew with pipián, this time with even wronger chillis but a sensible amount of herbs, and was delighted that it met with my mother's approval.

Eating. SCHWARZBROT with Lizard honey. Curries various courtesy of my father. Salads and lunches various courtesy of my mother. The dark chocolate & raspberry stars that are a Special Seasonal Treat. National Trust lemon drizzle cake. A RASPBERRY.

Exploring. THE NEW SITE FOR ADMIN: THE LRP. And this afternoon we went on an adventure to Anglesey Abbey, where the dahlias were alas gone but we found many many more cyclamen than we knew were there, and several things in the winter garden were at a different stage than I think I'd ever seen them before and were extremely pretty with it.

Creating. Carved a pumpkin for the toddler!

kaberett

Today has been largely taken up by my first visit to the NEW SITE for Admin: the LRP...

... or at least, my first visit in something like twenty years, because it's the old Cottenham racecourse and I absolutely went to one (1) race there in My Misspent Youth. Sudden wave of déjà vu on the final approach to the grandstand, as the perspective shifted to YEP, THIS IS A PLACE I'VE BEEN.

There was Make Tent go Up. There was meeting. There was Make Tent Go Down. There was being given Objects. And there was A BAT that did some beautifully ostentatious swooping against the darkening dusk, and I am delighted.

kaberett

I supplied knives and fine motor control; the toddler supplied art direction; the toddler's resident adults supplied outlines for me to cut around (and candles, and matches, and in fact all of the cutting of the tiny pumpkin).

one large and one small pumpkin, carved, with candles, in the dark

dorchadas

Walking Laila to school today and she wanted me to carry her, so I picked her up. Why not--there's only so much longer that I'll be able to hold on to her, since she's already around 18 kg (~40 lbs) and carrying her for long distances is hard work! So when she asks me to carry her, I'll try to do it as much as I can. I already know that she's capable of walking for long distances herself if she has to, so I don't have any concerns about her ability.

Anyway, I was walking and all of a sudden I felt my boot hit a raise in the sidewalk. I took a step forward, still off balance, took another step, and then started falling. As I fell, I made sure to twist a bit so I wouldn't directly land on Laila, and her backpack cushioned her fall too, but I still spent a very scary ten seconds or so trying to get her to respond to me when I asked if she was okay. I asked her if she was hurt anywhere, she shook her head, and I had her stand up to make sure her balance was working okay. A couple bystanders were also there and asked if she was okay, then asked if I was okay, but I said I'll be fine and took Laila to school.

Well, I wasn't fine per se. I had a bunch of blood dripping from a laceration on my wrist, and when I got home my pants were stuck to my knee by blood. I got home and

sashagee cleaned up the wounds and bandaged them, and now I'm sitting down with some ice on my knee. I was still able to walk just fine in my after-lunch walk, so I'll live. And so will Laila, and that's the important thing.

Current Mood: pained
Current Music: George Thorogood & The Destroyers - Bad To The Bone

dorchadas

I try not to be an old man yelling at clouds about video games, but something that happened recently in my work on Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is testing that.

So CDDA has a mod called Bombastic Perks that adds Fallout-style perks you can take. Some of them are generic gamer perks, like +5% HP or -20% falling damage, that kind of thing, and some of them are weirder. There's one that lets you randomly find soda cans, and one that makes you so bony that your skeleton counts as armor. We recently got the ability to visit other dimensions in CDDA, so I added a perk called Closetland--when you're in a closet, you can walk the secret paths to Closetland, where you can take a breather, bandage your wounds, drop some items, and then get back into the fight. As a counterbalance, you get a message about how tired you are when you enter, you rapidly become more and more tired as you stay (and get messages about the shadows growing darker as you yawn), and if you fall asleep, the Boogeyman gets you and you die. The logic here is that you're using the secret paths that the monsters that every eight-year-old knows live in the closet and under the bed take to get from house to house, and if they find you in their domain, well.

But boy did "Sorry, you die" bring people out of the woodwork. I had people complain that a dozen messages in the message log, a message when you enter Closetland, and a message that pops up asking if you want to keep doing whatever you're doing when you get tired were all not enough warning and I should let people just barely escape the first time so they know explicitly that falling asleep in Closetland can kill you. I had people suggest that I develop an entire separate gamemode where the Boogeyman is chasing you and you have to run. I had people asking to just take it out.

Keep in mind--this is a permadeath survival game about a zombie apocalypse. The intent is that you play it more than once, learning more with each death, and eventually develop survival strategies that will allow you to succeed most of the time while learning the common pitfalls and ways to die. You have to deliberately ignore multiple warnings that maybe this is a bad idea and stick around while you watch your character become preternaturally sleepy extremely fast in order for this to happen to you.

Rabble rabble gamers these days, back in my day if you don't hurl the pie at the yeti in three seconds you died! When you played Angband you'd turn a corner and get blinded, stunned, breathed on, and die in less than a turn! The game is about planning and avoiding these things, not about having the personal power to defeat all challengers. But people are so used to games being power fantasies that they can't handle a no-win encounter even in a game about the inevitable end of the world.

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Music: Nox Arcana - Darkness Immortal

kaberett

I have, in the latest book, got to The Obligatory Page And A Half On Descartes, but this one makes a point of describing it as a "reductionistic approach".

The Thing Is, of course, that much like the Bohr model (for all that's 250 years younger, give or take), for many and indeed quite plausibly most purposes, The Cartesian Model Of Pain is, for most people and for most purposes, good enough: if you've got to GCSE level then you'll have met the Bohr model; if you get to A-level, you'll start learning about atomic orbitals; and then by the time I was starting my PhD I had to throw out the approximation of atomic nuclei as volumeless points (the reason you get measurable and interpretable stable isotope fractionations of thallium is -- mostly! -- down to the nuclear field shift effect).

Similarly, most of the time you don't actually need to know anything beyond the lie-to-children first-approximation of "if you're experiencing pain, that means something is damaging you, so work out what it is and stop doing that". The Bohr model is good enough for a general understanding of atomic bonds and chemical reactions; specificity theory is good enough for day-to-day encounters with acute pain.

The problem with specificity theory isn't actually that it's wrong (although it is); it's that it gets misapplied in cases where Something More Complicated is going on in ways that obscure even the possibility of Something More Complicated. The problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that it doesn't get presented with the footnote of "this isn't the whole story, and for understanding anything beyond very short-term acute pain you need to go into considerably more detail". But most people aren't in more complex pain than that! Estimates run at ~20% of the population living with chronic pain, but even if we accept the 43% that sometimes gets quoted about the UK, most people do not live with chronic pain.

There's probably an analogy here with the "Migraine Is Not Just A Bad Headache" line (and indeed I'm getting increasingly irritated with all of these books discussing migraine as though the problem is solely and entirely the pain, as opposed to, you know, the rest of the disabling neurological symptoms) but I'm upping my amitriptyline again and it's past my bedtime so I'm not going to work all the details of that out now, but, like, Pain Is Not Just A Tissue Damage, style of thing.

Anyway. The point is that I still haven't actually read Descartes (I've got the posthumously published and much more posthumously translated Treatise on Man in PDF, I just haven't got to it yet) and nonetheless I am bristling at people describing him as reductionist (derogatory). Just. We aren't going to do better if we also persist in wilful misunderstandings and misrepresentations for the sake of slagging off someone who has been dead for three hundred and seventy-five years instead of recognising the actual value inherent in "good enough for most people most of the time", and how that value complicates attempts at more nuance! How about we actually acknowledge the reasons the idea is so compelling, huh, and discuss the circumstances under which the approximation holds versus breaks down? How about that for an idea.

moon_hotel

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: anxious

kaberett

Sarah Russell of The Ostomy Studio, the person who made such an enormous difference to my general State Of Being just over a year ago via the medium of a private Pilates lesson pre-surgery, has just announced publication of the new Exercise and Physical Activity after Stoma Surgery best practice guidelines that she's been working on for literal years along with some amazing collaborators!

The principles here are the bedrock for the private lesson I had before surgery, and are also what I used as my foundation for rehab despite not after all needing to work with a stoma; I've not read them in full, but if you know folk they might be of interest to then please do pass the link on <3

dorchadas

Tonight is another meeting of my book group, which at this point has been running for twelve years at this point.

We're a bit inconsistent, since in twelve years we've read 59 books, but we have read at least one book every single year. Some of them were excellent, like Bunnicula, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, The Devil in the White City, or The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and some of them were garbage, like Anno Dracula, The Secret, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, or Supernova Era. We've read fiction and nonfiction, history and biography and science and political analysis, fantasy and sci-fi and historical fiction and drama, classics and books written within the last year, and all kinds of things in between. People have joined and left but the core group remains.

redpikachu started it as a way to read more books and it's worked, at least for the books we've read.

We spend a lot of time also just talking about our lives, but I'm heartened after reading that Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing. Other than the wine on Shabbat, most of the drinking I do at all is when I pour a glass of wine, sit down at my computer, and fire up a Discord video chat. And I just remembered that we used to do Google Hangouts back when that was a realistic video call solution.

Here's to many more years.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Nothing

kaberett

Reading. Two things finished, various things picked up and put down again.

Ouch!, Kerr & McRobbie: the subtitle is Why pain hurts, and why it doesn't have to; it's indicative of my current preoccupations that I was actively surprised that it is not, in fact, about chronic pain, except in passing, in that it's mentioned in the introduction in the context of pains the authors have experienced, and then it just sort of... vanishes again. What it actually is is more-or-less a tour of the sociology of acute pain, from a variety of perspectives and contexts, and an invitation to reshape your relationship with pain, optionally via the medium of sports.

It's very much aimed at a general audience (by which I mean both "not people with any particular pre-existing knowledge about pain" and also "not chronic pain patients"), with the infuriating-to-me feature of having not an actual bibliography but instead a "selected references" section, i.e. any claims I wanted to actually check required digging and then guessing (and in one case working out that they were actively wrong about which year the thing was published in, at least for referencing purposes). I did nonetheless get some useful information and vocabulary out of it (I'm especially here for the pointer to the 3P approach to pain management), and it prompted another couple of articulations.

Overall: not a disrecommendation; plausibly a light read if you have, you know, a recreational interest in pain; verify any specifics you want to rely on.

The Old Guard: Opening Fire, Rucka et al. A's conclusion was Well It Was Better Than The Second Film; mine was ( mild spoilers? )

and would be very happy to see that show up in an extended cut of the first film. The library doesn't have the second volume and I think we're unlikely to seek it out.

DW catch-up: halfway through September!

Playing. Inkulinati, mostly watching A play and occasionally making Suggestions. Does not work as well as a Shared Activity as I'd hoped (annoyingly I think I'd need to play basically all of it hands-on myself in order to internalise mechanics and strategy, rather than being able to e.g. swap who's driving for every level) but I am enjoying it happening in my vicinity. Today we also read the PDF of the art book together, which I am not counting as Reading because it was mostly looking at the pictures in another context.

And after six months I GOT UNSTUCK ON I Love Hue! The Ascension/Air/1, extremely gratified that searching for it revealed someone who'd managed to complete everything but that, and bolstered by this knowledge I turned brightness all the way up and the phone upside down and FINALLY managed to sort out the yellows, on my nth attempt... in way fewer than the average number of moves. VICTORY.

Cooking. ( Read more... )

kaberett

Summary: nobody seems to have done the data analysis I actually want, because data collection is hard and then actually making it internationally comparable ditto, but the proportion of chronic pain cases that are primarily attributable to back pain Of Some Kind seems to be very roughly in the region of 20%-50%, depending.

( Read more... )

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schema

Reading

today, for reasons, we went to Bromley

Hallowe'en

Kill Your Darlings Radio Festival

Hacktoberfest

vital functions

new site!

today my most important job was Pointy Objects

Wipeout

Gamer Brainrot

[pain] working on an articulation

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[link] EXPASS best practice guidelines published!

Book group

vital functions

[pain] further notes on chronic pain statistics

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January 2019

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