Reading

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[migraine] peripheral vision nonsense

The thing about buying new glasses, right, is that I've been feeling avoidant about it in part because I think I was slightly migrainey the day I had the most recent test done and I was already pretty sure that my vision goes... wrong... when migrainey -- most noticeable when moving, but always... there.

Slightly more specifically: it's neither scintillating scotoma nor loss-of-whole-field-of-vision nor any of the other very classic visual auras; instead it's a sense that I'm not managing to track movement properly along the lower edge and especially the lower corners of my field of vision.

... which matches up really well, actually, with the peripheral vision deficiencies that, er, showed up during my last eye test.

I've been noticing the Weirdness on-and-off for quite some time now, and was dithering back and forth about whether it was just confirmation bias in that I was only noticing it when otherwise migrainey -- but then on Monday, while on my way to my GP surgery to pick up some paperwork, it resulted in the railings I was going past (and that I go past regularly!) causing an extremely pronounced and unmistakeable strobing effect. I am very confident that that is not something I would somehow manage to confirmation bias myself out of noticing most of the time, so, hurrah, Definitely A Migraine Symptom (for lo, on Monday I was migrainey) it is.

The thing that is mildly baffling me is that I can't actually find (admittedly on a fairly cursory search) any description of specifically peripheral vision fuckery as a migraine thing! Lots of mentions of tunnel vision, lots of mentions of classic aura, and one case study in which "peripheral vision" is used metaphorically. So, you know, let the record show, &c.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Princess Connect! Re: Dive - Bonds Connected, Hearts Tied

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Four years and three months Laila update

I technically should have written this last week, but I wanted to delay it a week because of an extremely momentous event:

2025-08-19 - Laila's First Day of School

It was Laila's first day of school!

She had a good time and we had no incidents with her going away from us. Unlike some of the other kids, who cried when they realized that their parents were not going with them into the school, Laila just looked around a bit worried and confused. I imagine she was trying to figure out what was going on and if she needed to start crying too if the other children were reacting that way, but we left while one of the teachers was talking to her and when

sashagee came to pick her up, she wasn't told about any incidents that had happened. And today, when we told her she was going back to school again, her reaction was "Yaaay school!!" so we had about the best possible first day we could.

She's only in half-day preschool at the moment because she hasn't been in any kind of structured environment like that without one of us present, ever--no daycare, no other school, and all her classes one of us was there. The first day at least went well. Hopefully the first week goes well.

In other good news, Laila is finally happy about using the potty for everything! She still has accidents--she's four, of course she does--but she'll run into the bathroom and sometimes we'll hear clapping and "Yaaaaay! Good job! Big girl!" from her and know we need to put another sticker on her chart. Her last bonus she got when she hit thirteen times was a princess tiara and a magic wand, both with Ariel the mermaid on them. Laila is still super deep in her princess phase.

Perhaps more interesting, in that it's atypical of four-year-old girls, is that she loves watching train videos, both ones of train crossings where the train goes on, and those videos taken from the front of trains--this one has gotten a lot of play lately--and she loves them so much that she's been requesting them even above Bluey or Hello Kitty Supercute Adventures. She's always been into trains, and even as a baby when we'd take her on the L she would get excited when a train would pull up to the station, so it's not out of character for her. But this specific interest has only appeared in the last month or so.

She's doing well in her swimming classes. She still throws all kinds of things into the pool, but last class was the first time she jumped off the wall and swam across half the lane to her teacher again.

Unfortunately, she had another seizure recently, but the doctors seem convinced that it's because she's growing and needs her medicine adjusted for her weight. They're raising it a bit and we'll see what happens. It's worrying, of course, but I'll just have to see what happens. But the doctors don't seem too worried.

Her language is improving, slowly. We have her in occupational and speech therapy--again, I think the state was incorrect in graduating her out of therapy when she was turning three--every week, and like I've said, they seem optimistic that she doesn't need too much help. She's been using more sentences, like "I've got my princess stuff!" and "I want to go to school," at least when she's not remembering that she's supposed to be staring at us and not talking to us. She definitely has some stubbornness and thinks, "Oh, abba and mama want me to talk? Then I won't!" But if we catch her while she's excited and doesn't remember that, well, then the words are starting to come out.

What other ways will she grow and change?

victory of the day is GLASSES

Ordered, at least, to pick up next week.

Indulgence is a writing slope off eBay with a lucky dip of writing utensils, one of which I am very cheerful about...

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vital functions

vital functions

Reading. ( Allie Brosh, Stuart Adlington, Liam D'Arcy + Grace Hall, Rosie Reynolds, Helena Attlee, Jeannie Di Bon, Mary Jane Paterson + Jo Thompson, Raymond Blanc )

Cooking. One more thing from East (kimchi pancakes, mildly disappointing) plus a gooseberry oat crisp I have been meaning to get to since I started picking the pink gooseberries [mumble] ago.

Eating. Ruby Violet (hazelnut + hazelnut brittle, blueberry + lemon curd). buns from home (cardamom, cinnamon, garlic + rosemary focaccia).

My first granadilla, courtesy of a whim in a supermarket!

Allotment apples and tomatoes.

Exploring. Spent a chunk of Monday afternoon poking around the Camley Street Natural Park!

Growing. There are TOMATOES. There are BEANS. I harvested some PEPPERS. I'm still not doing great at, like, efficiency or yield, but hey, I'm eating some things from the plot, which is better than none.

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books,
pilates

[books, embodiment] further grousing

Just, you know, For My Own Reference: a list of the exercises included in Hypermobility Without Tears. I am going to come back through and add links to Pilates and physio explainers for all of these.

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[books, embodiment] Hypermobility Without Tears, Jeannie Di Bon

Jeannie Di Bon is a "Movement Therapist" who "specialis[es] in Hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Chronic Pain." In the introduction, she talks about her own experiences in a way I find very sympathetic:

I've lost count of the number of times a doctor has told me it's all down to IBS and instructed me to eat more fibre and try Pilates or yoga to relax. Dismissive in its nature and kind of ironic now, as I trained to become a Pilates teacher in 2008.

And, you know, the actual core (yes I did that) of her Integrated Movement Method is sound: she's giving advice about fostering body awareness, of when and where you're tense and when you're not, working through a pretty standard sequence of breathing exercises and gentle movements. All the exercises in this book are the kind of thing that show up pretty early on in any full-body physiotherapy programme, that have loads of progressions available (particularly within the Pilates model), and they're absolutely fine and probably useful to folk who've not been able to access care covering this kind of topic.

If it were just the exercise programme, it would be ... fine. More or less. I think a bunch of the ways she explains movements are unclear and counterintuitive, but hey, presumably they work for at least some people.

Unfortunately, there are all of the bits in between.

Chapter 4 is where they went from "okay, you're simplifying to the point of lies-to-children but you are also explaining why" to "... either you're deliberately misrepresenting things for personal gain or you're wildly incompetent", and I'm still not sure which of those it actually is. (I am trying not to think too hard about the possibility that the answer is "both".)

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tl;dr there is nothing you will get from the Integral Movement Method that you won't get from competently-taught or -explained Pilates except scaremongering and misdirection... and unlike IMM, you can get decent Pilates resources for free. Don't bother with this one.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Doom - At Doom's Gate (E1M1)

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Game Review: Jupiter Hell

I'm going to start this review by talking about my first ever roguelike win, which was not in Jupiter Hell.

Over a decade ago, a single developer did a couple short roguelikes for the 7DayRL Challenge, including one based on Aliens (AliensRL) and one based on Diablo (DiabloRL). The latter is really great and I wish there had been more development on it--it has a function where you can point it at your Diablo installation and it'll play music, sound effects, and voice clips from the game, but lightning damage still hasn't been implemented. More relevant to this review, though, was DoomRL, based obviously on Doom. You pick up a shotgun and kill demons while listening to E1M1 / At Doom's Gate. It's a roguelike, though, so you also pick a class from marine, scout, or technician, level up and get to pick perks that change your playstyle, from gaining extra HP to dodging attacks easier to being able to dual-wield pistols to auto-reloading shotguns when moving to making melee attacks with zero turn cost if you kill an enemy while doing it. Since moving increass your dodge, it may be the only roguelike in which circle-strafing is an actual viable strategy.

After playing it for a long time and eventually using a Marine with an Ammochain build and plasma rifle (every burst consumes only one ammo), I was able to consistently make it to the Cyberdemon, and eventually I made it there with a thermonuclear bomb and also having gotten an invincibility powerup the previous level, so I activated the bomb and it blew up the entire level...and revealed secret stairs down to even more levels! I kept going and made it down to the Spider Mastermind and killed it, thus attaining the true ending. Or so I thought until literally today, when I learned there's an even more secret ending if you also nuke the Spider Mastermind and then you get to go fight John Carmack. So maybe I should get back to that.

But back to Jupiter Hell, eventually id Software politely asked if DoomRL could please not use their IP, and so it become DRL, and then creator said he was going to make a graphical roguelike with the same premise called Jupiter Hell. I bought it years ago, a couple weeks ago I cracked it open seriously, and now I've beaten it. Rip and tear.

Ahhh, fresh meat.

( Read more... )

okay, this is an anti-rec for Jeannie Di Bon

I am now well over halfway through the book, and spent most of chapter four screeching to anyone who would listen about the extent to which either she is deliberately and cynically misrepresenting approaches that aren't Her Personal Programme in the interests of selling the latter, or she's just incompetent.

The actual suggested movements -- the strength-building and the stretching -- are totally reasonable, and also totally standard. It's the surrounding framing that has my eyebrows crawling into my hairline; I... tried to summarise and rapidly discovered I was launching into the full rant, and it's past bedtime, so let's start with: while there's a References section it's a whole 15 items long, and she's blithely saying "X states" or "Y says" as though the fact that something has been published in a single peer-reviewed paper means that it's unquestionably true, and of those fifteen one is a systematic review of any kind and... Several... are under the aegis of an organisation specialising in complementary medicine.

More details tomorrow, probably. With excerpts.

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how do your gardens grow

finally it is tomato o'clock

a tomato with a dark purple upper and red lower, speckled with gold

(This cultivar is called Blue Fire. I was very late getting my tomatoes started, but I am about to have lots of them and I am excited by this! Rainbow planting didn't quite work partly because none of the Yellow Pear-Shaped made it but largely because I lost track of which were my purple plum tomatoes and which were instead my orange, but -- I'm about to have A Bunch of ridiculous coloured tomatoes, and this is probably the showiest of the lot of 'em!)

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Atrium Carceri - A Stroll Through the Ancient City

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We grant you the rank of developer

Last night I was officially invited to become a developer on Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

It's kind of funny because like 99% of my work is on the mods that ship with the game--I barely ever do anything on the core game itself. But because I'm so prolific--I've submitted the most PRs every year for three years running now--I elevated myself to one of the devs.

It's a free open-source game, so this position comes with no salary, no responsibilities, and no real cred except among fans of niche roguelike survival games. But nonetheless, all my work on the game got this for me!

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: C418 - Minecraft Alpha

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Game Review: Vintage Story (patch 1.20)

You ever have a game come out of nowhere and just kind of...take over your gaming life?

In 2023 it happened with Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, an event which has repercussions to this day, considering how much hobby time I spend how on developing CDDA--we're about to release the 0.I version and I have top billing in the special thanks section--and this year it happened with Vintage Story. I can also blame that on CDDA, since on the development discord people would constantly talk about Vintage Story, about mining and smithing and clayforming and farming and being attacked by bears that lunged at them out of the underbrush. I watched the stories with fascination while I played Horizon's Gate (which I still plan to get back to), and around halfway through January I finally gave in, went to the dev website and bought Vintage Story, and downloaded it. I installed a few mods that came highly recommended like that one prevents a fire temperature from resetting on each item in the stack, loaded up the game, and was promptly greeted with a very familiar sight:

Vintage Story - Autumn River Valley Review

Admit it, you can hear the song.

( Read more... )

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etymology of the day

Arancini. The small balls of risotto coated in breadcrumbs and then deep fried.

*Little oranges*.

This is not in any way an obscure or difficult to look up etymology, and yet somehow it was not until yesterday, on the tube, that I suddenly needed to look up from the book I was reading and *stare*.

(Earlier this week -- no, wait, late last week -- I was indexing a cookbook that included arancini. This week I am reading *The Land Where Lemons Grow*, because it's mostly a history of citrus cultivation in Italy with occasional recipes, so I wanted to read it Properly before indexing it and getting rid of it again. Apparently what it took for me to Have A Realisation was the combination in temporal proximity...)

vital functions

Reading. ( Allie Brosh, Jeannie Di Bon, Helena Attlee, Louis MacNeice, friends misc. )

... and several of the magazines that have been sat around causing Guilt and a sense of Obligation, subsequent to which I have happily recycled them. Favourite fact from the three so far: Garden Organic/the Heritage Seed Library are trialling using tuning forks to pollinate their tomato crops! ( Facebook | Instagram )

Bonus: sifting through a pile of notebooks etc to try to work out who the hell they belong to, mostly salvaged from the pile that was due to go out to event-freecycle on the basis that SURELY I could do something useful with them if, you know, I sat down with them at a time that wasn't in a field under Significant time pressure while Very tired. And I could! One and a half remain unidentified (I say "half" because We're Working On It).

Writing. A lot of lost property e-mails.

Cooking. One new recipe from East: paneer, spinach and tomato salad, accompanied by the herbed naan from the Leiths How to Cook Bread book (this is probably on my To Cook Through list). I was into this!

Also vaghareli makai ("spiced Indian corn") by way of David Lebovitz, and a slightly underwhelming lemony fennel and broccoli pasta (significantly improved by the addition of pine nuts).

Eating. STRAWBERRIES. Blackberries. Local plums are starting to be ripe!

Exploring. Poked around the green belt a bit to see how the plums were doing! And I think that's most of it?

A very brief poke around the entrance to the Pimp Hall Nature Reserve following a successful drop-off of Objects to the adjacent Household Waste Recycling Centre; tragically the signs on the gates claimed that they'd be locked at 4 p.m., which we had not quite anticipated, and we only reached them at 3.58. Next time, perhaps!

Creating. Hmm. Does sitting around knolling for the purposes of the big lost property post count? I think it probably does; certainly while the photos still aren't good (am I contemplating a lightbox and a tripod of some kind of this specific terrible hobby? to my slight horror, I kind of am...) the arrangements are getting much easier to parse visually, I discovered upon going back through a bunch of them, which I am pleased about.

Growing. Found a surprise pocketful of dried Sugar Magnolia pods, so I am definitely in the black when it comes to number of seeds for next year, which is a pleasant surprise!

Current Mood: worried
Current Music: Computer fans spinning up

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Stressed about stress tests

More spontaneous restarts with WHEA errors (could be caused by...a ton of things).

So I'm sitting here running some diagnostics and seeing if I can fix the problem. Hopefully I don't need a new computer.

Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: 松原みき - 真夜中のドア〜Stay With Me

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Wamono: the Art of Japanese Rare Groove

sashagee and I went out to an event!

Ever since Murasaki closed last year, I've been glad that I got a chance to take

sashagee there to see Van Paugam spin one of his sets before the end, and I've been on the lookout for more chances to see him. The people at the Anime Club mentioned this event, hosted by the Japanese Cultural Center in Kamehachi, the first sushi bar in Chicago, so I got tickets, yesterday morning

sashagee drove Laila out to spend some time at the grandparents--not a problem, Laila has been clamoring to see grandma and grandpa basically all week--and in the evening we got on the L and headed down to Kamehachi. The hostess saw how we were dressed and immediately asked us if we were there for the event and then ushered us upstairs.

The music schedule was Japanese vinyl from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and we arrived during the 70s section, took our bentō and out complimentary drinks, and sat down on one of the high tables.

It was a lot of fun!

sashagee, inveterate gacha fan that she is, bought a mystery box and then when Van Paugam offered another mystery box to the couple with the best dancing, we went out on to the dance floor and won the box! We got a lot of dancing in--though not as much as one guy, who spent basically the entire evening on the dance floor even when he was the only one there--

sashagee got to hear her favorite city pop song, Mayonaka no Door -stay with me, when the Hits section came on at the very end, and we chatted with people and had a lovely time. They even promised to do another event, though since we were in the slightly closed-in upstairs of Kamehachi and it was kind of hot, Van Paugam mentioned it would probably not be until next year to avoid the heat from causing any more problems.

I need to keep better tabs on his sets. The only problem is that they're mostly only announced a short time beforehand, and having Laila means we can't exactly drop anything and head out on a moment's notice. But right now we almost never get a date night, and that's definitely not helping things. It'll be better when Laila's speech is better, because right now

sashagee is worried that if we got a babysitter and something happened, Laila wouldn't be able to tell us what was wrong. So we need to wait a few months and see if her speech improves, and then we can re-evaluate.

Current Mood: confused
Current Music: Nox Arcana - Unhallowed Halls

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Actually had a dream that I remembered

That happens so incredibly rarely nowadays that I had to write it down.

It was basically inside a first-person shooter video game, in that I was basically a floating camera with a gun (as the saying goes) and almost never had any real sense of my body or its physical existence. The dream took place inside a sprawling haunted house in a way that my waking mind recognizes as obviously a product of video game considerations (like the giant stepped courtyard with basically no furniture and a thirty-foot wall separating it from the outside) but which seemed perfectly reasonable inside the dream. There was what we would call a hub area with several other people, but I can't remember anything about them other than their existence.

Everything beyond that was extremely gamey. In the dream I was exploring the corridors, fighting enemies, picking up weapons, and so on. The only weapons I remember are some kind of staff thing that required charging up attacks before being able to get off a shot and the trusty v1.0 Booted Foot. Enemies I remember a bit more variety: there were floating balls of light that zapped me, a gray faceless mannequin in a black coat that grabbed me and slowed me down (having this happen was basically the only time I had any sensation of my body), a blue floating headless shadow in a thick cloak, and a giant dog but one which looked more like the faehounds from Final Fantasy XIV. I went around exploring, fought enemies, went back to the hub area and healed up and talked with the NPCs, you know, like a game. And eventually in that courtyard a mannequin grabbed me and I guess that sensation of actually having a body shocked me out of the dream because that's when I woke up.

This is obviously inspired by me playing Infra Arcana lately.

victory of the day

Today I have got Somewhat Caught Up on last event's lost property Situation. My GREAT TRIUMPH was, partway through the paperwork, going "... I'm sure that brooch in particular is... Oddly... Familiar..."

-- and indeed upon going back through my records it transpires that I HAD RETURNED IT TO ITS PERSON AT THE FIRST EVENT THIS YEAR.

So my spreadsheet is duly updated and they can have it back again at the last event of the year :)

(Some other victories: cut-price overripe strawberries. More of my mother's birthday cake. Rye and caraway and poppyseed bread. the elderly niter kibbeh in the fridge still being Definitely Food and substantially enlivening dinner. Shitposting in the PD crew Discord. Starting Solutions and Other Problems with A, and the cake, and the strawberries.)

Current Music: Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail - Desertwalkers

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Two annoyances

Annoyance the First:

I wrote a bit ago about how my computer is acting up, and having looked into it, it seems to just be a problem endemic to the Ryzen 5800 processor series--which is what I have, of course. There's a ton of threads about it with people's problems and solutions and so far I have two problems:

Screen turns back and the fans spin up: The one person I found with an actual diagnosis said this is related to the graphics card overvolting, so I downloaded MSI Afterburner and limited it to 90% of normal maximum voltage since it's not like I play Crysis on max on this machine anyway. It hasn't happened since but it only happens once every few weeks so no way to tell if it's actually fixed.
Spontaneous restarts during idle: Everyone seems to agree this is a problem with one or more of the cores undervolting, hence why it only happens during idle periods. There are a ton of solutions posted out there and I did try one that worked for a while (setting the power plan to high performance--I have a desktop, it's always plugged in anyway), but recently it started happening again. While investigating possible solutions, I saw people mentioning their BIOS version and thought, huh, I should look into that too and it turned out that the BIOS I have is version 303 and dated to 2021 (a year before I bought this computer). We're now up to 307 released this year. Well, the BIOS is partially responsible for controlling core voltage so updating certainly isn't going to make it worse, so I updated. It's been a couple days and I haven't had any spontaneous restarts yet, but we'll see if I need to keep looking. Everything I found online seemed to indicate this is a problem that gets solved different ways for different people because computers are notoriously finicky, so I might be back to the well.

All I can really say is, though, I have never previously had this degree of difficulty with a computer. I took a chance on AMD and boy have I had nothing but problems. Never again.

Annoyance the Second:

So yesterday I went into to buy Laila's medicine for the month as I do when she runs out and it came to this princely sum of three-hundred and twenty US American dollars, of which one single medication was $300. I asked the person at the counter what was going on, and she said that the manufacturer has coupons but I need to call my insurance. So I call my insurance and they tell me I need to call the manufacturer, and also that the insurance has a different price scale based on supply (a 43-day supply, like we got, is more than twice as expensive as a 30-day supply). So I call the manufacturer and can't get a hold of them since it's after 9 p.m., so I try again this morning. The main number you're ""supposed"" to call sends me in circles until the machine hangs up (and later, I learn, does exactly the same thing to the pharmacist when she calls them), so I call a different number and actually get a hold of someone and they tell me that they don't deal with customers at all, the entire thing is handled between pharmacists and the manufacturer. So I go into the pharmacist again, and she has also been on the phone, and the only thing she can say is that maybe the coupon was already applied but it ran out, citing the transaction in June where we were only charged $167 on a $300 expense, and that may be possible--I went back and checked and we were previously charged $55.03 for a for a $159 expense. Which is all well and good I guess, since we're almost at the spending limit for Laila's health insurance for the year, but still.

Well, the doctor wants to take her off two of those medications, and if she responds well, that will vastly reduce our monthly bill. I can only hope, becuase I'd rather not spend $300 a month for one medication on top of the other medical expenses we have. And this is with good insurance!

(That's a lie, America does not have good health insurance, only health insurance that is less bad Emoji Sad Eagle Flag

Current Mood: sick
Current Music: Infinity Nikki - Serene Sounds of Danqing Island

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The House of Plague

Well, today was rough.

Last night I started feeling a bit odd at 9 p.m. or so, like I had a frog in my throat, so I assumed I was going to come down with the cold that first Laila and then

sashagee had. But then in the middle of the night, I started sweating profusely and my stomach started gurgling, and, well. I thought it was something I had eaten, maybe the sandwich I bought at the work canteen, but the next morning when I woke up after having called off work--

sashagee having kindly let me sleep in for a couple hours--it turned out that both she and Laila were also feeling bad in the exact same way. And the air outside was bad, so we didn't go anywhere, we didn't do anything, we just sat around in the morning and Laila watched Bluey and we mostly avoided eating anything. And then by the afternoon, we were basically back to normal again with only a bit of lingering bleh feeling.

I only write about this because it came on all of us nearly at the same time. Usually Laila gets sick first, then

sashagee, and then me (and not always me). This time it was

sashagee, then Laila, then me, and all within hours of each other. And then gone again by the next day.

I bet we have a lot more of this to look forward to when Laila starts school in a couple weeks(!).

Redactle-related fact of the day

I did not, until a few hours ago, know that diesel was named after Rudolf Diesel, "... who invented the Diesel engine, which burns Diesel fuel".

(Some cheerful things, in brief: turns out shimmer inks really do work better when you thoroughly scrub the feed of your fountain pen clean at least occasionally; I am excited about tomorrow's bread; I was Greatly Honoured by the Toddler in a truly toddleresque fashion the details of which I shall not go into; I have finally got my act together to order a copy of the Roti King cookbook; glorious comfort reread of a thing I'd totally forgotten was even available for comfort reread, and for bonus points there are new bits!!!)