[pain] working on an articulation

Oct. 29th, 2025 09:48 pm
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
[personal profile] 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.

Milestone

Oct. 28th, 2025 06:25 pm
azurelunatic: Karkat Vantas yelling. His shirt has the astrological sign Cancer in grey. (Karkat Yell)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Video appointment with chemotherapist today. I'm done with immunotherapy! The scan says I've been stable.

I still have:

* bone strengthening (not marrow encouraging) med every 12 weeks, infused
* Scans every 3 months

So that means a trip or two to the cancer center every 3 months, although if they keep it at 3 months for the one and 12 weeks for the other, they may fall out of sync.

I should probably celebrate this?

Fic title meme

Oct. 29th, 2025 12:21 am
trobadora: (mightier)
[personal profile] trobadora
From all around my flist, last seen at [personal profile] facethestrange's:

How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'A' and 'T'.

I picked my favourite title for each letter, not necessarily my favourite fic:

A - Absent Heart (But My Body is Here)
B - A Bitter, Better Truth
C - A Cruelty of Harpies
D - Darkness Spilled Before Our Bed
E - Echoes Woven Into Light
F - Farshalah'kiah for the Modern Orion Woman
G - Glass on the Ground
H - Hindsight From the Dinner Table
I - In This Fading Hour
J - none
K - Kreisverkehr
L - Listen (it's late, it's late, but listen)
M - Make Answer to the Clock
N - Not To Be Repeated
O - Out of the Water
P - Pull/Recoil
Q - Quiet Bower
R - R'lyeh Is Not an Empty House
S - Summer's Turns
T - A Thread as Red as Blood
U - (un)forced, (un)happy
V - Volcano Day
W - Why Should You Linger
X - none
Y - none
Z - Zone F: Fandom Primer

You can tell I have a preference for a certain style of title, LOL!

The most represented fandom here is, unsurprisingly, Guardian (with 6 titles); second is Griimm with 3. My most-written fandom (Doctor Who) only has 2 on this list; either my title preferences have changed or Guardian inspires me for better titles. *g*

And the missing X and Y are probably not surprising, but I didn't expect J! I guess I'll have to do something about that at some point ... *g*
trobadora: (Ya Qing)
[personal profile] trobadora
I just realised I never posted this here - written for [personal profile] gavilan in this year's [community profile] guardian_wishlist:

scale to feather, skin to skin (997 words)
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Mature
Relationships: Ya Qing/Zhu Hong, Zhu Hong & Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Zhu Hong, Ya Qing
Content tags: Yashou transformation, non-human sex, Post-Canon, Post-Fix-It, Enemies to Lovers, background implied Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan

Summary: Ya Qing, half-transformed, had feathers down the side and back of her neck. They covered her shoulders and arms, curving along the sides of her bare breasts.

Duolingo alternatives

Oct. 28th, 2025 02:52 pm
ysobel: (Default)
[personal profile] ysobel
Found an article with suggestions and am noting for future checking-out. This isn't my personal recommendation, but if any of y'all have used these, feel free to comment.

* Drops ("Language Learning Games: Drops"). Mostly vocabulary rather than full sentences. Free accounts limited to 5min/day. Paid upgrade available. Company also has apps for specific languages incl Korean, Tagalog, and others

* Busuu. No time limits for free accounts, at least. Paid upgrades available.

* Memrise. Free plan is more vocab than full sentences. Grammar lessons require paid.

* Babbel. Exclusively paid r/th freemium. Mostly just European languages.

* LingoDeer. Has Asian and European languages - there is also a games app for Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, Chinese and German. Mostly paid.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] 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

jesse_the_k: cap Times Roman "S" with nick in upper corner, captioned "I shot the serif." (shot the serif)
[personal profile] jesse_the_k

Robert Bringhurst's remarkable reference work, The Elements of Typographic Style, provides a full semester of type history in less than 400 pages. It's not just the book's elegant design nor well-chosen exemplars that so thrilled me I read both the 2nd and 3rd edition, dropping more than 50 stickies along the way. The current edition, version 4.3, is out of print and still focuses exclusively on printed material.

Bringhurst is a poet and translator. That last vocation has brought him into regular contact with non-Latin alphabets, and the Elements of Typographic Style provides the best advice I've ever seen in English regarding how to set type with accents, diacritics, and other "analphabetic characters."

context: why I care )

Archived links )


I drafted this review a decade ago, and I still believe it, so it’s a proof of life post.

meme of seven deadlies

Oct. 28th, 2025 10:29 am
thistleingrey: (Default)
[personal profile] thistleingrey
Seen variously, and trying to go with the first titles to mind, per category---

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

So much of my reading of the past decade-plus has been in electronic formats, and so many of my grad-era books were monographs or editions deprived of their paper slipcovers by library staff, that---sorry, artists---I've kind of stopped looking at covers for potential appeal. I can appreciate them as standalone art!

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

Joyce, Finnegans Wake

...Either half the stuff I read in (and for) grad school was challenging, or none of it was. Never mind finishing things, a restriction which might limit a person's attempts to start, and never mind the C20/21 bias regarding text-boundaries (what is one unit of "books"?).

For example, for me it was more of a challenge to have worked carefully through any one small chunk of skaldic verse than to plod through Joyce on my own. We wouldn't say I can't consider my dips into Íslendingasögur cumulatively challenging because I've met only parts of the modern edition's three volumes, or if we did, I'd say that it encompasses a bunch of things published in separate smaller books as standalone-ish texts (see below, sloth). Small bonus for most dips into skaldic verse having occurred via a once-monthly evening reading group, where I was often youngest and always the attendee with the least familiarity with Scandinavian languages.

That's probably Pride: challenging literary theory I've ingested and reflected back, with a detour around Lodge's game of Humiliation (see BoardGameGeek, or quotation and musings by a random emeritus prof).

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

Years ago, each of them, but:

Smith, The 101 Dalmatians
Wrede and Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecelia
the Penguin translation into English of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

Dante's Inferno
Njáls saga (see above, pride)
Spolsky, The Languages of the Jews

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Somehow I've accreted several Beowulfs (editions, not counting multiple translations) despite not being terribly fond of it as a text. I may still have a second copy of The Owl Service.

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Ehh, not worth the effort of wordmaking (carried mostly by crashy Microsoft Voice Access).

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

...No? When I was 10-11 and wrote one (1) unfinished crossover fanfic, I moved published writers' characters around amongst the different settings. I didn't put myself in; no one resembling me would've survived those settings.

Ongoing

Oct. 27th, 2025 10:48 pm
viridian5: (Nine of Wands)
[personal profile] viridian5
Recently the one-year anniversary of owning my Kia Forte and the 19-year anniversary of my brain surgery passed.

During last week's pain management appointment, my doctor brought two trainees/interns in and asked me if they could sit in on our consultation. When I said yes, I didn't realize I'd have to explain some things to them about Chiari I malformation, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, my brain surgery, and other ideas/procedures floated to treat me. It didn't help that I forgot the word "vertebrae" during the surgery talk and had to tell them that some of the small pieces that jut out of my spine were shaved down to make more room for my brain. When my doctor asked if they had questions, the woman asked if any other things were suggested to treat me, at which point I told her traction made things so much worse and I absolutely refused to get my neck fused as a result. (She also thought people realized they had Chiari just in childhood, and I had to say that if it doesn't become obvious in the victim's childhood, it often does in your 30s, which it did for me.)

Then an office worker came by to say there was food in the kitchen area and the two immediately disappeared for it, mid-consultation, while I and my doctor exchanged a "looking into the camera on The Office" look.

I told him that I sometimes get numbness, pain, or a burning agony on the front of my left thigh, which he said came from the spine, like the L3 area, and suggested I do certain stretches for it. The office had me take a cognition test, due to possible side effects of some of the medications I'm on, and I scored average in most areas and above average in one. I discovered during it that I can memorize five numbers at a time but not six.

+++

The "check brake light" dashboard alert is once again randomly coming on and turning itself off in my Kia Forte. Having replaced a wire, which worked for seven months, and replaced the brake light bulb and cleaned its housing, which worked for three months, my mechanics have no other idea what to do, and I don't trust Huntington Volvo, where I bought the car, after they gave me this car with four rotting tires on it and refused to get back to me on anything. Thus, I'm living with the alert when it's there. The way it activates with a loud, distracting ~ding~ every time sucks.

+++

Since the government is still shut down, I'm not getting my November food money.

Supercomputing and Affirmation

Oct. 27th, 2025 08:49 pm
tcpip: (Default)
[personal profile] tcpip
Every so often, there is a slight glimmer of light in my world where my usual state of driven dysthymia changes due to the affirming words and actions of others. Such an experience occurred last Friday when I organised a researcher tech talk with Dr Tomasz Wozniak, a senior lecturer in economics at UniMelb. Tomasz has recently been published, as part of an international team, in a Bank of Canada paper and in the prestiguous Journal of Econometrics on Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) and time-series models that analyse the relationships between multiple economic variables to identify and isolate the effects of exogenous economic shocks. It's actually important stuff to keep people in jobs when (for example) there's a massive negative disruption to trade (hello, US tariffs).

Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.

This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment is $44 (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.

(no subject)

Oct. 27th, 2025 02:26 am
viridian5: the Queen of Hearts from Patricia A. McKillips' _Fool's Run_ (Default)
[personal profile] viridian5
It: Welcome to Derry certainly has my attention now.
viridian5: From a 2009 <i>Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion</i> window display at Bergdorf Goodman. (Mannequin)
[personal profile] viridian5
Loro Piana 1 (closer)I did a night run into Manhattan to see window displays and found that I couldn't get close to Saks Fifth Avenue's windows because there was a cordon around the building as workers mounted giant "gems" on the structure, which is probably for the coming Christmas/holiday spectacle. I'm happy about this because last year, after about 15 years of building light shows and amazing things, Saks gave us nothing. Their window displays were sad and basic too. I did one pass of them, I only needed one pass. Bergdorf and Bloomingdale's I visited a few times.

As a reminder for why I was so pissed at Saks last year, this is what they had on the building for the Christmas/holidays in 2023. The zodiac clock for Carousel of Dreams. It would periodically do a whole light show with music. I was so sad when they disassembled it and took it down, the pieces going to parts unknown.

Dior has its whole building shrouded, so I'm wondering if they'll be doing something big. Last Christmas, Dior did this. (This was a temporary location, so they have a different building to work with this year.)

I did the run now because soon there will only be shrouds on window displays for weeks before the grand unveilings, with grand unveilings being anywhere from the teens to the twenties of November.

I've posted 25 photos of my current run--featuring some Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Saks Fifth Avenue windows--on my Flickr. The Loro Piana displays at Bergdorf Goodman had a placard at the bottom of each explaining things about the House's history or their cashmere. I love the little goats on the scales in this window, Capra hircus goats representing the source of their cashmere. The thistles in one display represent the dried thistles traditionally used for teaseling their cashmere.

And use this chance to be heard

Oct. 26th, 2025 10:52 pm
viridian5: the Queen of Hearts from Patricia A. McKillips' _Fool's Run_ (Default)
[personal profile] viridian5
From [personal profile] musesfool, the AO3 alphabet meme:


Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A - About-face (Doctor Who, Fifth Doctor/Vislor Turlough, Tegan Jovanka/Nyssa)
B - Babes in Toyland (Buffy the Vampire Slayer [movie], Pike/Benny)
C - Canadian Shack #24 (The X-Files, Fox Mulder/Alex Krycek)
D - Daily Free Spin (Weiß Kreuz, Schuldig & Brad Crawford)
E - Early in the Mourning (Andromeda)
F - Fallout (My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU [anime], Hayama Hayato/Hikigaya Hachiman)
G - Games People Play (Andromeda)
H - Halber Mensch (Weiss Kreuz, The Sandman, Schuldig/Fujimiya Aya (Ran), Brad Crawford/Schuldig)
I - I Lost My Limbs But Not My Lover (Twitch City, Newbie/Curtis)
J - Journey Plus Destination: Strangers on a Train (due South, Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski)
K - Keeping Score (The X-Files)
L - Left in the Dark (Once a Thief [TV], Victor Mansfield/Nathan Muckle)
M - Mad Love (Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, Michael Bergen (Berg)/Pete Dunville, Michael Bergen (Berg)/Irene)
N - Naming and Being (Saiyuki)
O - Oblique (The X-Files, Fox Mulder/Alex Krycek)
P - Paradox (The X-Files, Fox Mulder/Alex Krycek)
Q - Quagmire (X-Men [comicverse], Marvel [Comics])
R - Rant (Saiyuki)
S - The Safest Place (A Quiet Place: Day One, Eric & Samira "Sam")
T - Table Scraps (due South, Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski, Diefenbaker & Ray Kowalski)
U - Ugly Side (Doctor Who)
V - The Very Secret Thoughts of Clark Kent (Smallville, Clark Kent/Lex Luthor)
W - Waiting (due South, Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski)
X -
Y - You Can Bend, or You Can Break (Saiyuki, Cho Hakkai/Sha Gojyo)
Z - Zero Hours (Andromeda, Seamus Harper/Dylan Hunt)

25/26, out of 590 stories on AO3. I picked the very first entry for each letter and ignored the fics that start with numbers.

Doctor Who nitpick

Oct. 26th, 2025 05:30 pm
ysobel: (Default)
[personal profile] ysobel
I'm up to s2 e3 in my rewatch.

...and ok. In e1, the TARDIS, with those inside, accidentally shrinks. The Doctor and companions are the size of an inch. They go outside, where they realize that instead of a planet with anaconda-sized earthworms, they're on normal Earth as tiny creatures. Shenanigans ensue.

At the end of the serial, they -- of course -- get back to the TARDIS and get everything back to normal. And as part of this, the (mini) Doctor grabs a (full size) seed of wheat, which he brings inside as a way of measuring progress: as the TARDIS returns to normal, the grain of wheat shrinks from apparently huge to, well, the appropriate size for a grain of wheat.

Except that /doesn't fucking make sense/.

When the TARDIS first shrank, so did everything inside. People, their clothes, everything. Presumably embiggening works the same. So why is the seed excepted? By the logic of the miniaturization, the seed should have remained the same relative size, becoming a huge-ass seed.

*blinks in confusion*

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