Current Mood: bored

I didn't post one of these last month, because I had been working on a secret project. I intended to finish that project in June, but it was not to be, partially due to busyness but mostly due to the fact that I am designing my own thing and ran into snags. Here's hoping I can finish in July!

(Some folks around Dreamwidth know what the secret project is; I'm keeping it secret HERE though so if you comment here, please don't give it away? Thanks!)

[click pics to embiggen]

A pivot table, showing I crafted for 40 hours in May and 32 hours in June on four projects.

[Image Description: A pivot table, showing I crafted for 40 hours in May and over 32 hours in June on four projects.]

I had hoped to finish several projects in June, not only the secret one. I did manage to finish the Capybara. It's pretty big! And it was for a Nerdopolis challenge. The theme was "Rodents", and of course I chose a Capybara because there is a capybara mount in Final Fantasy XIV, so perfect nerd cred tie-in.

A crocheted capybara, done in the African Flower technique.

[Image description: a stuffed crocheted capybara, done in the African Flower technique. It is made up of different shaped motifs crocheted together. It is largely a light brown in color with creamy white on its neck, belly, and rump.]

The Mosaic Cardi is still in process. I'm on the right front now. It's kinda a weird construction, not one I have encountered before, and I can't say I'm really enjoying it because long rows of HDC are (a) LONG, (b) boring. Can't wait until I get to the mosaic part.

The Sophie Scarf was supposed to be done this month for another Nerdopolis challenge. The theme was "How do the fine folks in your Nerdery travel?" and of course I chose the chocobo, so the scarf is yellow in color. I just, you know, ran out of time. I might finish it this month, we'll see.

brithistorian

A book has to really impress me to get a reaction before I've finished it, but Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance has definitely done that. I had read some of Palmer's science fiction and been very impressed by it, and I knew before reading this that she is a historian, so when I first heard of this book, I immediately requested it from my local library.[^1] Not really knowing anything about it when I requested it, I thought it was a history of how the Renaissance came to be. Then I started reading it, and from the way she talked about historians creating the idea of the Renaissance, I thought it was a Renaissance equivalent of Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages.[^2]. Then I read on and saw that it's both of those things and more. It's also Palmer's academic biography, and an explanation of how academia works, and an exploration of the processes that created the Renaissance (and that created similar shifts in society at other times and places. It's the best history book I've read recently.[^3]

Besides the major historical themes of the book, Palmer has also included a number of interesting trivia and also Easter eggs for science fiction fans: - The genetic changes in Europeans that makes the Black Death no longer the huge plague that it was in the Middles Ages took several hundred years to come about, and also caused Europeans to be more susceptible to "autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, and (in [Palmer's] case) Crohn's disease."[^4] - She refers to Florence in the Renaissance as a "wretched hive of scum and villainy."[^5] - She uses the board game Siena as an illustration of how government worked in Renaissance Florence.[^6]

I particularly love this paragraph about the chronology of the Renaissance, and how it's exceedingly different depending on who you ask:

All agree that the Renaissance was the period of change that got us from medieval to modern, but people give it a different start date, because they start at the point that they see something definitively un-medieval. If we leave the History Lab a moment and visit my friends across the yard in the English Department, they consider Shakespeare (1564-1616) the core of Renaissance, while Petrarch's contemporary Chaucer (1340s-1400) is, for them, the pinnacle of medieval. When I cross the walk to visit the Italian lit scholars, they say Dante (1265-1321), despite being dead before Chaucer's birth, is definitely Renaissance, and often that Machiavelli is the start of modern, even though he died before Shakespeare's parents were born.

Reading this book makes me both sad and glad, in varying degrees at different times, that I never got my PhD and entered academia, depending on whether I feel at that particular moment that by having done so I would have been placing myself in cooperation or competition with Palmer. But leaving that aside, I'm exceedingly glad to be living in a time that I get to read this book, and I'm eagerly looking forward to getting to read more of Palmer's books.

[^1] Apparently a lot of other people had also heard of it, because I only got it about a week ago.

[^2] Although much more fun to read than Cantor.

[^3] I almost said "easily the best history book I've read recently," but I'm also currently reading Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, which gives Palmer some serious competition. But since I feel compelled to write a pre-completion reaction to Palmer's book and not to Parker's. . .

[^4] p. 116. All the MAGAts who keep yammering on about herd immunity with regard to COVID need to know that, but they probably wouldn't listen anyway.

[^5] p. 136.

[^6] pp. 65-8.

blueshiftofdeath

Current Mood: contemplative

Review

I briefly mentioned this in my 2024 reading roundup; I really liked it! The narrator for the audiobook also did a fantastic job-- I'm not sure how much of a difference that made, but I can at least imagine reading the book in written form and liking it less than the audiobook version, since I think the narrator really sells some of the turns of phrase. In any case, this was a pleasant listening experience for me, someone that's already a full on social media hater and has an axe to grind about it.

( cut for length )

The Arguments

Before getting into the arguments, I want to share the author's note from the introduction, dated March 2018:

( cut for length )

You are losing your free will.

Basically, social media is (1) designed to manipulate you and (2) addictive. You spend increasing amount of time glued to your screen, actively consuming material meant to direct your behavior (usually into buying things) and/or giving your information to the platform to help them present the material that will direct your behavior. Weird and bad.

( cut for length )

Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.

( cut for length )

Social media is making you into an asshole.

( cut for length )

Social media is undermining truth.

( cut for length )

Social media is making what you say meaningless.

( cut for length )

Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.

( cut for length )

Social media is making you unhappy.

( cut for length )

Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity.

( cut for length )

Social media is making politics impossible.

( cut for length )

Social media hates your soul.

( cut for length )

Final Thoughts

( cut for length and tbh I think I repeat myself a fair amount )

*finally finishes this post several months after starting it*

brithistorian

A South African video game studio (not a phrase I think I've ever typed before) has created a game called Relooted, a heist game where the objective is to rob museums and steal back African artifacts. I'm pretty sure my computer isn't powerful enough for me to be able to play it once it's released, but I love the idea and I look forward to seeing more games like this.

brithistorian

I recent listened to Green Day's latest album Saviors (édition de luxe) for the first time. I liked the whole thing, but I've especially latched on to "Fancy Sauce." The chorus is like a Russian nesting doll of Easter eggs: The tune of the chorus is like a greatly slowed down version of the can-can song (Offenbach?), while the lyrics of the chorus contain call-outs to Suicidal Tendencies ("I'm not crazy, you're the one that's crazy") and Nirvana ("stupid and contagious"). Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube

brithistorian

Between finally getting off of Keppra (with its side effects of lethargy and sleepiness) and finally starting to get caught up on all the things I fell behind on during my long Keppra-induced nap, I feel like I'm finally starting to get back into my usual life again. Barring unforeseen events (which is never a safe thing to do, and yet I persist on doing it anyway), you should start seeing me around here more often, hopefully even reading and commenting on your posts.

lassarina

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blueshiftofdeath

Current Mood: amused

I got this book from the library and was not expecting how serious it would be... it's a lot of diagrams and hard math and physics explanations for how bicycles work. Seems pretty interesting but definitely not casual reading or close to a priority right now.

...Buuuut I did still skim through, particularly the section on the science of bicycle balancing, which was really the part I was most interested in. And it's interesting!! That and some of the information on relatives of the bike made me happy I got the book, even if I will return it not having read 99% of it.

Bike Relatives

There were tons of these actually but I'm just sharing the ones that tickled me most.

Sociable Monocycle

Behold:

old timey (1800s?) image of a giant wheel with one man pedaling on each side of it

Unfortunately, there was basically no information on this; the picture is shared without context, and the citation also seems to have no context. I couldn't find any information on it when I searched online either... I'm so curious if this was really a thing and if so, how many there were??

Quardacycle/Quadricycle

Apparently nowadays this is also getting applied to pseudo-cars like this, but it can refer to the equivalent of a bike but with 4 wheels. Here's one I found for sale. What the hell... I wanna ride in one!!!

Velomobile

Basically a bike or trike where the vehicle is encased so it's more car-like from the outside. Apparently this makes the vehicle more aerodynamic. Here's a top-tier video from 2011 where someone shows off his:

Watch on YouTube

Bicycles: How Do They Work?

I've been repeatedly going like: "How the hell do people manage to ride bikes all the time and have it be second nature?? Shouldn't it be really hard to keep the bike balanced? But it seems everyone can do it, even tiny kids!" Obviously the human capacity to learn is amazing, but the bicycle has achieved a level of ubiquity that is unusual for vehicles.

There were three pages in the book that completely addressed this, in a section called "How Bicycles Balance." To quote a bit of it:

It was and often still is widely believed that the angular (gyroscopic) momentum of a bicycle's spinning wheels somehow supports it in the manner of a spinning top. This belief is absolutely inaccurate. [...] Locked steering on a forward-rolling bicycle does not permit any wheel reorientation, and the bicycle will fall over exactly like a bicycle at rest, no matter how fast it travels or how much mass is in the wheels.
[...] Still, there is an extremely interesting gyroscopic aspect to bicycle balance: the angular momentum of a bicycle's front wheel urges it to steer (i.e., to precess) toward the side on which the bicycle leans, as can be demonstrated by lifting a bicycle off the ground, spinning the front wheel, and briefly tilting the frame. In other words, the gyroscopic action of the front wheel is one part of a system that automatically assists the rider in balancing the bicycle. [...]
The basic means by which bicycles are balanced and controlled involves vehicle supports that travel only in the direction in which they are pointed [...] For this, at least one wheel must be steerable, usually the front one. This balancing-by-steering function can be performed not only by conventional large-diameter bicycle wheels [...] but also by small-diameter wheels, as on a foldable scooter, by skates on ice, by skis or runners on snow, and by fins or foils in water.

I ended up watching a video that goes over this, IMO extremely well and clearly:

Watch on YouTube

(Honestly I think you can skip the first 4 minutes if you're impatient.)

Watching the bike ride by itself made me feel like... damn, what am I so nervous for?? Not only can 5 year olds ride bikes, bikes can ride with nobody on them at all! All I gotta do is get it going and then sit there!

Interesting to me about all this (expressed in both the book and video) is that research into bicycle physics is ongoing, and previously it seems even scientists thought gyroscopic action was "essential", only to have this be disproven in 1970. I usually think of inventions as something that you make after you come up with a very clear idea in which you know how all the pieces work... I forgot that people can just make whatever, tweak it and iterate on it, and then be surprised at how well it works. And yeah, the design of the bicycle is just incredible!!

I'll end with a paragraph from the intro to the "Steering, Balancing, and Stability" chapter that made me chuckle:

The most visible wonder in balancing a bicycle is that the bicycle can be balanced on just two points of support. Indeed, above a minimum speed, it appears impossible to fall down even if one were to try! This is of course not so; it would be easy to crash a fast-moving bicycle, but riders obey an unconscious compulsion not to do so.

lebateleur

...with June's falling on this weekend. It was grand. There were four of us at final count; we sat down to read at 11:30 and didn't stop until 6:15 pm. The only time anyone spoke was when one of us got up to get more tea and asked if anyone else wanted any, too. I love that I can do this, and that I know multiple people who are also happy to spend their weekends doing this. (And it's even better now because having those other people with me means that when I sit down to read a book, I actually read the book, instead of pushing through a page or two and then picking up my phone "for just a minute" and doomscrolling updates about things I have no ability to affect for hours on end.)

I finished Kara Cooney's When Women Ruled the World, which was an incredibly frustrating book and Maggie O'Farrel's Hamnet, which was an incredibly good one (but which left me as melancholy as if I had doomscrolled the news for hours on end).

Afterwards we popped over to Near BBQ and introduced one of the SSRers to one of the employees, a Geek BBQ alum whom we hadn't seen in ages and with whom it was great to catch up. Then we walked SSRer A to the metro, with a short interlude to kill 30+ lanternfly nymphs on the way.( Read more... )

All in all, a pretty good weekend.

これで以上です。

spiralicious

Current Mood: hungry
Current Location: from francis with love

My plan had been for this to be a daily thing for the month of June, but things didn't work out that way. I will still be putting up my 30 LGBTQ+ YouTube Creator Recs anyway. It will just extend past June. My reason for focusing on YouTube creators is that YouTube is suppressing queer content across the platform and it's not like that's something that magically stops being a problem at the end of June anyway.

1. Kaz Rowe (they/them)

Their YouTube content is long-form history essays, usually focusing on the weirder parts of history and LGBTQ+ history, describing their own content as "creative lectures on weird, queer, or forgotten history."

I've been a long time fan of their well-researched content, costumes, and thoughtfully detailed sets. They are clearly passionate about the subjects they cover and their sources are always cited in the descriptions of their videos.

My top three favorite videos are:

The 1840s Lesbian "Mobs" That Took Over Prisons

Why Did So Many Lighthouse Keepers "Go Mad"?

A Look at Queerness in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Outside of YouTube, they are a cartoonist, illustrator, historical researcher, and self-described train appreciator. They have an ongoing, long form urban fantasy webcomic, Cunning Fire. They frequently create many comics dedicated to LGBTQ+ historical figures. And they've written a graphic novel, Liberated: The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun.

(Doing this on my phone means no links for now sorry)

kaberett

Reading. ( Scalzi, Wells, Gordon + Ziv, Burch + Penman, McMillan-Webster )

I have also done a bunch of variably directed online reading about models and theories of pain, and will happily recommend the British Psychological Society's Story of pain should this be relevant to your interests!

Writing. I am several thousand words and 18 (of 52) questions into the consultation on the EHRC Code of Practice consultation. The deadline is in a little under 24 hours. Approximately two thirds of the questions appear to be very simple and straightforward tickboxes. I am not super enjoying the free-text responses, and especially did not enjoy that despite the total lack of any indicator of a word limit there is in fact a word limit and it's 1000 words. I discovered this having written 2511 of the damn things.

More cheerfully I am also, as mentioned, enjoying playing with my pens for the purposes of notes about pain. I am increasingly convinced (cannot remember if I mentioned?) that I have Solved the Problem of one of my fancy pens having an unwelcome tendency to dry up when looked at funny, via the method of "giving the cap a bonus little wiggle once it's on". (It's the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age which, second hand, was a PhD completion present from A, because -- for those of you who aren't massive fountain pen nerds -- it's made out of a resin that's got crushed Etna basalt mixed in with it; I spent a while going "is it just because red-family inks are typically quite dry???" but nope, the effectiveness of the extra little wiggle suggests quite strongly that the spring for the inner cap isn't quiiite activating when I'd ideally like it to. This isn't necessarily a huge surprise given how sticky it was when I first got the pen, but it still took me... a while... to catch on.

Watching. Up to date with Murderbot. Remain grumbly about Decisions including "how little time the poor thing spends with its helmet up" and "how bad people are at poly" and also, fundamentally, the word "throuple" (I AM TOO OLD AND CRANKY FOR THIS NONSENSE, APPARENTLY), but am also mildly peeved that we've run out of episodes.

Listening. An Indelicates gig, which I almost could not make myself leave the house for but was very very glad I did. Not having yet managed to scrape together the brain to listen to Avenue QAnon significantly increased the proportion of new-to-me songs!

Cooking. Bread? Bread.

Eating. The branch of Tonkotsu a short way from the Indeligig venue turned out to have outside seating! And an updated menu since last time we made it to them, so we both delightedly consumed the chilli tofu ramen and also shared the cauliflower 'wings' and some edamame and the very pleasant yuzu lemonade and also also I tried A's Smoked Hibiscus Margarita and it was great. (I mildly regretted not being in fit state to actually want an entire cocktail of my own.)

Growing. I... harvested and processed 1.7 kg of redcurrants! And ate several handfuls of raspberries! Depending on how badly my neglect since Wednesday has damaged everything given The Heat there's at least as much again to come off the redcurrant bush, and the jostaberry and gooseberry were also both looking extremely promising. AND the second sowing of kohlrabi has started to come up.

dhampyresa

So I have tendinitis in my wrist, which means I now need to wear a brace. This is really annoying because it gets in the way of doing anything. I can't draw with it on :( Even typing is a fucking hassle. Wearing it in the heat makes me feel like a sausage. A sweaty, sweaty sausage.

amarisllis

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kaberett

There has been A Great Squawking audible through the open windows for much of the last week. Yesterday A got to witness the source and then this morning so did I.

You see. There is a slightly scruffy, slightly scrawny magpie, which we wouldn't even necessarily have clocked as a juvenile if we'd seen it by itself? But we didn't. What we saw was it being attended by two actually filled-out adult magpies... up to and including it sitting back on its haunches and raising its mouth to the sky and continuing to yell until food was placed in it.

We have also got to watch it hop around in important little circles, intermittently pecking disconsolately at the ground, because apparently this is how the grown-ups make food appear!!! and it has not yet quite managed to work out why It's Not Working for baby, who is a Good Brave Baby who is doing All The Right Things and yet??? no food?????

And now that we have matched the yelling up with the culprit, I am grinning every time I can hear it, not just when it's visible. :)

kaberett

Went on an Adventure to post a lost item back to someone (hopefully in time for the next thing they want it for...), and was rewarded with DUCKLINGS.
Not too warm to achieve fallback dinner of I Don't Know, Bake A Potato, with the result that we finished the lurking salad leaves and also stuck some of the cook-from-frozen pasteis de nata into the oven once potatoes were done.
Ridiculous organic greengrocer had an option on sending us rainbow chard this week, which means I might actually manage to cook one whole new recipe this month (!), which was otherwise... not looking likely. (I have been comprehensively failing to sow any, but there we go.)
Went fossicking in sofa to try to at least rationalise my horrid piles. Found one (1) of the two (2) fancy watch chargers I own, and not the one I was expecting to turn up (because I thought I'd probably mislaid it in a field), which hopefully means that given a leeeetle bit more fossicking I might even find the second.
Really enjoying playing with pens for the purposes of making notes on the pain reading. (Today has been Mindfulness for Health, with detours to read up more on the gate control and [neuromatrix] theories of pain; I was surprised that Model First Proposed In The 1960s is still apparently more-or-less the best we've got for "how the fuck does psychology and emotional affect and other sensory input actually affect how pain is experienced?")

altamira16

This is a weird slipstream book that feels like it is trying to horn in on Nick Mamatas's territory sometimes.

Jonathan Abernathy is a lonely adult. He is an orphan, and his life is going nowhere. He goes and begs his old manager at the hotdog stand for a job because he desperately needs the money.

But he is working on a bigger project where he is a dream auditor. At night, he enters people's dreams and sucks away the bad parts so that they can be more productive. (This is the thing that feels Mamatas-like. People are doing weird things because of capitalism.) There are all sorts of things about the dream world that are unclear. What happens to the parts of the dreams that are sucked away? What happens to the lives of the people whose dreams have been changed?

He has a neighbor named Rhoda who has a daughter named Timmy, and sometimes Rhoda asks Jonathan to watch Timmy.

He likes her. He starts seeing her in dreams, but whose dreams are they? Which dreams are real?

lunabee34

1. I had a good birthday. I got flowers (which are still going strong!) and a Star Trek card game from

sweettartheart and cards from

lyr,

decynthus, and

princessofgeeks. Thank y'all! I also got lots of stationery stuff (a friend gave me a Yamamoto paper tasting set, Josh gave me a leather notebook cover, and I got various notecards and notebooks). The kids gave me amazing cards. The one they drew together said on the front, "You're Old," and inside it said, ( spoiler for Star Trek Prodigy ) This goes in the save forever pile.

2. I know one of my requests for Yuletide already. Mom and Dad watch westerns on True Grit pretty much 24-7, and this visit featured The Posse from Hell--the gayest cowboy movie that doesn't realize how gay it is of all time. I mean, y'all, the seasoned gunslinger tends lovingly to the greenhorn's butt wounds at one point, and they frequently stare into each other's eyes and kinda pant into each other's mouths, and THEY ARE SO IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER.

3. I also want to request Star Trek Prodigy. We just finished the two-season series when we got back from my folks. I can't say enough good things about this show--from the callbacks to every Trek franchise and the little Easter eggs to all the voice actor/character cameos, this show is just a delight. I love that it is joyful and hopeful and kind; it's firmly a kids' show, but who cares? It's just an excellent watch. I highly recommend it.

4. Mom and Dad's was fine. They didn't turn on that horrific American Family Radio even one time, and there was zero craziness (which proves to me that when they're scared of losing contact with their grandchildren they do possess the ability to keep their mouths shut for a couple of days). They are clearly on the back foot and concerned that we're going to cut them out of their lives. Not gonna lie; it made for a much more pleasant trip.

brithistorian

Today I learned that the Japanese word for reference (as in bibliographical reference) is 参照 (sanshou). Breaking it down by kanji, it means "nonplussed" (参) "illumination" (照). So if you're nonplussed by what the author said, checking the reference should give you some illumination!

kaberett

If you have had long-term pain, of any kind, for any reason, a component of your pain is neuroplastic. Neurons that fire together wire together: you've had lots of practice at being in pain. This comes down, fundamentally, to how we learn.

Which means that while neuroplastic pain management approaches may very well not solve all of your problems, they'll treat a component of them, and that's worth having -- in exactly the same way that we don't want to e.g. give up painkillers that "take the edge off" but don't solve the whole problem.

(None of this is actually novel except insofar as most education about chronic pain blithely asserts that "most" healing has completed within 3-6 months, so pain persisting beyond that timescale Is Neuroplastic unless you've got cancer we suppose. So in the context of My Project, the framing of "this is an approximately unavoidable complication of your underlying condition that requires active management in its own right" strikes me as important.)

vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Second-to-last vigilantes chit-chat on bnha_fans, as the current season approaches the end!

Commented on common_nature, booknook, anime_manga, ffxv.

Promoted finalfantasy in a comment.

Signal boosts:

everykindofcraft, a new comm for all kinds of craft and already decently active!
Continuing to enjoy the weekly stories on senzenwomen, "Histories of women in and around Japan, 1868-1945"
Bunch of fanweeks, zine and other events for Final Fantasy XV being promoted on ffxv :)
Via squidgestatus, SquidgeWorld is having their summer fundraiser!

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Review

The Arguments

You are losing your free will.

Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.

Social media is making you into an asshole.

Social media is undermining truth.

Social media is making what you say meaningless.

Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.

Social media is making you unhappy.

Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity.

Social media is making politics impossible.

Social media hates your soul.

Final Thoughts

Bike Relatives

Sociable Monocycle

Quardacycle/Quadricycle

Velomobile

Bicycles: How Do They Work?

Links

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