you keep second guessing yourself. It’s Brahms, 100% for sure. But wait I don’t listen to much Brahms and it’s so familiar. Is it Mahler? No, it’s Brahms. But wait… that was just a hair Beethoven? But no it overall doesn’t sound like Beethoven, a bit too modern. Mahler??? No, Brahms1
In retrospect, bouncing back and forth between Beethoven and Mahler as the other two candidates should have told me for sure I was listening to Brahms. Hindsight, etc.
(cw: talk about death [specifically mine, theoretically])
As of today I have (officially) stayed alive with Type 1 diabetes for ten years1. I’ve done a little bit of reading on the history of Type 1 treatment, one of the first acute conditions turned chronic through medical intervention (thank you, Drs. Banting, Macleod, and Best). The longer I live, the more “I would have died by now” milestones I pass, and the more I am reminded of how grateful I am for advances in diabetes treatment. I have passed the “I would have lived this long on a starvation diet” milestone. In a few years, I’ll probably make it past the “lethal atherosclerosis” line, then the “renal failure” line, assuming I retain access to current diabetes and other medical technology2. I’ll probably also mostly avoid the non-lethal sequelae, the blindness and the amputations and the peripheral neuropathies. Apparently in a few years I’ll need to start taking statins even if my cholesterol is good, because diabetes often brings vascular complications. As good as diabetes technology is, I am, fundamentally, manually running one of the primary metabolic loops in the human body. It’s decidedly imperfect even when running at top performance.
I don’t recommend having “I could have died” experiences for anyone, but it does mean that I am aware of and grateful for being alive and (approximately) healthy basically every single day. It also means I’m aware of exactly how conditional “health” is. I don’t have a family history of Type 1—I’m the first one we know of as far back as family memory goes—which means my diagnosis was something I couldn’t even have mentally prepared for. Intellectually I knew that disability is something that could come into my life at any time for any reason, but now I know it viscerally.
My wife wrote a really good post about COVID denialism and the belief that disability is something that happens to Other People. I have lived for the past 4.5 years of this pandemic knowing not only that I am more vulnerable to negative consequences of COVID due to diabetes, but that I could easily get even more disabilities as a result of infection. I was already disabled, but I am multiply disabled now by society’s failure to grapple with the reality of this disease. If I could have one wish from getting diabetes, it would be for everyone around me to recognize that their health is also conditional and to behave accordingly.
I know this post feels like kind of a bummer, but I am genuinely grateful to be alive and experiencing the world and everything it has to offer, even the bad stuff3. It is a gift to be here and talking to all of you. After all, there’s new frogs and sea slugs and cool music to listen to.
Liz’s Delicious Sludge Cocktail
I try to have at least one treat I “shouldn’t” have on each diagnosis anniversary as a celebration of the fact that I can. This year I asked my wife for a black sesame ice cream cocktail, which I knew full well would look like a glass full of concrete. But hey, it’s delicious concrete.
Mark Scherz just posted the news that he and fellow researchers have just described1 seven new tree frog species from Madagascar. Adorable! Look at the art they commissioned! Listen to their little froggy beeps!
you know how some birders maintain a Life List of all the species they’ve identified? well I have that but for sea slugs (really opisthobranchs more broadly). I’m gonna add that as a page on my website because I can, because it’s neat, and because it’s funny1,2.
watch this space once I unpack my boxes of books3 and can flip through the books I probably tucked my active list into back in 2007. if I can’t find it I’ll reconstruct to the best of my ability, I think I was up to 25 species or something.
tremendous shout out to bcj for allowing me the use of this lovely Northern Leopard frog to inaugurate the day
For the past several years, I’ve treated October as an excuse to watch the Big Famous Movies (horror edition) that I’ve never gotten around to watching, plus some other ones thrown in that are on-theme. So far Natalie and I have done:
Draculas month, featuring:
Zombies month, featuring:
Aliens month (ongoing this year!), featuring:
So here’s where you come in: what are some important themes we could do? What goes on those lists? I’m largely looking for The Big Ones (like the Romero trilogy, Alien, Dracula, stuff like that), but give me any sleeper hits you think really should not be missed and what theme they go with. I don’t do great with loving depictions of torture or human-on-human violence, but if you think there’s something I really shouldn’t miss for cultural reasons, recommend it and let me know whether I should prepare myself going in.
Future themes we’re rotating in our minds include: Vampires (non-Dracula edition), Ghosts (The Shining, Poltergeist, etc), Horror Comedy (things like Evil Dead would go here), Witches, and Werewolves. Any major categories we missed? Recommendations for movies to add to theme year reprises are also welcome.
Shana tovah everyone! I finally have a chance to sit down and go through some of the posts I’ve been bookmarking in my RSS reader to share with you.
Three Views of Victor Frankenstein’s Guilt – An essay from Calliope that was originally posted to Cohost, but they reposted it to their blog and I’m bringing it here so that you read it. Calliope has great thoughts on Gothic literature and I really love the diversity of ways one can read Victor Frankenstein’s motivation. Plus, it’s motivating me to reread Frankenstein for the first time in about two decades, right on time for Spooky Month.
Star Trek Writers’ Guides – Do you know about Cliff Pervocracy’s PDF hobby? You should. It’s great. Immensely relatable. He collects PDFs of… stuff… reads them, and writes about them. In this case it’s writers’ guides for both The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation (TNG). As someone who’s primarily familiar with TOS (and about half of DS9) and has just recently started watching TNG, these are fascinating. It’s really neat to read the evolution of what Star Trek thinks it’s all about.1
a bunch of podcasts (happy international podcast day) – I love podcasts (when I’m in the mood for them, anyway!). Dante did a neat writeup of podcasts covering different historical periods, that I’m absolutely going to go through for recommendations. And maybe someday I’ll write up a list of my own favorites…
On Content Warnings – A thoughtful writeup by Shel on the utility and drawbacks of content warnings. Well worth a ponder, especially as we (…I) move to a more blog-centric internet and try to come up with my own categorization systems.
This is a book about French peasants doing religious crimes – A writeup of a talk Laura Michet gave a few years ago! I definitely want to track down a copy of this book. I mean, who doesn’t want to read about oddball Medieval Christian heresy?
Daily Art on tumblr is working with generative art (as far as I can tell, older/more traditional generative art rather than newer generation general AI tools… please let me know if you find out otherwise). I’ve got it in my feed reader for a daily art bite. Really loving how a bunch of the designs a week ago turned out looking like quilt designs.
sweet nectar – art of one of wormvermin’s OCs. not embedding a photo because there is tity, though it’s closer to “classical nude” than “hardcore porn”
https://howdidyoufind.me/ – A neat little website specifically for stories of how people found it. Hat tip to effika!
We all know that eggs are nature’s legs – Another inscrutable question from bcj
only Paul Hollywood knows that’s a slur, I guess – An exchange from The Great American Baking Show that left me and my wife shaking our heads in wonderment
Need For A National Weather Modification Research Program – United States government, 1974. PDF hobby!! Haven’t read the whole thing, but I love it. Hat tip to Colin for finding this one.
one of these days my life will slow down enough that I can actually get all these saved posts into a document and then it’s all over for y’all. I’ve got like three weeks of posts to get through! (I will probably split it into multiple roundups though just for the sake of scale.)
In a classic turn for me, I’m not only learning a new knitting technique (brioche) but doing it in two colors at once. Brioche is a really cool and plush knit form that basically ends up with a double layer of fabric at the end, and a lot of designs end up fully reversible. I have heard from my pal Seth that actually, two-color can be a slightly easier way to learn brioche knitting because there’s an easier way to tell apart the two active sides of the knit… so I’m hoping that helps.
Since I’ve never done brioche before, I’m starting with a swatch to get my footing before I break into the hat pattern I’m planning to make (seriously it’s so cute, go check it out). I’m also going to swatch the repeating pattern to see what size needles I need to use to get the hat to be the right size. Because I am, as previously established, a brain genius who likes to make things hard for myself, I am going to swatch flat, even though the pattern is written in the round. This means that I’m going to have to remember which pattern rows are “wrong” sides and knit reversed stitches (purl where it says knit and vice versa) on all those rows. I’m guessing I’m going to mess up kind of a lot but what can I say? it’s an adventure.
there is a very specific feeling of relief upon realizing I don’t need to hurry to finish a library book before it’s due, because I definitely will want to buy a copy for future reference and cross-checking.
(the book in question is Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation by Christopher M. Elias)
